11 February 2013 Last updated at 02:06

In pictures: Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, France

German investigators have opened a new inquiry into the wartime massacre of 642 people by SS troops in the central French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Photographer Arko Datta visited Oradour-sur-Glane recently and took pictures of the village, whose ruins are preserved as a memorial to the massacre.

On 10 June 1944, a detachment of SS troops surrounded the tiny hamlet in the central Limousin region. It is believed by some that they were seeking retribution for the kidnap of a German officer but some say that resistance members were based in a different, nearby village.

Women and children were herded into a local church into which hand grenades were thrown before it was set on fire.

The men were locked in a barn. Machine-gunners shot at their legs, then doused them in petrol and set them alight.

Some 60 soldiers were brought to trial in the 1950s. Twenty of them were convicted but all were later released.

Sixty-eight years on, one survivor, Robert Hebras, welcomed the new German inquiry but said it should have happened sooner.

The German prosecutor says he hopes a new legal process will begin in Germany but with the remaining suspects now very elderly, time is short. Photographs by Arko Datta.

In Pictures

In pictures: Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, France

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