Word: oradour
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...early 1944 an officer from the SS second division, some of whose members are buried at Kolmeshöhe, was shot by a French resistance sniper. In retaliation, soldiers from the division rounded up the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, a nearby village, and massacred all 642 of them, including 207 children. They then burned the town to the ground. During the Battle of the Bulge, a Waffen SS battle group from the first division gunned down 71 American prisoners of war captured at Malmédy, Belgium, 40 miles northwest of Bitburg. Afterward, boisterous SS men used the bodies for target...
...individual engagement based on a personal obstinacy. "I ran to Biafra," he has said, "because I was too young for Guernica, Auschwitz, Oradour and Setif." He wants to exorcise the great butcheries of humanity. A man of fire, a warrior of peace, Kouchner invented "the duty of international meddling." He favors intervention--peaceful if possible, military if necessary--to stop massacres and those who commit them. In the name of human rights, he approved the U.S. intervention in Iraq: "The No. 1 weapon of mass destruction is Saddam Hussein," he said. He lost loved ones in the attack against...
...critical of President Nixon's decision to resume the bombing of North Viet Nam than Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme. In an emotional statement last December. Palme, 45, an intense, dedicated socialist, compared the aerial attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong to the past atrocities of "Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka." Washington, long annoyed by Sweden's harsh criticism of the U.S. role in the war, reacted sharply, telling Stockholm, in effect, not to bother sending a new ambassador to the U.S. capital for the time being. Will those ill feelings last into...
...following day, in reprisal for the kidnaping of an SS officer by the French underground, a heavily armed contingent from the Reich division rounded up all the inhabitants of the peaceful village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Old people were routed from bed and children from the schoolhouse, where their teacher had just scrawled on the blackboard: "I make a resolution never to harm others." In the main square, German machine-gunners methodically mowed down 200 men, poured gunpowder onto the pile of bodies and set it afire; only five escaped...
...women and children had been herded, SS men ignited special suffocating grenades. Some of the trapped people died at once. Others were machine-gunned as they poured out of the building. Then the Germans set fire to the bodies of 241 women and 202 children; one woman survived. Oradour to this day remains an empty, desolate monument to the massacre...