Former SS soldier charged over World War II massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters, New York Times

Former SS soldier charged over World War II massacre

Date January 9, 2014 - 12:51PM

Berlin: German prosecutors have charged an 88-year-old former member of Hitler's elite Waffen SS for taking part in a World War II massacre of hundreds of French villagers, nearly 70 years after one of the most infamous Nazi atrocities.

The state court in Cologne said the man, identified only as Werner C. - in keeping with German privacy laws - faced 25 charges of murder and hundreds of counts of accessory to murder in connection with the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane, a central French village about 25 kilometres northwest of Limoges, in June 1944.

In the methodical slaughter, which took place four days after the D-Day landings that eventually led to the Nazis' defeat, SS soldiers took the small village by surprise and killed nearly all its inhabitants within a few hours. They killed 642 men, women and children.

The men were herded into barns and shot dead while the women and children were burned alive in the village church.




Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/former-ss-soldier-charged-over-world-war-ii-massacre-20140109-hv7xm.html#ixzz2pswgH8ma

[riversedge]

1. The real Nazi. We can not compare

anyone to them. IMHO

[Jack from Charlotte]

6. If you're not familiar with this town......Oradour-sur-Glane

It was both the 1st and last scene in the incredible UK series, "The World at War," narrated by Laurence Olivier. A few days after D-Day, the SS came here, killed every man, woman and child, 642 people in all. It was a reprisal for something. And the Germans had the wrong town.......

De Gaule had the town remain exactly as it was as a memorial.

Here's the text........

The story of Oradour-sur-Glane was featured in 1974 in the noted British documentary television series The World at War, which was narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The first and final episodes (1 and 26, entitled "A New Germany" and "Remember" respectively) show helicopter views of the destroyed village, interspersed with pictures of the victims that appear on their graves. Episodes 1 and 26 both started with the words:

Down this road, on a summer day in 1944. . . The soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community which had lived for a thousand years. . . was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road . . . and they were driven. . . into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then. . . they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a World at War...

[tabasco]

9. Outstanding documentary on the war.

The best I've seen.

[burrowowl]

11. I've been there

a very somber and fitting memorial. I glad the officer has been caught.

[riversedge]

14. No, I was not familiar with this particular

town--and horrible atrocity. Thank you. I really is unimaginable that this would happen--so cold. ...

[grahamhgreen]

7. Torturing people to death is pretty comparable.

[azurnoir]

2. Good

they should not get away with their crimes what the Nazi's did there are not that really adequately describe

[another_liberal]

3. ". . . the D-Day landings that eventually led to the Nazis' defeat."

It is always hard for Americans to grasp, but what defeated the Nazis' was not D-Day. We have been taught that was so, however, our invasion of France was really only a dramatic sideshow. The fact is that Germany's defeat in WWII had already been assured by her irreplaceable losses during three years of fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

At the time of the undeniably courageous assault on Normandy's beaches by Americans and British troops, Soviet forces were conducting their own "Blitzkrieg" across the vast expanses of German-held Ukraine and Belorussia. They did not stop until Fall, when their tanks were on the Vistula river, within sight of Warsaw. In early 1945 they resumed their advance, which ended with the capture of Hitler's capital, Berlin.

That is what defeated the Nazi's.

[tabasco]

10. You are correct that the Soviets, to a very great degree, defeated the Germans,

but to characterize the Western Front as "a dramatic sideshow" is equally incorrect.

Lest we forget, the U.S. war on Japan allowed the Soviets an economy of force on their eastern front. This was crucial for the Soviet offensive to break out of Moscow, when tens of thousands of Siberian troops were deployed from the east.

[another_liberal]

12. The Japanese made that decision, not the U.S.

To equate what we did to Germany with what the Soviet Union did to them is grossly out of balance. By any means of comparison (German casualties caused, German divisions destroyed, German territory conquered, etc.) we were by far the junior partner in that alliance. The Soviet Union was the German Army's graveyard. By the time we opened the long-awaited "Second Front," most of Germany's experienced officers and noncoms were either buried on the Eastern front or had been disabled in the fighting there.

The SS division mentioned in this top post was in France to recover from the losses it had sustained in fighting in the East the previous year. They were recruiting sixteen year old volunteers to try and come back to something close to full strength. The enemy our soldiers faced in Normandy was a mere shadow of what they had been in June of 1941.

[BigDemVoter]

4. Awful & a coincidence you should post this. . . .

I am just on the last 25 pages or so of "Hitler's Willing Executioners--Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." It's quite horrifying, as you can imagine, and it is meticulously researched.

Monsters like this should never escape because of age, infirmity, etc. It's good to see them still being pursued.

[madokie]

5. Why does the dick and W and their cohorts get a pass

for the atrocities they were responsible for in Iraq and Afghanistan? Many people died and will continue to die because of those war criminals

[grahamhgreen]

8. +1. Why I this case can they not plead collateral damage, but gunning them down by chopper or drone

is OK?

[24601]

13. Why does President Obama get a pass for his drone strikes? OK then, here's the answer for both.

Genocide & intentional targeting of non-combatants isn't even close to the unintended killing of non-combatants that results from trying to take out lawful targets. It comes down to intent.