PARIS — French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has paid homage to Nazi victims, urging voters not to repeat "the darkest page" of modern French history by forgetting the horrors of World War II.
Macron walked slowly through the site of the deadliest massacre in Nazi-occupied France, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in western France.
In 1944, an SS armored division herded villagers into barns and a church, blocked the doors, and set the village ablaze. A total of 642 people died, and only six survived. The town's ruins are preserved as a testimony to Nazi horrors.
The En Marche! candidate was accompanied by the town’s mayor and 91-year-old Robert Hébras, who was one of the massacre’s six survivors and the only one still alive.
Macron has promised that if elected, he will come back to a village for the June commemoration of the massacre.
The town is today a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history.
Macron warned that "to forget … is to take the risk of repeating history and these errors."
He is trying to distinguish himself from far-right rival Marine Le Pen, whose party's past is stained by anti-Semitism.