75 years after May of 1941.The battle of Crete was the first in WWII where civilians fought against a Nazi invasion.
This fact was never forgiven by Adolf Hitler's barbarians, the first civilian massacres of WWII took place here.
Photos above from the massacre in the village Kontomari of Chania , (2 June 1941). The whole execution operation was photographed by Franz-Peter Weixler, serving as a war propaganda correspondent (kriegsberichter) for the Wehrmacht at that time.
In the summer of 1945 the greek gonvernment sent a Central Committee for the Verification of Nazi Atrocities in Crete during the occupation of the island between 1941-1944. The members of the commitee were author Nikos Kazantzakis , academy professors Ioannis Kakridis & Ioannis Kallitsounakis and photographer Konstantinos Koutoulakis. They visited all the burnt Cretan villages and interviewed the witnesses of the massacre : The execution of the whole male population between 18-60 years old , villages plundering and burning of was the treatment of Nazi barbarism to the people that resisted and supported the partizans. The photographic archives of Konstantinos Koutoulakis have been donated to Malevizi municipality in Heraklion and they are exhibited all over Crete and Greece.
- Blown up church and widows
- Widow on her husband's grave
- Ruins in Ano Meros , Rethymno
- Nikos Kazantzakis visiting executed people's graves near Ayia prisons in Chania
- Execution place in village of Chania
- Gerakari, Rethymno
- Skourvoula, Heraklion
- Viannos, Heraklion
- Nikos Kazantzakis visiting the destroyed villages.
- Konstantinos Koutoulakis checking a torture wooden column.
- Kardaki , Rethymno
The last photo above is taken in my village , Kardaki, in Amari territory, Rethymno . Kardaki was burnt down in August of 1944 together with 7 more villages : Gerakari , Gourgouthoi , Vryses, Ano Meros , Smiles , Drygies , Krya Vrysi. In this photo there's my grandfather , Charalampos Kydonakis , with his father Stelios Kydonakis and widows standing on the point where the execution of the village's men took place. The German troops had blacklisted specific numbers of men that would be executed in each of the above villages. In my village the black list number referred to 20 men , but, as the village was small and the number of men wasn't sufficient, they brought men from other villages to execute them and fill that number ... One man , M.Vlepakis was shot in the execution, but the rest bodies fell on him and the German officer didn't notice and didn't shoot his head after the execution. Finally Vlepakis escaped wounded in the night and was the witness of what exactly happened in there. My grandfather joined the partizans in Northern Greece after the retreat of the Greek Army in Albania after the Nazi invasion. When the last German troops left Greece , he came back to Crete in 1944 , returned to Kardaki, where he found his brothers Manolis and Mihalis executed and his house and village burnt to the ground.