May 28th 1940

[borebage53]

85 years since on this day in 1940 of the Wormhoudt Massacre. Retreating British soldiers fighting a rearguard action towards Dunkirk and who had been captured and rounded up by the Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler” Division.
Having exhausted all their ammunition trying to delay the German advance the British troops had no choice but to surrender expecting to be treated as POW’s under the terms of the Geneva Convention.
After their surrender a large number of troops of the 2nd Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment,4th Battalion Cheshire Regiment,and gunners of the 210 Battery 53rd (Worcestershire Yeomanry) Anti-Tank Regiment,Royal Artillery along with some French Depot troops were being herded by the SS towards a barn near Wormhoudt.
The Allied troops had already become alarmed by the brutal conduct of the SS soldiers with some of the stragglers being shot out of hand.
On arriving at the barn the Senior British Officer ,Captain James Lynn-Allen,protested but was immediately “rebuked” by a German SS Officer.
When there were nearly 100 men herded inside the small barn the Leibenstandarte Adolf Hitler SS Division soldiers threw stick grenades into the crowded barn killing many of the POW’s.
The grenades failed to kill everyone largely due to the heroic and selfless action of 2 British NCO’s, Sergeant Stanley Moore and CSM Augustus Jennings,who threw themselves on top of the first grenades and sacrificed themselves to attempt to shield their comrades from the blasts.
I shall pause my account just here for a moment so when you read it you can think about what they selflessly did without any hesitation in pursuit of their duty.
The SS “butchers” then moved into the barn firing their weapons to finish off any wounded still alive. A total of 80 men were killed, 15 others were badly wounded ,6 more of whom died in the few days after the massacre. Only a handful of the men survived who were found by regular German Army medics who treated them humanely and took them to their field hospitals to treat their wounds after the SS had moved on. No German Officer was ever tried in Court for the atrocity.
Hauptsturmfuhrer Wilhelm Mohnke was the SS Officer in charge of the SS murderers,who escaped any justice,and who died peacefully in August 2001.

 

[borebage53]

I have just re-read my post and had to correct 2 minor typo errors. I do apologise as I do not like to make any mistakes at all when recounting the actions of very brave British soldiers such as these men.
The barn at the site of the massacre has been rebuilt as a Memorial and can be visited to this day. Captain Lynn-Allen died while trying to escape but he did enable Private Bert Evans to escape. Other of the precious few survivors were Pte Arthur Johnson and Gunner Brian Fahey. Evans was the last of the few survivors of the massacre. Another killed in the barn was Captain Charles Orton of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who had been a First Class Cricketer before the War.

 

[sixthswan]

Mohnke did serve six years in solitary confinement at Lubyanka and a further four years, in the officers' prison camp in Voikovo.
There were several atrocities attached to his command.
But as mentioned he was never prosecuted, due to lack of evidence.
Perhaps all these prisoners of war held by soldiers he commanded directly, just all died accidentally, at the same time.
A cynic might suggest that his debriefing by the CIA on his release by the Russians, furnishing information on SS veterans and other fellow Nazi's, including the situation in Russia - had something to do with it. In return for money and guaranteed immunity from prosecution.

 

[borebage53]

The Soldier.
If I should die,think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave,once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind,no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
( A poem by serving war poet Rupert Brooke,written in 1914 and published posthumously after his death in 1915).
Brooke served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Infantry Division and saw action at the Siege of Antwerp in 1914. He sailed with a British Expeditionary Force to Egypt where he developed severe gastroenteritis followed by streptococcal sepsis from an infected Mosquito bite. He died of Septicaemia while on a French hospital ship en route to the Gallipoli landings in 1915. He was 27 years old. He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek Island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea where his grave remains. He has a statue in Rugby,Warwickshire.

 

[LGFOX]

Thanks once again to our house historian telling us about another WW2 incident I had no idea about. A particularly hideous incident very early on in the war.
I often think what drove ‘normal’ Germans to be so vile to their fellow man and clearly against the Geneva convention. Is the answer that this was the SS? They’d collected certain individuals to be members who clearly were complete beasts. They were led by one of the greatest psychopaths in history in Himmler. Could that have been the problem. He made Hitler look like like an amateur in the horror stakes.
To throw stick grenades into a barn full of unarmed people is unbelievable. The bravery of these men is off the scale in their personal sacrifice.
It further sickens me that someone like Mohnke basically got away with it and had it seems a long uninterrupted life living past his 90th birthday. I wonder how he felt about what he’d done. No doubt got away with it as said for giving info to the allies. Many other prominent Nazis did the same. Quite shameful and sad on all parts.
Thankyou Borebage again.

