By late May 1940, the German advance through France had shattered Allied defenses and pinned the British Expeditionary Force against the English Channel. The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, part of the 4th Infantry Brigade, received orders that amounted to a death sentence: hold your positions as long as possible to buy time for the evacuation at Dunkirk. On May 27, soldiers of C Company and HQ Company fell back to their headquarters at Cornet Farm, just outside the hamlet of Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais. They were told by radio that they were isolated and would receive no assistance. The unit facing them was the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf, commanded by Theodor Eicke, whose men had been indoctrinated with fanatical Nazi ideology. The Totenkopf had already refused to accept the surrender of two hundred soldiers earlier that month, killing them on the spot.

The Germans attacked the farmhouse with mortars, tanks, and artillery, reducing the building to rubble and forcing the defenders into a cowshed. When the Norfolk men ran out of ammunition, they surrendered. The captives, most of them wounded, were disarmed and marched down the Rue du Paradis. SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Fritz Knochlein had ordered two machine guns set up by a barn in the paddock of a nearby farm. Ninety-seven British soldiers were murdered. The Germans forced French civilians to bury the bodies in a shallow mass grave the next day. But Knochlein's men had not been thorough enough. Private William O'Callaghan had survived, and he pulled Private Pooley alive from among the dead. The two men hid in a pig sty for three days and nights, surviving on raw potatoes and puddle water until the farm's owner, Madame Duquenne-Creton, and her son Victor found them. The French civilians risked their lives to care for the wounded soldiers.

Pooley and O'Callaghan were eventually captured by a regular German army division and sent to a military hospital. Pooley, badly wounded, spent three years in a German hospital before being repatriated in 1943 as medically unfit. When he told British authorities what had happened at Le Paradis, they did not believe him. It was simply not thought possible that German forces would commit such atrocities against British troops. O'Callaghan remained a prisoner of war until 1945. Only when he returned and confirmed Pooley's account did the authorities launch an official investigation. Lieutenant Colonel A.P. Scotland, who led the subsequent War Crimes Investigation Unit, later expressed fury at the delay. Had Pooley been believed immediately, Scotland argued, an international investigation "would have shone a worldwide spotlight on the crimes of the SS" and might have curbed worse atrocities before the war ended.

Fritz Knochlein was arraigned on war crimes charges in August 1948. His defense rested on the claim that he had not been present at the massacre, though his lawyers did not deny the killings took place. The Judge-Advocate was unequivocal: regardless of any claims about the British using illegal ammunition or misusing a flag of truce, the German troops had "absolutely no right to execute prisoners of war without a fair and proper trial." On October 25, 1948, Knochlein was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on January 28, 1949, in Hamelin. No other German soldiers were prosecuted. The bodies of the massacre victims, exhumed by the French in 1942, were reburied in Le Paradis churchyard, now part of the Le Paradis War Cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Only about fifty of the ninety-seven were ever identified. In 2021, a memorial stone was erected at Norwich Cathedral in Norfolk, connecting the place where these men came from to the place where they died.