Authors: Rick Stroud
It was well known throughout Crete, and in all the Nazi-occupied territories of the Mediterranean, that the Germans demanded the lives of ten civilians for every one of their soldiers killed in ‘unlawful combat’. The guerrillas faced the possibility of around 500 Cretan deaths. Clutching at straws, Moss reasoned that as the dead Russian was wearing British clothing and carrying no identity tags, the Germans might think that the raid had been carried out by a British commando party.
Nothing daunted Moss, who was still keen for action and began to embellish his plans to work with the Russian prisoners of war, more of whom were arriving at the hideout. He sent a wireless signal to Barker-Benfield at GHQ Cairo, outlining his scheme to use the Russian POWs. The plan was approved, but he was ordered to first return to Cairo, on a boat which was scheduled to arrive in three days’ time.
In Anogia, once called ‘Camelot’ by the SOE, a proclamation went up. It was signed by Heinrich Müller, who had been sent back to the island after Kreipe’s abduction:
Order of the German Commander of the Garrison of Crete
Since the town of Anogia is a centre of the English espionage in Crete, since the Anogians carried out the murder of the sergeant of the Yeni-Gavé garrison and the garrison itself, since the Anogians carried out the sabotage at Damastas, since the andartes of various resistance bands find asylum and protection in Anogia, and since the abductors of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, using Anogia as a stopping place when transporting him, we order its RAZING to the ground and the execution of every male Anogian who is found within the village and within an area of one kilometre round it.
Chania
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3-8-44
The Commander of the Garrison of Crete
H. Müller
On 12 August word reached the village that lorries carrying hundreds of soldiers were leaving Heraklion, heading west. The men of the village fled, heading for the mountains. At dawn on the 13th, the lorries arrived; troops leapt out and quickly surrounded the village. Machine guns were set up in the main street and the soldiers rounded up the remaining inhabitants, about 1,500 people, mainly women and children. They were to leave the village within the hour. The people did as they were told, trooping past soldiers who were already looting their houses, plundering personal belongings, food and livestock.
Sweating soldiers unloaded hundreds of cans of petrol, which they carried through the village streets, kicking down doors and emptying them into the houses. Then they threw in stick grenades turning Anogia into a blazing inferno. Not all the buildings were empty. In one were two cousins who could not walk; in another a man who was too mentally ill to understand what was going on; and in another, widowed sisters who refused to leave each other or their home. An old man was dragged out of hiding and shot, the soldiers left two dead piglets in his arms as a joke. When the fires died down, dynamite was set in the ruins and detonated.
It took from
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3 August until 5 September to destroy the entire village. The work was hard and slow; each evening the exhausted soldiers withdrew to the village of Sisarha to recuperate. In twenty-four days, Müller’s forces killed 117 people, destroyed 94
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houses, and burnt many small vineyards, cheese mills, wine presses and olive groves. Not a house was left standing; any livestock that could not be taken away in trucks lay dead in the ruins.
Finally the lorries bounced down the hill, heading back to the garrison at Heraklion, leaving desolation where once
4
,
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00 people had lived and thrived. The troops covered their faces to protect them from the stench of rotting carcasses and the grime blowing across the rubble. The fires burned for days, sending black smoke towering into the sky, a warning to Cretans for miles around. Anogia was not the only village to be pulverised. Damastas, where Moss had ambushed the armoured car, received the same treatment. Dense smoke coiled over the remains of nine villages in the Amari valley, including Yerakari, where 164 more Cretans were killed. Some villages were destroyed on a whim: others emerged unscathed: Asi Gonia, said to be protected by Saint Giorgios, miraculously avoided the kerosene and dynamite.
When Moss got to Cairo, he found that Barker-Benfield had left for the newly liberated Greece. A fortnight later the brigadier returned and told the young captain that the plans had changed: he was to forget Crete and go instead to Macedonia. Moss never returned to the island.
