Again? Never!

"I will have just one thing to say to him: 'At last'.
"I was in the barns. I lost my mother and I lost my wife. I had been married for ten months -- that's not long.
"I have received many French presidents and each time I have asked: when will a German leader come to see Oradour?
"Because to describe it is one thing, but to see it is quite another."
Jean-Marcel Darthout, 89, massacre survivor, Oradour-sur-Glane, France

Thierry Zoccolan/AFP/Getty Images

"How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live based on their race, religion, their political persuasion or their sexual orientation?
"Places such as this warn each one of us to help ensure that such things never happen again."
German Chancellor Angel Merkel -- Dachau

The village of Oradour-sur-Glane is a preservation of a past wartime atrocity. It has never been re-built, deliberately, with the intention of maintaining it as it was after troops from the 2nd SS Panzer Divison Das Reich marched into the village to confront the villagers, and then leave, when there were no more villagers to confront. The troops shot, gassed and burned alive 642 people, 247 children among them, on June 10, 1944.

The women and the children were rounded up and ushered into the village church. The church was then set afire, and all within were burned alive. The village men were also there. They were there to observe, and presumably, they did, incapable of reacting, kept forcibly from doing anything to halt the atrocity. And then it was their turn. They were taken to the barns and raked with machine-gun fire. And thus died the village.

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Germany is in the throes of self-abnegation. Committed to remembering what its Fascist, Nazi past wrought. Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit last month to the former Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, the first such visit by any German chancellor. In an attempt to combat present day neo-Nazism, to demonstrate the commitment of the government of Germany to battling facism, racism, hatred, racial demagoguery.

And Joachim Gauck, the German president, set himself to become the first German president to visit the infamous site of Oradour-sur-Glane, in humility and shame for the past. The barbarity of Nazi occupation is still visible in the memorial that the village has become. President Gauck has paid two previous visits to European killing places by the Nazis; the Czech village of Lidice near Prague, and the Italian hamlet of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

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French President Francois Holland will accompany Joachim Gauck. President Hollande was once mayor of nearby Tulle. The very same SS troops had butchered 99 civilians there, before moving on to Oradour. "Today it will be Francois Hollande and Joachim Gauck at Oradour", said Raymond Frugier, the mayor of a new village built nearby the shrine that Oradour has become.

When Mr. Frugier was four he recalls his father seeing the SS column approaching the town. He gathered his wife and two children, to hide in the forest nearby. And they survived.