WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (20 page)

Greece

1940–44 

Greece was occupied by Germany during World War II, despite the brave resistance of its people to the Nazi invasion. On 28 October, 1940, Mussolini sent a message asking Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas to allow his troops to enter the country, and to surrender arms to the Axis powers. Legend has it that the Greek government responded with a simple ‘No’ (
Ochi
in Greek), though some historians dispute this, saying that the Greek government, in fact, sent back a message saying – in French – that it would choose to go to war with the Axis powers rather than surrender. Whatever the case, ‘Ochi Day’ has been celebrated in Greece ever since, as the moment when the Greek nation said no to fascism and stood up for its independence as a sovereign state.

As a result of the Greeks’ refusal to capitulate, Italian troops stationed in Albania attacked the mainland, and after a period of bitter fighting, the Germans invaded and occupied Greece. However, during the period of occupation, Greek resistance fighters constantly sabotaged the regime, particularly on the island of Crete, causing direct disruption to the Axis powers’ military campaign in Russia, as well as other campaigns.

R
EVENGE MASSACRES

However, the Axis powers responded to these acts of resistance with terrible reprisals, in the form of massacres and atrocities perpetrated on the civilian people of Greece. One of the worst massacres of the entire war took place on the island of Cefalonia in September 1943. An Italian division of more than 12,000 men and officers, known as ‘Acqui’ and commanded by General Antonio Gandin, were stationed on the island. Earlier that month, the Italian troops had been told to end hostilities against the Allies, since the alliance between Germany and Italy was beginning to break down. On Cefalonia, the Italian troops were jubilant and they celebrated the news by singing, dancing and drinking, overjoyed to think that Italy’s support of the Nazi regime was coming to an end and that defeat for the Nazis seemed to be in sight at last.

German troops stationed on the mainland of Greece were, however, bitterly disappointed at the news, as well they might be. Their resentment and anger reached a crescendo when they heard of the merriment on Cefalonia, and they decided to attack the Italian troops. German aircraft began to bomb the island, and a German battalion commanded by Major Harald von Hirschfeld travelled to the island to attack the Italians. The German troops immediately began fighting, and soon shot General Gandin, along with groups of other Italian prisoners. According to witness accounts, the Nazis took out Italian prisoners in groups of four to ten people, and shot them together. Unbelievably, they shot over 4,000 Italian soldiers in this way, leaving their dead bodies all over the island. Another 4,000 soldiers were taken by ship to the mainland and then transported to labour camps in Germany. Sadly, some of the ships travelling through the Ionian sea on their way there were hit by mines, and many of these soldiers died on the way.

In total, about 10,000 Italian soldiers died as a result of fighting between the Germans and Italians in Greece. Afterwards, the case came to the courts at the Nuremberg War Trials, but by this time von Hirschfeld was dead, killed by a bomb in Warsaw in 1945. However, another general involved, Hubert Lanz, who had commanded some of the troops, was charged with the massacres. He gained a sentence of 12 years’ imprisonment, and was later released. The case was re-opened in 2002, and a further ten ex-Nazi officers (now in their eighties and nineties) were investigated to determine their part in the killings.

In order to honour those who had died in this tragic episode, the remains of more than 3,000 soldiers were dug up in the 1950s and taken back to Italy to receive a proper burial. Today, their graves remain in the war cemetery at Bari.

W
EDDING PARTY MASSACRE

Another hideous massacre took place at the village of Kommeno in Northern Greece on 16 August, 1943, when a wedding party was taking place. Thedoros Mallios gave a wedding reception for his son Spyros, which lasted the whole night through. In the early morning, the revellers left the party, only to be gunned down by soldiers from the First Alpenjager Division, known as ‘Edelweiss’. The bride, groom and all the guests were shot dead, and the house then razed to the ground. A total of 34 people died in this incident. The soldiers also rampaged around the village, killing over 300 people – almost half the inhabitants of the village, including 74 children aged from one year old to ten years old. Finally, they set fire to the houses and burnt the village to the ground.

On the island of Kos, a terrible massacre of prisoners of war took place on 4 October, 1943. By now, Italian troops were fighting on the British side in the war. However, despite the combined Allied forces, Germany gained the upper hand at Kos, and took over 4,000 soldiers prisoner. Hitler ordered all the Italian soldiers among them to be executed, including the officer commanding the Italian troops, Colonel Felice Leggio. The Italian prisoners were taken to a deserted area just outside the town, where they were shot in groups of ten. Afterwards, the victims were buried in a mass grave. In all, 102 men perished in this way. Once the war was over, the Greek authorities had the bodies unearthed and taken back to Italy, where they were buried at the war cemetery in Bari.

