Nazi war crimes

In 1944, in the Limousin region of France, was a small village of about 670 people called Oradour-sur-Glane.  On June 10, it ceased to exist.  The village and all but twenty-odd survivors were wiped out by a German Waffen-SS company en route to intercept the Allied advance following the D-Day landings at Normandy.  All the men were rounded up into barns and machine-gunned, and the women and children were corralled into the church, which was then set alight.  The town was then razed.

Today, the Village Martyr has been preserved exactly as it was left that day as a memorial to the victims and the atrocities of war.  A rusted car is parked in the street beside the single disused tram line, power poles still supporting snapped, coiling cables.  Deformed bicycles and Singer sewing machines are strewn inside the collapsing stone shells of houses.  On the tiled floor of a broken boucherie lays the prostrate scale on which the family's evening meals were once weighed by the butcher for the village wives and mothers.  Even with the visiting tourists, the streets have an eerie quiet.

There is some debate over the exact circumstances of the massacre, but it appears that the battalion commander, Adolf Diekmann, believing the kidnapped German Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe was being held by the French Resistance in the town, exceeded his orders to take 30 hostages and instead ordered the population be exterminated as a "just retaliation."  Though his actions prompted protests within the German army, including from Field Marshall Rommel, Diekmann and much of the company which had committed the massacre were never tried; they were killed in action shortly afterward in the Battle of Normandy.

The Eagle's Nest

I can now say we've been to Germany -- a little corner pocket called
Berchtesgaden which is the gateway to Obersalzberg, the Nazi southern
headquarters and second seat of power. We caught a bus an hour out of
Salzburg and joined a tour which Mai Li had spotted on the internet and
booked before we left Sydney. This particular tour is recommended by the
New York Times, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves (European travel guru) and
others. The guide was extremely knowledgeable about the Nazi history of the
mountain, covering the life of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi high officials --
Speer, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Hess, and quite a bit on Martin Bormann,
Hitler's secretary and architect of much of the mountain stronghold;
indeed, it was his idea to construct the Eagle's Nest -- a luxurious tea
room (what we might call nowadays a conference centre) perched at the apex
of the mountain, accessible by a steep and winding mountain road, and then
a long (and once-heated) tunnel to the large, completely brass-lined
elevator which takes you to the top -- as a fiftieth birthday present from
the Nazi party to Adolf Hitler.

About half of the Nazi buildings remain, including some of the officials'
houses, but Hitler's residence sustained two direct hits in an RAF bombing
raid on Obersalzberg in 1945. The remains were completely razed in the
early fifties and trees were planted closely together over the site to
ensure it is never used as a place of pilgrimage by Hitler sympathisers.

We explored part of the extensive bunkers which were built under the
residences as a potential last refuge and means of escape of the Nazi high
officials and their families.