The Viannos massacres

On Tuesday 14 September 1943, the Orthodox feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, units of the German 22nd Air Landing Infantry Division began systematically destroying the villages of the mountainous Viannos district in south-eastern Crete. In accordance with the orders of the divisional commander, General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, the soldiers shot men over the age of sixteen and anyone they found outside their homes, burned houses, looted property and destroyed crops. The operation lasted until 16 September. 461 dead have been identified by name, and most sources state that there were more than 500 victims. In Greek memory these events are known as the “Viannos holocaust” (Ολοκαύτωμα της Βιάννου) and are regarded as the occupation crime with the second-highest death toll in Greece, after the massacre at Kalavryta in December 1943.

Viannos under Italian occupation

Viannos is a mountainous region in the south-eastern part of the prefecture of Heraklion, stretching between the foothills of the Dikti massif and the coast of the Libyan Sea. After the German airborne invasion and the evacuation of British forces in the spring of 1941, the island was divided: the western and central parts, with Chania and Heraklion, were occupied by the Germans, while the east – the prefecture of Lasithi (PL) together with neighbouring Viannos – went to the Italians of General Angelo Carta’s Siena Division. Until the end of 1942 the Italian presence in these mountains was negligible, which made it easier for several partisan bands to form. One of the largest in Crete was led by the kapetan (guerrilla chief) Manolis Bandouvas, who kept in touch with officers of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), active on the island since 1941.

From the first days of the occupation the Germans met resistance with collective punishment – in the summer of 1941 paratroopers shot the men of Kondomari and razed Kandanos to the ground (the Kondomari and Kandanos massacres). From 1942 they also gradually appeared in the Italian zone: they garrisoned the coastal villages of Tsoutsouros and Arvi, and in May 1943 they set up a three-man post at Kato Simi, at the foot of Dikti. Officially it was buying potatoes for the army; in reality it was keeping watch on the area.

Kato Simi, 10–12 September

On the evening of 8 September 1943 the radio brought news of Italy’s surrender. Rumours immediately spread in eastern Crete that the British would land any day on the south coast, precisely between Viannos and Ierapetra, and that General Carta would hand his division’s weapons over to the partisans. Meanwhile the Germans, as part of Operation Achse, were taking control of the Italian zone of the island and disarming those Italians who had not managed to hide; Carta himself was secretly taken to Egypt at the end of September by SOE officers, among them Patrick Leigh Fermor.

On the night of 9–10 September Bandouvas ordered the post at Kato Simi to be wiped out. The partisans killed the two German soldiers who were there and threw their bodies into a ravine. The British historian Antony Beevor writes that the kapetan acted without consulting the British: he was counting on an imminent Allied landing and on becoming a hero of the liberation. Bandouvas later claimed that he had ordered the Germans to be taken alive, in line with instructions from Cairo; the SOE officers – Leigh Fermor and Thomas Dunbabin – denied that any order to attack had come from them.

When the Germans found the bodies, they sent an infantry company to Kato Simi – around 165 men, according to Greek accounts – bringing with it inhabitants of the surrounding villages detained along the way. Bandouvas, aware that the village was in danger, laid an ambush in the valley at its entrance. On the morning of 12 September the partisans opened fire and the fighting went on until late afternoon; the Germans withdrew with clear losses, and a dozen or so of them (partisan accounts speak of twelve) were taken prisoner. Bandouvas’s band lost one man and withdrew into the mountains. The scale of the German losses is disputed: Greek and British accounts spoke of a company wiped out, whereas researchers drawing on German documents point out that in September 1943 the Germans lost 53 men killed and dead from all causes across the whole of Crete.

Müller’s order

Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, a Generalleutnant who since August 1942 had commanded the 22nd Infantry Division – a unit trained for air landing and stationed in Crete since 1942, with its headquarters in Heraklion – saw the events at Kato Simi as an opportunity to intimidate the whole eastern part of the island. The aim was not only to avenge the dead but also to set an example to the Italians, who after the surrender were wavering between handing their weapons to the Germans and going over to the partisans. Müller ordered units of his division’s 65th Infantry Regiment to destroy Viannos, and to shoot on the spot all men over the age of sixteen and anyone caught outside the villages, regardless of sex or age.

