Talking to some biker friends today, we started to remenisce about our motorcycle trip to France some years ago. One morning we took the pilgrimage to Oradour sur Glane where this Peugeot 202 is still parked where it was left on june 10th 1944.
tinyurl.com/6f3hcrw
Can there be any more poignant piece of motoring history in the world ?
Most of us left the place with tears in our eyes.
Ted
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We have been to Oradour Ted and agree completely with you. A very moving place which should perhaps be better known.
vitesse
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Never been to Oradour, its on my to-do list.
I suspect the feeling is much the same as Port Arthur, in Tasmania, which gave me the heebie jeebies.
www.portarthur.org.au/
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>> Port Arthur, in Tasmania, which gave me the heebie jeebies.
Yes, people treated each other quite harshly until just yesterday. Convicts in Tasmania, slave depots in West Africa... but after all, only some of them died.
My sister and her husband, both doctors, used to work in the Chatham Islands, off in the South Pacific from New Zealand. One Sunday they went to a headland with their children for a picnic. To their surprise, there was no vegetation at the end of the headland, just bare earth.
They stumbled over a bone sticking out of the ground that they immediately recognised as a human thighbone. My sister, an imaginative woman though an experienced GP, insists that the blue sky suddenly turned black and their nippers started whining and wanting to leave.
When they mentioned the place to a knowledgeable Kiwi, he said oh yes, there had been indigenous people in the Chathams, but the NZ colonists had shipped some Maoris in to wipe them out, and that headland was the place where the last of the natives had been done in with wooden clubs and so on.
I have no idea whether that is true, but my sister thinks it is. And probably if you go back far enough in time you can find sites of the same sort almost everywhere on earth. According to some theories our species was cannibal for millennia. That's what has made us so clever, so cunning and damn nasty.
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The entire place looks very ery, almost like Chernoby. It looks like a great reminder of what the SS did to many places though. In Manchester the only reminders are usualy found when you have an unusual gap between houses where newer houses have been built due to bomb damage.
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Not sure the The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich ever made it to Manchester Rats...
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 22 Jan 11 at 18:27
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No but the SS did a lot of damage to all of our cities.
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Err no, that would have been the Luftwaffe.
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Indeed.
I always think of the SS as the entire miltary operation of the Nazi regime. Never did history in school, we just watched Harry Enfield videos instead.
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>> Never did history in school, we just watched Harry Enfield videos instead.
>>
Then do it now. It's a fascinating subject, and far more rewarding than sitting on here fretting about Pandas. ;-)
Last edited by: Harleyman on Sat 22 Jan 11 at 19:01
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I read up a lot about the Nazi area a few years back. For some reason I was a lot more fascinated about the horrorcaust though.
I am not joking though when I say I didn't learn anything about the nazis from school. I have learnt a about real life experiences from my grandparents.
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>> I am not joking though when I say I didn't learn anything about the nazis
>> from school. >>
The 'Yesterday' channel on cable often has really good WW2 documentaries. Failing that, dig out the World At War series on DVD - superb, even though a little historic now (it was made in the 1970's?) when many survivors from the war were still alive to tell their tales.
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>> the World At War series on DVD - superb, even though a little historic now
>> (it was made in the 1970's?) when many survivors from the war were still alive
>> to tell their tales.
And therein lies its key. The tales of the eyewitnesses - from all sides - gave this program a sense real life. It hits you hard and says "Hold up, this sh-- really happened"
Last edited by: Zero on Sun 23 Jan 11 at 21:48
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My two remaning grandparents tell me a lot (one is 81 - my mothers mum) and the other is 91 (my dads dad) so I do get both sides of the story. My grandma tells me what it was like during the way on the home front and my Grandpa was stationed in India as a fitter so has some stories to tell too.
None of my grandparents were actually in battle though, although my late grandad was in the Navy during ww2 he never really spoke about it.
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>> fretting about Pandas. ;-)
>>
Buy a FIAT, and you deserve to fret!
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2200 miles and no problems so far, not even a rattle. The big difference is my car is made in Poland (a country destroyed by WW2) and not Italy.
I would never buy an Italian car they are too busy striking to make cars.
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>> >> Never did history in school, we just watched Harry Enfield videos instead.
>> >>
>>
>> Then do it now. It's a fascinating subject, and far more rewarding than sitting on
>> here fretting about Pandas. ;-)
>>
Seconded. You could do a lot worse than get hold of a DVD set of The World at War and watch. Coincidentally enough, the opening sequence relates the occurrences at Oradour-sur-Glane.
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Recalling my last visit to Manchester, I can think of some neighbourhoods which could do with a bit of urban-renewal, blitzkrieg style...
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Which was when?
Some parts especialy towards the east do need bombing but I think most European cities are like that. I think we have all learnt lessons from the 60's and 70's though.
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Well, Old Trafford could do with a few 10 000lb bombs in the Stretford End...
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That I will agree with you on, I hate football it causes too much traffic down my road.
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Overloon war museum near the Dutch German border.
When I went there the majority of the exhibits were still where they'd ground to a halt, but I understand they've been moved under cover to preserve them. IIRC this is the site of the only tank battle ever to have taken place on Dutch soil.
One room was dedicated to the holocaust - a very moving experience.
There's a large inscribed monolith. The inscription makes the feelings of the Dutch to the Germans very clear!
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>> There's a large inscribed monolith. The inscription makes the feelings of the Dutch to the
>> Germans very clear!
There is an old Dutch Joke.
A German touring Holland on holiday, came across a street party, where everyone was laughing uproariously, and getting drunk and eating heartily.
