“Two heavy machine guns opened crossfire on the unarmed column,” the report stated. “People fell immediately. The standard MG34 crew fired up to 900 rounds per minute. And for the prisoners, who were placed almost right next to each other, there was no chance left.”
It happened on May 27, 1940, in Le Paradis in northern France.
99 soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment have already laid down their arms. They were not commanded by their officer, but by Fritz Knöchlein, a company commander from the SS Totenkopf Division. There were bullet holes and blood on the farm wall. After the bursts, Knöchlein gave a new order.
“The SS soldiers moved forward,” and before that, the sound of bayonets being attached to rifles could be heard.
They approached the bodies near the wall and tested each one with a blow. 99 bodies against the wall. These dead people near the farm did not appear by chance. They were left in isolation to buy time for hundreds of thousands of others. Le Paradis became the end of a chain that began earlier, when a German tank group passed through the forest, where the Allied command was not expecting the main attack, but a difficult obstacle.
The old expectation of a front line and a slow war fell apart within a few days. The breakthrough cut the French company in two. Then the Germans went to the sea. As the tanks reached the coast of Dunkirk, British and French units began to roll back to a narrow strip of coastline. The English Channel remained behind them.
It’s only 33 km from England. But for the encircled units, this distance meant nothing until the fleet arrived and until someone held the roads, canals, and villages on the approaches to the shore. Therefore, the rearguards were ordered to stand still, and so individual battalions remained cut off. The Norfolk Regiment found itself in just such a position.
The units that covered the retreat of the main army did not expect to be rescued first. They delayed the German advance while the evacuation took place on the coast of Dunkirk, and places on the ships were given to those who managed to retreat to the water. This was the meaning of their last fight. Not a breakthrough, but a delay.
For the soldiers in Le Paradis, this meant being surrounded, captured, and shot after surrender. Later, occupied France was already under German control, and the Gestapo was looking for those who could tell about the crimes of the SS. But it wasn’t only the dead who remained at the farm wall.
Witnesses survived under the bodies of those shot. While the survivors at the wall could name the executioner, his path began much earlier, in Munich’s poverty. Fritz Knöchlein’s eighteenth birthday coincided with the year of the global economic collapse.
Munich has already experienced a collapse. Bread queues have not disappeared. Fritz Knöchlein was born on May 27, 1911, in Munich, the capital of Bavaria.
When the Great Depression hit in 1929, he entered adulthood in a country with mass unemployment and political anger. By 1932, about 30% of Germans were unemployed. For young people, it was not a background, it was a choice without a choice. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler received the post of Reich Chancellor, and the radicals saw a direct path to the top before them.
Knöchlein went there too. In June 1934 he joined the SS, which Heinrich Himmler sought to enlist in for special personal loyalty. The next step came quickly. In 1935-1936, Himmler ordered Knöchlein to be enrolled and sent as a cadet to the SS cadet school in Braunschweig. Theodor Eicke brought to the front not just a unit, but people of the same training.
Knöchlein received this training at the SS Junker School in Braunschweig, where officers were prepared not through strategy, but through the suppression of pity. West taught tactics, engineering and officer honor. Braunschweig taught differently. There, cadets were forced to memorize ideas of racial superiority and obedience to orders above any personal choice. On the parade ground it looked simple.
Black uniform, silver death’s head on the collar. The cadet stood in formation, repeated loyalty formulas, then spent hours going through drill commands, running, and grueling drills until the habit of doubt was erased and only a reaction to orders remained. For the American military academy, West Point, an officer is a commander who thinks.
For the SS school, an officer is a performer who does not hesitate. This connection did not end with the barracks. After September 1, 1939, Knöchlein commanded an SS unit during the invasion of Poland and was soon promoted. He was given the third company of the second SS Infantry Regiment, one of the support regiments of the third SS Panzer Division Totenkopf.
Here the preparations from Braunschweig coincided with the composition of the division itself. Theodor Eicke recruited it from among former concentration camp guards, and therefore for many in this unit the line between combat and punitive action disappeared even before the first serious clash. Therefore, a ready-made team was sent to the Western Front. Commander on top, officers below.
One school, one style, one set of commands. When the German columns marched through France, Knöchlein led his third company not as a newcomer, but as an officer who had been trained from barracks to regiment. They crossed the French border on May 10, 1940. After breaking through to France, Knöchlein’s company faced a different task.
At the headquarters, the radio operator received a short message: “There will be no reinforcements, no air force, no way out.” 338,000 Allies managed to withdraw through Dunkirk. And against the backdrop of this evacuation, one battalion remained in place, covering the retreat of the entire army to the English Channel.
