French execution survivor, one of only six people to survive the massacre of Oradour by Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS Das Reich Panzer Division on 10 June 1944. That day in Oradour-sur-Glane, close to Limoges, he lost his mother and his sister: 642 people (186 men, 254 women and 207 children) were brutally murdered by the SS.
Robert Hébras was one of the six men who survived the execution by machine guns. The six stayed – partly covered beneath the dead bodies of their buddies – in the barn and pretended to be dead. The SS soldiers stood on the pile of corpses and shot everyone who was still moving. They set the barn on fire 15 minutes after the execution to cover their tracks. Pierre-Henri Poutaraud fled out of the fire too soon and was murdered by a guard positioned near the cemetery.
Because of the fear for their lives the five remaining men waited so long under the burning corpses that they themselves caught fire. Robert Hébras said, “My left arm and my hair had already burned. It was a terrible pain; therefore I had to get out of the barn.” Three of five men who managed to escape the burning village, were seriously injured by the hail of bullets, including Robert Hébras. One bullet remained stuck in his leg, another grazed his wrist.
Half the Hébras family – his mother Marie, his nine-year-old sister Denise, and his 22-year-old sister Georgette – died in the extermination at Oradours. His father only survived by chance as he happened to be on a farm beyond Oradour, as did his sister Leni, who had married and moved away.
After the 10 June 1944 massacre, Robert Hébras participated actively in the resistance against Nazism, in the last year of the war he also fought for the French Resistance. In the year 1983, he took part in the lawsuit against one of the assassins of Oradour – Heinz Barth – as a witness in the former GDR. In 2003, a documentary movie was released, entitled “Encounter with Robert Hébras – On the trail extinguished life” (“Begegnung mit Robert Hébras – Auf den Spuren ausgelöschten Lebens”) by the German filmmaker Bodo Kaiser.
Robert Hébras is noteworthy for his memoirs of National Socialism and through his commitment as a contemporary witness and as a writer. Throughout his lifetime, the former resistance fighter always stood up for the reconciliation between Germany and France.
Despite his old age Robert Hébras still took tours through the ruins of the martyr village. He was available for young people – especially schoolchildren, students, volunteers and Holocaust Memorial Servants – for interviews and video projects and he worked actively at the Centre de la mémoire.
In addition, the trained mechanic held for many years, the office of the chairman of the National Association of families of martyrs and served as President of the Assembly of former participants of the war of Oradour.
In March 2008, Robert Hébras received the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award from the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service at the Austrian embassy in Paris.
Robert Hébras was married and had a son and three grandchildren. He was living in Saint-Junien near Oradour, when he died on 11 February 2023 at the age of 97.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)