The Kalavryta massacre

Early on the morning of Monday 13 December 1943 soldiers of the German 117th Jäger Division herded the inhabitants of the mountain town of Kalavryta in the northern Peloponnese into the school building. The women and small children were locked inside; the men and older boys were led out to a hillside above the town. While the soldiers looted and set fire to the houses, the men waited for several hours under the muzzles of concealed machine guns. In the afternoon, at the signal of two flares, fire was opened on the whole group. That day, according to various counts, between about 440 and more than 500 men and boys were killed in Kalavryta – the youngest were twelve or thirteen years old. A dozen or so survived, buried under the bodies of the dead. The massacre was the culmination of a German anti-partisan operation in which almost 700 civilians in all were killed and dozens of villages and monasteries destroyed. In Greece it is called the “Holocaust of Kalavryta” (Ολοκαύτωμα των Καλαβρύτων) and is regarded as the bloodiest crime of the German occupation of the country.

The Peloponnese under occupation

After the German invasion in the spring of 1941 the country was divided into German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation zones. The Peloponnese, and with it Kalavryta, fell to the Italians. Before the war the town had just under 2,300 permanent inhabitants, and many more in summer: the rack railway from Diakopto on the Gulf of Corinth made it a fashionable summer resort for well-to-do families from Athens and Patras. Kalavryta also held a special place in Greek national memory: according to tradition, it was at the nearby monastery of Agia Lavra that the uprising of March 1821 began, which started the Greek War of Independence.

In the spring of 1943, fearing an Allied invasion of the southern Balkans, the German command decided to reinforce the Italians in the Peloponnese with its own troops. The 117th Jäger Division was sent there, renamed and reorganised from the 717th Infantry Division – a unit made up largely of older age groups from Austria, which in October 1941 had taken part in the mass executions at Kraljevo and Kragujevac in Serbia. Its command was taken over by a Bavarian, General Karl von Le Suire, formerly a mountain infantry regimental commander in the Caucasus. According to the German documents cited by the German historian Hermann Frank Meyer, Le Suire openly despised the Greeks, and the military commander in Greece, General Wilhelm Speidel (PL), told the division’s officers on its arrival that fighting partisans was “total war” requiring “hardness and a certain brutality”. In November 1943 the division numbered some 17,000 men.

After the Italian surrender in September 1943 the Germans disarmed the Italian garrisons and became the sole occupiers of the Peloponnese. They controlled mainly the coasts and the roads, however. The mountainous interior of the peninsula, especially the northern range between Patras, Kalavryta and Aigio, increasingly belonged to the partisans of ELAS – the armed wing of the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM), founded in September 1941. The Germans already had behind them the Viannos massacre on Crete in September, and in the Ionian Islands the shooting of Italian prisoners on Kefalonia and the occupation of Corfu. In the Peloponnese they began preparing a large operation that was to encircle the partisan units in the mountains around Kalavryta and destroy them in battle.

The prisoners from Kerpini

In mid-October 1943 the division sent Captain Hans Schober’s company into the Kalavryta area to reconnoitre the terrain and roads ahead of the planned operation. The detachment was lightly armed and had no radio. On 16 October it ran into an ELAS ambush near the village of Kerpini and, after a fight in which it ran out of ammunition, surrendered the next day. The number taken prisoner varies in the sources: the German historian Hermann Frank Meyer gives 81 prisoners, other studies 78. A few soldiers managed to escape and alert the division.

The prisoners were marched through Kalavryta, where they spent the night in the school building. The inhabitants of Kerpini and Kalavryta tended the wounded Germans, and three of them were taken to the local hospital. The next day, despite the protests of the staff and local notables, these three were handed over to the relatives of an eighteen-year-old secondary-school pupil from a neighbouring village whom the Germans had hanged publicly in Kalavryta on 1 September. The wounded men were murdered; the inhabitants later gave them a solemn burial in the local cemetery, wishing to show that they had nothing to do with the killing. The remaining prisoners were moved by the partisans to the village of Mazeika (today Kleitoria), where they worked in workshops and at tree-felling, under fairly loose guard.

Over the following weeks negotiations for an exchange of prisoners went on, with Orthodox clergy acting as intermediaries. The partisans demanded the release of fifty Greek hostages for every German – a reversal of the German reprisal “quota”. The talks came to nothing. At the same time, according to Meyer, the Germans took some 4,000 civilian hostages in the Peloponnese, and at the end of November shot 118 of them. Whether the division’s command seriously considered an exchange or was merely playing for time remains unclear.

