The massacres at Kondomari and Kandanos

On the morning of 2 June 1941, the day after the last British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers laid down their arms on the south coast of Crete, four lorries full of German paratroopers surrounded the village of Kondomari near Maleme airfield. A few hours later the bodies of the men of Kondomari, shot without trial, lay in an olive grove on the edge of the village, and an army photographer accompanying the unit had recorded the whole execution on film. The next day, 3 June, German soldiers entered the mountain village of Kandanos in the west of the island, killed some 180 of its inhabitants, slaughtered the livestock and burned every house, and put up signs on the approach roads proclaiming that the village would never be rebuilt. Both crimes were the first results of an order issued on 31 May by the commander of the German forces on Crete, General Kurt Student, and the beginning of four years of occupation terror on the island.

The end of the fighting on Crete

The Battle of Crete, which had begun with the airborne landings of 20 May, turned in its last days into a retreat. From the night of 28–29 May Royal Navy ships took the defeated garrison off the island: from Heraklion in the north and, above all, from the small harbour of Chora Sfakion on the south coast, to which the soldiers had made their way across the mountains from around Chania. The commander of the island’s defence, the New Zealander Major General Bernard Freyberg, flew out to Egypt on orders from Cairo on the night of 30–31 May.

War chronologies record under 1 June that Commonwealth forces completed their withdrawal from Crete. This agrees with the sources, though the word “withdrawal” sounds gentler than what actually happened. On the night of 31 May – 1 June Rear Admiral Edward King’s ships lifted the last 4,000 or so soldiers from Sfakia. On the morning of 1 June the senior officer left on the beach, Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker of the Australian 2/7th Battalion, carried out a written order left behind by Major General Eric Weston: he had the weapons destroyed and surrendered to the Germans. How many soldiers remained on the island is hard to establish – those on the spot spoke of about 5,000, while the Germans gave a figure of 6,500 prisoners on 2 June. Some of them did not wait for captivity and took to the mountains. That same morning German bombers sank the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Calcutta near Alexandria, sent out to meet the last convoy. The island was in German hands.

For the Cretans, however, this was not the end of the war but the start of an occupation whose first days brought punishment for what had happened during the battle.

Resistance nobody expected

Before the invasion German intelligence had given assurances that the people of Crete, who had little love for the government in Athens, would receive the invaders calmly, perhaps even with goodwill. It turned out otherwise. From the first hours of the landings Cretans took up arms in great numbers: hunting guns, old rifles dating back to the risings against the Turks, weapons taken from dead paratroopers, axes, scythes and knives. They hunted down paratroopers who had landed far from their units, showed Allied soldiers where they were hiding and seized the weapons containers dropped from the air. Women, old men and priests also took part in the fighting. At Kastelli (Kissamos) in the west of the island the inhabitants, backed by only a handful of soldiers, wiped out an entire company of paratroopers on 20 May. Near Kandanos, on the road from Chania to Palaiochora on the south coast, local peasants together with a few gendarmes held up a detachment of motorcyclists and sappers of the 5th Mountain Division in a gorge for two days, 24 and 25 May, inflicting casualties on it.

It was the first time in this war that the Wehrmacht had faced such widespread resistance from a civilian population. Under German doctrine, rooted in the experience of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, civilians fighting with weapons in their hands, without uniforms or command, were francs-tireurs standing outside the laws of war, and their communities were liable to collective punishment. Among the soldiers, shaken by the enormous losses of the elite Fallschirmjäger (PL) units, stories quickly spread of wounded paratroopers tortured, mutilated and finished off by Cretans. Isolated cases of the wounded being killed and bodies desecrated probably did occur, but the stories were greatly exaggerated: the marks taken for mutilation were mostly the result of hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and knives, of the rapid decomposition of bodies in the heat and of the work of birds. According to historians’ accounts, a three-month inquiry by Wehrmacht military judges counted some 25 cases of mutilation, most of them inflicted after the soldier’s death. Nobody waited for its findings, however.

The order of 31 May

Reprisals began while the battle was still going on. On 23 May the commander of the 5th Mountain Division, Generalmajor Julius Ringel, ordered that any civilian caught with a weapon be shot, that hostages be taken from among the men and ten of them killed for every “hostile act”, and that villages near the scene of attacks be burned. Aircraft dropped leaflets carrying the order. Paratroopers shot civilians on the beaches of Missiria near Rethymno, and according to Polish and British studies, after taking Kastelli on 24 May the mountain troops shot some 200 hostages in the square – despite the protests of German prisoners freed there, who testified that the Cretans had treated them in accordance with the laws of war.