He wandered up to a Dutch guy, and said "What is the party about"
The Dutch guy says, "Its a national holiday to celebrate a WW2 bomb, where 400 Dutch people got killed"
"Why are you celebrating that in a happy manner?" said the German.
"Because 4000 German troops died in the explosion as well"
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I was in Holland with my brother-in-law who, at the time, was a large portly character and spoke German very well. We were waiting to be served and were obviously overlooked until I said they seem to have something against us. We were immediately dealt with and my BIL later explained he was often mistaken for being German.
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Not been on this evening, just got back from a very fine meal and a couple of glasses of blob.
Rats, Have a look here, it's a four parter and there are some very good clips in part 4 of the village garage with all the cars in the rear yard.
tinyurl.com/6kz7hqz
The Peugeot is parked where the driver left it upon arriving back from a call. he was marched away and murdered with the rest of the inhabitants, bar a handful.
It's generally thought to be the village doctor's car although some have said it's the wine merchant's......Wrong place at the wrong time ?
I have all the World at War DVDs together with the Great War in Colour if you want to borrow them.
Ted
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I would like to visit Oradour. I visited a concentration camp at Mauthausen (sp?) in Austria some years ago and that was incredibly moving.
It really took some time to digest the fact that this sort of thing actually happened - not that long ago really.
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In Prague a few years ago, we toyed with the idea of crossing into Poland to visit Auschwitz. It didn't take us long to decide against.
I was born before the War, my wife during it. We learned all about that stuff as horrified young nippers. I can even remember a newsreel in the cinema showing corpses strewn on the ground in one of those hellholes. I thought at first they were rags, then I saw that they contained skin-and-bone skeletal dead humans. I must have been six or so. I haven't forgotten that monochrome image and never will.
In Prague, we realised visiting the place would tell us nothing new but would probably depress the hell out of us. So we stayed in Prague drinking beer.
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On my way to/from Prague in a beaten up Type 2 camper (taking in the Munich Oktoberfest along the way), we visited Dachau once. Being a child of the 70s, I hadn't had the experiences in youth you speak of, AC. I'm glad to have done it, but that evening was obviously the least merry on a pretty wild trip.
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should have gone to terezin AC its only about an hour on the service bus from prague and cost about £4 return,main thing is make sure you dont miss something like the 4.15 bus back though because the next one was something like 7.00pm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terezín
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Very detailed account of Oradour Massacre here
www.oradour.info/
Also a very good museum there
www.oradour.org/index.php?rubrique=7
On our visit there a few years ago the "saddest" sights were not the cars but the sewing machine and bedhead which seemed to be the only things remaining in each house.
Talking to a Frenchman last summer who has done some research into the movements of the SS towards Normandy, he said that they had committed several minor atrocities on their journey. He thought it was because they were not particularly keen to move North from a relatively cushy posting in the South and were constantly attacked by the Resistance on the way. ( There is a memorial to members of Resistance killed or missing on 8th June 1944 in Noailles 50 miles South of Oradour, another in Bretenoux, 80 miles South, 20 killed on 9th June and several others)
I gather that there is also a book by Max Hastings on the subject of Das Reich which covers the events gets mixed reviews though - has anyone read it??
Das Reich: The March of the 2nd Panzer Divisio: The March of the 2nd Panzer Division Through France, 1944 [Paperback]
Phil
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Ratto,
If you do one thing this year - watch this series - ground breaking has become a hackneyed phrase over the years but this was truly ground-braking immaculately filmed and researched this is a true tour-de-force - the haunting music the authoritative narration by Laurence Olivier - opening and closing sequences of the series include footage from Oradour - probably the most emotive sequence of any British documentary. Watch an learn.
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Yes I'd second that... We went to Breendonk a couple of years ago which has so much it becomes a little overpowering...
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This is probably the best site for Oradour and the other ' Martyr ' villages.
Hundreds of photographs, Roll calls of the dead, names of survivors and their stories, etc.
www.oradour.info/index.htm Might be same as Phil's post.
Ted
Last edited by: Ted on Tue 25 Jan 11 at 22:31
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Das Reich were constantly plagued by the USAAF and the RAF when moving, and they were convinced the resistance were giving their position away to the allies.
They didn't realise they had sloppy Enigma processes and they were always one of the first to have the codes broken by Bletchley Park, who seemed to take a pleasure in duffing them up, because it was one of Hitlers elite Waffen SS divisions. Hence they were nasty as a disturbed wasps nest. Contained a lot of Non Germans too.
>> I gather that there is also a book by Max Hastings on the subject of
>> Das Reich which covers the events gets mixed reviews though -
Not a great fan of Max Hastings, some things were said about him in the falklands war by the other hacks, including him loosing others reports when it was his turn to be sent back to file them and the fact he always seemed to be "further behind the action"
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 25 Jan 11 at 22:48
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Max Hastings' book on Das Reich is a cracking history. I would also recommend "Six Armies in Normandy" by John Keegan - one of the best histories of that campaign.
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I live just up the road from Oradour;
I agree the sewing machines in particular are touching, so is the doll`s pushchair in the church. I am told however that the particular car that features in the pictures is, in fact, a fake. It was allegedly put there in the late 1940s, before the place was opened to the public.
This isn`t meant to be controversial, just what I have been told - the sole survivor of one of the families used to service the Prelude - and I won`t be near a computer again for a while to answer any follow-up questions.
Anyway Oradour is well worth a visit and I am always surprised by the number of German visitors. My only advice would be - go on a sunny day rather than a dismal one.
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Yes, indeed. One of the few places where the hairs on the back of your neck tingle just being there. Very poignant.
I understand Auschwitz is the same - you can sense the evil in the air.
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World's saddest car ? - vitesse
