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E-book
Author Farmer, Sarah Bennett

Title Martyred village : commemorating the 1944 massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane / Sarah Farmer
Published Berkeley : University of California Press, ©1999

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Description 1 online resource (xvii, 300 pages)
Contents Ch. 1. The Massacre -- Ch. 2. Framing the Story -- Ch. 3. Creating the Monument -- Ch. 4. The Memorial Landscape -- Ch. 5. The Bordeaux Trial -- Ch. 6. The New Town
Summary Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation. In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks. In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife. Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.--Publisher description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-282) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre, Oradour-sur-Glane, France, 1944
World War, 1939-1945 -- Atrocities.
Massacres -- France -- Oradour-sur-Glane
HISTORY -- Military -- World War II.
Atrocities
Massacres
Massamoorden.
Vergelding.
History & Archaeology.
History - General.
SUBJECT Oradour-sur-Glane (France) -- History
Subject France -- Oradour-sur-Glane
Oradour.
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 98029646
ISBN 9780520925465
0520925467
0585283516
9780585283517
Other Titles Oradour, arrêt sur mémoire. English