by Helen Fry
Major Ryder ordered the rest of his men into the barn to take cover. Now they were completely cut off and surrounded by SS regiments. He gave his men the option of surrendering to save their lives or fighting to the bitter end with no ammunition. They decided on surrender and broke up their weapons. Three men slowly left the barn with a rifle draped in a white towel to surrender. The firing started and all three were shot as they walked towards the SS officers. Major Ryder ordered the rest of his men out of the barn with their hands up, to the sound of cheering SS who surrounded them. The SS instructed the British soldiers wounded in battle to sit. It was then that Sergeant Pooley squatted down as the SS shouted orders in German and began to kick the surrendering soldiers. Pooley was struck by an SS officer and fell to the ground.
At a little distance stood Fritz Knöchlein, grinning at the humiliation of the British. He walked towards his prisoners, bawling orders that he expected to be obeyed. He called three SS officers and quietly told them, ‘Now we have these damned English swine. We will arrange a nice little shooting for them. I have sworn to avenge Harrer’s death.’5
On the scene was SS Master Sergeant (Hauptscharführer) Theodor Emke, who would later be called as a key witness to the atrocity. He provided a statement to Warrant Officer Ullman on 23 October 1946.6 With all prisoners out of the barn, they were ordered to march towards Le Paradis. SS men waited, poised by a hedge in a small field, their guns at the ready. Knöchlein ordered them to fire. The British soldiers fell into the dips in the field. Pooley felt a sharp pain in his leg as he and O’Callaghan threw themselves onto their comrades. Within seconds, the bodies of more soldiers covered them. They remained totally still as SS men walked up and down the lines, shooting any survivors. A whistle was blown and the SS moved off, their voices becoming fainter. The badly wounded Pooley passed out and O’Callaghan fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. They were the only survivors.
All this had been overheard by four French refugees who had fled the fighting and were sheltering in a nearby pigsty. As they made their way along the road they were stopped by a German soldier, who asked if they had seen any British soldiers. They said they had not. He accused them of being spies and held a revolver to the head of 60-year-old Madame Romanie Castel. She pleaded not to be shot. The German soldier showed mercy and strode off.7
In the field, Pooley finally stirred with a severe pain in his left leg. He pulled himself from under the dead bodies and heard O’Callaghan snoring. He woke him, and the two men climbed out of the ditch. In his statement, O’Callaghan described having walked beside the pile of bodies and seen not a single survivor.8 As he approached the barn, he had heard German voices. He returned to Pooley, telling him that they had to get away urgently. He helped Pooley to cover behind a bush and went off to find shelter. He found a pigsty and went back to collect Pooley. This became their shelter for the next three days, hiding until the SS regiments had moved away from the area. They survived by eating raw potatoes.
On the fourth day, Madame Romanie Castel returned home to find the two British soldiers. She hated the German occupation of France and would not betray the soldiers. Instead, she dressed Pooley’s wound, made a meal and agreed to shelter them. Occasionally they heard the voices of German soldiers in the distance. One day a passing German medical officer visited the farm, looking for wounded German soldiers. Observing the Geneva Convention, he arranged for Pooley and O’Callaghan to be transferred to a hospital in Béthune. Pooley was subsequently moved to a hospital in Paris, and thereafter to a POW camp in Germany. After sixteen days, O’Callaghan was discharged and taken with other British soldiers to a different POW camp. It would be more than five years before he and Pooley saw each other again.
Men in Knöchlein’s regiment had been disgusted by the order to shoot surrendering British soldiers. It continued to be discussed among younger members of the SS regiments, who suggested that Knöchlein should be challenged to a duel to save the honour of the SS. A German war reporter saw the carnage at Le Paradis and counted at least fifty dead British soldiers near the barn. He assumed it was the result of fierce fighting and photographed the scene.
Heinrich Himmler summoned the divisional commander, SS General Theodor Eicke (inspection officer for the concentration camps in the 1930s) and ordered the shootings at Le Paradis to be kept a state secret. The 2nd Totenkopf Regiment was withdrawn from France to fight elsewhere, including on the Russian front. There a number of its 3rd Company lost their lives in battle, complicating Colonel Scotland’s later task.