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As the war drew to a close, North Africa and Crete became military backwaters. German forces in Europe were caught between the Red Army advances in the east and the Allied army in the west. The German high command on Crete lost confidence. On 11 October 1944, after uneasy negotiations, and with German artillery standing by to shell the city, Heraklion was liberated. Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi, codenamed ‘Selfridge’, sat on a horse watching the Germans retreat through the arch of the West Gate, under which Kreipe had also been driven on the night of his capture.
The retreat was accompanied by triumph, tragedy and farce. Women who had collaborated were paraded and had their heads shaved; in the court of Heraklion traitors from the village of Sarcho were stabbed to death and thrown from a first-floor window. Kapitan Boutzalis shot a rival through the arm for being rude to his daughter. A captured German agent pleaded to be allowed to commit suicide. He was taken to the edge of a cliff where his arms and legs were broken with boulders, before he was allowed to crawl to the edge and fall to his death.
For the next few months the Germans remained inside Chania, their last stronghold. Communists argued with Nationalists about who should govern the island. Civil war broke out in mainland Greece and for a while it looked as though it would spread to Crete.
On 30 April 1945, Hitler took his own life at his
Führerbunker
and the following week Germany surrendered. On 8 May, VE Day, the new commander of Fortress Crete, General Benthack, who had only been in office since the previous January, contacted the British and capitulated. Major Dennis Ciclitira appeared at Benthack’s headquarters in Chania to take his surrender, but the general insisted that he be dealt with by a man of similar rank. When Ciclitira offered to radio to British HQ in Heraklion, Benthack asked him how he proposed to do so. Ciclitira replied that his secret radio set was concealed in the building next door to the German headquarters. It had been there for weeks, its radio signals hidden by the amount of radio traffic coming from headquarters. Benthack was taken to Heraklion, and, in a cobbled-together ceremony at the Villa Ariadne, he surrendered to Major General Colin Callander, commanding officer of the British Army’s 4th Division in Greece, who had been flown in especially to take charge of the proceedings. Benthack’s men were permitted to keep their weapons until British troops arrived to guard them.
In a surreal moment, undercover SOE agents entered Chania and invited German officers to a party in a nightclub. As a German band played jazz, the British officers revealed who they were and what they had been doing, declaring to the astonished enemy their real names and their codenames.
On 23 May 1945, the German troops were at last disarmed and sent home, but, to the disgust of the Cretans, taking an enormous amount of booty with them: ‘They left like tourists, carrying their suitcases.’ British soldiers of the Royal Hampshire Regiment were detailed to protect the German soldiers; their regimental history notes: ‘The Cretans strongly resented the restraint of the British troops towards their hated and conquered foes.’
Several questions dogged the legacy of the Kreipe kidnap operation after the war, the most important of which were: had it been worth it, and did it lead to any reprisals? These are themes which recur in Leigh Fermor’s post-war correspondence with Cretans, fellow SOE operatives and even a German officer who had been a member of Kreipe’s staff in Crete.
The abduction of the Divisional Commander from virtually outside his own home stirred the hornet’s nest of German fury. Müller’s leaflet of 13 August 1944, distributed to the islanders by air, ordered the destruction of Anogia giving the reasons as: the murder of a German NCO; Moss’s ambush at Damastas Bridge; and finally the kidnapping of General Kreipe. Müller left the Cretans in no doubt that the abduction was one of the causes of the reprisal: ‘since the abductors of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, using Anogia as a stopping place when transporting him, we order its RAZING to the ground and the execution of every male who is found within the village and within an area of one kilometre around it.’
In the early months of
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945, as the German occupation of Crete drew to a close, the use of destruction as a method of coercion came to know no bounds and was designed to implicate the entire occupying force in acts of terrorism. In his final report on the activities of SOE on the island, Tom Dunbabin, who is reported to have disapproved of the Kreipe operation, wrote that, in the end, the destruction was not limited to the Amari Valley, but ‘was spread over the whole of western and eastern Crete. This was the last act of German barbarity for most of Crete.’ He went on to analyse the German master plan as being to ‘cover the imminent withdrawal by neutralising the areas of guerrilla activity, and to commit the German soldier to terrorist acts so that they should know there would be no mercy for them if they surrendered or deserted.
