THE NORMANDY MASSACRE
(June, 1944)
A sensation was caused in Allied Headquarters when reports came through that a considerable number of Canadian soldiers were shot after being taken prisoner by the 12th. SS Panzer Division ‘Hitler Jugend’. On the morning of June 8th. thirty seven Canadians were taken prisoner by the 2nd. Battalion of the 26th. Panzer Grenadier Regiment. The prisoners were marched across country to the H/Q of the 2nd. Battalion. In the village of Le Mesnil-Patty they were then ordered to sit down in a field with their wounded in the center. In a short while a half track arrived with eight or nine SS soldiers brandishing their machine pistols. Advancing in line towards the prisoners they opened fire killing thirty five men. Two of the Canadians ran for their lives and escaped the slaughter but were rounded up by a different German unit to spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. First to make contact with the Canadians was a combat group led by Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl-Heinz Milius and supported by the Prinz Battalion. Near the villages of Authie and Buron , a number of Canadians of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, were taken prisoner. Numbering around forty, they were individually killed on the march back to the rear. Eight were ordered to remove their helmets and then shot with automatic rifles. Their bodies were dragged out on to the road and left to be run over by trucks and tanks. French civilians pulled the bodies back on to the pavement but were ordered to stop and to drag the bodies back onto the road again. On the 7th. and 8th. of June, in the grounds of the Abbaye Ardenne, the headquarters of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer’s 25th. Panzer Grenadiers, twenty of the Canadians were shot. After being taken prisoner they were locked up in a stable, and being called out by name they emerged from the doorway only to be shot in the back of the head. During the afternoon of 8th June, twenty six Canadians were shot at the Chateau d’Audrieu after being taken prisoner by a Reconnaissance Battalion of the SS Hitler Jugend. Other units of the German forces in France called the Hitler Jugend Division the ‘Murder Division’. After the war, investigations established that separate atrocities were committed in 31 different incidents involving 134 Canadians, 3 British and 1 American. Brought to trial before a Canadian military court at Aurich in Germany on 28 December, 1945, Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death but later reprieved and spent six years in Canadian jails before being transferred to Germany where he was released on September 7, 1954. He died of a heart attack on December 23, 1961 at age 51.

LE PARADIS
(Pas-de-Calais. May 26,1940)
A company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, trapped in a cowshed, surrendered to the 2nd Infantry Regiment, SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head) Division under the command of 28 year old SS Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Knoechlein. Marched to a group of farm buildings, they were lined up in the meadow along side the barn wall. When the 99 prisoners were in position, two machine guns opened fire killing 97 of them. The bodies were then buried in a mass grave on the farm property. Two managed to escape, Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan emerged from the slaughter wounded but alive. When the SS troops moved on, the two wounded soldiers were discovered, after having hid in a pig-sty for three days and nights, by Madame Castel of Le Paradis who then cared for them till captured again by another Wehrmacht unit to spend the rest of the war as a POW. In 1942, the bodies of those executed were exhumed by the French authorities and reburied in the local churchyard now part of the Le Paradis War Cemetery. After the war, the massacre was investigated and Knoechlein was traced and arrested. During the war he had been awarded three Knight's Crosses. Tried before a War Crimes Court in Hamburg, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, and on January 28, 1949, the sentence was carried out. Married with four children, his wife attended the trial every day.





WORMHOUDT
(Pas-de-Calais. 27/28 May, 1940)
The day after the Le Paradis massacre, some 80 men of the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment, and the Royal Artillery, were taken prisoner by the No7 Company, 2nd Battalion of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. At Esquelbecq, near the town of Wormhoudt, the prisoners were marched into a large barn, and there the massacre began. Stick grenades were lobbed in amongst the defenceless prisoners who died in agony as shrapnel tore into their flesh. When the last grenade had been thrown, the survivors were then ordered outside, there to be mown down under a hail of bullets from automatic weapons. The SS then entered the barn again to finish off the wounded. Fifteen men survived the atrocity, only to give themselves up to other German units to serve out the war as POWs. Unlike the Le Paradis massacre, the victims of Wormhoudt were never avenged, as after the war no survivor could positively identify any of the SS soldiers involved.

With regards to the 130+ Canadians murdered by the ss hitler jugend(I don't capitalize on purpose), the War Amps of Canada has produced an excellent video about this story. The videos are available at www.waramps.ca it is called Take No Prisoners. The video also disputes(quite rightly in my humble opinion) the notion that these murders were in retaliation for Canadians killing Germans. On a personal note my wife's great uncle Robert Harper was one of those murdered.

Ham,

Thanks for your post I was not aware of these autoricities.