 

[borebage53]

Just one day before the Wormhoudt massacre a similar atrocity had happened at Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais. On 27th May 1940 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment had become isolated from their unit. They occupied and defended a farmhouse,fighting on until they ran out of ammunition and Major Lyle Ryder ordered his men to surrender.
Members of the 14th Company SS Division Totenkopf, under the command of Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Knochlein led the British survivors across the road to a wall where they were murdered by machine guns. 97 soldiers of the Royal Norfolk’s were killed with only 2 survivors,Pte William O’Callaghan who pulled Pte Albert Pooley still barely alive from the pile of bodies. The majority of the victims were already wounded from the fighting when they were shot. Knochlein had ordered his men to finish off any still alive with bayonets.
O’Callaghan and Pooley hid in a pig sty for 3 days and nights surviving on raw potatoes and water from puddles. They were eventually found by advancing Wehrmacht soldiers who captured them and treated them well getting them to field hospitals.
It is also thought that around 20 men of the Royal Scots,who were holding the line adjacent to the Norfolk’s,were also massacred by SS units.
On the evidence of O’Callaghan and Pooley and 2 French civilian witnesses,Knochlein was eventually arraigned for war crimes. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to death in 1948. He was hung on the gallows at Hamelin in Germany by Albert Pierrepoint on January 21st 1949.

 

[LGFOX]

Thanks again. The SS were truly the top of the Nazi evil tree. Himmler got away after the war was lost but was captured a few weeks later. Sadly whilst being examined by a doctor he bit into a cyanide pill he’d hidden in his mouth. He never went to trial where he’d have faced the consequences of his evilness and no doubt had been executed.

 

[borebage53]

Both SS and Wehrmacht units were particularly brutal in their treatment of French African Colonial troops during the Battle of France in 1940. France had posted lots of their Colonial soldiers in the French Occupied Rhineland so they were particularly hated by the Germans from the outset. Lots of massacres,summary executions and other atrocities were perpetrated against them. Senegalese Tirailleurs, who effectively fought the hardest against the Germans, were the most hated so consequently took the brunt of the most savage reprisals. It is estimated that the Wehrmacht alone killed anywhere up to 3000 French Colonial troops during the Battle of France in 1940.
Hardly any surprise then that after the “Operation Dragoon” landings of American and French troops in the South of France,August/September 1944, the advancing French Colonial troops involved took their “revenge” on the Germans with equal savagery and brutality.

 

[hackneyfox]

A fair number of nazis fell down the stairs or died in house fires after the war.
Unfortunately far too many were never dealt with or did a couple of years in prison and then returned to positions of power in civilian life.

 

[borebage53]

The only Nazi institution that didn’t break down in the final days of the Reich was their propaganda. It carried on the lies until the very end. Adolf Hitler,apparently, had “died a hero” fighting to his last bullet in the Chancellery.
The fact that his last bullet was a self inflicted shot into his own head didn’t really fit in with the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda myth!

 

[Sammelslongshot]

On the subject of ww2. Today I visited Bentley Priory from where Hugh Dowding commanded Fighter Command during The Battle Of Britain. Interesting museum in a wonderful building. Worth a visit if you are in Stanmore, Harrow area. Hugh Dowding and Keith Park deserve to be as well known in our history as names like Nelson and Wellington.

