I just spent 2 weeks on beautiful Crete, from where I watched the Berlin “anti-Coronavirus” protests & middle class Germans happily mingling with Neo-Nazis. Here’s a small story from Greece in WW2 for all who think that the #Wehrmacht “really wasn’t that bad”. #NeverAgain #Thread 
In May 1941, after occupying mainland Greece, the German army attacked #Crete. They staged a massive airborne invasion with the Fallschirmjäger paratroops who were opposed by British and Greek troops and Cretan civilians.
After two weeks of bloody battle, the #Fallschirmjäger defeated the defending troops, but sustained losses so heavy that Adolf Hitler forbade any airborne landings for the rest of World War 2. Over 4000 of them were killed or lost in action.
The British and Greek lost around the same number of men. Cretan civilians, who had resisted Ottoman occupation for centuries had fought the Germans too. In one recorded incident, an old Cretan man even clubbed a parachutist to death with his walking cane.
The oh so civilised #Wehrmacht, which murdered thousands of civilians in the invasion of Poland 1939, was surprised by this. Immediately after the end of the battle, they wanted to make sure the Cretans would not attack them again; on orders of paratrooper General Kurt Student.
During the battle, dead paratroopers had been found near the village of Kondomari in western Crete. On June 2nd, 1941, German paratroopers under the command of Oberleutnant Horst Trebes, accompanied by propaganda photographer Franz-Peter Weixler, surrounded the village.
Men, women and children were forced to gather in the village square. Then, a number of what the Germans declared to be "hostages" were selected among the men, while women and children were released. Franz-Peter Weixler's photographs document what happened next.
The men, around 30, are led to an olive groove; and the German soldiers line up to shoot them. The juxtaposition of Weixler's photographs is startling: there are the men of the village, in waistcoats and dusty boots, with straw hats and impressive moustaches.
The German soldiers wear what #Wehrmacht high command must have thought were fitting uniforms for a hot climate; shorts and pith helmets. They look like idiot boy scouts. Like blind young men playing war. Like bloody murderers.
Then the German soldiers open fire; and they don't stop shooting until all the men are dead.
Their work done, the paratroopers march off. In July 1941, commander Horst Trebes was awarded the Knight's Cross for "his leadership during the assault against Crete". In 1944, he was killed in action in Normandy.
The next day, his colleague Walter Gericke (here left of Trebes) and his men destroy the village of Kandanos in Western Crete and kill 180 of its inhabitants. After the war, Gericke joined the #Bundeswehr and served as Generalmajor from 1962 to 1965. He died in 1991.
Franz-Peter Weixler was later accused of high treason for having leaked uncensored material of the paratroopers' activities, arrested by the Gestapo & imprisoned from 1944 on. In 1945, during Hermann Göring's trial in #Nuremberg, he gave a report on the #Kondomari massacre.
His images from Kondomari were re-discovered in 1980 in the federal German archives by Greek journalist Vassos Mathiopoulos, and are widely know today. The full series is here: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:…
Kondomari has been declared a "martyred village", and a memorial in the village lists the names of the victims and features some of Weixler's images.
As Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) writes in "Waiting for the Barbarians":
"Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking."
"Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking."
We Germans must keep re-learning & confronting our #history. If we fail, idiot boy scout murderers will take over, and wave their flags from the Reichstag. #NeverAgain
