Massacre at Oradour

New York: Random House, 1989. First Printing. Hardcover. good/good. Name written in ink inside front flyleaf. This work discusses the history, background and events leading up to the Nazi war-crime of the attack upon the martyr village of Oradour-sur-Glane. This atrocity was carried out on Saturday 10th June 1944 by soldiers of the Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich. On that day, without giving any explanation, they killed a total of 642 men, women and children, leaving only a few survivors. They then destroyed the entire village. This work has been described as a True and Wholly Engrossing Tale of High Finance and Treachery in Which the Secret of a Wartime Tragedy is Revealed. The atrocity and its particularly disturbing details have never been adequately explained until now. In 1982 Robin Mackness met the one man left alive who held the knowledge which made terrible sense of the massacre. Five further years of thorough investigations convinced the author that he had discovered the true secret of Oradour. It cost him twenty-one months in prison and much else besides. Robin Mackness was born in 1938 and was educated at Bedford School and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he studied Law. In the course of his military service,he rowed for the RAF. The themes of all his books are exploitations of recent truths, in so far as there can ever be any certainty about recent truths, he admits.