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DANGEROUS TO TELL HISTORICAL TRUTH
French teacher jailed for challenging wartime lie
"Truth can stand by itself. Only the lie needs the support of the state." — Emil Maier Dorn
In a striking example of what academic freedom means in a liberal democracy, another academic has been imprisoned by the French state. In this instance, the offender had questioned the now-discredited canard of a "Nazi massacre" in a small French village. What happened, in fact, was that as the famed SS Division "Das Reich" was on its way to the Normandy front, several of its members were captured by the infamous Maquis and gruesomely mutilated and murdered. The SS men responded by going after the so-called Resistance, placing women and children in the village church, where they presumed they would be safe as they went after those responsible for that hideous atrocity. Unknown to the Germans, the sanctuary was being used by these thugs as storage place for high explosives, which detonated during the ensuing exchange, killing the hundreds who had taken refuge within the church. The following report recites the usual warmed-over wartime propaganda.
By SUSAN BELL PARIS—A Teacher banned from working in France for peddling revisionist views on the Holocaust has been sentenced to two years in prison by a French court after he made a film contesting a brutal Second World War massacre by Nazi SS storm-troopers. The conviction of Vincent Reynouard, 33, coincides with the 60th anniversary today of the slaughter of 642 villagers, including 245 women and 207 children, at Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June, 1944, four days after the D-Day landings by Allied forces. In his film entitled The Tragedy of Oradour-sur-Glane: 50 Years of Official Lies, Reynouard blamed the inhabitants of the tiny Limousin village for their fate. Disputing evidence of eyewitness survivors, the former teacher denied that the SS deliberately killed more than 350 women and children after rounding them up and ordering them into the village church, arguing that the deaths were due to explosives concealed in the church by members of the French Resistance active in Oradour. Reynouard had sent videos of his film, along with order forms for additional copies, to the last two living survivors of the massacre, the village memorial centre (now a national war memorial and museum) and to the mayor of Oradour and numerous villagers. Reynouard was first convicted in 1991 of distributing revisionist literature when he was a student in Caen, in Normandy. Six years later he was sacked from his post as a maths teacher at a technical college in nearby Honfleur, after he set homework involving counting Dachau concentration-camp victims and was discovered to have stored revisionist documents denying the Holocaust on the school computer. Reynouard was eventually banned from teaching anywhere in France. He also wrote a revisionist book questioning the Nazi slaughter entitled The Oradour Massacre: A Half-Century of Theatre. In 1998, some 500 French and German copies of the book were seized by police in Brussels and the Flemish port city of Antwerp at the request of French judicial authorities. Reynouard’s sentence was handed down by the Limoges appeals court, which said that his film had insulted the memory of those who had been massacred. The court doubled his original prison sentence, but reduced his fine of $10,000 (£6,688), ordering him instead to pay $1,000 (£668) in damages to each of the three civil parties in the case, including Marcel Darthout, one of the last two survivors of the massacre still alive today. Today, only the stone skeleton of the original Oradour-sur-Glane remains. The late president Charles de Gaulle ordered that the charred ruins of the village should be left as a memorial to the suffering of France under the Nazi occupation and a new village was constructed nearby. A rusting bicycle, a blackened iron bedstead and the charred wreckage of a baby carriage are still standing as a chilling reminder of the horrific events of that spring afternoon when Hitler’s troops razed the village to the ground and murdered its inhabitants. The massacre is believed to have been a reprisal for a French Resistance attack which killed 40 Germans following the D-Day invasion. The SS Das Reich storm-troopers were heading for Normandy when they were ordered to attack the village, a sleepy backwater near Limoges with little Resistance activity. Many historians have argued that the Nazis attacked Oradour-sur-Glane in error after mistaking it for nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres, a suspected Resistance stronghold about 15 miles away. On their arrival, the SS rounded up children and women, many carrying babies in their arms, and marched them to the village church, where they locked them inside before throwing in grenades filled with poison gas, and opening fire. As those who survived screamed for mercy, the SS built a human bonfire by throwing wood on to their badly injured bodies and setting it alight. Only one woman escaped from the church, by throwing herself from a 12ft-high altar window. Among the 60 troops who perpetrated the massacre were 14 French nationals from the eastern region of Alsace, of whom all but one had been conscripted by force.
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