A True and Wholly Engrossing Tale of High Finance and Treachery in Which the Secret of a Wartime Tragedy is Revealed Through a Contemporary Drama. On 10th June 1944, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, the inhabitants of a remote village in South West France were rounded up by a company of SS soldiers and all but a handful were shot or burnt to death - 642 in total. The atrocity and its particularly disturbing details have never been adequately explained until now. In 1982 Robin Mackness met the one man left alive who held the knowledge which made terrible sense of the massacre. Five further years of thorough investigations convinced the author that he had discovered the true secret of Oradour. It cost him twenty-one months in prison and much else besides.