This was the road along which "collective responsibility" inevitably led. Pierre-Henri Simon, the Catholic writer, who had spent nearly five years in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps and was to become a fierce critic of his own country's conduct in Algeria, comments that "collective responsibility" was "exactly the principle by which Hitler's men justified the massacre of Oradour". Happily, during the Algerian war nothing took place approaching the atrocity of Oradour, when in June 1944 an entire French village — totalling 643 men, women and children — was massacred in reprisals by the German S.S.

XREF: Connects colonial counterinsurgency justifications to Nazi reprisal logic—a stark parallel worth holding in mind.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 361