2018 Battlefield Tour post 23
France/ Belgium Trip Post No 23.
From Ulster Tower we drove 50 miles north to Lestrem, just north of Bethune to visit the site of a WW2 massacre at Le Paradis Farm.
The war crime was committed by members of the 14th Company, 3rd SS Division Totenkopf (Deaths Head), under the command of Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Knochlein. It took place on 27 May 1940, during the Battle of France, at a time when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was attempting to withdraw through the Pas-de-Calais region region during the Battle of Dunkirk.
The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolks, along with the 8th Lancashire Fusiliers, were holding the Allied line at the villages of Riez du Vinage, Le Cornet Malo and Le Paradis with the Bn Hq based at Le Paradis. The Bn’s had been ordered to hold out for as long as possible against the Germans to give time for the BEF to evacuate from Dunkirk.
The SS Division Totenkopf emerged from the Bois de Paqueaut wood and attacked Le Cornet Malo at dawn on 27 May. The British troops defended stubbornly but were eventually overrun. The attack resulted in the deaths of four German officers and 150 men. Later the same day, the German troops moved forward to attack Le Paradis.
After the engagement at Le Cornet Malo, C Coy and HQ Coy of the 2nd Royal Norfolks had fallen back to their headquarters at Cornet Farm, owned by the Duries family, just outside Le Paradis. The company commanders had been informed by radio that their units were isolated and would receive no assistance. They therefore dug in around the farmhouse, which lay on the Rue du Paradis, the boundary between the Royal Norfolk Regiment and the adjacent 1st Royal Scots. The Norfolks' last contact with Bde HQ at L'Epinette was at 11:30 but despite no support and heavy opposition, the defenders held out against the 14th Coy, 1st Battalion of the 2nd SS Infantry Regiment until 17:15, when they ran out of ammunition. During the battle the building was badly damaged and forced the defenders to abandon it and fight in the open. SS-Standartenfuhrer Hans Friedmann Gotze commander of the Totenkopf Division's third regiment, was killed in the fighting.
The 99 surviving defenders of the 2nd Norfolks were eventually ordered by their commander Major Lisle Ryder to surrender and they left the cowshed that they had been defending under a white flag. Due to the boundary between the two British regiments being the road, Ryder's men surrendered not to the company they had been fighting, but rather to SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Knochleins unit, which had been fighting the Royal Scots.
The Germans accused the British of using Dum Dum bullets and sentenced them to be executed. After being searched in a field opposite the farm the prisoners were then taken to Le Paradis farm in the Chemin du Paradis, lined up against a barn wall and machine gunned by troops from No.4 MG Coy. The SS troops then either shot any survivors in the head, bayoneted or smashed skulls in with rifle butts. Ninety-seven British troops died. Two survived, with injuries, and hid until they were captured by German forces several days later.
Graves found near Le Paradis in 2007 suggest that around 20 men of the Royal Scots who surrendered to an SS unit may also have been killed in a separate massacre.
Private William O'Callaghan from Dereham in Norfolk had survived and pulled Private Albert Pooley from Acton in London alive from among the bodies in the field. The pair then hid in a pig-sty for three days and nights, surviving on raw potatoes and water from puddles before being discovered by the farm's owner, Madame Duquenne-Creton, and her son Victor. The French civilians risked their lives caring for the two men, who were later captured by the Wermacht’s 251st Infantry Div Division and transferred to a military hospital.
The Allies received no information about the massacre until the summer of 1943, when Pooley, who had spent the last three years in a German hospital due to the injuries he had suffered in the massacre, he had a leg amputated, was declared medically unfit and repatriated. British authorities did not believe Pooley's story on his arrival; it was not thought that the German army were capable of such atrocities against British troops. Private O'Callaghan did not return to the United Kingdom until 1945 after the liberation of his POW camp. His confirmation of Pooley's story prompted an official investigation.
The bodies of those killed in the massacre were exhumed in 1942 by the French, but only about 50 of the 97 were successfully identified. The bodies were then reburied in Le Paradis churchyard, which now forms part of the CWGC Le Paradis War Cemetery. In 1970, a memorial plaque was placed on the barn wall where the massacre took place and a small memorial at the side of the road. A large memorial was subsequently erected beside the church.
After the war, Fritz Knöchlein was located, tried and convicted by a war crimes court, with the two survivors acting as witnesses against him. For his part in the massacre, Knöchlein was executed by hanging on 28 Jan 1949 in Hameln Jail, Germany.
Evidence of the battle can still be seen today with the heavy calibre shell marks on the gable end of Le Cornet Farm.
