The bakery in Oradour-sur-Glane
The sign near the window in the photo
above says that this building was the Boulangerie, one of the
few French words that I knew. Note the metal shutters, which
are folded back. The photo below shows the front of the building
which faces the main street, Rue de Emile Desourteaux.
When the villagers were ordered to assemble
at the Fairgrounds, the baker showed up bare-chested and covered
with flour. He told the soldiers that he was worried about his
cakes in the oven. He was assured that the cakes would be taken
care of.
After the massacre, several burned bodies
were discovered inside the bakery, including the body of a baby
that was found inside the oven. The SS claimed that the village
was in the hands of the French resistance and that the partisans
returned to the village the next day and moved some of the bodies.
The SS claimed that they had found the burned bodies of German
soldiers in the town. Their justification for destroying the
town was their claim that a popular Waffen-SS battalion commander,
Major Helmut Kämpfe, had been kidpnapped by the French resistance
and was scheduled to be ceremoniously burned alive in the village
that day. Kämpfe's body was found later at another village
a few miles from Oradour-sur-Glane.
The photo below shows the inside of the
bakery with the oven on the left.
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