S
ADISTIC KILLINGS

Resistance activity was high in Greece throughout the war, resulting in terrible reprisal atrocities committed by the German troops. On the morning of 13 December, 1945, in the town of Kalavryta in the south of Greece, a German army unit called the ‘Kampfgruppe Ebersberger’ attacked civilians in revenge for resistance activity around the area. The soldiers rounded up inhabitants and took them prisoner in the local school, before taking the men out to a hillside where they were all shot dead. Over 600 men, forming the whole male population of the town, were murdered in this way. The German soldiers also set the town on fire, killing many more victims and leaving only a few houses standing. The massacre is remembered today with a memorial, listing the names of the men who died at Kalavryta and the surrounding villages on that fateful day.

Another horrifying massacre took place at Distomo in central Greece on 10 June, 1944. In this incident, an SS Police unit known as the Panzergrenadier Regiment Number Seven was attacked by resistance fighters as it drove through the area. Seven SS soldiers were killed in an ambush outside the village, whereupon the SS convoy doubled back and wreaked their revenge on the civilian population there. The soldiers ran amok in the village, raping women, looting the houses and setting fire to the buildings. Their attacks on the local people were savage: in one case, a woman and her baby were mutilated, her breast cut off while the nipple was still in the baby’s mouth. All along the main street, bodies were strung up on the trees. All in all, 218 civilians were murdered, some of them in the most horrible ways.

Later, it was found out that the commander of the unit, SS Hauptstrumfuhrer Lautenbach, had falsified a report on the episode, but no action was taken as the massacre was judged a ‘military necessity’.

A
FTERMATH

After the war, the full extent of the suffering of the Greek people during the German occupation of Greece became clear. It was calculated that around 60,000 men, women and children lost their lives in massacres at the hands of the Nazi troops during the war years. Not only that, but the suffering continued when a bitter civil war erupted in Greece after the war, claiming thousands more victims. Hostilities only ended in 1949, when the communist-led Democratic army were defeated by the Hellenic army.

In 1960, the German government paid the Greek government a total of a 115 million marks as compensation for the war crimes committed during the occupation. In 1990, officials from the German embassy took part in a ceremony commemorating the victims of the massacre at Distomo, but to date no compensation has been made for them in particular.

Today, at the Mausoleum there, the skulls and bones of the victims are displayed for visitors, so that what happened on that fateful day in 1944 can never be forgotten. The history of the Nazi occupation of Greece is a shameful one, and it is important that the massacres and atrocities that took place there – both against the Italian soldiers and the Greek civilians – should be remembered, not only as an indictment of the Nazi regime, but of all forms of intolerance and hatred throughout history.

Russian Ethnic Cleansing And Other Atrocities

1939–49

During the years 1939–49 the Soviets, under the leadership of a powerful and dangerous dictator, Joseph Stalin, caused the suffering and death of millions of ordinary individuals. In fact, Stalin may be responsible for more intentional human slaughter than any other single human being in recorded history. His dream was to have a powerful industrial state which he tried to fulfil with a callous disregard for human life. His victims were either executed or imprisoned in labour camps that turned out to be little better than ‘death’ camps.

UNTOLD HORROR

By 1928, Stalin had established himself as a supreme leader and he wasted no time in setting in motion a number of campaigns. These campaigns were aimed at firstly the collectivization of agriculture, which cost million of lives, and the cleansing of ‘enemies of the people’, whereby he sent millions to the famous Gulag system of slave-labour camps.

The infamous Gulag was established in 1934, with its own brand of murderous security police called the Smersh. They were responsible for the execution of thousands of captives during the war of 1941–45, and their system of mass execution, although extremely primitive, was highly effective.

Having purged the country of many people who were not deemed suitable citizens, many of them members of the Red Army Corps, Stalin was ill-prepared for Hitler’s massive attack in June 1941. After heavy losses and enforced months of retreat from the Germany army, Stalin and his henchmen began to panic and decided to destroy any records that had been kept from the notorious Lubianka Prison, for fear of the secret leaking out to the rest of the world. Torture tactics in Lubianka were prolonged and vicious. Eyeballs were left hanging from their sockets as the hapless victims were beaten again and again in an effort to obtain a confession. One of the most infamous of Stalin’s security police at Lubianka was a man named Lavarenti Beria. He has been labelled as a sadist, rapist, murderer and someone who loved to inflict pain.