When reports of civilian resistance and alleged atrocities reached Berlin, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, to which the paratroopers belonged, ordered an inquiry and told Student to apply the harshest reprisals. On 31 May Student, who after the fighting had become the first German commandant of the island, issued an order on “punitive expeditions”. It stated as established fact that the civilian population, including women and boys, had taken part in the fighting, committed sabotage, and mutilated and killed wounded men. As means of revenge it listed shootings, levies (PL), the burning of villages to the ground and “the extermination of the male population of entire areas”; the last two required his approval. The reprisals were to be carried out quickly, dispensing with all formalities and courts, and by the very units that had fought the inhabitants. According to not fully confirmed accounts, several German officers, among them the chief of staff of the 7th Air Division, protested against mass executions. The order was not changed.

Kondomari, 2 June

Kondomari lies in the municipality of Platanias, a dozen or so kilometres west of Chania and about three kilometres from Maleme airfield. On 20 May the III Battalion of the Luftlande-Sturmregiment (Air Assault Regiment) had landed in the area, and in fighting with New Zealanders and local people it had lost nearly two-thirds of its men, including its commander. When the bodies of several German soldiers were found near the village, its inhabitants were held responsible for their deaths.

On the morning of 2 June paratroopers of that battalion arrived in Kondomari in four lorries under Oberleutnant Horst Trebes, a 24-year-old officer and former member of the Hitler Youth who was the most senior officer in the battalion to have come through the battle unwounded. The soldiers surrounded the village and drove all its inhabitants, women and children included, into the square. According to accounts cited in Polish studies, a paratrooper’s smock was found while one of the houses was being searched, and this was taken as proof of guilt. The villagers were given an hour to hand over the killers. When they handed over no one, the women and children were sent away, and hostages were picked from among the men and led to a large olive tree on the edge of the village. For a while they sat in its shade, watched by the women and children from the hillside. In the early afternoon the shots rang out; photographs taken that day show soldiers firing rifles and sub-machine guns from a semicircle drawn up in front of the hostages.

The number of victims is uncertain. According to German documents 23 men were killed, and the memorial in the village lists that many names. Some accounts speak of 21 hostages, one of whom survived; other sources give about 60 dead. Nor has it been settled whether Trebes chose Kondomari himself or was carrying out his superiors’ orders. Either way, the crime was a direct application of Student’s order: people chosen at random were killed without inquiry or trial.

Weixler’s photographs

The execution at Kondomari was watched and photographed by Franz-Peter Weixler, a war correspondent with one of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda companies. His pictures show the men herded into the square, the interrogation, the hostages sitting under the tree, the firing squad in a semicircle and the bodies in the olive grove. These were images that propaganda could not use. Weixler, who had joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1933 and been expelled from them in 1934, passed some of the negatives to an acquaintance in Athens, and according to later charges also helped one of the Cretans to escape. After the summer of 1941 he was discharged from the army, and in March 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with treason for showing the photographs to outsiders. He remained in prison in Munich until the end of the war.

In November 1945 Weixler made a written statement for the tribunal at Nuremberg, where Göring was on trial. In it he wrote that neither he nor his comrades had seen on Crete a single murder of German soldiers that could have justified “reprisals”. The Kondomari negatives were found in the German Federal Archives in 1980 by a Greek journalist, Vassos Mathiopoulos, and their connection with Kondomari was established only later by another journalist, Kostas Papapetrou. Since then Weixler’s photographs have been among the most widely reproduced images of Wehrmacht crimes in Greece.

Kandanos, 3 June

Kandanos, a village in the mountains of the Selino province 58 kilometres south-west of Chania, paid for the fighting in the gorge on 24 and 25 May. The Germans accused its people of killing and mutilating soldiers from the units that had been mauled there; after the war people remembered in particular an ambush said to have been led by a local Orthodox priest. On 3 June German soldiers surrounded the village. Sources differ over exactly who led them: English-language studies point to the same III Paratroop Battalion that had been at Kondomari the day before, most probably again under Trebes, while Polish studies speak of mountain troops. In both versions, however, events took the same course. The soldiers killed the inhabitants they found in the village, many of them elderly, slaughtered the cattle and other animals, and then set fire to every house and blew them up. According to the most frequently cited estimates about 180 people died, though figures in different sources range from several dozen to 300. The neighbouring villages of Floria, Kakopetros and Prases met a similar fate. Kandanos was declared a dead zone, and the survivors were forbidden to return or rebuild.

