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France and Germany just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Elysee pact and the start of their reconciliation.

I was reading a good book reciently and it showed in great detail how close relations between France and Germany were almost wrecked for generations by the SS and Hitler. The book many focuses on the Oradour Massacre in France and the fallout and its shows how close France came to a Poland type uprising.

This new book is only the second book in English to deal exclusively with the “Oradour Massacre” when 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane were rounded up and murdered by a division of the Waffen-SS. The entire population was assembled in the village square. At about three o’clock the women and children were separated from the men.

The Germans accused the menfolk of storing arms and ammunition in the village. The men were then taken away in groups of between 30 and 70, and shoved into the six largest buildings in the village, including barns, garages, blacksmiths, etc. Of the 190 men thus incarcerated, only six got out alive. All the others were machine-gunned and then the buildings were set on fire. The women and children were locked up in the church. Two German soldiers carried in a box of gas grenades and then ran out.

The grenades exploded, and the smoke enveloped the entire church. During the ensuing mayhem, German soldiers burst in through the doors again and sprayed machine-gun fire into the crowds of people. When all appeared to be dead, they set fire to the church. The entire village was then burned, until very little remained except the charred ruins which stand there today.

The massacre was carried out by a detachment of the third company of the 1st Battalion of the No. 4 Panzergrenadier Regiment (“Der Führer”) of the Das Reich Division of the Waffen-SS. Most of the detachment which sacked Oradour were themselves Frenchmen, from Alsace and Lorraine. When Rommel was told of the Oradour massacre he said that the Division should be punished, and offered to preside over a court-martial.

http://vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/1/3/Brandon276.html

The SS Der Führer Regiment commander Adolf Diekmann ordered 642 French civilians gassed, shot and burned in the worst massacre in Western Europe during the war. It was actually Rommel's area of operations that it happened and he was not only horrified he feared a wider plan by the SS to mass murder the French. According to some sources he threatened to resign if further attacks happened and demanded to lead to the court martial of Adolf Diekmann and that the Regiment should be punished which certainly caused conflict between the Army and the SS.

Three days later Diekmann resolved the conflict by taking off his helmet and leading his men into a suicidal attack on a fortified allied position with predictable results. Rommel using the radio and press managed to convince enough French people it was an isolated incident that has been dealt with and would not be repeated to quelch talk of an uprising.

Lets say you have a military commander in France in late 1943 and 1944 who openly turns a blind eye to the SS's actions. In the meantime the SS carry out a number of Oradour type massacres in France and the French revolt like the Poles do in 1944. How might it alter Allied war planning if such a revolt happened either before or during the attack on Normandy? Would Hitler's orders to burn Paris and other important French cities to the ground as they leave have been followed by German generals angry at the French? What would be the long term effects on Franco-German relations during the Cold War to today?
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