corps escaped the encirclement. The Red Army then launched the Vienna Offensive which destroyed any resemblance of an organised German line of defence. The remnants of the division retreated into Czechoslovakia where it surrendered to the American forces on 9 May. War crimes Poland With the invasion of Poland, Theodor Eicke – who was the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, inspector of the camps, and murderer of Ernst Röhm – joined the fray with one cavalry and four infantry regiments. Three of his regiments, "Oberbayern", "Brandenburg" and "Thuringen", formed the basis of the first Einsatzgruppen; the Oberbayern and Thuringen (EG II and EG z. B.V) followed the Tenth Army in Upper Silesia; the Brandenburg (EG III) followed the Eight Army across Warthegau. His Totenkopfverbände troops were called on to carry out "police and security measures" in the rear areas. What these measures involved is demonstrated by the record of SS Totenkopf Standarte "Brandenburg". It arrived in Włocławek on 22 September 1939 and embarked on a four-day "Jewish action" that included the burning of synagogues and the execution en masse of the leaders of the Jewish community. On 29 September the Standarte travelled to Bydgoszcz to conduct an "intelligentsia action". The German Intelligenzaktion resulting in the mass murder of approximately 100,000 Poles, was a major step in the implementation of Sonderaktion Tannenberg (Operation Tannenberg a.k.a. Unternehmen Tannenberg) of installing Nazi officials from SiPo, Kripo, Gestapo and SD to head an administrative machine in occupied Poland, leading to the Generalplan Ost colonization programme. In October 1939, these Totenkopfverbände troops formed the core of the 3 Totenkopf Division, of which Eicke became the commander. During the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising the training Battalion of the 3rd Panzer Division Totenkopf took part in the suppression of the uprising. France Le Paradis Massacre While the Totenkopf Division committed numerous massacres of French Arab and African troops, the most infamous remains the murders at Le Paradis. The Le Paradis massacre was a war crime committed by members of the 14th Company, SS Division Totenkopf, under the command of Hauptsturmführer Fritz Knöchlein. It took place on 27 May 1940, during the Battle of France, at a time when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was attempting to retreat through the Pas-de-Calais region during the Battle of Dunkirk. Soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, had become isolated from their regiment. They occupied and defended a