Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane: Nazi Gold and the Murder of an Entire French Town by SS Division Das Reich

by Vincent Depaul Lupiano

The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is recognized yearly throughout France with the same profundity as the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers in the United States. The Oradour Massacre is taught in school in France and the anniversary is commemorated every year. Today, Oradour is a destination for people interested in one of the most horrific events in French history. Each year, the devastated village attracts over 300,000 visitors worldwide. On June 8, 1944, 15,000 men and 209 tanks and self-propelled guns of the Das Reich 2 Panzer Division rolled out of Montauban in southern France and began an ordered 450-mile march that ended at Normandy more than two weeks later. While in Montauban, a battalion from Das Reich surrounded Oradour-sur-Glane, massacred 642 men, women, and children, and razed the village to the ground. Das Reich became one of the most dreadful legends in the history of France and World War II. This is the story of the Oradour massacre and its real how two SS officers—a general and a major—“acquired” one million dollars’ worth of gold ingots while encamped at nearby Montauban, and how that led to the massacre in 1944.

Genres: World War II, Nonfiction

274 pages, Hardcover

First published March 5, 2024

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a slim volume and poorly written. A lot of the book seemed to be fanciful conjecture.

Lupiano is excessively repetitive on points of interest that are do not need to be mentioned but once. The officer in command of the SS troops who massacred was killed when struck by shrapnel before the end of the war. We are told this in almost the exact same way 6 times. There is no variation in detail. This is done with other passages too.

Some of the book deals with the background of the key personnel. Some details the efforts of the French maquisards, the rest deals with a story of a guy caught moving gold out of Switzerland to France long after the war. The style of writing is different and for me, it did not ring true. Very little is written on the actual massacre itself.

Overall, I know there must be better books about the massacre. I would give this one a hard pass.

[Faith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a terribly written book that was probably mis-titled because it certainly isn't about the actual events at Oradour-sur-Glane. That takes up barely 6 pages of 230. Lupiano didn't bother to give any real detail about the massacre, as evidenced by the fact that the map of that day's events mentioned places and times that the author didn't mention in his narrative. In fact, that map appears without attribution and seems to have been stolen from Wikipedia. Only three members of Oradour are even mentioned by name, including one of the survivors who wrote a book that this author treats with some distain.

Lupiano was far more interested in talking about the Nazis who perpetrated the massacre or the people who, decades later, tried to traffic the stolen gold. Murderers and thieves were the people he fleshed out. The innocents were ignored.

As if that wasn't bad enough, though, the writing here was atrocious. Lupiano switched verb tenses from one paragraph to the next and repeated himself constantly. I wonder if this was self-published? I'm not sure, but my local library (from where I obtained this disaster) doesn't usually add self-published books to their collection.

Definitely skip this one and find a better history about this part of WWII.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today, the ghost town, of Oradour-sur Glane is left untouched for more than 70 years (by order of then-general Charles de Gaulle), is well known by French schoolchildren, most of whom make a pilgrimage here. A sign greets every pilgrim who enters with only one English word: Remember. It was here machine-gunned and burned by Nazi troops on June 10, 1944 (four days after D-Day). that the Nazi troops methodically rounded up the entire population of 642 townspeople, of whom about 200 were children. The women and children were herded into the town church, where they were tear-gassed and machine-gunned as they tried to escape the burning chapel. Oradour's men were tortured and executed. The town was then set on fire, its victims left under a blanket of ashes. For years the reason for the mass killings remained unclear. Some say the Nazis wanted revenge for the kidnapping of one of their officers (by French Resistance fighters in a neighboring village), but others believe the Nazis were simply terrorizing the populace in the wake of D-Day. Then along comes this book that proposes a different reason. "Nazi Gold" was a wrinkle I had not heard before.

Lupiano in this book, explains how SS division commander, Maj. Gen. Lammerding, has accumulated untraceable gold bars from German and French sources. He concocted a plan to hide the gold through the end of the war. He has been ordered to head north from southern France to Normandy to stop the allies during D-Day. So, with the aid of two accomplices, he crates up the gold and took it with the division. However, plans go awry, and one maquis and five French resistance teenagers ambushed a car, a truck, and a half-track on a road outside Oradour-sur-Glane. Lammerding orders his battalion to find the "records" in the only place that made sense to hide a half ton of gold: Oradour-sur-Glane. There is a great an interesting story here but the writing of it needed more work. Lots of repetition and the actual massacre took up about six pages of a 250-page book. Yet, I felt the book turned out to be far more interesting than at first glance just because of the story. What happened to the gold and the people involved made for a mystery worth reading.

[Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

I agree with Faith. Apart from the appalling writing, I hated the overtly emotional language and the way he constantly made authoritative claims about people's motives or state of mind and a given moment.

And at no point does Lupiano make any attempt at sourcing any of his claims. He just announces that the accepted historical narrative is wrong, makes a bunch of statements that are obvious speculation mixed in with some that may be speculation or may be evidenced, and expects us to take his word at it. I have no idea whose testimony if any is used to produce the conversations presented.

Read literally anything else