AN ABANDONED town has remained untouched since a Nazi massacre saw a baby crucified and women burned alive.

Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne, west central France, now serves as a permanent memorial after being destroyed on June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day.

Not far from the city of Limoges, 643 inhabitants, including 247 children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company as collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area.

All men over the age of sixteen were taken to six locations and shot, before their bodies, many still living, were covered in combustible materials and set alight.

Over 400 women and children were crammed into the small ancient village church, where they were asphyxiated with black smoke.

After being fired upon if they tried to escape, the interior of the church was set alight – reducing most bodies to cinders.

Within hours, the community of Oradour-sur-Glane had been reduced to mountains of human ash and the buildings completely destroyed.

A handful of men, one woman and one child managed to escape and were the only survivors that afternoon.

Raymond J. Murphy, a 20-year-old American B-17 navigator shot down nearby, witnessed the aftermath of the massacre and recalled seeing a baby who had been crucified.

Almost 80 years later, Oradour-sur-Glane has practically remained untouched.

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By order of president Charles de Gaulle, the remains were preserved to reflect a demonstration of France’s wartime martyrdom.

But the burned-out shells of buildings still stand in this wrecked village frozen in time.

Inside the church, a memorial to locals who died in the First World War is riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel scars.

A former cafe remains in the village centre, as does a sewing machine and a torched car parked in front of a house.

A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, attracting hundreds of thousands of villagers each year.

Near the village entrance is the Centre de la memoire d’Oradour museum, which houses items recovered from the burned-out buildings.

That include watches stopped at the time their owners were burned alive, glasses melted from the intense heat, and various personal items.