Le Paradis Massacre: SS Execute 97 British POWs

SS troops lined up 97 British prisoners of war against a barn wall and opened fire with machine guns. The Le Paradis massacre of May 27, 1940, was one of the worst atrocities committed against Allied POWs during the Fall of France, and its perpetrator walked free for eight years before justice caught up with him. The 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, had been defending a farmhouse and surrounding positions near the village of Le Paradis in northern France as part of the rearguard action protecting the Dunkirk evacuation. Outgunned and surrounded by the SS Totenkopf Division, the Norfolks fought until their ammunition was exhausted, then surrendered. SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Knochlein ordered the prisoners marched to a barn on the Duriez farm. The men were lined up along the barn wall, and two machine guns opened fire. Knochlein's men then walked among the bodies with bayonets and pistols, finishing off the wounded. The entire process took minutes. Two soldiers survived. Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan, both badly wounded, crawled into a pig sty and were later found by the farm's French owner, Madame Duriez, who hid and fed them until they were captured by a regular Wehrmacht unit that treated them as conventional prisoners of war. Pooley and O'Callaghan spent the rest of the war in POW camps. After liberation, Pooley reported the massacre, but his account was initially dismissed as fabrication. O'Callaghan's corroborating testimony and the eventual discovery of the mass grave at Le Paradis confirmed the atrocity. Knochlein was arrested, tried by a British military tribunal in Hamburg in 1948, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on January 28, 1949. The Le Paradis massacre exposed the SS Totenkopf Division's disregard for the laws of war, a pattern that would repeat across the Eastern Front and at other locations in Western Europe throughout the conflict.