Le Paradis massacre
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The Le Paradis massacre was an atrocity against soldiers hors de combat during the Battle of France of World War II, when members of the British Royal Norfolk Regiment were victims of a German SS war crime at Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais on May 26, 1940.
The Royal Norfolks were one of several units covering the retreat and evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. The HQ company of the regiment's 2nd Battalion surrendered to a unit of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head) Division. The commander was SS Obersturmführer Fritz Knoechlein. The 99 prisoners were marched to some farm buildings where they were lined up alongside a barn wall. They were then fired upon by two machine guns. 97 of them were killed and the bodies buried in shallow pit. Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan had hid in a pig-sty and were discovered later by the farm's owner, Mdme Creton, and her son. The two soldiers were later captured by a Wehrmacht unit and spent the rest of the war as prisoners of war.
The bodies were exhumed in 1942 by the French and reburied in the local churchyard which now forms part of the Le Paradis War Cemetery. The massacre was investigated by the War Crimes Investigation Unit and Knoechlein was traced and arrested. Tried in a court in Hamburg, he was found guilty and hanged on January 28, 1949. A memorial plaque was placed on the barn wall in 1970.
