"Today, blood must flow." The sentence is said to have been uttered by Heinz Barth, a junior officer in the SS division "Reich," which was stationed in France in the summer of 1944. A group of some 150 soldiers from the division were on the road to the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane when Barth allegedly spoke the words. Just hours later, the village lay in smoking ruins, its population massacred by the Nazi troops.
Now, seven decades later, the sentence -- and whether it can be proven that Barth indeed said it -- has become a key element into an ongoing German investigation into the events of June 10, 1944, one of the most horrific slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis in World War II. This week, investigators from the public prosecutor's office in Dortmund travelled to Oradour-sur-Glane as part of this search for evidence. Should they ultimately be successful, a handful of aging Germans could finally be brought to justice for a crime that has never been adequately atoned for.
"As a state prosecutor, one of the things that I must prove is that the perpetrators knew that murders were taking place," Andreas Brendel, head of the central Nazi war crimes investigation unit in Dortmund, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Barth's statement means that members of the unit knew what was going to happen on that day. That was one of the main things that encouraged me to reopen the investigation."
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