ΛΙΓΚΙΑΔΕΣ
Few lights can be seen emanating
from Lingiades, for this village has never fully recovered from one of the most
brutal and horrific instances of Nazi inhumanity – the slaughter of all of its
inhabitants, ninety two men women and children and the immolation of their
homes, on 3 October 1943. As late as the nineteen nineties, most of the village
still lay in ruins. The enormity of the crime still haunts the people of
Epirus, who shudder and speak of the massacre in hushed tones every time they
drive up the mountain. Four were the survivors of this heinous crime, two
twenty four year old boys who were lucky enough to have the bullets graze but
not penetrate their bodies, a young woman, and the then infant Yiannis
Babouskas who sought vainly to suckle from his dead mother’s breasts, in a
scene evocative of that of Delacroix’s paiting of the Massacre at Chios.
The slaughter of the inhabitants
of Lingiades, took place by way of a reprisal by the Nazis for the
assassination of veteran Nazi lieutenant colonel Jozef Zalminger by the EDES
resistance forces, led by Kostas Tolis. In the view of the German National
Socialists, the lives of the undermenschen held no intrinsic value and could be
taken away at will in order to secure the obedience of a cowering and
terrorised subject population. That the massacre at Lingiades still plays upon
raw emotions is amply evidenced by the fact that at a 2007 conference in Munich
on crimes of the Wehrmacht in Greece, the son of the Nazi Josef Salminger, ,
Hermann, who was mayor of Mittenwald, refused to meet with the Greek delegation
and in particular, with Yiannis Babouskas, the sole surviving survivor of this
terrible crime. His very words: “I will not meet with the Greeks.”
Historian Christoph
Schmink-Gustavus maintains that this crime, unlike many others, seems to have
been covered up by the German authorities. According to his view, the massacre
was subject to an inquiry by the court at Bremen. While thousands of pages of
evidence was amassed, the court gave emphasis to the testimony of one Nazi
officer who swore: “I did not ever see any village in Epirus burning.”
Subsequently the inquiry blamed Hitler and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy for
such brutalities as were committed in Greece and the whole event was forgotten.
This is despite the report of Sergeant Alfred Schrepel who had reported at that
time: “At the village of Lingiades at peaks 1015 and 1277, limited resistance
by the enemy was neutralised. Fifty citizens were killed. Lingiades was burnt and 20 mules collected in loot.” It
was in this banal way that the murder of thirty four children aged between six
month and eleven years, thirty seven women aged between thirty to sixty and
eleven elderly inhabitants, along with the destruction of 43 houses, and 57 sheds
was reported.
The court at Bremen may have
skipped over the incident, the mayor of Mittenwald may harbour resentment at
the fact that victims of his father’s belief in German racial superiority
refused to accept their domination by a hysterical and genocidal regime but instead,
fought valiantly for liberty, seeing, as a result, the wholesale destruction of
Lingiades but the inhabitants of Epirus have not forgotten. Indeed, it is easy
to see why they have not, for the massacre in Lingiades was not an isolated
incident. A few months before, on 12
August 1943, a two-man Wehrmacht reconnaissance team came across a small group
of ELAS guerrillas in the village of Kommeno near Arta, and had reported back
to divisional headquarters in Ioannina. On the evening of 15 August 1943, Lieutenant
Colonel Josef Salminger, whose son was so eager to pour salt in the wounds of
Greek victims of his brutality, ordered an attack the village on the following
morning. The attack was led by Lieutenant Röser, who personally shot the
village priest at the outset of the assault. Men, women and children, seventy
four of them under the age of ten, were killed indiscriminately, though
thankfully, almost half of the village's population managed to escape by
swimming across the Arachthos river. The first Wehrmacht reports recorded that
150 civilians had died. As the reports moved up the command chain, they were
amended so that "150 civilians" became "150 enemy". The
names of the three hundred and seventeen villagers who were killed are now
recorded on a marble monument in the village's main square, a testament to the
German totalitarian regime and it was for this crime that the EDES resistance
assassinated Salminger and it was for this that the hapless victims of
Lingiades paid with their lives.
The Nazis came to my mother’s
village too, in 1943, suspecting that its inhabitants were arming the ELAS
guerrillas. They rounded up all the inhabitants in the village square and were
preparing to gun them down when the village priest offered his life in exchange
of that of everyone else. The bemused Nazi office, having concluded his search
of the village and found no weapons, dismissed the terrified villagers and
permitted them to return to their homes. Had he not done so, I would never have
existed. For me, this brings the magnitude of the crimes at Kommeno and
Lingiades into stark focus. Generations of people were denied a chance to live
as a result of a brutality that has gone unpunished. Hubert Lanz, who ordered
the attack on Lingiades and other villages in Epirus, was rewarded in 1951 by
being appointed by the Free Democratic Party of Germany as adviser on military
and security issues. It is worthwhile mentioning that this was the party that
advocated the release of all "so-called war criminals" and welcomed
the establishment of the "Association of German soldiers" of former
Wehrmacht and SS members, to advance the integration of the nationalist forces
in democracy.
When I consider 28 October 1940,
our so-called OXI day, I do not conjure up images of a defiant petty dictator
Metaxas, or of gallant Greek soldiers repulsing the Italians from the mountains
of Epirus. Instead, I think of Lingiades, Kommeno and the many other villages
that fell victim to Nazi fascist barbarism. And I scratch my head and wonder
how it is possible, given the amount of blood spilled and the enormity of the
suffering that was caused, that many so-called ‘patriots’ cannot say OXI to the
perverse appeal of fascist ideologies or political viewpoints that demonise and
dehumanise others. To the martyrs of Lingiades and Kommeno, then, on this
seventieth anniversary of their slaughter, let us resoundingly cry OXI to the
besmirchment of their memories and a further OXI to all forms of intolerance
and brutality wherever these raise their disgusting heads.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
First published in NKEE on Saturday 26 October 2013
posted by PANEPIROTIC FEDERATION OF AUSTRALIA at Monday, October 28, 2013
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