Crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS in Greece

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
German paratroopers shoot Greek civilians, Crete, June 2, 1941
Icon tools.svg This article or section was due to content flaws on the quality assurance side of the editorial history entered. This is done in order to bring the quality of the articles in the field of history to an acceptable level. Articles that cannot be significantly improved are deleted. Please help fix the shortcomings in this article and please join the discussion !

As crimes of the Wehrmacht and the SS in Greece are war crimes and crimes against humanity referred to by troops of the Wehrmacht and the SS during the occupation in World War II were committed.

Occupation Zones and Partisan War

Occupation zones (1941–1944)

After first Italian and later German and Bulgarian troops attacked Greece in October 1940, the Greek armed forces surrendered on April 23, 1941. The country was divided into three zones of occupation. Germany claimed the smallest territorial area, but through a corresponding treaty secured the prerogative of economic exploitation in all of Greece, including the Bulgarian and Italian-occupied zones. The occupying powers appointed Greek governments to collaborate with them and partisan warfare ensued .

Martyr villages and towns of Greece

The term martyr villages and towns of Greece ( Greek Μαρτυρικά χωριά και πόλεις της Ελλάδας , transcribed: Martyrika choria ke polis tis Elladas ) are used in Greece to refer to memorials in which, during the years of foreign occupation between 1945 and 1945, major crimes were committed perpetrated against the civilian population. The list only includes those places whose atrocities have been historically reviewed by a scientific committee and does not take individual fates into account.

Massacre by occupation forces

The conquest of Greece by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS , the fight against the resistance of the Greeks, and the so-called reprisal measures against innocent civilians were extremely bloody and took place with the utmost brutality. Here are just a few of the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and SS :

At the Generals Trial in Southeastern Europe in 1947 and 1948, Generals Hubert Lanz , Hellmuth Felmy and Wilhelm Speidel were found guilty of being responsible for the excessive shooting of hostages in their area of ​​command and sentenced to twelve, fifteen and twenty years in prison, respectively. All three of them were pardoned and released at the end of 1951, after which they received a pension. Felmy lived until 1965, Speidel until 1970 and Lanz until 1982.

Great famine in Greece

Wehrmacht soldiers in a shop, April 1941
Population development 1936–1943 in the city of Athens

On April 28, 1941, members of the Wehrmacht began sacking Athens . The journalist Laird Archer reported how Wehrmacht soldiers cleared out business after business in the inner city. The captured goods were sent home by the soldiers in small packages, empty shops were marked on the outside for soldiers who followed. This contradicted the Hague Land Warfare Regulations of 1907, but the occupiers viewed the goods as their legitimate spoils of war. The Great Famine ( Greek Μεγάλος Λιμός Megálos Limós ) in autumn and winter 1941/1942 was by far the worst famine in the history of Greece . It was the result of an occupation policy of the National Socialist German Reich designed for maximum economic exploitation during the occupation of Greece . Estimates of the number of people who died from starvation, direct or indirect, in Greece during World War II vary between 100,000 and 450,000. Of 300 children examined in Athens in October 1944, 290 had tuberculosis.

Deportation and murder of the Greek Jews

Liberation of Greece, civil war

When the partisan movement gained space in mid-1943, the LXVIII. Army corps of the Wehrmacht on so-called security battalions from the Greek population. The occupying power relied on brutal retaliatory measures, including looting, shooting hostages and cremating entire villages. In the period from June 1943 to June 1944, the German occupiers reportedly killed 20,650 suspected partisans, captured another 25,728 and shot 4,785 hostages. The Nazi regime plunged Greece into a famine during the occupation; it murdered more than 90 percent of the Jewish population (that was at least 58,885 men, women and children) and murdered at least another 70,000 innocent civilians.

The occupation on the Greek mainland ended in October 1944 with the withdrawal of the German troops; Parts of Crete and individual islands in the Aegean Sea remained under German occupation until the Wehrmacht surrendered . In 1943 a latent civil war began, which increased in strength in autumn 1943 and broke out for the first time with the battle of Athens (December 1944 to January 11, 1945) after the liberation of Greece in October 1944 by the predominantly communist resistance organization EAM or its military arm ELAS . EAM and ELAS could have taken power from October to December 1944, given the low number of British troops, but they did not. The security battalions, which previously collaborated with the German occupation troops, fought - during the Dekemvriana - as allies of the British armed forces, which, at the behest of British Prime Minister Churchill , were supposed to prevent a Communist takeover. This "second round of the civil war" ended with the Varkiza Agreement signed on February 12, 1945 . The parliamentary elections of March 31, 1946 were boycotted by the communists; from March 1946 to October 9, 1949, the third and “hottest” phase of the Greek Civil War took place.