 

[LGFOX]

As a side note, as someone who has lived in Deutschland, loves Germany and its people, I’ve always been careful to say that the atrocities in WW2 were by the Nazis and not just Germans. Yes of course they were German by birth, but as I’ve always said, all Nazis were German but not all Germans were Nazis. Thankyou for acknowledging that here.
I’m always aware that we love talking about the war, but I’m well aware through German friends it still has mental repercussions for them to this day.
On the flip side to the Nazi atrocities, there were many Germans who resisted and did everything to stop them. It’s an amazing fact that Hitler himself had so many attempts on his life, sadly all failures, that he thought himself a special person sent by God.
Of course many will know about the famous July 1943 attempt by Claus Stauffenberg and his small group of resistance fighters which was portrayed in the film The Valkyrie. But there were many many others both before and during the war. Probably the most unluckiest was that in November 1939 by Georg Elser. He planned for months to bomb Hitler and his entourage whilst he was giving his annual speech in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. He devised one of the very first bombs which would be detonated by a timer. Sadly Hitler left an hour earlier than he was supposed to due to bad weather and so that when the bomb exploded bringing the whole ceiling down onto the stage, he’d already left.
It would have definitely killed him and probably a number of his entourage including Himmler and the equally vile Heydrich.
Elser was caught and imprisoned until the end of the war where sadly just a few days before it ended he was executed on Hitlers orders by the SS.
As an afterthought, anyone who visits Berlin, May I suggest a trip to the resistance museum at the old BendlerBlock where the July 43 conspirators were executed. This is on the now aptly named Stauffenberg Strasse

 

[Popside]

As a side note, as someone who has lived in Deutschland, loves Germany and its people, I’ve always been careful to say that the atrocities in WW2 were by the Nazis and not just Germans. Yes of course they were German by birth, but as I’ve always said, all Nazis were German but not all Germans were Nazis. Thankyou for acknowledging that here.
I’m always aware that we love talking about the war, but I’m well aware through German friends it still has mental repercussions for them to this day.
On the flip side to the Nazi atrocities, there were many Germans who resisted and did everything to stop them. It’s an amazing fact that Hitler himself had so many attempts on his life, sadly all failures, that he thought himself a special person sent by God.
Of course many will know about the famous July 1943 attempt by Claus Stauffenberg and his small group of resistance fighters which was portrayed in the film The Valkyrie. But there were many many others both before and during the war. Probably the most unluckiest was that in November 1939 by Georg Elser. He planned for months to bomb Hitler and his entourage whilst he was giving his annual speech in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. He devised one of the very first bombs which would be detonated by a timer. Sadly Hitler left an hour earlier than he was supposed to due to bad weather and so that when the bomb exploded bringing the whole ceiling down onto the stage, he’d already left.
It would have definitely killed him and probably a number of his entourage including Himmler and the equally vile Heydrich.
Elser was caught and imprisoned until the end of the war where sadly just a few days before it ended he was executed on Hitlers orders by the SS.
As an afterthought, anyone who visits Berlin, May I suggest a trip to the resistance museum at the old BendlerBlock where the July 43 conspirators were executed. This is on the now aptly named Stauffenberg Strasse

I’m no traveler but I am determined to tour Germany if possible and always thought of the war stories as nazis not Germans rightly or wrongly we all should move on .

 

[Sammelslongshot]

As a side note, as someone who has lived in Deutschland, loves Germany and its people, I’ve always been careful to say that the atrocities in WW2 were by the Nazis and not just Germans. Yes of course they were German by birth, but as I’ve always said, all Nazis were German but not all Germans were Nazis. Thankyou for acknowledging that here.
I’m always aware that we love talking about the war, but I’m well aware through German friends it still has mental repercussions for them to this day.
On the flip side to the Nazi atrocities, there were many Germans who resisted and did everything to stop them. It’s an amazing fact that Hitler himself had so many attempts on his life, sadly all failures, that he thought himself a special person sent by God.
Of course many will know about the famous July 1943 attempt by Claus Stauffenberg and his small group of resistance fighters which was portrayed in the film The Valkyrie. But there were many many others both before and during the war. Probably the most unluckiest was that in November 1939 by Georg Elser. He planned for months to bomb Hitler and his entourage whilst he was giving his annual speech in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. He devised one of the very first bombs which would be detonated by a timer. Sadly Hitler left an hour earlier than he was supposed to due to bad weather and so that when the bomb exploded bringing the whole ceiling down onto the stage, he’d already left.
It would have definitely killed him and probably a number of his entourage including Himmler and the equally vile Heydrich.
Elser was caught and imprisoned until the end of the war where sadly just a few days before it ended he was executed on Hitlers orders by the SS.
As an afterthought, anyone who visits Berlin, May I suggest a trip to the resistance museum at the old BendlerBlock where the July 43 conspirators were executed. This is on the now aptly named Stauffenberg Strasse

Remember the World at War tv series. Featured a British woman married to a German lawyer. They were active anti Nazis. There was a tv series about her called Christabel starring would you believe a young Liz Hurley.