Operation Kalavryta

On 25 November Le Suire issued the final order for the operation, now named Unternehmen Kalavryta, with its start set for 5 December. Besides crushing the partisans, its aim was to free the prisoners and – as the order put it – take “appropriate reprisal measures”. Some 3,000 soldiers set out from Patras, Aigio, Corinth, Argos, Pyrgos and Tripoli in several battle groups, supported by Luftwaffe aircraft. It was commanded at first by Julius Wölfinger and, after he was injured in a car accident on 8 December, by Hans Ebersberger.

In the first days there were skirmishes, but the partisans slipped away every time. On their way the Germans burned villages and monasteries and killed peasants. When news of the approaching columns reached Mazeika, the partisans hurriedly led the prisoners off to the neighbouring village of Mazi. On the afternoon of 7 December the prisoners, led in small groups onto a hillside, were shot and their bodies thrown into a ravine; two survived. Who in ELAS gave the order is still disputed today. One of the survivors reached the Germans, and the bodies were found on 11 December.

Reprisals before Kalavryta, 8–12 December

When news of the prisoners’ deaths reached divisional headquarters on 8 December, Le Suire ordered “as an immediate reprisal measure” that the male population be shot and the villages burned. In doing so he invoked the 1941 guidelines of the OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel on collective reprisals for partisan attacks – the same logic of collective punishment that the Germans applied throughout the occupied Balkans. That same day 58 men aged from 17 to 90 were shot in front of the church in the village of Rogoi, 37 in Kerpini, and about twenty in two villages named Zachlorou – twelve of them in a tunnel of the rack railway. At the nearby famous monastery of Mega Spilaio about twenty monks, local people and visitors were killed and the monastery itself burned down. According to Greek counts, at least 143 men had been killed in these villages before the Germans entered Kalavryta.

The first units surrounded Kalavryta on the morning of 9 December. The soldiers were billeted in the inhabitants’ houses, the mayor had to hand over a list of the town’s partisans, whose houses were immediately burned, and a curfew was imposed. Ebersberger gave assurances that the Germans were concerned only with the partisans, and many inhabitants believed him. Meanwhile on 10 December it became clear that the main aim of the operation had failed: the ELAS units had managed to slip out of the encirclement. Le Suire ordered the operation to be ended and the occupied area to be “cleansed”, and Kalavryta, Mazeika and every place where it had been “proven that the bands had found shelter” to be “razed to the ground” before the troops withdrew. That day five inhabitants who had broken the curfew were shot.

On 12 December the soldiers took all the inhabitants’ livestock and sent it to Patras. In the afternoon Ebersberger assured the head of the community that nothing would happen to the population and that the troops would leave the next day. Some of the columns did indeed leave for Patras. In the evening the commander gave his officers their orders for the executions. Some of the soldiers billeted in houses warned their hosts, and a few men managed to hide.

13 December

At about six in the morning of 13 December the inhabitants were woken by the church bells. Everyone – men, women and children – was to report to the school with a day’s provisions and a blanket. Already at the door the officers were dividing people into two groups. Officially, men aged 15 to 65 were being selected, but appearance was what counted, and the youngest victims were about twelve. The women, children and a few old men were locked in the school. The men were led out to a field on Kapi hill, about 700 metres above the town, and surrounded.

Ebersberger divided his soldiers into four groups: one looted and set fire to the town, the second guarded the school, the third escorted the men and surrounded the hill, and the fourth, commanded by the Austrian Willibald Akamphuber, formed the firing squad. The contents of the bank’s vault were carried off; the manager was brought down from the hill to open it. For several hours the men watched their town burn, while their families were still locked in the school. In the end the fire reached the school building too; the women broke down the doors and jumped from the windows, fleeing to the nearby woods. At least one elderly woman died in the crush. A later legend of a German or Austrian soldier who supposedly opened the school doors finds no confirmation in the present state of research.

On the hill the men at some point noticed the camouflaged machine guns. According to survivors’ accounts, Akamphuber once again gave them his “word as a soldier” that they were in no danger. In the early afternoon, at about 2.30–3 p.m., two flares were fired from the command post. The machine guns fired several long bursts, after which the soldiers walked among the bodies, finishing off with pistols anyone who showed signs of life. According to local tradition, the clock on the tower of Kalavryta’s cathedral was stopped at 2.34, the moment of the execution – and it shows that time to this day. Of those shot, twelve or thirteen badly wounded men survived; the Germans did not know they existed. One died a few days later.

Agia Lavra and the toll of the operation

That night and the next day the widows buried the men in the frozen ground, partly on the hill itself and partly in the cemetery, to which they carried the bodies on blankets. Almost all the houses – about a thousand – had been burned or wrecked, provisions and livestock plundered, and in the depths of winter the women and children were left without a roof over their heads and without food. On 14 December the troops left. On their way the soldiers set fire to the monastery of Agia Lavra, the symbol of the 1821 uprising, killing several monks there, and also burned more villages and Mazeika, which most of its inhabitants had already abandoned. The first help – bread and blankets – was brought on 15 December by peasants from the neighbouring villages; soon two nurses and a doctor from the Hellenic Red Cross arrived. ELAS partisans also returned to Kalavryta, and many of the women received them with hostility: they were blamed for provoking the reprisals and leaving the population defenceless.