On 13 September more than 2,000 soldiers assembled around Viannos. They were divided into smaller groups, which surrounded the region and entered it simultaneously from several directions. That day the Germans behaved calmly: in Agios Vasilios and other villages they assured the inhabitants that those who stayed at home had nothing to fear. Some of the men who had fled into the mountains after the fighting at Kato Simi believed these assurances and returned.

Three days, 14–16 September

On the morning of 14 September the Germans set fire to Pefkos and Simi and at the same time began mass executions. Men were led out of their houses and shot in groups on the edges of the villages, by the roads and in the olive groves; people encountered in the fields and pastures were also killed, including women and old men. The executions were followed by looting, the burning and blowing up of houses, and the destruction of stores and crops. The operation covered the villages of eastern Viannos – Kefalovrisi, Kato Simi, Amiras, Pefkos, Vachos, Agios Vasilios, Ano Viannos, Sikologos, Krevatas, Kalami and Loutraki – and of the western part of the province of Ierapetra: Mirtos, Gdochia, Riza, Mournies, Mithi, Malles, Christos and Parsas (today Metaxochori). Around a thousand buildings were destroyed, mostly dwellings. The survivors were forbidden to return to the ruins or to bury the dead; the bodies lay for many days where they had fallen.

In the secondary school at Ano Viannos the Germans locked up 137 men from Kalami and Sikologos and, together with other detainees – women among them – some 300 hostages, who were to be shot if the partisans did not release the prisoners taken at Kato Simi. After the intercession of local clergy, including the Bishop of Petra, Dionysios Marangoudakis, the hostages were released on 25 September.

The exact number of victims is not known. Greek lists of names include 461 people; most accounts, including those in English, state that more than 500 died. Bandouvas’s band scattered through the mountains, and the kapetan himself, with a group of companions, made his way west to the White Mountains; in October his men clashed there several times with the Germans, who again responded by executing civilians, among other places at Kali Sykia and Kallikratis. In November 1943 Bandouvas was evacuated to Egypt.

The perpetrator on trial

Müller remained in Crete. In the autumn of 1943 his troops took part in the capture of the Dodecanese, and on Kos more than a hundred captured Italian officers were shot on his orders. In the spring of 1944 British agents planned to kidnap him, but shortly beforehand he was replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe, who was abducted in April in his stead. In the summer of 1944 Müller returned to the island as commandant of “Fortress Crete” and, in reprisal for the kidnapping and for partisan activity, ordered more villages destroyed – in August Anogeia and the villages of the Amari valley were razed, among others, and 164 civilians were killed around Kedros. The inhabitants called him “the Butcher of Crete”.

He ended the war as commander of the Fourth Army in East Prussia, where he was captured by the Red Army. Handed over to Greece, he stood trial before a military court in Athens together with his predecessor as fortress commandant, General Bruno Bräuer. Both were sentenced to death on 9 December 1946 and shot on 20 May 1947 – the sixth anniversary of the German airborne invasion of Crete. No one else was held to account for the Viannos massacres, and the survivors were never paid compensation. Rebuilding the villages took years; some never recovered. Each of the burned villages now has a memorial to its dead, and a joint memorial to the victims of the September operation stands in the village of Amiras.

Place in the war

The Viannos massacres belong to a series of mass reprisals with which, from the autumn of 1943, the Wehrmacht responded to the growth of the Greek resistance – which had been gaining strength since the destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct – and to the uncertainty caused by the collapse of its Italian ally. A month earlier, on 16 August 1943, soldiers of the 1st Mountain Division had murdered 317 inhabitants of Kommeno in Epirus; in December 1943 several hundred men and boys were shot at Kalavryta and in the surrounding villages, and in June 1944 more than 200 people were massacred at Distomo. The German command in Greece treated collective punishment of the civilian population as a normal method of anti-partisan warfare, in line with orders which as early as 1941 provided for the shooting of as many as 50–100 hostages for every German soldier killed.

In Crete, Viannos also became a warning. The argument over whether Bandouvas’s unauthorised attack provoked a needless tragedy, or whether the Germans were in any case looking for a pretext to intimidate the island after Italy’s surrender, recurs in Greek and British memoirs to this day; the SOE officers drew the lesson that the partisans on the island should be restrained from open action until real Allied help arrived. That help never came in the form of a landing: the German garrison held out at the western end of the island until May 1945.