At the entrances to the ruined village the Germans put up signs in German and Greek. One proclaimed that Kandanos had been destroyed on 3 June 1941 “for the bestial murder of German paratroopers, mountain troops and sappers by men, women and children together with a priest”, and for resisting the Greater German Reich, “never to be rebuilt”. Another spoke of revenge for the murder from ambush of a platoon of paratroopers and half a platoon of sappers; the third was the shortest: “Here stood Kandanos, destroyed in retribution for the murder of 25 German soldiers.” Photographs of these signs went round the world after the war, and copies of them stand today in the square of the rebuilt village.

The first months of occupation

Kondomari and Kandanos opened a series. According to German reports cited by historians, 878 men were shot on Crete in the first weeks of the occupation. On 1 August a German punitive expedition shot more than 140 people in the villages of Alikianos, Fournes and Skines south of Chania, and in September mountain troops combed the Omalos plateau in the Lefka Ori (White Mountains), where partisans and Allied soldiers were hiding. The British historian Antony Beevor states that between the invasion and 9 September 1941 the Germans shot 1,135 Cretans; some authors put the number of victims of reprisals in this period higher, at as many as 2,000.

Student left Crete as early as June. Command of the island, now called “Fortress Crete”, passed to General Alexander Andrae of the Luftwaffe, under whose rule, until the autumn of 1942, the shooting of hostages and the burning of villages became a regular instrument of occupation. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda publicised the Cretans’ alleged atrocities abroad and blamed the British for them, while in London the Foreign Office advised the BBC not to praise the inhabitants’ part in the defence of the island, so as not to give the Germans a pretext for further reprisals. The Greek government-in-exile demanded the opposite.

Reckoning

None of those who directly carried out the crimes of June 1941 ever stood trial. Horst Trebes received the Knight’s Cross in July 1941 for the fighting on Crete, and was killed in Normandy in July 1944. Ringel never answered for his orders. In May 1946 Student came before a British military court at Lüneburg, but he was charged only with crimes against British and New Zealand prisoners of war. Found guilty on some of the charges, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and released in 1948; Britain did not hand him over to Greece, which wanted to try him for crimes against civilians. Greek courts did, however, try later commandants of the island. Andrae, extradited to Greece, was sentenced in 1947 to four life terms, but the sentence was reduced and he was released in 1952. Generals Bruno Bräuer and Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, commandants of Crete in 1942–1945, were sentenced to death and executed in Athens on 20 May 1947, the sixth anniversary of the airborne landings.

In 2019 Kondomari was recognised as a Greek martyr village; Kandanos was rebuilt, and the German organisation Aktion Sühnezeichen later helped to build a water supply system for the village. On 31 October 2024 the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, became the first German head of state to visit Kandanos, where he asked the survivors and their descendants for forgiveness for the crimes committed there by Germans, and for the fact that for decades they had gone unpunished.

Place in the war

The massacres at Kondomari and Kandanos were among the first mass crimes committed by the Wehrmacht against civilians in Greece, carried out even before the war against the Soviet Union began in the east, where collective reprisals against civilians became an everyday occurrence. The German historian of the occupation of Greece, Hagen Fleischer, pointed out that the Germans had not previously applied “reprisals” on such a scale outside occupied Poland and other Slavic lands. The principle that whole villages bore collective responsibility for individual acts of resistance led in the following years to the destruction of many Cretan communities, among them the villages around Viannos in September 1943 and Anogeia (PL) in August 1944.

Terror did not break the resistance. The Cretans hid hundreds of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had remained on the island after 1 June, and helped them escape to Egypt by boat and submarine. With their help British liaison officers began operating on the island, and in the mountains grew one of the strongest resistance movements in occupied Greece, which in time confined German authority to the largest towns. According to the British historian Callum MacDonald, the occupiers had killed 3,474 inhabitants of Crete by May 1945; estimates that also include the victims of hunger and disease are several times higher.