D-Day plus four marks a seldom-recalled event of great significance for America in 2022.

On June 10, 1944, troops of the 4th SS Panzer Regiment surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. The SS troops ordered the people to assemble in the village square and shot anyone who tried to flee.

The men who remained were confined in six locations, faced down by heavy machine guns. The SS troops set off an explosion, then gunned down the men, aiming for the legs before finishing them off at point-blank range and setting the dead and dying on fire.

The SS troops locked the women and children in the village church, filled with black smoke from an exploding gas canister. The Germans threw in grenades, shot indiscriminately, and set the victims on fire. The rest of the village was then looted and set ablaze.

The Nazi forces killed 245 women and 207 children, including six below the age of six months. The 196 men killed included seven Jewish refugees from other parts of France. Out of the 648 people murdered, only 50 could be identified. One woman survived by jumping from a church window, breaking her leg, and taking a bullet from an SS soldier. She lost her husband, son, two daughters, and a grandson only seven months old.

Following the atrocity, the Nazis mounted a propaganda campaign claiming that the villagers initiated the battle, that the men of the village died during the fight, and that the women and children died from an explosion in a nearby ammunition dump. To adapt the Cecil Eby title, the victims were caught between the bullet and the lie.

The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane was a reprisal for attacks by the Maquis or Résistance. This mass murder and the oppression of a nation were enabled by the systematic disarming of the French people. The first scholarly work on the subject was Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, by Stephen P. Halbrook.

Prime Minister Pierre Laval in 1935 decreed the registration of firearms for the first time in modern French history. The registration, Halbrook explains, was “aimed at firearms owners at large and did not focus on those responsible for fomenting political violence.” The main effect “was to enhance the power of government over the citizens.” Little did anyone anticipate that “just five years later, France would be conquered by Nazi Germany.”

Halbrook is also the author of Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State. Before the National Socialists took power, Halbrook notes, the liberal Weimar Republic sought to register, regulate, and prohibit firearms. A 1926 order demanded the surrender of all firearms and a 1926 Bavarian law barred Gypsies from owning guns.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, they seized the registration records of the Weimar Republic. Nazi official Wilhelm Elfes ruled that weapons belonged only in the hands of the organs of the Reich and the states. In the National Socialist view, nobody needed a firearm for self-defense when the police protected society, and sport shooting and hunting were not a “need” determined by the government.

In 2022 under the Biden regime, conservative Christians, Jews, and patriotic Americans are the disfavored groups. It disturbs the Junta that these Americans have the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment says the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” Joe Biden claims the Second Amendment is “not absolute.”

Biden exploits mass shootings by criminals to call for a ban on “assault weapons.” The addled Biden is now spouting nonsense about 9mm bullets, hinting at a ban on handguns. If embattled Americans thought that the Democrats’ endgame is to disarm the people, it would be hard to blame them.

Disarming the people is a National Socialist policy, and so is the relentless demonization of the domestic opposition. The hate-America Left shares the class-based demonology of Marxism and the race-based hatred of National Socialism. Embattled Americans face a domestic Nazi-Soviet Pact that targets anyone less than worshipful of the Biden regime as a “domestic terrorist” or “violent extremist,” code for Trump voters and anyone who dares question the 2020 election.

In the FBI’s needless arrest and confinement of Peter Navarro, Roger Kimball notices a resemblance to the Nazis’ geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo. The Nazification of American life thus advances along with the Sovietization of American life as charted by Victor Davis Hanson.

Meanwhile, for the second time, Joe Biden failed to recognize the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, the massive operation that launched the liberation of Europe from National Socialist tyranny. That lapse should come as no surprise.

President Donald Trump recognized D-Day and publicly honored veterans of the Normandy operation. That was a shining example of American greatness, but the leftists pulling Biden’s strings contend that America was never great. So no surprise that Biden declines to recognize the 4,414 Allied soldiers who gave their lives that day.

As embattled Americans remember their sacrifice, they might also recall the 648 victims of Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944. This is what can happen when the people with all the power have all the guns.