In the second half of May 1940, the Western Front crumbled under the blows of German tank units, and the small village of Le Paradis suddenly found itself in the center of an alien calculation. For the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, this calculation meant a dead end. The ring was tightening, the connection was weakening, help was not coming.
They realized this quickly and were left to hold on. On May 27, 1940, Fritz Knöchlein’s 3rd Company opened fire on the British headquarters on a fortified farm. The fighting went on not only at the farm walls, but also through the houses, courtyards and turns of the village streets, where the Norfolks clung to every piece of defense.
Isolation did not break the battalion immediately. British soldiers killed more than 150 advancing Germans. The losses of his company turned into a new order. Exactly 99 surviving British remained in the barn after hours of shelling. Knöchlein threw tanks and artillery into the action, then mortars were brought in.
The blows hit the farm without pause. The bricks were crumbling, the walls of the barn were settling inward, and the smell of gunpowder and fine brick dust hung in the air. The battle lasted for hours. Return fire was weakening. By the end of the shelling, the defenders ran out of ammunition. That was the main thing. Neither a breakthrough nor a maneuver.
Major Lyle Ryder saw that what followed would only be the destruction of the people already trapped in the destroyed barn. So he chose change. A white flag, just a piece of cloth, was shown in the opening. The 1929 Geneva Convention required that the lives of those who laid down their arms be spared.
They expected to be treated as prisoners, but SS troops stood in front of them. 99 wounded British soldiers came out and were thus formally captured according to the rules of war. The exit from the barn was supposed to lead to the rear, but Knöchlein led the people not to the guards, but to the execution site.
The moment these 99 Britons laid down their arms, their status as prisoners ceased to mean anything to the SS company. The people were immediately disarmed. Belts, helmets and the remains of equipment flew into the grass. Then the column, already defenseless and beaten to the brim, was driven to the lawn near the brick wall of the barn.
What happened next looked less like a fight and more like a procedure. The SS soldiers closed the ring. In the opposite corner there were already two heavy MG34 machine guns. They were installed in advance. The metallic clang of the bolts could be heard. This machine gun was belt fed and had a rate of fire of up to 900 rounds per minute, so the tight group of people against the wall had neither time nor space to move.
When the lines reached the desired point, Knöchlein simply gave a sign with his hand. Machine guns opened fire at point-blank range. The queues cut off the front row, and the back ones fell from above, because there was nowhere to retreat. In a few seconds, the brick wall, grass and bodies merged into one rubble.
The shooting stopped only when no one was standing anymore. There was a mountain of bodies lying against the brick wall. There were still some living people under this pile of dead. And Private William O’Callaghan realized it first. With his arm shot through, he lay among the bodies and waited for the SS soldiers to move away from the wall. Then the order became even more direct.
“Knöchlein ordered to finish them off with bayonets.”
The SS men fixed their bayonets and climbed onto the bodies. They stabbed from top to bottom, into the chest and stomach, into those who were still breathing and twitching. Blood was already standing in the holes near the wall, and the damp earth underfoot was crumbling from the rain.
97 out of 99 people were killed at this place. Almost no one survived. When the Germans left, O’Callaghan crawled out of the dead and in the darkness found Private Albert Pooley. He lay unconscious, with his legs broken by machine gun fire. O’Callaghan dragged him away with one hand, through the mud and wet grass, until he reached an abandoned pigsty.
There they hid. The next day, local Frenchmen were forced to dig a temporary grave for the 97 bodies near the barn, and the overnight rain quickly turned the earth into a heavy, sticky mush. But the cleanup failed. O’Callaghan and Pooley survived in the pigsty. They survived for three days, chewing raw potatoes and collecting water from puddles, until French citizens found them and helped hide two future prosecution witnesses.
Three days later, survivors have already appeared. So, rumors from above appeared next. 97 victims were exchanged for one reward. When news of the execution of Le Paradis reached the command, General Erich Hoepner demanded an investigation and sharply raised the question of Theodor Eicke, commander of the SS Totenkopf Division.
For the army command it was a matter of honor and discipline, for the SS it was a threat. Eicke reacted immediately and without hesitation, because the internal analysis threatened to hit both him and his subordinates. He wrote an urgent letter to Heinrich Himmler. In this report, Eicke turned the meaning of the massacre upside down and claimed that the British allegedly used dum-dum bullets, that is, prohibited deforming ammunition.