Casualty numbers

List at the Kahal Shalom Synagogue with the names of the victims of the Holocaust in Rhodes

The available sources illustrate the effects of the occupation and the hunger crisis of 1941–1944. Here are a few examples: Before the outbreak of war, Greece had about eight million inhabitants. Human losses from war and occupation amount to 500,000, that is six to seven percent of the Greek population. 75,000 soldiers lost their lives in fighting. About 30,000 Greeks were shot by the occupying powers. The civilian victims were mainly opposition and Jews. 95,000 people had been detained in Greek occupation camps and prisons. The hunger crisis in the winter of 1941/1942 killed around 250,000 people. The list of places where crimes against the war population took place is long: Distomo , Kalavryta , Kommeno , Kefalonia , Chortiatis. Approximately between 70,000 and 80,000 Greeks were killed in partisan warfare or in retaliatory actions by German, Italian and Bulgarian troops. If you add up the famine, Holocaust, occupation and the civil war caused by the Germans, then Greece lost between 273,000 and 747,000 of its citizens between 1941 and 1949.

On the basis of various sources, including the tickets in Greek and German found in the Auschwitz train station after the war, Danuta Czech established that a total of around 55,000 people were deported from Greece to Auschwitz . The study by Hagen Fleischer on the Holocaust in Greece, published in Dimension des Genocide , edited by Wolfgang Benz, resulted in the following numbers of victims:

Greeks of Jewish denomination killed 1941–1945
number Place of death
52.185 Victims of Auschwitz (German Zone)
4,200 Treblinka victims (Bulgarian zone)
2,500 Executions and other occupation-related deaths within Greece
58,885

See also

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimension of the genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. dtv, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 , in particular:
  • Steven B. Bowman: The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945. Stanford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-5584-9 .
  • Danuta Czech : Deportation and extermination of the Greek Jews in KL Auschwitz (in the light of the so-called “final solution of the Jewish question)”. In: Auschwitz notebooks. 11, Verlag Staatliches Auschwitz-Museum 1970, pp. 5–37.
  • Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , in particular:
    • Aron Rodrigue: Rhodes. Pp. 215-218.
    • Davin Naar: Saloniki. Pp. 306-311.
  • Eleni Fourtouni: Greek Women in Resistance. New Haven 1986, Thelphini Verlag, ISBN 0-915017-05-9 .
  • Christiane Goldenstedt: Albert Goldenstedt - A Delmenhorster in the anti-fascist resistance. Oldenburg Studies Volume 89, Isensee Verlag, Oldenburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7308-1552-6 .
  • Chryssoula Kambas, Marilisa Mitsou (Ed.): Understanding Hellas. German-Greek cultural transfer in the 20th century. Cologne-Weimar-Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20450-1 .
  • Katerina Kralova: The Legacy of the Crew. German-Greek relations since 1940. Bonn 2016, ISBN 978-3-7425-0004-5 .
  • Mark Mazower : Greece under Hitler. Life during the German occupation 1941–1944 . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2016, ISBN 978-3-10-002507-4 .
  • Anestis Nessou: Greece 1941-1944. German occupation policy and crimes against the civilian population - an assessment according to international law. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-507-1 .
  • Johanna Weber: Faces from the Greek resistance. Agra Verlag, Athens 1996, ISBN 960-325-184-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georgios I. Panagiotakis: The epic battle for Crete . Iraklio 2012, ISBN 978-960-87416-7-6 , General information on the Battle of Crete, p. 39 (Greek: Η επική μάχη της Κρήτης .).
  2. ↑ Eberhard Rondholz : "The toughest measures against the gangs are necessary ..." - Fight against partisans and war crimes in Greece. Aspects of the German occupation policy 1941–1944 . In: Ahlrich Meyer (Ed.): Repression and war crimes. The fight against resistance and partisan movements against the German occupation in Western and Southern Europe . Verlag der Buchladen Schwarze Risse, Rote Strasse, Berlin 1997. ISBN 3-924737-41-X . Pp. 130-170.
  3. ↑ Military History Research Office (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War , Vol. 5/2: Organization and Mobilization of the German Sphere of Power , Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-06499-7 , p. 162.
  4. ↑ Guest of Honor Schramm: [An aid organization for Greece: encounters and experiences with survivors of German acts of violence from 1941–1944] . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003, p. 122 ff.
  5. ^ Hermann Frank Meyer: "Atonement" on the Peloponnese . accessed on March 4, 2016.
  6. ↑ Stratos N. Dordanas: Reprisals of the German Authorities of Occupation in Macedonia 1941-1944. Dissertation. Faculty of History and Archeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 2002. P. 703 ff.
  7. ^ Edmund Keeley: Some Wine for Remembrance. White Pine Press, Buffalo NY 2001, ISBN 1-893996-15-8 .
  8. ^ Laird Archer: Balkan Journal. WW Norton, New York 1944, OCLC 602392801 , pp. 196-199.
  9. ↑ On the economic policy of the German occupiers in Greece 1941–1944, exploitation that led to the catastrophe. ( Memento from July 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ a b c 1939–1945 Partisan war in Greece . LeMO , German Historical Museum
  11. ^ Danuta Czech : Deportation and extermination of the Greek Jews in KL Auschwitz. In: Hefte von Auschwitz , 11, 1970.
  12. ↑ Fleischer, p. 72.