German
authorities said on Monday they had raided the homes of six
men suspected of taking part in the Nazi massacre of 642
mainly women and children in a French village in 1944.
The raids, carried out in recent weeks in cities across Germany, were part of
a murder probe into the men, believed to have been part
of a Waffen-SS unit called "Der Führer."
The men, aged 18 and 19 at the time, have "either denied their participation in the massacre or were not fit for questioning,
according to the investigators' first impressions," prosecutors said.
Authorities had hoped the raids
would unearth documents, for example diaries, linking the
men to the massacre that took place in the French village
of Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944. However, prosecutors
in the western city of Düsseldorf acknowledged that "until now, no substantial evidence had been uncovered during the raids."
Four days after the Normandy landings
that marked the start of the liberation of France and Europe
from Nazi occupation, Oradour was destroyed by a detachment
of SS troops for reasons that have never been made clear.
They ordered the town's 642 inhabitants,
including some 200 children, to assemble in the village
square.
Women and children were then herded
into the church which was pumped full of toxic gas and
set on fire. The men were machine-gunned and burned alive
in a barn. The entire village was then torched, never to
be rebuilt.
In France, the slaughter has come
to symbolise the worst of Nazi barbarity and the village
has been left as it was as a memorial.
Around 60 soldiers were brought
to trial in France over the massacre in the 1950s, and
20 of them convicted, but all were released within a few
years.
Since the Nuremberg trials after
the war, where several top Nazi henchmen were sentenced
to death, German authorities have examined more than 25,000
cases but the vast majority never came to court.
But now, with many of the suspected
war criminals in or approaching their 90s, there has been
a minor flurry of arrests and court cases in Germany dealing
with war-time atrocities.
thelocal.de
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