Jim

I have spoken to many veterans of 1 CanPara. They all tell me that following the ss atrocities toward the Canadians, they didn't take too kindly to the ss soldiers. To put it mildly, although 1 CanPara came across plenty of ss troops in their advance, there were NO ss prisoners taken by 1 CanPara. You do the math.

Usjumper do you know how Kurt Meyer managed to have his death sentence reprieved? Amazing then that he only spent 9 years in jail.
I wonder how painful that heart attack was that he suffered.

The Le Paradis massacre memorial refers to 97 all ranks of the Royal Norfolk ........... 'and other regiments', but usually no reference is made -here or anywhere else - to whom these other regiments are.

Some texts do refer to the mauling that Knochlein's company received by the Royal Scots and were forced to move on to other objectives ; that the losses inflicted on them by the Royal Scots caused much loss of face; when the Norfolks surrendered they were not surrendering to those they had for the most part been in battle against.


The role of the Royal Scots at le Paradis is often understated; that they almost lost the remnants of their 1st battalion to a similar massacre, but for the timely intervention of a senior Wehrmacht officer preventing the shooting of prisoners.

I knew the story , I knew the places , but thank you anyway for sharing and refreshing my memory !


Currahee !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Mark W.

Kurt Meyer was convicted and sentenced to death although no evidence came to light to prove that he had ordered the killings. What happened next is rather interresting.

Some time after the sentence, but before the execution, doubts settled in and his sentence was commuted to life. He served part of his life sentence in Canada. As time passed, the thought and guilt of wrongful conviction grew among everyone concerned with it. In the end, it came down to finding a face saving manner to release him. While in Canada, National Defense staff officers, many of which had faught against him back in '44, started using him for his much respected military tactical skills. Actually, Meyer himself had started this strange collaboration, preparing pages of unsolicited tactical recommendations for the Canadian army based on his experiences fighting the russians. The army went as far as using him on preparing a plan for the defense of Dawson Creek, Yukon, the agreed "stop line" where it was thought a soviet agression on North America would pass. Everybody remembered how effective his defense of Normandy crossings had been. He was eventually transfered back to Germany, at Werl militaty prison. From there, his new commutal to 14 years with time off for good behavior, was announced in early 1954. He was released on september of the same year.

Back in 1945, Kurt Meyer's court martial was presided by Maj-General Harry Foster, CO of 4th canadian AD [actually, CO of 1st ID by war end]. General Foster's son, Tony Foster, has written a book "Meeting of Generals", 1986. In his book, he offers the following discussion he had with his father on the occasion of Meyer's death.

I asked if there had ever been any doubt in his mind of Meyer's guilt.
"Not the slightest. He was just as guilty of murder as I was at the time... or any other senior officer in the field during a battle. The difference between us was that I was on the winning side. That makes a big difference."
Had the courtmartial been a sham then? Vindicativeness by the victor over the vanquished?
"I don't believe Meyer pulled the trigger on his captives or gave orders to execute any of them. But I'm sure he knew what happened. SS discipline was such that he couldn't help but know. But does that make him guilty of murder anymore than I'm guilty for knowing about the German prisoners my troops killed?"
"Then why did you convict him?"
"Because I had no choice according to those rules of warfare dreamt up by a bunch of bloody barrackroom lawyers who never herd a shot fired in anger. In wartime a commanding officer is responsible for the actions of his men."
"But that's absurd!"
"It's also military justice."
"Then where is the truth?"
"Ah! I suppose in the final analysis it lies in the conscience of the victor."

I guess everybody here on the board can relate to that, as we've all seen or read about Ronald Speirs's story for instance.

I will say this though, justice was somehow served when you consider that out of the 20,000 soldiers that were making up the 12th SS on june 6th, only a couple hundreds were left standing by the time of the Falaise gap. I'm pretty sure then that most of the actual murderers perished.

I hear another officer in 12 SS......Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded a Regiment (26th SS Pz Gren?) is still alive and living in Germany.....or at least he was when one of my books, Steel Inferno 1st SS Panzer Corps in Normandy was published.

Incidentally Mohnke was alledgedly involved in the Le Paradis massacre at Dunkirk, when with the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler.

You are confusing this with the Wormhoudt massacre of the 28th May -with which the SS-LAH were involved, of whom Deitrich was commander and Mohnke was battalion commander.

Not to be confused with the Le Paradis massacre, with which the SS Totenkopf were responsible on May 27th.


..

Yep, I just checked my book and I made a mistake. Got the two muddled up, Le Paradis is the name that automatically springs to mind when I think "SS.....Dunkirk....massacre" unfortunately, as it's been mentioned around here before.

Cheers for telling me otherwise.