A sad demise. “Tireless smuggler of memory”, Robert Hébras, the last survivor of the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne) in 1944, died on Saturday, at the age of 97.
This “craftsman of peace and reconciliation”, died Saturday morning at 6:15 a.m. at the Saint-Junien hospital, about ten kilometers from Oradour-sur-Glane, “surrounded by his relatives”, announced his family, the town hall, and the association of the families of the martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane in a press release.
“A tireless transmitter of memory”
President Emmanuel Macron hailed on Twitter the memory of a “survivor” who “devoted his life to transmitting the memory of the victims, to working for peace and reconciliation”, while the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, spoke of ” a tireless transmitter of memory”.
“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 former President François Holland.
Massacre and trauma
Robert Hébras was soon to be 19 when, on June 10, 1944, the SS of the Das Reich division killed 643 people in this Limousin village, one of the worst massacres of civilians committed by the Nazis in Western Europe.
That afternoon, “the Germans get out of their truck, tell the population to gather in the central square. For about three-quarters of an hour, no one worries. The men are then separated from the women and children”, Robert Hébras still told with precision, in 2020, to an AFP correspondent. Among the victims, “the youngest was a week old, the oldest 90 years old”.
In barns, soldiers shoot men with machine guns, before burning them. In the church, they lock up women and children and set fire. Then they burn the bodies, dig graves and set fire to the entire village. 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.
“Convinced and committed European”
This killing was “meticulously prepared and executed” by the Nazis, who wanted to “sow terror so that the population does not switch to the side of the maquis”, particularly active in Limousin, explains the president of the national association of the families of the martyrs of ‘Oradour-sur-Glane Benoît Sadry.
After many years of walling himself in silence, – “My son, I never wanted to talk about Oradour with him, except when he was 20, when he went to the army” – Robert Hébras fought “so that we don’t forget”, tirelessly telling his story, especially with schoolchildren. “I did what I had to do,” summed up the 95-year-old former mechanic, to whom President Emmanuel Macron had awarded the insignia of Commander of the National Order of Merit in 2022.
“Convinced and committed European” according to his family, and also decorated with the Legion of Honor, then the German Order of Merit in 2012, Robert Hébras had guided French and German Presidents François Hollande and Joachim Gauck in the ruins in 2013. of the martyred village. He had testified for the first time at the trial of the massacre, organized in Bordeaux in 1953, which resulted in the conviction of seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians incorporated into the SS, the “Despite us”.
War of Memories
The amnesty for these 14 soldiers, voted the same year by Parliament, provoked a long war of memories between Limousins and Alsatians, which indirectly affected Robert Hébras years later. In 2012, he was sentenced for defamation for having expressed, in a book, doubts about the forcible enlistment of the “Despite us” in the Waffen SS, before being definitively cleared a year later by the Court of Cassation.
In recent years, Robert Hébras had passed on his memory work to his granddaughter Agathe Hébras, with whom he had co-written a book on the history of Oradour-sur-Glane. The president of the Haute-Vienne department council, Jean-Claude Leblois, and the president of the Oradour memory center, Fabrice Escure, saluted this Saturday “his fight for the recognition and memory of the martyr village and its 643 victims. »
Robert Hébras died just before the 70th anniversary of the verdict of the Bordeaux trial, which fell on the night of February 12 to 13, 1953.