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LIMOGES (AFP)---Nazi war criminal Heinz Barth, who has died
aged 86, showed no regret for his part in the wartime massacre
of 642 men, women and children in the French village of
Oradour-sur-Glane, survivors charged on Tuesday.
Heinz Barth, a former SS platoon leader, was jailed for
life by an East German court in 1983 for his part in a string
of atrocities during World War II, including the slaughter
at Oradour that in France came to symbolise the worst of
Nazi barbarity.
He was released from prison in 1997 on health grounds, sparking
an outcry at the time, and spent the last years of his life
in Gransee near Berlin, where his death was announced late
Monday.
"In 1983, during his trial in East Berlin, he voiced
no regret," recalled Robert Hebras, 82, one of six people
who survived the massacre at Oradour, near Limoges in central
France.
"His sole regret was the fact there were survivors
left to testify."
"He never spoke a word of regret. ’It was war,’ that’s
all he said," agreed Jean-Marcel Darthout, 83, the only
other survivor.
Oradour was destroyed on June 10, 1944, four days after
the Normandy landings which marked the start of the liberation
of France and Europe from Nazi occupation.
A detachment of SS troops heading north to reinforce German
defences halted in the village and, for reasons that have
never been made clear, ordered its 642 inhabitants, including
some 200 children, to assemble in the town square.
Women and children were then herded into the town church
which was pumped full of toxic gas and set on fire. The men
were machine-gunned and burned alive. The entire village
was then torched.
Never rebuilt
The village was never rebuilt, its charred ruins being left
to stand as a monument to Nazi atrocities while a new town
was built nearby.
Barth took part in the Oradour massacre as a platoon leader
in the regiment Der Fuhrer, commanding several dozen men.
Earlier in the war, in 1942, Barth served as an officer
in a Nazi armoured regiment responsible for the slaughter
of 91 people in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Convicted in absentia by a French court after the war, Barth
lived under a false identity in East Germany for years before
being tracked down and made to stand trial again.
Both Hebras and Darthout said it was "immoral" that
Barth, who died on August 6, should have been granted early
release from jail.
"He can’t have been that sick, since he went
on to live another 10 years," said Hebras.
The mayor of Oradour, Raymond Frugier, said Monday the town "will
never be able to forget" the atrocities which he committed.
"For such crimes one should not be pardoned. For Oradour,
his death doesn’t change anything for all the children,
women and men that are dead," he said.
Barth was the last German soldier to stand trial over the
Oradour massacre.
Around 60 soldiers were brought to trial in France in the
1950s, and 20 of them convicted, but all were released within
a few years.
General Heinz Lammerding of the SS Das Reich division, seen
by historians as the chief architect of the massacre, died
in 1971 after a successful entrepreneurial career, never
having been indicted.
ejpress.org
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