After an introduction by Katrin Unger, Deputy Director of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, historian Erkenbrecher presented the results of her research into the persecution, compensation and reception of the massacre carried out by the Waffen-SS in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. 643 women, men and children were murdered by the Germans and the village was destroyed.
The ruins have been a memorial ever since, and the village was rebuilt in the immediate vicinity after the war. While the commemoration of the terrible crimes continues to be highly valued in the village itself, it has been pushed into the background at an official level in favour of the new Franco-German friendship. In Germany, people wanted to know little about it anyway and the perpetrators were never adequately persecuted under criminal law. It was not until 2024 that Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his shame during a state visit that the German state had left the perpetrators unchallenged. Erkenbrecher took the aforementioned question of whether Germans should be allowed to visit Oradour as an opportunity to point out what survivors are generally concerned with: recognising that injustice was done and the suffering that was caused.
Andrea Erkenbrecher's historical study has been published under the title "Oradour and the Germans. Historical revisionism, persecution under criminal law, compensation payments and gestures of reconciliation from 1949 onwards" was published by deGruyter-Oldenbourg in 2023 and is available in bookshops.