As the Germans infiltrated the Soviet Union, many of the Soviet citizens welcomed them, hoping it would put an end to the sadistic reign of Stalin. However, where the Red Army were still in control, people who they considered to be disloyal to the state were eliminated either by shooting or by being deported to the slave camps of Vorkuta and Karaganda, which were all part of the massive Gulag network. Right from the start the conditions in these camps were so bad that prisoners were not expected to survive more than a couple of years. A camp at Kholmogori became known as a ‘death camp’ because everyone who was sent there feared for their life. It is thought that as many as 30 per cent of new inmates died in their first year from exposure, disease, malnutrition, overwork or from overzealous interrogation methods.

If a prisoner managed to survive the interrogation, the second stage was even more perilous. In fact, transportation of prisoners became as dangerous as the camps themselves. In 1941, 12,000 prisoners being held in cells on board the Soviet steamer
Dzhurma
froze to death when the ship sailed too close to the ice at Wrangle Island. A trainload of Polish deportees, approximately 1,650 in total, perished in the winter of 1940–41, due to the cramped conditions and lack of heating in the cattle cars. Of the estimated two million Polish civilians who were deported to the Russian Arctic regions of Gulag in railway convoys, it is believed that as many as half were dead before the year was out.

People who Stalin considered to be nonessential intelligentsia – i.e. scientists, engineers, doctors and teachers – were rounded up and deported to camps.

In April 1940, as many as 15,000 from three large Soviet detention camps located in Ostashkov, Kozielsk and Starobielsk mysteriously disappeared in the Okchotzk Sea.

The camps continued to eat up millions of supposedly disloyal civilians and the situation became even worse during World War II. In 1943, the Germans uncovered what turned out to be the most notorious of all Stalin’s wartime atrocities, in a forest in western Russia.

THE KATYN MASSACRE

In April 1940, approximately 22,000 Polish prisoners were rounded up and transported to Katyn Forest and surrounding areas, where they were executed. The prisoners included army officers, civil servants, landowners, policemen, ordinary soldiers and prison officers. After being made to dig their own graves, they were shot in the back of the neck and buried on the spot. Stalin personally ordered the executions in his effort to eradicate the intellectual elite in the Polish army. His order for the ‘cleansing’ campaign was sent by memo directly to the head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Lavarenti Beria.

When the graves were uncovered in 1943 by the occupying Nazi forces, Goebbel felt it was a gift in the making and advertised their discovery to the world. This was not only a major embarrassment to Stalin, but to his wartime allies, Roosevelt and Churchill, too. At first Roosevelt dismissed the report as ‘German propaganda’, while Churchill, who was a little less explicit, said, ‘The less said about that the better’. Consequently, the whole matter was covered up until 3 March, 1959, when the then head of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, sent full details of the atrocity to Krushchev.

In his memo, he revealed the full extent of what had taken place – a total of 21,857 people had been needlessly and heartlessly executed:

• 4,421 in the Katyn Forest

• 3,820 in the Starobelsk camp

• 6,311 in the Ostashkovo camp

• 7,305 in other camps and prisons in western Ukraine and western Belorussia

All the bodies were dressed in Polish uniforms and wore insignia indicating their rank. It soon became obvious that the officers came from a camp at Kozielsk, which was situated on the grounds of a former monastery, near Orel.

It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later, on 13 April, 1990, that the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted his country’s involvement in the massacres. Two years later, the Polish president, Lech Walesa, received documentation stating that Stalin had directly ordered the killing of the Polish people. They were businessmen who had been called up for national service following the Nazi invasion of Poland, but instead of fighting for their country they found themselves prisoners of the Red Army. The only survivors of the Katyn massacre were 448 officers, who had been transferred for no apparent reason, to a camp at Pavlishchev Bor.

The Katyn massacre is a prime example of the hypocrisy and conspiracies of international politics in an effort to cover up the enormity of human rights violations carried out during World War II.

