Oradour-sur-Glane has lost the one who perpetuated the memory of this martyr village of the Second World War. At 97, Robert Hébras died this Saturday, February 11. He was 18 years old, in June 1944, when SS soldiers entered this locality in central France and killed 643 people, including 260 children. The man, who is one of the six survivors of the horror, had been fulfilling a duty of memory for decades.
With him, a page of history is turned. At 97, Robert Hébras was the last survivor of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. On June 10, 1944, the Nazi soldiers invaded his village, locked women and children in the church, which they set on fire. Robert is taken with about sixty men to a barn. German soldiers open fire with two machine guns.
Only six inhabitants escaped this massacre. Among them, Robert Hébras, who was hidden under the corpses of his comrades in a barn and managed to escape. He joined the resistance, then the French army until 1945. For more than 40 years, he did not speak of this fatal day. Until in 1988, the only surviving woman of the drama died. It’s a click. Robert Hébras travels through France and Europe to tell his story to the youngest, and visits the ruins of his village.
First testimony in 1953
He had testified for the first time in 1953 at the massacre trial, which resulted in the sentencing of seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians incorporated into the SS, the “Malgre-nous”. The amnesty for these 14 soldiers, voted the same year by Parliament, provoked in France a long war of memories between Limousins and Alsatians.
More recently, Robert Hébras set out to link this tragedy to that of contemporary dramas. He had thus met several survivors of the Bataclan. In 2022, he had published a book with his granddaughter to transmit his memory.
” Convinced and committed European »
” Convinced and committed European according to his family, decorated with the Legion of Honor, the highest French distinction, and the German Order of Merit, Robert Hébras had guided in 2013 the French and German presidents François Hollande and Joachim Gauck in the ruins of the martyr village.
Emmanuel Macron hailed on Twitter the one who worked for the ” peace and reconciliation “. ” It is up to us to convey his message, the one he entrusted to me in September 2013 with the German President: never forget and defend peace, Europe and democracy “, also reacted the former president François Hollande.
(With AFP)