The Distomo massacre

On the afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1944 soldiers of the 2nd Company of the 7th Regiment of the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division entered Distomo, a village in central Greece between the massifs of Parnassus and Helicon, not far from Delphi. For about two hours they went from house to house, killing everyone they found – old people, women, children and infants. Then they set the village on fire. In all, 218 people died; that is the figure given by most studies and accepted, among others, in the Polish and German literature on the subject, although some publications give 228. The massacre was a reprisal for a clash with ELAS partisans that had taken place the same day a few kilometres from the village. Distomo, together with Kalavryta, became in Greek memory a symbol of the German occupation. On the same day, in France, the SS Das Reich division massacred the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, and exactly two years earlier the Germans had destroyed Lidice.

Greece in June 1944

By the spring of 1944 Greece had been under occupation for three years. After the Germans entered Athens in April 1941 the country was divided between Germany, Italy and Bulgaria, and after the Italian surrender in September 1943 the Wehrmacht also had to police the former Italian zone on its own. The German forces in Greece were part of General Alexander Löhr’s Army Group E, and in central and southern Greece they were commanded by General Hellmuth Felmy, commander of LXVIII Army Corps. In Athens sat the collaborationist government of Ioannis Rallis, while in the mountains ELAS was growing in strength – the armed wing of the communist-dominated National Liberation Front (EAM). In March 1944 the EAM set up its own Political Committee of National Liberation in the mountains, a rival to the government-in-exile in Cairo.

For the German command the partisans were a double threat. British deception operations reinforced the German belief that the Allies might land in the Balkans, and every act of sabotage – such as the blowing up of the Gorgopotamos viaduct in November 1942 – cut the few roads and railways by which the troops in the south were supplied. Sweeps against lightly armed, mobile bands failed and dispersed forces needed to defend the coast. The British historian Mark Mazower, in his book Inside Hitler’s Greece, describes how in the winter of 1943/1944 the Army Group E command increasingly resorted to “mass killing of civilians” as a means of cutting the partisans off from the population. Standing orders permitted collective punishment: shooting hostages at a ratio of dozens of Greeks for every German killed, and burning villages deemed to be partisan villages. Kalavryta in December 1943 was the bloodiest, but not the only, example of this policy.

The Polizei Division in Greece

The 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division had been formed in 1939 from members of the German Order Police and had fought in France and outside Leningrad. At the beginning of 1944 its rebuilt regiments were transferred to Greece, where they were placed under Wehrmacht command and used against the partisans. Its replacements were largely very young ethnic Germans from Hungary and Romania – according to Mazower, some of them were fifteen or sixteen years old – led by experienced, heavily indoctrinated Waffen-SS officers. Mazower calls this combination of poorly trained teenagers eager to prove their “Germanness” and fanatical commanders “lethal”. He cautions, however, that the division’s make-up does not explain everything: the unit operated within Army Group E and carried out a policy of terror that the Wehrmacht in Greece had been pursuing for months.

The division was commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Schmedes and the 7th Regiment by SS-Standartenführer Karl Schümers, an officer whom even a favourable service report described as inclined to “exceptionally draconian” methods. The company that entered Distomo was commanded by 26-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Lautenbach, formerly an officer of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler division. On 5 April 1944 the same regiment had massacred the inhabitants of the village of Kleisoura near Kastoria in western Macedonia – between about 220 and 280 people, according to various estimates – in reprisal for the killing of two German soldiers by partisans.

The ambush near Steiri

On the morning of 10 June Lautenbach’s company set out from Livadeia, the capital of Boeotia, on a sweep against partisans in the Distomo area. According to the reconstruction accepted by historians and by a German court in Bonn, the soldiers passed through the village without meeting resistance and moved on towards the neighbouring village of Steiri. On the road a few kilometres from Distomo they ran into an ELAS ambush. In the fighting the Germans lost, depending on the source, from a few to a dozen or more killed and a dozen or more wounded.

Lautenbach turned back to Distomo and on his own initiative ordered a “reprisal action”. Under the orders of the German command in the Balkans then in force, reprisals were to be decided by higher commanders in consultation with the field commands, not by a company commander; for this reason, as the German literature stresses, the massacre was unlawful even under the German law of the time. In his report Lautenbach claimed that his men had been fired on from the village itself “with mortars, machine guns and rifles”, which was meant to justify treating Distomo as a partisan nest.

Two hours in Distomo

Most of Distomo’s inhabitants, fearing reprisals, had managed to flee into the fields and mountains – according to German studies, some 1,600 people left the village. Those who stayed were mainly old people, women and children, convinced that they were in no danger. In the early afternoon lorries full of soldiers drove into the village. The SS men shot everyone they saw in the streets, broke down the doors of houses and killed the inhabitants in their rooms and kitchens. Survivors spoke after the war of exceptional cruelty: of infants bayoneted, of pregnant women, of the murdered village priest, of rape and looting. These accounts, given in post-war testimony, cannot today be verified in every detail, but their overall picture is confirmed by independent evidence from the first days after the crime. People encountered on the roads and in the fields around the village were also killed.