 

[Popside]

Remember the World at War tv series. Featured a British woman married to a German lawyer. They were active anti Nazis. There was a tv series about her called Christabel starring would you believe a young Liz Hurley.

World at war quote my mate “ everyone should watch that at some point “ asap in our lives I think . So sad.

 

[Sammy George]

Borebage I am in awe of your war knowledge, something that I am very interested in myself. I think the massacre you refer to was featured in the origonal Dunkirk film starring John Mills. We all know that the vile SS purported many other massacres, some seen in films i.e The battle of the Bulge, Great Escape.
I learnt of one fairly recently that happened in a village in Normandy (sorry the name escapes me), a few days after D-day. An entire village of French civilians were massacred as the SS sought retribution against the French resistance. i think over 500 died but miraculously I think 6 survived.
Just horrendous

 

[borebage53]

Borebage I am in awe of your war knowledge, something that I am very interested in myself. I think the massacre you refer to was featured in the origonal Dunkirk film starring John Mills. We all know that the vile SS purported many other massacres, some seen in films i.e The battle of the Bulge, Great Escape.
I learnt of one fairly recently that happened in a village in Normandy (sorry the name escapes me), a few days after D-day. An entire village of French civilians were massacred as the SS sought retribution against the French resistance. i think over 500 died but miraculously I think 6 survived.
Just horrendous

That is Oradour-Sur-Glane the Martyred Village. It was “visited” by a unit (Der Fuhrer regiment) of the Das Reich Waffen SS Division on 10th June 1944. Das Reich were newly arrived only a few months before from the Eastern Front with a grisly reputation there for numerous massacres.
They massacred 642 men,women and children before burning the village to the ground. The old town of Oradour has been left untouched ever since as a Memorial where crumbling walls,cars and household items can be viewed by tourists. A constant reminder of the atrocity that took place there not only to the French but to all other places who came face-to-face with Nazi oppression.

 

[Sammy George]

Thanks for that Borebage. It's impossible to imagine how people could do this

 

[borebage53]

The Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky were liquidated after the assassination of the Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942.
He was ambushed in his car and mortally wounded in the streets of Prague on 27th May 1942 by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers ,trained by the British Special Operations Executive, and sent by the Czechoslovakian Government-in-Exile to kill him. Heydrich died from his wounds on June 4th. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the SOE soldiers and Resistance Partizans to the villages.
On 9th June all men and boys over the age of 14 in Lidice were slaughtered,the village was razed and all the women sent to concentration camps. The village of Lezaky suffered the same fate on 14th June.
After hiding in safe houses and in a Prague church the Czech and Slovak soldiers were betrayed by a traitor in the Czech resistance and surrounded by 800 Nazi troops. After resisting continuous attempts and shoot outs to flush them out and with the church crypt, as their last refuge, being purposely flooded the soldiers all committed suicide rather than suffer being taken alive!

 

[sixthswan]

From Wikipedia...

The only adult man from Lidice actually in Czechoslovakia who survived this atrocity was František Saidl (1887–1961), the former deputy-mayor of Lidice who had been arrested at the end of 1938 because on 19 December 1938 he accidentally killed his son Eduard Saidl. He was imprisoned for four years and had no idea about this massacre. He found out when he returned home on 23 December 1942. Upon discovering the massacre, he was so distraught he turned himself in to SS officers in the nearby town of Kladno, confessed to being from Lidice, and even said he approved of the assassination of Heydrich. Despite confirming his identity, the SS officers simply laughed at him and turned him away, and he went on to survive the war.

 

[Sammelslongshot]

That is Oradour-Sur-Glane the Martyred Village. It was “visited” by a unit (Der Fuhrer regiment) of the Das Reich Waffen SS Division on 10th June 1944. Das Reich were newly arrived only a few months before from the Eastern Front with a grisly reputation there for numerous massacres.
They massacred 642 men,women and children before burning the village to the ground. The old town of Oradour has been left untouched ever since as a Memorial where crumbling walls,cars and household items can be viewed by tourists. A constant reminder of the atrocity that took place there not only to the French but to all other places who came face-to-face with Nazi oppression.

