AS Robert Hebras wanders the ruins of his old village, the ghosts slowly begin to come alive for him.

Now an old man, he remembers the warm, thriving little community that was Oradour-sur-Glane... before the Nazis and their trucks came.

And with tears in his aged eyes, the 87-year-old remembers how the name of the quiet French village came to be spoken only in horrified whispers.

Here on June 10, 1944, 642 men, women and children were brutally murdered, including Robert’s mother Marie and two sisters, Georgette, 22, and nine-year-old Denise.

The village now stands as charred reminder of one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War.

Today – 68 years later – Robert supports the German authorities’ recent decision to reopen an investigation into the senseless slaughter which could finally bring six of the SS killers to justice.

Robert, who lives in Saint Junien, near Oradour – close to Limoges in western France – was one of just six survivors.

He only lived by playing dead, stifling the urge to scream as Nazi executioners continued to fire at the lifeless bodies on top of him.

The soldiers – part of Hitler’s Das Reich Division – then set the corpses alight.

Yet 18-year-old mechanic Robert somehow managed to crawl through the blazing barn they were in and out to freedom.

Remembering the bloodbath, he says: “It was Saturday so I was not working. I was with a friend and we were chatting outside my house.

“All of a sudden there was a large noise. We looked up and there were several German trucks parking at the edge of the village. The Nazis ordered us to gather in the main square.

“It was all done in a very calm and orderly fashion. I wasn’t at all scared. Why should I have been? I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

More than 400 women and children, some from surrounding villages, were taken off and locked in the church, which was then burned to the ground.

Many suffocated or were burned alive – the Nazis used machine guns on the few children who were still screaming.

“It was simply an execution,” says Robert. “There were a handful of Nazis in front of us, in their uniforms.

"They just raised their machine guns and started firing across us, at our legs to stop us getting out. They were strafing, not aiming.

“Men in front of me just started falling. I got caught by several bullets but I survived because those in front of me got the full impact.

"I was so lucky. Four of us in the barn managed to get away because we remained completely still under piles of bodies. One man tried to get away before they had gone – he was shot dead.

“The SS were walking around and shooting anything that moved. They poured petrol on bodies and then set them alight.

“We were able to crawl out of the back of the barn as it was engulfed by fire. I hid in the woods with burnt hair and a burnt left arm until I thought it was safe.”

Robert eventually took shelter with a relative who lived six miles away.

There he was reunited with his father who had been out of the village working on a farm.

“My father and I returned to Oradour a few days later,” he recalls. “There were still piles of bodies in the church. They had not managed to burn the evidence properly.”

This week investigators from Berlin visited the village, preserved as it was that terrible day as a permanent shrine to the victims – 328 blackened buildings in ruins, rusting cars left where they were last parked.

The new inquiry was triggered by information found in files of the Stasi secret police in former Communist East Germany, now in an archive in Berlin.

The homes of six German men in their eighties, all believed to be soldiers in Das Reich were searched 18 months ago.

But the Mirror can reveal that half of these men look unlikely to ever face justice.

Dr Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel office, says: “There are six suspects but apparently three are medically unfit to stand trial.

“People realise that time is running out and there are some energetic prosecutors who want to try and bring these people to justice while they still can.

"We are not going to take them out of their death beds but if it’s still possible, it should be done. We owe it to the victims.”

The order to kill everyone in the village was given because the Nazis were intent on taking revenge for the capture of senior German officer Helmut Kampfe by the Resistance.

The regimental commander Sturm- bannfuhrer Adolf Diekmann was informed by the Nazi-supporting Vichy regime that Kampfe was being held hostage in Oradour.

But the Oradour in question was an entirely different place – Oradour-sur-Vayres.

Yet despite this, vengeful SS men did not bother to read their maps before opening fire.

More than 150 soldiers took part in the killing. After the war investigators could only identify 66 who had survived. Diekmann who ordered the atrocity had died in action in Normandy three weeks later.

It was not until 1953 that a trial of 21 men took place, and 20 were convicted. Two were sentenced to death and the rest given jail terms.

But amnesties and pardons freed all of those convicted within five years of the trial. In 1981 former SS Untersturmfuhrer Heinz Barth was arrested and tried for his part in the massacre.

Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983 for giving the order to shoot 20 male victims, he was released from prison in 1997 and died in August 10 years later, aged 86.

Despite the age of the surviving SS killers, the German authorities still insist they are serious about prosecutions now.

Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel said: “This time we aim to make arrests and put those responsible on trial for war crimes.”

If trials take place, Robert will be the key witness. The only other survivor alive is Oradour carpenter Jean-Marcel Darthout. But he is said to be too ill to give evidence.

Robert says: “The people involved are now old men just like me. It’s possible they have lost their memories. It is excellent that Germany is taking responsibility for Oradour.

“I lost everything that day. I pray there is still time to bring to justice any of those monsters still alive who did this to us.”

A horror frozen in time

STANDING exactly as it was the day Hitler’s troops left it in 1944, the village is a chilling spectacle, writes Tom Parry.

What strikes you most are the reminders of ordinary lives suddenly cut short.

A bicycle, a sewing machine, the signs on the walls for a dentist, a doctor and baker.

The old church where the women and children were taken, is eerily silent.

The old Post Office, now crumbling, still bears black marks from where it was torched by the Nazis.

It is right that Oradour, like Auschwitz, is left in its ruined state for future generations – and in memory of those innocents who died.

Visitors are free to walk around and to feelthe full devastating impact of a plaque on acrumbling wall.

It simply reads: “Souviens-toi – remember.”

mirror.co.uk