While receiving treatment in a Paris hospital, Pooley had been advised to keep quiet about Le Paradis; if he didn’t, the Nazis would hunt him down and eliminate him as a witness to the atrocity. Pooley suppressed his experiences, but it took its toll on his mental health. When he finally returned to England, he told his story, but was ignored on the grounds that he was suffering from battle fatigue. He was doubtful that there were any other surviving witnesses – O’Callaghan might well be dead. He returned to Southall, London, and worked in the post office.
But O’Callaghan had survived in a different POW camp, and had also kept silent about his experiences. When he returned to England, his reports were also discredited. When Colonel Scotland heard about the two survivors, he was furious that the War Office had neither told him nor taken the men’s testimonies seriously. He tracked down the two men and asked them to come to the cage. O’Callaghan agreed, but Pooley was profoundly depressed by his experiences and refused.
O’Callaghan was finally able to swear a statement before the commissioner for oaths in Westminster on 2 November 1946. Four days later, he persuaded Pooley to do the same. Their testimony, alongside the interrogation of SS soldiers from the unit and eyewitness account from Madame Castel, enabled Knöchlein to be indicted for war crimes and to stand trial.
Gathering evidence of war crimes could be harrowing. At the request of Major Terry, the French police were asked to take down a key statement from farmer Monsieur Louis Creton. Creton had evacuated his home on 20 May 1940 because of the advancing German army and had returned on 2 June 1940 to find that a communal grave with a small cross had been dug in one of his meadows. He said:
I also noticed bullet marks on the stable wall facing onto the meadow. By the wall, bits of brain and pools of congealed blood were scattered on the ground. At a distance of about 25 metres from the wall I found a pile of about 200 German cartridge cases … I found several buckets of blood and human brain which proves that the British soldiers had been shot from very short range.9
Creton’s single-page testimony was typed and dispatched to London as key evidence in the Le Paradis massacre case.
Fritz Knöchlein
Finally, on 10 October 1946, the ‘tall, fierce, disdainful, highly strung, excitable’ SS Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Knöchlein was brought to the London Cage from American custody.10 It was the beginning of 615 days in British detention, 64 of them in solitary confinement at the London Cage in 1946.11 As one of the most loathed prisoners ever to cross the threshold of the cage, Knöchlein was described by Scotland as ‘a Nazi of the first order, the worst order, a German who had dedicated himself to brutality; irresponsible in the possession of power, ruthless in execution’.12
Knöchlein was interrogated for short periods on 15, 17, 18 and 21 October and on 12 and 14 November 1946. He was required to appear for several identity parades at the cage when eyewitnesses were asked to identify him. During this time, he became extremely unstable and behaved like a half-crazed animal. He claimed that the guards came into his room every ten minutes from ten o’clock in the evening, pulled off his blankets and shook him until he woke. He frequently screamed out, calling the guards ‘Bastards and British Gestapo’.13
Colonel Scotland was having none of this behaviour and issued immediate orders for every item to be removed from Knöchlein’s room: the bed, table, chair, all toiletries, and even the fireplace to prevent him from hurting himself.14 Knöchlein was left with two blankets and
a pillow. The following day he was brought before Scotland and told that he would be in solitary confinement for at least twenty-eight days. On 15 October, he was given his second interrogation in Room 25 by Regimental Sergeant (RSM) Major Ullman, with Major Terry present.15 Two days later, Knöchlein was seen again in Room 25 by Ullman, but refused to provide the name of his regiment. Scotland entered the interrogation room, waited and watched for a few moments. Without saying a word to Knöchlein, he turned to Ullman and barked, ‘Have him sent to me.’16
Ullman escorted Knöchlein to Room 24, where Scotland instructed the German to sit down. Major Terry was present. Scotland explained to Knöchlein the charges being gathered against him. Knöchlein responded by citing his SS oath to Hitler as the reason for not answering any questions. He then complained bitterly about being held there. But this was Scotland’s territory, and he showed no fear of the SS officer as he rounded the desk and told Knöchlein that he usually gave prisoners an opportunity to write down their version of events and account for the allegations against them.
