Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire.

Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation. In 1946 the French state expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms, and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German Occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks.

In this first full-scale study of the destruction and commemoration of Oradour over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in the French understanding of their experience under German domination. Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss.