World War II (continued from WW I) German Occupation Page 2

In the process the Greeks took control of northern Ipiros (in southern Albania), which was primarily populated with Greeks. The Greek army failed, however, to coordinate forces with the British, as had been proposed, to defend the Macedonian border, which left it open to the invasion of the Nazi army the following April, 1941, which greatly outnumbered the combined Greek, British, Australian and New troops defending it.

By late May all of Greece, including Crete and the other islands (the latter invaded by both airborne and seaborne German forces) was occupied by the Germans. Metaxas had died earlier, and King George fled into exile in Cairo.

During the winter of 1941-2, nearly half a million Greeks starved to death, with all food confiscated to feed the occupying armies, mostly the Germans, who had not been provided for by their superiors.

People who survived in Athens have reported the death of some 1700 Athenians per day, with corpses constantly carted through the streets and thrown into piles.

Stories abound, of Nazi soldiers throwing the pits of olives just eaten to staring children, who sucked the pits for any bit of juice and flavor left on them, and of children having their arms broken for trying to steal a loaf of bread. Equally terrible were the burning of entire villages, (some say as many as one thousand) even suspected of harboring resistance fighters, and terrible massacres, such as the one in the village of Kalavryta in themountains of the Peloponnese , where some 1400 men and boys (all males over the age of 13) were taken to a field and shot, the village then burned, leaving the women and young children to fend for themselves in the bitter cold of winter.

In Crete, where resistance fighters (including English and Australians as well as Greek) kidnapped a German general, a whole string of villages were burned in retaliation by the German army. In northeast Macedonia, the Bulgarians (allied with the Nazis) desecrated ancient churches and sites, with an agenda of future annexation of ‘Slavid Macedonia’.

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