Wormhout massacre

When Wormhoudt massacre on 28. May 1940 , were according to other sources 97 defenseless British and French prisoners of war from the 80 hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke guided Battalion Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , under the command of Sepp Dietrich , summarily executed. The murdered belonged to the 2nd Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment , the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery as well as a French military depot on a farm near Wormhout in the North Department (northern France).

The British soldiers were part of the rearguard of the 48th (South Midland) Division , which was supposed to secure the retreat at the Battle of Dunkirk . After they were overtaken and captured by the Waffen SS, they were locked in a barn near Wormhout and Esquelbecq . First, the SS people threw some hand grenades into the barn, which killed or injured many of the prisoners. Two groups of five survivors each were then brought out and shot individually. A total of 80 prisoners were murdered.

Fifteen prisoners survived the massacre. They were found in the barn by soldiers of the Wehrmacht, given medical care and taken to a prisoner of war camp.

Legal processing

A case against Wilhelm Mohnke, which had started in 1988 on the initiative of the British MP Jeff Rooker , was stopped by the Lübeck public prosecutor Heinrich Wille on the grounds that the evidence was insufficient. Mohnke had taken over the command of the 2nd battalion on May 28, 1940 after the wounding of battalion commander Ernst Schützek, but since the wounded commander Schützek remained in the battalion area, the authority to command and thus the responsibility could not be established beyond doubt.

Web links

literature

Leslie Aitkin: Massacre On The Road To Dunkirk. Wormhout 1940. Granada Publishing, Mayflower 1976, ISBN 0-583-12938-2 .

Individual evidence

↑ Joachim Scholtyseck : The Blitzkrieg against France - Return to the “normal” war? In: Manuel Becker (ed.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies. Lit, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1768-8 , pp. 51-80, here p. 68; William T. Allbritton / Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr : SS-Oberstgruppenführer and Colonel General of the Waffen-SS Joseph (Sepp) Dietrich . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs . Primus, 2nd edition, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-727-9 , pp. 308-315, here p. 310.

[1] Joachim Scholtyseck : The Blitzkrieg against France - Return to the “normal” war? In: Manuel Becker (ed.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies. Lit, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1768-8 , pp. 51-80, here p. 68; William T. Allbritton / Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr : SS-Oberstgruppenführer and Colonel General of the Waffen-SS Joseph (Sepp) Dietrich . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs . Primus, 2nd edition, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-727-9 , pp. 308-315, here p. 310.