Hubert Lanz - World War II - Greece - Anti-partisan Operations in Epirus

Anti-partisan Operations in Epirus

On 9 September 1943, Lanz assumed command of the newly formed (on 20 August) XXII Gebirgskorps in Epirus, Greece. The Germans feared an Allied landing in Greece (a belief reinforced by British disinformation measures like Operation Mincemeat), and were engaged in continuous anti-partisan sweeps, during which several hundred villages were evacuated and often torched. Collective punishment of entire localities for guerrilla attacks was common, with directives to execute 50 to 100 hostages for each German casualty; only four days before Lanz assumed command, men of the 98th Regiment of 1. Gebirgs-Division under Lieutenant-Colonel Josef Salminger, an ardent Nazi, had executed 317 civilians in the village of Kommeno.

Lanz himself was often at odds with his new subordinates. A conservative officer of the old school, and a devout Catholic, he had little in common with the energetic and fanatical young officers of the 1. Gebirgs-Division like Salminger. Lanz was certainly no Nazi, and his involvement with the circles of the 20 July plot was known; after its failure, he was said to sleep with a revolver under his pillow. Despite Lanz's personal misgivings and his clashes with his subordinate, General von Stettner, over the treatment of civilians, reprisals remained a standard tactic: following the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Salminger in a guerrilla ambush in late September, Lanz issued an order demanding "ruthless retaliatory action" in a 20 km area around the place of the ambush. As a result, at least 200 civilians were executed, including 87 in the village of Lingiades alone.

Although these large-scale operations proved to have little permanent effect on the guerrilla groups themselves, the reprisals instilled sufficient terror in the local population to deter cooperation with the guerrillas. Furthermore, in late 1943, pressed by both the Germans and rival leftist ELAS guerrillas, General Napoleon Zervas, the leader of EDES, the dominant guerrilla group in Epirus, reached a tacit agreement with Lanz and restricted his forces' operations against the Germans.