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Caption: 70 Years Ago
27 November 1944
Caption: History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity. - Dexter Perkins
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Caption: 70 years ago, on 27 November 1944, four French women, members of the Réseau Alliance, were executed--shot in the back of the neck--by the Gestapo in this forest...where I drive past on a daily basis.
Caption: Bombs were dropped on Offenburg by the American Air Force on the same day; 300 USAAF B-17 and Liberator bombers attacked the marshalling yards on
27 November 1944.
General Eisenhower had ordered on 22 November 1944 to attack railway and transportation hubs along the Rhine River Valley from the air. After a daylight attack of the Americans on Offenburg, the British bombed Freiburg the following day.
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Caption: The women were arrested in France in 1943, deported to Germany, & spent one year in the Offenburg Prison before being executed after Allied troops reached Strasbourg, France.
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Caption: Their bodies were hastily buried in this forest & found in December.
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Caption: History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.
~Charles Angoff
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Caption: A different memorial, down the road, en route to Offenburg.
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Caption: History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.
~Konrad Adenauer
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Caption: At the Offenburg Train Station, a new Memorial Plaque displays a train schedule from 1943,
in remembrance of the victims
sent off via train to concentration camps.
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Caption: History is all around us.
Open your eyes.
#seewhatisee