The death toll varies depending on the source and on what is being counted. The final German report on the operation speaks of 696 Greeks shot and 28 localities destroyed, and of 511 killed in Kalavryta itself on 13 December – unaware of the survivors. The Museum of the Kalavryta Holocaust gives 465 shot in the town that day. Hermann Frank Meyer, in his detailed study of 2002, counted at least 693 killed in the whole operation (676 civilians and 17 partisans), including 486 in Kalavryta on 10, 13 and 14 December, and more than 50 settlements destroyed; more recent Greek counts speak of 677 civilians murdered, 499 of them from Kalavryta. Historians consider the figures well in excess of a thousand dead that circulated after the war to be exaggerated. For the Germans themselves the operation was a failure: apart from the “reprisals”, they achieved none of its aims.

The perpetrators and the reckoning

The criticism that arose within the Wehrmacht itself concerned above all effectiveness: the commander of Army Group E, General Alexander Löhr, and Speidel concluded that such actions only drove the population into the arms of the partisans, and forbade similarly drastic measures. In his final report Ebersberger wrote that he and his soldiers had carried out the order of destruction “not only out of a sense of duty, but out of full conviction”.

As early as November 1944 the United Nations War Crimes Commission – set up in the wake of the St James’s Palace Declaration – accepted charges in the case, and in 1947 a Greek military court drew up an indictment. In the American trial at Nuremberg in 1948 of the generals who had served in south-eastern Europe (the so-called Hostages Trial), Speidel and the commander of the troops in southern Greece, General Hellmuth Felmy, were sentenced – partly for Kalavryta – to 20 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively; both were released in the early 1950s. The tribunal described the massacre as “plain murder”. The direct perpetrators never stood trial: Le Suire died in Soviet captivity in 1954, Ebersberger went missing on the Eastern Front in 1944, and Akamphuber and the soldiers of the firing squad were never prosecuted. The West German prosecution service discontinued proceedings against one of the battle-group commanders, ruling that the executions had been a permissible means of fighting partisans.

Memory

In Greece Kalavryta became a symbol of the suffering of the occupation, a “martyr town”. In the 1970s a memorial was raised on Kapi hill bearing the names of the dead, with a chapel, a sculpture of the “Petrified Mother” and a great white cross; on the hillside are the inscriptions “No more wars” and “Peace”. Every year on 13 December memorial ceremonies are held there, attended by representatives of the state and the Church. In 2005 the Museum of the Kalavryta Holocaust was opened in the rebuilt former school, in which the women and children had been locked; it was inaugurated by President Konstantinos Stephanopoulos. Mikis Theodorakis dedicated his “Requiem” (1984) to the massacre, and Charlotte Delbo, a former prisoner of Auschwitz, wrote about the widows of Kalavryta.

The first German to come to Kalavryta after the war was the SPD activist Ehrengard Schramm, in 1952; she arranged vocational training in Germany for several dozen boys from the town. Compensation intended specifically for Kalavryta was never paid – some families received only small sums from the general amount that the Federal Republic of Germany transferred to Greece in 1960, and the courts dismissed the survivors’ lawsuits against Germany on grounds of state immunity. In April 2000 the German President Johannes Rau laid a wreath on Kapi hill and expressed shame and sorrow for the crime. The question of war reparations remains in dispute between Athens and Berlin to this day.

Place in the war

Kalavryta was the bloodiest, but not the only, example of how the Wehrmacht fought the partisans in Greece in the autumn and winter of 1943. After Italy left the war the Germans had to police the whole country by themselves, they feared an Allied landing, and ELAS was growing in strength. The response was a policy of collective reprisal: for every soldier killed, dozens of hostages were shot, and villages where partisans might be hiding were burned along with their inhabitants. The 1st Mountain Division was conducting similar operations in Epirus at the time, and in June 1944 SS units committed the Distomo massacre.

The terror did not break the resistance – on the contrary, it drove more and more people to join the partisans, while deepening the divisions among the Greeks themselves, some of whom blamed ELAS for bringing reprisals down on defenceless towns. These divisions, on top of the clashes between ELAS and the rival EDES that had been going on since the autumn of 1943, weighed heavily on the country’s fate after liberation in 1944 and led to civil war. Kalavryta, together with Viannos and Distomo, became one of the main arguments in the post-war disputes over German responsibility for the occupation of Greece.