The Soldier.
If I should die,think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave,once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind,no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
( A poem by serving war poet Rupert Brooke,written in 1914 and published posthumously after his death in 1915).
Brooke served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Infantry Division and saw action at the Siege of Antwerp in 1914. He sailed with a British Expeditionary Force to Egypt where he developed severe gastroenteritis followed by streptococcal sepsis from an infected Mosquito bite. He died of Septicaemia while on a French hospital ship en route to the Gallipoli landings in 1915. He was 27 years old. He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek Island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea where his grave remains. He has a statue in Rugby,Warwickshire.

Often think of an Uncle I never knew. First served in the desert. His unit was then sent to Singapore but that fell before they arrived. Diverted to Java to assist the Dutch. After a brief fight captured by Japanese in March 1942. Survived over 3 years in brutal conditions before he succumbed age 28 to dysentery and beri beri in June 1945. Lies with other comrades in Ambon, Indonesia. A long way from dear old blighty.

 

[LGFOX]

The Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky were liquidated after the assassination of the Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942.
He was ambushed in his car and mortally wounded in the streets of Prague on 27th May 1942 by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers ,trained by the British Special Operations Executive, and sent by the Czechoslovakian Government-in-Exile to kill him. Heydrich died from his wounds on June 4th. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the SOE soldiers and Resistance Partizans to the villages.
On 9th June all men and boys over the age of 14 in Lidice were slaughtered,the village was razed and all the women sent to concentration camps. The village of Lezaky suffered the same fate on 14th June.
After hiding in safe houses and in a Prague church the Czech and Slovak soldiers were betrayed by a traitor in the Czech resistance and surrounded by 800 Nazi troops. After resisting continuous attempts and shoot outs to flush them out and with the church crypt, as their last refuge, being purposely flooded the soldiers all committed suicide rather than suffer being taken alive!

For anyone who wants to know more about this then there have been two excellent films made. The original, my favourite, is called Operation Daybreak. Stars Martin Shaw, Joss Ackland, Antony Andrews and Diane Coupland of Bless this House fame.
The newer version is Operation Anthopoid. Stars Cillian Murphy.
Reinhard Heydrich was in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He was known as one of the most evil Nazis, and chaired the Wannsee conference which formalised the Final Solution to the Jewish question.

 

[Sammelslongshot]

For anyone who wants to know more about this then there have been two excellent films made. The original, my favourite, is called Operation Daybreak. Stars Martin Shaw, Joss Ackland, Antony Andrews and Diane Coupland of Bless this House fame.
The newer version is Operation Anthopoid. Stars Cillian Murphy.
Reinhard Heydrich was in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He was known as one of the most evil Nazis, and chaired the Wannsee conference which formalised the Final Solution to the Jewish question.

I agree that Operation Daybreak is excellent. Ironic that Heydrich was played by Anton Diffring. The actor played a lot of Nazis. His background is where the irony comes in. Also recommend Conspiracy which stars Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich. Chilling production about the Wannsee conference.

 

[LGFOX]

I agree that Operation Daybreak is excellent. Ironic that Heydrich was played by Anton Diffring. The actor played a lot of Nazis. His background is where the irony comes in. Also recommend Conspiracy which stars Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich. Chilling production about the Wannsee conference.

I’ll check that out.
Yes the irony as you say. Poor guy was half Jewish and gay. Stood no chance. You do wonder how they felt being typecast as yet another Nazi officer time and again.
Curd Jurgens was another in the same vein.

 

[borebage53]

Curt Jurgens always remembered to turn his captains cap back to front when looking through the U-Boat periscope in The Enemy Below. I remember that film well as I played the pivotal role of 4th Dyslexic Enigma machine operator. The only known time that confusion was ever caused at Bletchley Park!

 

[kendalfox]

1940 saw leicester worst bombing raid of the war according to my Dad we lost over 100 people l was only 2and a half when it happened my Dad was at work at the Co-op,'.
Bakery down Union Street he said Highfields had it really bad think he said it was in November of that year.
l know we had stray bombs from their activities in Coventry ....quite a few times we had bombs dropped after the pilots jettisoned
their loads on the way back to Germany