Ascq massacre

The Ascq massacre is a massacre of 86 men on April 1944 in Ascq, France, by the Waffen-SS during the Second World War.

The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend set out on rail trucks for Normandy at the end of March, 1944. On April 1944, 1st, the train was approaching the gare d'Ascq when an explosion blew the line apart : two trucks had been derailed. The commander of the convoy, SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck, ordered to search and arrest all male members of the houses on both sides of the track. Altogether 70 men were shot beside the railway line and another 16 killed in the village itself. Six other men were arrested, charged with bomb attack after an investigation by the Gestapo, and finally executed by firing squad.

At the end of the war, some SS men stood trial in a French Military Court at Lille. They were sentenced to death, even though the sentences were later commuted to a period of imprisonment. Finally, Walter Hauck was released in July 1957. Hauck was also the author of a similar massacre in Leskovice in May 1945.

After the massacre, 60,000 workers started a strike in Lille — which is one of the most important demonstration in France during the World War II under German occupation — and minimum 20,000 people were present at the funerals in the village.