BRUTAL
 
MURDER
 
AT
 
BRONIKI

On 1 July, 1941, approximately 180 German soldiers of the 2nd and 6th Infantry Regiments and the 5th Artillery Regiment were taken prisoner by the Red Army in the town of Broniki in the Ukraine. Most of the soldiers were wounded from fighting, but the majority did not die from their injuries but at the hands of the Soviet soldiers. The following day, advancing German troops found the bodies of 153 men in a clover field near Broniki. According to the 12 soldiers who survived the attack, they were taken to a field just off the main road and forced to remove their clothes. Any valuables such as rings, watches and money were stolen along with all their clothes. Standing naked, with their backs towards the soldiers, they were fired on with machine guns and automatic rifles. The survivors managed to escape by running into nearby woods. Similar reports from other regiments brought to light that the Soviets were not taking any prisoners of war due to the bonuses they were being offered. It was alleged that for every 20 German soldiers, a Russian soldier would be granted a three-day pass to return to his family and would also receive a decoration or promotion in rank.

MASSACRE AT GRISCHINO

Grischino was an important industrial region in the Ukraine, which was initially occupied by German forces and then recaptured by a Soviet armoured division in 1943. In an counteroffensive attack in February 1943, the German 7th Armoured Division uncovered evidence of a horrendous massacre. They found the bodies of 406 German soldiers, 58 of whom were members of the Todt Organization, 89 Italian soldiers, 9 Romanian soldiers, 4 Hungarian soldiers and some Ukrainian volunteer workers. All 596 were Axis personnel that had been captured by the Red Army and brutally murdered and horribly mutilated. The female personnel had been bestially mutilated and raped. Their breasts and genitals were cut off and one had died with her legs splayed apart with a broomstick rammed into her vagina. The men had received similar treatment, with their ears and noses cut off, and genital organs removed and stuffed into their mouths. In a cellar room at the main train station, 120 German soldiers had been herded into a large storage room and gunned down.

PRISON MASSACRES

Soon after the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviets made a hasty retreat, which resulted in tragic consequences for all the political prisoners held in their jails. During the week of 22 to 29 June, 1941, literally thousands of Ukrainian and Polish prisoners were murdered in their cells, as the Soviet officers had no time to take care of them. In their panic to get away, the Soviets set fire to some of the prisons and the helpless inmates were burnt to death. In Lutsk, for example, out of the 4,000 inmates, 2,800 lost their lives. Some of them had been killed by hand grenades thrown into their cells and many more had been executed by a shot in the neck. In the cellars of Brygidki Prison, 423 bodies were recovered, with hundreds more piled up in the courtyard outside. In a military prison in Samarstinov, 460 charred bodies were discovered, many of them showing evidence of torture. The bodies were literally piled up layer upon layer until they nearly reached the ceiling. The stench of decomposing corpses was so nauseating that the German commander who made the grim discovery ordered that the bodies be covered in lime and that all doors to the cellars were to be bricked up. On 26 and 27 June, 520 Ukrainians were shot at Sambor. Another 700, including the entire local intelligentsia, were arrested and shot at Zlochev on 16 July. When bodies were discovered at Kremenets, they had no skin covering their bones, having been thrown into boiling water. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 Ukrainian and Polish prisoners were killed in their prisons by members of the Red Army.

UNIVERSITY OF LVOV

An Einsatzkommando unit killed 45 professors at the University of Lvov when the city was taken by Germans on 30 June, 1941. With the help of the Ukrainian ‘Nachtigall’ battalion, they started to round up the professors, their families and relatives, while the Jewish inhabitants of the city were shot on sight. Some of the professors, 38 in total, were taken to a place of execution just outside the city and shot to death. Another seven, including the former prime minister of Poland, Professor Dr Bartel, were shot in the courtyard of Brygidki Prison. Ironically, this was exactly the same courtyard where just days before they had discovered the bodies of the murdered prisoners.

VIOLENCE
 
IN
 
VINNITSA

When the Germans took occupation of the town of Vinnitsa in July 1941, they uncovered a mass grave in the prison courtyard. The grave, which was 20 m (65 ft) long by 6 m (19 ft) wide, contained the bodies of 96 Ukrainian political prisoners. Behind the prison, in another courtyard, they discovered a second grave. It is alleged that the prisoners were executed because the Soviets did not have time to evacuate them prior to the arrival of the German troops. Many other graves were uncovered in the area, but the true extent of the atrocity was never uncovered because the Red Army reoccupied the area a short while later. By the time the city was taken by the Red Army, a total of 9,439 bodies had already been discovered, all with bullet wounds to the neck. Ukrainian witnesses testified that trucks kept coming day and night carrying dead bodies to the burial grounds. It would appear that most of the victims were either farmers or field workers (
kulaks
), who Stalin classed as ‘enemies of the people’.