Thus, the killing of prisoners was turned into self-defense on paper. First, Hoepner’s request appeared, then Eicke’s report landed on the table. After this, Himmler intervened and stopped the inspection before it actually began. This is where the cover came into play. Not on the battlefield, but in the office.
The army launched an internal investigation, but Himmler personally ordered the incident to be hushed up, and the Le Paradis case was effectively dropped. 97 corpses became a direct step towards promotion in rank. Knöchlein did not receive disciplinary action and continued his career within the SS. And the glitter of the knight’s cross on his uniform later only cemented this substitution.
More than 7,000 people were awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross during the war. For Knöchlein, this award became not only a mark of distinction, but also a shield from the tribunal within the Reich. What followed was no longer an investigation, but growth. Knöchlein was promoted, his combat record was expanded, but the story of the shooting itself remained under the false explanation of dum-dum bullets.
So the false report outlived 97 dead and opened a new company for the killer. Knöchlein was sent to the Eastern Front. While the SS man was furthering his career, a man who had survived the shooting arrived in London. The Wehrmacht expected officer’s honor. In fact, the prisoners were shot.
Private Albert Pooley sat before military investigators with gangrene in his leg and named the killer. In the summer of 1943 he was returned to Britain as a seriously wounded prisoner. During that period, such exchanges took place through neutral countries, including Sweden. Pooley immediately testified, but the government in London did not believe him.
British officials stuck to the old system. Regular German army, European war, officer’s honor. Therefore, the bullet’s story was attributed to trauma and post-war disorder. So the matter froze for 2 years. It was only in 1945, when Germany collapsed, that the investigation acquired a second witness. William O’Callaghan returned and confirmed O’Callaghan’s bullet story.
Released from a prisoner of war camp. The second testimony narrowed the search, but by May 1945 the man in question was already hiding under a false name. In a barracks at a prisoner of war camp in Sheffield, British officers picked up his papers and tore off his mask on the spot. He was wearing someone else’s uniform, and the signature was also someone else’s.
From Sheffield he was sent straight to London Cage, the main interrogation centre for the British army in London, housed in the Kensington mansions. More than 3,000 prisoners passed through this center. There, investigators compiled testimonies, checked names, and verified parts and dates.
Thus, the search for one SS man turned into a formalized case of war crimes. They spent a long time collecting papers; witnesses were searched for in camps and hospitals. The indictment was signed three years later. The three-year investigation has reached the court in Hamburg. On October 11, 1948, the case opened at Curiohaus, where British tribunals tried war crimes in post-war Germany.
As the former SS officer explained the evidence, he chose the old line. In the courtroom, the defendant denied his guilt, cried, and insisted that he was not at the Le Paradis farm on the day of the shooting. Then Knöchlein turned the conversation to London, talking about hunger and icy water.
In the middle of the interrogation, another detail emerged. He complained that the guards chased him around the yard with a heavy log until he fell down exhausted. But this defense fell apart as soon as the witnesses entered the room. The sound of Albert Pooley’s cane hitting the court floor was louder than the defendant’s complaints.
William O’Callaghan stood nearby. French farmers followed suit, who came to Germany for identification. Here the dispute was no longer about the defense’s version, but about the people who saw it with their own eyes. Following this testimony, the tribunal sentenced Knöchlein to death by hanging. After the decision was announced, all that remained was the execution.
And on the morning of January 21, 1949, the executioner was already waiting at the lever in Hamburg prison. The British used a long drop. The length of the rope was checked in advance against height and weight tables so that the neck could be broken immediately. Knöchlein was led to the scaffold; he was 37. He stood under the noose, raised his head and began to shout a curse at England in German.
“I only just managed to get started. May God punish England.”
At that moment, the executioner pressed the lever, and the dry clang of metal cut off the end of the sentence. The trapdoor went down. The body fell through the opening, the rope tightened, and the unspoken word was forever stuck in that second in 1949. No one shed a tear.
From that day on, the verdict ceased to be a stage and became paper. The death sentence of 1949 is no longer read aloud today, but rather according to an archival code. After the execution, the Le Paradis case file was classified as closed. Inside were hundreds of pages of survivor testimony, interrogation reports, service sheets and court materials.
Thus ended not only the biography of the convicted man, but also the case itself. The case against Le Paradis is closed. What was said in the courtroom by voices then existed only on paper. Names, dates, testimony, signatures. No gestures, no last phrase, no tears. But it is in this form that history has been preserved.
Not in retelling, in documents. Today, the original minutes of the Hamburg Tribunal on the Le Paradis case are kept in the National Archives of Great Britain.
