Le Paradis massacre

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The Le Paradis massacre was carried out on May 27, 1940 by the 3rd and 4th Companies of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd SS Totenkopf Regiment (motorized) under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Knöchlein on 99 British prisoners of war.

During the advance on Dunkirk , the SS Totenkopf Division in the Pas-de-Calais department suffered heavy losses in battles with the British rearguard in and around Le Paradis near Lestrem . After the British resistance was broken, members of the 2nd Battalion Royal Norfolk of the 4th Brigade , 4th Division - most of them wounded - fell into the hands of the SS troops. The SS soldiers lined up the prisoners of war against a wall and shot them with two heavy machine guns . Anyone who was hit still showed signs of life were stabbed with a bayonet or shot at close range. Knöchlein later tried to justify himself by stating that the British troops were using the dum-dum projectiles , which were contrary to international law . This could never be proven.

Two soldiers, William O'Callaghan and Albert Pooley , survived seriously wounded. After the SS soldiers withdrew, they were found by a Wehrmacht unit and taken to a hospital. An investigation by Wehrmacht agencies had no consequences. The two survivors pushed on the search for Fritz Knöchlein and helped to locate him. As part of the Curiohaus trial , the British military court sentenced Knöchlein, who initially denied everything but was incriminated by a Waffen-SS soldier, to death on October 25, 1948 . The sentence was carried out in Hameln in 1949 .

Historical processing

The massacre of Le Paradis and the two survivors' search for Fritz Knöchlein was the subject of Cyril Jolly's 1957 book The Vengeance of Private Pooley .

As part of his war experiences described in the book Saat in den Sturm , Herbert Brunnegger describes how he experienced the massacre as a soldier in Fritz Knöchlein's unit.

literature

  • George H. Stein: The Waffen-SS. Cornell University Press 1966, pp. 76-77.
  • Gerald Reitlinger : SS. Alibi of a Nation. 1922-1945. Arms and Armor, London 1981, pp. 148-149.
  • Cyril Jolly: The Vengeance of Private Pooley. William Heinemann, London 1957.
    • in German published by the Kongress-Verlag (GDR) under the titles Die Rückeltung des Soldiers Pooley (1957) and Ich sucht mein Killer (1961)

Footnotes

  1. ^ The Hamburg Curiohaus Trials - Nazi war crimes before British military courts , pp. 54 and 60, publisher: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, January 2017
  2. ^ Publisher: Beacon Books. The German translation is entitled I'm looking for my murderer ; it was published in the 3rd edition in 1961.
  3. ^ Herbert Brunnegger: Saat in den Sturm. Leopold Stocker Verlag 2000, pp. 75-87.