Confronting History
Rick Steves does a great job of including stops on the tours to expose us to important local and/or world history that is also often quite impactful. In this case, we stopped at Oradour-sur-Glane which is a small town whose inhabitants were massacred and the town burned by a nazi SS troup 4 days after the D-Day landings.
Oradour-sur-Glane
It is believed the massacre of this quintessential French village may have been due to suspected French resistance supporters living here, although this was entirely unsubstantiated. Men were machine gunned down, women and children were forced into the church which was then set on fire, and then the entire village was set ablaze. Of the 6oo+ villagers (men, women and children) only about 5 survived - some by hiding under dead bodies or in spite of multiple gun shot wounds. In 1946, President Charles de Gaulle officially approved preserving the village in its ruined state as a national remembrance.