According to the most commonly cited figures, 218 people died. Among the victims were, depending on the source, between about 35 and about 60 children, including several or a dozen or so infants; German studies speak of 34 children and four infants. Whole families ceased to exist. Argyris Sfountouris, then a boy not yet four years old, lost both his parents that day and, by his own account, some thirty relatives. After killing the inhabitants the soldiers set fire to the houses; much of the village burned down.

A few days later – three days after the crime, by his own account – the Swedish classical philologist Sture Linnér reached Distomo; since 1943 he had been working in Greece for the Red Cross delegation organising food relief for the starving country. The news of the massacre reached him on his wedding day; he went to the scene with his wife. In memoirs published many years later (Min Odyssé) he described the road to the village, lined with bodies hanging from the trees, and the decomposing corpses in the ruins of the houses. His account became one of the most important testimonies to the crime.

The German investigation

Lautenbach’s report was quickly challenged by the occupation apparatus itself. Georg Koch, an NCO of Secret Field Police Group 510 who had accompanied the unit, submitted his own report: the company had been attacked a few kilometres from the village, not from Distomo, and no one in the village had fired on the Germans. The report reached General Felmy, who – according to German studies – deemed Lautenbach’s report “knowingly false”. Prime Minister Rallis also intervened, complaining to the German Foreign Ministry’s plenipotentiary for the Balkans, Hermann Neubacher. Neubacher was anxious to preserve what little authority remained to the collaborationist government, which a crime of this kind undermined.

Because the company had been operating within Army Group E, the case was examined by Wehrmacht officers rather than an SS court. Lautenbach admitted that he had exceeded his orders, but – as Mazower writes – the board of inquiry found in his favour, ruling that he had been guided not by recklessness or ignorance but by “a sense of responsibility for his men”. According to German sources, proceedings against him and his deputy were dropped when both were killed a few months later. After the war Felmy was sentenced in 1948, in the so-called Hostages Trial at Nuremberg, to 15 years’ imprisonment for crimes in Greece; he was released early in December 1951. None of the direct perpetrators of the Distomo massacre was ever brought to trial.

The long dispute over compensation

After the war Distomo became one of the main arguments in Greek claims against Germany. Under an agreement of 1960 the Federal Republic paid Greece 115 million marks for the victims of National Socialist persecution. Bonn thereby regarded the question of individual compensation as closed; the families of victims of military reprisals, such as those in Distomo, did not accept this. In the 1990s relatives of those murdered, among them Argyris Sfountouris, went to court. On 30 October 1997 the court in Livadeia ordered Germany to pay the victims’ families compensation usually converted at some 28 million euros, and in May 2000 the judgment was upheld by the Greek Supreme Court (the Areios Pagos). It was never enforced, however: the Greek Minister of Justice withheld the consent required by law for the seizure of a foreign state’s property, and in 2002 the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the families’ complaint.

In Germany the plaintiffs lost at every level – finally before the Federal Court of Justice in 2003 and before the Federal Constitutional Court, which in 2006 declined to hear their complaint. The courts invoked state immunity: the actions of armed forces are sovereign acts for which a state is not answerable before the courts of another state. In 2008 the Italian Court of Cassation allowed the Greek judgments to be enforced in Italy and a judicial mortgage to be registered on the German-owned Villa Vigoni on Lake Como. Germany then took the case to the International Court of Justice, and Greece joined the proceedings as an intervener. In its judgment of 3 February 2012 the Court ruled that Italy had violated Germany’s jurisdictional immunity. The dispute did not die: in 2014 the Italian Constitutional Court held that immunity could not shield a state from liability for war crimes, and in Greece successive governments returned to the question of reparations, without, however, deciding to seize German property. The families of the Distomo victims never received the compensation awarded to them.

Its place in the history of the war

The Distomo massacre came in the last months of the German occupation of Greece. Four days earlier the Allies had landed in Normandy, and the Red Army was approaching the Balkans; in the autumn of 1944 Army Group E began to withdraw from Greece, and on 12 October the Germans left Athens. Yet to the end of the occupation they did not abandon the policy of collective punishment – Distomo was one link in a long chain that included Kommeno, Viannos, Kalavryta and Kleisoura, as well as the shooting of hostages in Athens. According to historians’ estimates, thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of villages burned in German reprisal actions in Greece.

The terror did not break the resistance. Instead it drove more people into ELAS, while deepening divisions among the Greeks themselves – some blamed the partisans for bringing reprisals down on defenceless villages, others joined the collaborationist Security Battalions. These divisions weighed on the country’s fate after liberation and led to the civil war that lasted until 1949.

In the autumn of 1944 the American photojournalist Dmitri Kessel photographed ruined Distomo for Life magazine; his pictures of the surviving inhabitants went round the world. In the 1980s a memorial with a chapel and an ossuary holding the victims’ remains was erected on a hill above the village; the names and ages of the murdered are inscribed on a marble wall. Every year on 10 June memorial ceremonies are held there. The memory of the massacre, kept alive by survivors such as Sfountouris, has made Distomo – together with Kalavryta and Oradour-sur-Glane – one of Europe’s symbols of crimes committed against civilians under the pretext of fighting partisans.