The village of Oradour-sur-Glane is a martyr village of the Second World War.

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STEPHANE MAHE / POOL / AFP

  • A Spanish historian has found the trace of a Spanish refugee who was among the victims of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre and who was not listed in the registers.

  • It is probable, given the means at the time, that there are still other forgotten victims of this massacre of June 10, 1944 by the Nazis.

It is David Ferrer Revull, a Spanish academic, who deserves the credit for correcting the results of the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne), a martyred village of the Second World War.

It officially went from 642 to 643 dead, after the discovery of an ignored victim, Ramona Dominguez Gil, a Spanish refugee who had passed through the registers.

The historian has carried out, in particular in the departmental archives of Haute-Vienne and of families, research on Spanish refugees in the region (numbering about twenty in Oradour at the time of the massacre).

Following a "declaration of death" from the Limoges tribunal de grande instance in December 2019, the name of Ramona Dominguez Gil was officially added, more than 75 years after the massacre, said Claude Milord, president of the 'National Association of the Families of the Martyrs of Oradour, confirming information from Ouest-France.

All his family decimated

Ramona Dominguez Gil, a septuagenarian from Aragon, had followed her son fleeing Francoism to France, and the family (with her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren) was staying in a house in Oradour.

It has been established that "the whole family had been wiped out in the massacre" but for some unknown reason, the septuagenarian "was not listed in the list of victims" subsequently, according to the court ruling.

The academic hopes to recover a photo of Ramona Dominguez for the “Faces of Oradour” gallery, where more than 500 portraits on porcelain since 2018 have enabled site visitors to see the faces of the martyrs.

More than a hundred photos could not be recovered.

Other victims probably forgotten

On June 10, 1944, the SS Das Reich division had gathered the men of Oradour in the barns of the village and had shot them.

They had gathered women and children in the church before setting it on fire.

A memory center, opened in 1996 not far from the ruins of the martyr village, welcomes around 300,000 visitors each year.

According to Claude Milord, "it is probable that there are other people who died in the massacre but forgotten in the registers", given "the means of investigation and archives, which were clearly not the same at the time. period ”, and the various statutes:“ There were refugees, people passing through Oradour, people in hiding, refractory to the STO (compulsory labor service)… ”

Politics

The general indignation of the political class after the revisionist tags in Oradour-sur-Glane

Miscellaneous

Oradour-sur-Glane: Tags on the village memory center

  • Limousin

  • Society

  • Massacre

  • Second World War

  • Nazism