Knöchlein interrupted him, snapping: ‘I refuse to write anything down.’
Scotland replied: ‘Exactly what I expected from you. You have sworn under your SS oath to your Regimental Commander that what happened at Le Paradis on the afternoon of 27 May 1940 was to remain a secret for life. Don’t worry. You will not be asked any more questions here. You are denied the opportunity to write down your version of events.’17
Knöchlein was dismissed back to his room in solitary confinement. He was seen again on 18 October, this time by a Major Mason with RSM Ullman acting as interpreter. On 21 October, having received additional statements from other prisoners about the Le Paradis murders, Knöchlein was interrogated again in Room 25 by Major Terry and RSM Ullman. Even confronted with the evidence provided by survivors Pooley and O’Callaghan, Knöchlein remained uncooperative and denied all knowledge of the shootings.
In other rooms in the cage, under the direction of Major Terry, the interrogation of SS officers about the Le Paradis massacre continued, as interrogators gradually pieced together the circumstances surrounding the massacre. Between 10 October and 13 December 1946, a total of 136 prisoners were interrogated about the massacre, most spending an average of ten days in the cage. It was one of the busiest periods: the guards and camp staff were fully engaged in duties of feeding and guarding the prisoners, escorting them to the interrogation rooms and keeping an eye on them in the exercise grounds.
Allegations of torture
Knöchlein maintained that after his interrogation on 15 October 1946, Scotland ordered two guards to be stationed in his room at night. Then, for four days and nights he was taken to the guardroom, where the guards were playing cards and singing. He was allowed to lie down, but could not sleep. His clothes were confiscated, and he was given prison slacks to wear during the daytime and thin pyjamas at night. For three days, he had barely any food or sleep. In his formal complaint to the authorities, Knöchlein alleged that Ullman told him during an interrogation: ‘There existed Gestapo methods not only in Alexanderplatz in Berlin. We can do that much better here. We will knock you [??] … here miserably [??] … you will wail!’18 The complaint continued: ‘At that he got hold of me on the front of my … twisted my collar until I was suffocated, and shouted into my face: “I hate you, I hate you, I have never hated anybody like you!” During this time the guards were instructed to treat me correspondingly.’19
Knöchlein claimed that on 17 October the guards forced him to make 100 trunk bends without pause, until he was ready to fall over. When he wanted to stop, he was told that this disobedience would be punished, and the comments were accompanied by persistent threats with a wooden cudgel. He was made to walk round a narrow, 2-by-2-metre space in a circle for four hours, always in the same direction, even though he pleaded that he was becoming giddy. For complaining, he was given a heavy kick with a boot every time he passed the guard. He claimed that between fifteen and twenty of these kicks had occurred. Finally, he had to turn around on his own axis for so long that he was unable to keep upright and collapsed to the ground. An interrogation session followed immediately.20
In his complaints, Knöchlein said:
Late in the evening, Captain Cornish finished these cruelties temporarily and ordered them to let me have food and sleep again. In the meantime I was made to work most heavily, mostly in an altogether useless way. For instance to scrub a flight of stairs and, when this was finished down below, to begin afresh on top, to scrub about with a brush on a tiled floor with a tiny rag. For instance, half a sock to wipe a large room, to clean the lavatory, and to carry coal (although I pointed out that my wrist had been broken and despite my reference to the international agreements involved considering officer prisoners of war).21
When he needed the toilet, Knöchlein claimed that the guards deliberately refused to hear his knocks. Or they came along, sneered, then left without allowing him to go to the lavatory. At one point, Knöchlein was held in a narrow room with three other prisoners, with no room to move. In answer to their repeated requests to use the toilet, the guard placed a bucket in the room and told them to use that. Through the night, the stench became overpowering in the stale air of the cell. But their complaints were met with scornful laughs from the guards. Knöchlein’s fellow prisoners – Werner Schifer and Oskar Schmidt – had witnessed it all, he said.
