SS Massacre on the Road to Dunkirk av Leslie Aitken

The two most notorious massacres of British troops by the SS, at Le Paradis and at Wormhout, in northern France, took place within a day and forty kilometres of each other in May 1940. At Wormhout the main victims of the carnage were members of the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment; up to eighty men were butchered in an old cowshed by members of II Battalion Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The murdered men were part of the outer perimeter of the BEF that provided protection for the evacuation beaches at Dunkirk, which was getting into full swing at the time of these dreadful events.Whereas the man primarily responsible for what happened at the ill-named le Paradis was brought to justice and executed in the immediate post war period, the same could not be said for Walter Mohnke, the man many have claimed to be behind what happened at the atrocity in the old barn near Wormhout. Besides the events in northern France, he was also accused of engaging in a massacre of Canadian and American soldiers in Normandy and the Ardennes towards the end of the war. In the final days of the Third Reich, Mohnke's loyalty was considered by Hitler to be of such depth that he was responsible for security in the Fuhrer's bunker in Berlin until the bitter end.Leslie Aitken wrote this book, originally published in 1977, to ensure the memory of those heroic men who died in such terrible circumstances; and the respect due to those who survived the ordeal in the old barn. Only afterwar