The Forgotten Massacres of Defenseless Soldiers in WWII
SS War Crime Against British Soldiers: Le Paradis Massacre in France
11m
May 1940. As Allied troops retreat toward Dunkirk, a small British unit makes its final stand in the French village of Le Paradis. Surrounded and out of ammunition, the men of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment surrender—expecting the rights of prisoners of war. Instead, ninety-nine soldiers are led to a nearby farmyard and machine-gunned by SS troops under the command of Fritz Knöchlein. Ninety-seven are killed; only two survive to tell the world.
The Le Paradis massacre became one of the first Nazi war crimes in Western Europe—a brutal warning of what was to come. Years later, survivor testimonies would bring Knöchlein to justice, while his commander, Theodor Eicke, fell on the Eastern Front. The massacre’s perpetrators met violent ends, but their crime stands as a lasting reminder of the ruthlessness of the Waffen-SS and the high price of humanity’s early stand against Nazi tyranny.
Up Next in Season 1
-
The Reckoning at Mauthausen: How the ...
When U.S. forces arrive at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, most SS guards have fled. Those who remain are seized by prisoners who have endured years of forced labor, starvation, executions, and medical experiments in one of the Third Reich’s most lethal camps.
In the chaotic hours after liberation, a...
-
153 Captured Nazi Soldiers Killed in ...
In the opening days of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a battalion of the Wehrmacht is cut off near the Ukrainian village of Broniki during fierce fighting on 1 July 1941. Around 180 German soldiers are surrounded and taken prisoner by retreating Red Army units as t...
-
419 Escaped, Hunted to Death by Civil...
From the cheers of the 1938 Anschluss to the genocidal war in the East, Nazi propaganda transformed entire societies into instruments of persecution. Nowhere was this more brutally exposed than in Mauthausen’s Block 20 — the camp’s secret death block for Soviet officers erased from official recor...