Knöchlein always believed that because he had dared to complain, he was subjected to further mistreatment. When he returned to his room, he found it was a centimetre deep in dirty water. The guard ordered him to kneel and mop it up. Knöchlein described what happened next:
As I had only one pair of trousers which were my own, I refused. Then I was lifted up by my legs, head downward and then dropped. About ten buckets of water were poured over my head and my clothes, and I was pushed several times down a narrow and steep flight of cellar stairs, a cudgel knocking me in the back, so that I almost broke all my limbs. Finally I had to take off my shoes and step with stockinged feet into the icy water which was several centimetres high, and that is how I had to ‘clean!’ Then I was forced to run about in the open where it was pouring, holding my shoes in my hand and with only my stockings on, driven on to more speed by a wooden cudgel in my back.22
Knöchlein was forbidden to change his clothes or underwear. Most of the meals that he was now permitted were taken standing in front of an open lavatory door, with only a few minutes to eat. Finally, he was ordered to kneel down in dirty water and scrub the guardroom. A guard sat on his back to keep him on his knees; this was witnessed by eight guards and two corporals.23
Knöchlein claimed that the treatment worsened: on 9 October 1946, he was put in a small corner of the kitchen with a big multi-flame gas stove. The gas flames radiated an enormous heat. He was forced to scrub a tiny piece of wood for ninety minutes without any water – an action which he described as
quite meaningless, and with no rest. When the sweat was streaming down my face and body, I was escorted in a bathroom. Doors and windows were wide open. I had to undress and, in my heated state, I had to step under the icy shower (a special shower which does not drop water on the body from above but also throws it from the sides!).24
Three guards prevented him from leaving the ice-cold shower. Standing freezing and shivering, he was then smeared with coal, so that he had to remain under the cold shower for ‘reasons of cleanliness’. Finally, they poured an additional bucket of cold water over him. He claimed that this torture led to the onset of bad bronchitis, and his rheumatic disease got worse. He always maintained that he survived only because he was a fit man. But this was not the end of the matter. That evening, he was escorted into the back garden with fellow prisoner Oskar Schmidt. Knöchlein was ordered to kneel on the ground in front of a guard. When he refused, he and Schmidt had to run continuously in a circle while the guard pushed them in the back with a cudgel. Then Knöchlein was given a heavy log weighing about 50 pounds, which he had t
o carry while running, and Schmidt was forced to carry a wooden beam. Finally, they were both coerced into running around with a barrel partly filled with lubricating oil. It had serious consequences:
My fellow-prisoner Oskar Schmidt, a man of 46 years who was obviously about to break down, was told that he had to suffer all this because I had refused to kneel on the floor. I was told that I was a bad comrade and responsible for Schmidt’s sufferings because I would not kneel down! Schmidt then broke down with a heart attack and was unconscious. In order to put an end to his torture I said I was willing to kneel down before the guard inside the house, which I was forced to do in front of the guardroom. At these sadistic tortures, a corporal was present, apart from the guard, and many other guards looked on from the window.25
Oskar Schmidt survived the heart attack. He was carried to his room by Knöchlein and a guard ‘after he had had his heart massaged, he soon regained consciousness’.26 Colonel Scotland witnessed Oskar Schmidt’s signed statement on 8 November 1946. The question remains open whether it was obtained through intimidation, or even brutality.
The following year, Schmidt was tried as a war criminal in Hamburg for his part in the murder of RAF airmen who had tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III (the Sagan case, discussed in the next chapter). He was sentenced to death and hanged in Hameln prison in February 1948 by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
Back in the cage
Knöchlein claimed to have been subjected to further humiliating treatment on 6 November 1946, treatment that, so he argued, went against military discipline: he had to stand to attention and salute an ordinary guard without rank, who kicked him on the legs. Knöchlein asked to register a complaint and found himself back in front of Colonel Scotland, complaining to him that military salutes were only to be given to an officer of the same rank or higher.27