These massacres were only the beginning. They also developed the military vocabulary to match their unparalleled ingenuity of destruction: the elimination of a population, as in Kommeno, was a Clean-Up Operation Undertaking: Waldheim talks about Sauberungsunternrhmen (Purging Operation) Kommeno , for example. The 1946 report says: “principal harbors were blown up… Installations, machinery and quays were destroyed.” The Germans also blew up the strategic Corinth canal. Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes Trials interrogations 1946-1949. They raped all female children and women, cutting their breasts and ripping apart their stomachs. But the Germans, being the warlords-in-chief, outdistanced their partners in crime, Bulgarians and Italians. Despite the fact that several historians and modern day nazi apologists are trying to exonerate the Germans for the countless atrocities and crimes against humanity they committed in Greece during WW2, the truth cannot be hidden. image: Five green National Guardsmen drag a broken, fully-dressed corpse of a man out of a well by his limbs with hookedpoles. 1,770 Greek villages lie in ashes. There had been no incident to incite that massacre. On August 16, the day after one of the greatest holy days of the Eastern Orthodox church, the Dormition of the Mother of Jesus, the Germans, also in Epirus, destroyed the village Kommeno. ... but points to the 1988 amnesty declared by the Greek parliament for all civil war crimes. After the First World War, Greece did not enjoy political stability, enduring repeated coups d’état and dozens of governments. They defeated the Italian allies of the Germans. Atrocities in which the eager German troops exceeded the directive of 100 Greeks killed per German death abound. The leadership of the National Army after the successful operations in Grammos sector (Operation Pyrsos/Torch). It was one of the first conflicts of the Cold War: Greece was the only place in Central, Balkan and Eastern Europe where communism attempted, but failed, to take power. Among those executed was Kostas Archakis, aged 103 and two 80-year old women who were thrown into their burning homes to endure horrible deaths. In areas under their control they launched a terror campaign against their opponents. In Athens, Greece, the bloody events of Sunday, December 3, 1944 initiated a brutal civil war, worse than anything the continent would see for another half-century. The Greek government claimed in 2006 that the Greek Resistance killed 21,087 Axis soldiers (17,536 Germans, 2,739 Italians, 1,532 Bulgarians) and captured 6,463 (2,102 Germans, 2,109 Italians, 2,252 Bulgarians), for the death of 20,650 Greek partisans and an unknown number captured. The American Civil War has been covered many times on Listverse, but history classes tend to overlook the presence of genuine crimes against the understood rules of proper war-time conduct. You've come to the right place. These debates are not confined to the considerable atrocities committed by both sides in the Greek civil war, but are always extended to the crimes of … All able-bodied men who could be caught were shot and the rest fled for their lives to the mountains. The Germans developed the act of destruction to the level of a fine art: they spread the condemned structures with incendiary powders, which under fire from a gun or a pistol exploded into flames. The systematic massacre and deportation of Greeks in Asia Minor, a program which had come into effect in 1914, was a precursor to the atrocities perpetrated by both the Greek and Turkish armies during the Greco-Turkish War, a conflict which followed the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919 and continued until the retaking of Smyrna by the Turks and the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922. The Civil war is another catastrophe for Greece, for many worse than the Nazi occupation. Massacres of Greeks took place especially in Ionia, Crete, Constantinople, Macedonia and the Aegean islands. Behind him a row of bloated bodieslie on the ground. More than 90 holocausts have taken place in Greece, in which the majority of the inhabitants were murdered. They slaughtered 60 percent of the horses, mules, and cattle; 50 percent of the donkeys, sheep and goats; 80 percent of the hogs; and 50 percent of the chickens. In addition, 1,700 to 1,800 villages were burned, many of them totally. In 1940, there were 7,335,000 people in Greece. The UN, the WHO, and the Future of U.S. The genocidal effects of German occupation of Greece reached a macabre climax in June 1944. Perhaps this is a later Greek Civil War photo? Much of Greece was subjected to enormous destruction of its industry (80% of which was destroyed), infrastructure (28% destroyed), ports, roads, railways and bridges (90%), forests and other natural resources (25%) and loss of civilian life (7.02% – 11.17% of its citizens). See more ideas about civil war, greek, greek history. '' » 27 Feb 2007, 11:58 are replete with accounts of massacres perpetrated throughout Greece warlords-in-chief outdistanced. Bodieslie on the ground forced to flee the Aufraumtruppen ( Clean-Up troops ) people are killed during occupation... In historical Perspective gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Wehrmacht University and Miami University Departments of,... 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