Seen in isolation, the abduction was exactly what Kreipe called it: ‘a Hussar stunt’ – dangerous, exhilarating and with elements of an undergraduate prank about it. But Kreipe’s capture was one in the eye for the oppressors and a great morale booster for the islanders. Whatever it cost in life and property, many saw it as worth it. Even so, it is impossible to argue that the kidnap caused no reprisals. Moss’s later action at Damasta Bridge made a difficult situation worse and left an uncomfortable legacy. Leigh Fermor and Ralph Stockbridge both regretted what Moss had done.
In
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951 Billy Moss published his book
Ill Met by Moonlight
, based on the diary he kept during the operation and the photographs he took. The book was later made into a film of the same name. Kreipe took exception to both claiming, among other things, that in the car he had not given Leigh Fermor his word to cooperate and not resist. He successfully took out an injunction to have the book and the film banned in Germany on the grounds that they defamed his character. Of the two SOE men he said: ‘Paddy, I liked Paddy, but Moss, always with his pistol, it was childish’. He also claimed that, during the kidnap, Moss had hit him with a rifle butt. This is unlikely because Moss was on the opposite side of the car dealing with the driver and taking control of the vehicle, and he was not armed with a rifle.
One German who did read the book was a Dr Ludwig Beutin, who had been a German officer on Crete. Beutin wrote to Moss who did not tell anyone about the letter. Sometime after Moss’s death, in
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965 at the young age of forty-four, Leigh Fermor came across the correspondence and wrote to Beutin. The doctor confirmed that the Germans knew about the resistance centres at Yerakari, Anogia and Asi Gonia, and that they had not found any secret radios. He explained that when Kreipe’s replacement arrived on 8 May, he ordered the search for the general, which had been going on for over two weeks, to be scaled down. Troops were left guarding the coast but withdrawn from the mountains. ‘The matter was closed to us,’ wrote Beutin.
Leigh Fermor thought that this letter from Beutin proved that the massacres of August
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944 were nothing to do with the kidnap. Another account of the operation was written by Giorgios Harokopos, the young man who was taken on the boat with Kreipe, and to whose family Leigh Fermor had offered compensation. Harokopos’s book contains some passages that do not stick to the Leigh Fermor party line, and this upset the Englishman. Leigh Fermor thought that Dr Beutin’s evidence dealt with what he started calling the ‘Calumnies of Harokopos’. There were other critical voices from within the fold: in 2
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11, Kimonas Zografakis, who had helped shelter the abductors, wrote an article in which he described Leigh Fermor as ‘neither a great Philhellene nor a new Lord Byron . . . he was a classic agent who served the interests of Britain . . . anything else that the people of Greece attribute to him derives from either ignorance or Anglophilia, ignoring the terrible sufferings he caused our country at that time.’ Leigh Fermor never stopped looking for corroboration that the kidnap had caused no actual harm to Crete. He was haunted too by the accidental killing of his Cretan friend Yanni, and by the killing of Fenske, Kreipe’s driver.
Kidnapping a German general was a decisive event in the lives of everyone who took part. Almost thirty years later Leigh Fermor, most of the kidnap party and General Kreipe himself were reunited, in jovial mood, on a Greek television show. Leigh Fermor wrote up the story of the kidnap in various forms for the rest of his life, first in long hand, then in typewritten copies and finally in a bound, word-processed document entitled ‘Abducting a General’.
In peacetime Leigh Fermor returned to the itinerant life of a travel writer. By the end of his life he had nearly fifty passports, all of them crammed with customs stamps and many of them the double-decker type issued to people who travel a lot. His friend Xan Fielding wrote of him: ‘As delightful as his conversation, was the romantic attitude he adopted to his mission in Crete. Each of us I suppose . . . saw himself playing a role created only by his own imagination. I, for example, affected to regard myself as the Master Spy, the sinister figure behind the scenes controlling a vast network of minor agents who did all the dirty work. Paddy obviously scorned such an unobtrusive and unattractive part. He was the Man of Action, the gallant swashbuckler and giant slayer.’