A Personal Favour
Over a hundred young Greeks were slated to be shot after resistance fighters and British forces sabotaged an airfield.
1944
Over a hundred young Greeks were slated to be shot after resistance fighters and British forces sabotaged an airfield.
1944
The German occupation of Greece began in 1941, and continued for three years of forced labour, summary executions, and famines. By the summer of 1944, Berlin was struggling to keep hold of the Mediterranean, but airbases popping up on the Greek islands might have been a grave setback for the Allied cause.
ON May 14th, 1944, a British submarine crew and members of the Sacred Band, a Greek special forces squadron, sabotaged a strategically important airstrip which the Germans had been building on the island of Paros. Next day, the furious German governor, Major Georg von Merenberg, arrested Nicholas Stellas, a local civilian and suspected partisan, and hanged him, defiant to the last, in Marpissa’s town square. Von Merenberg also demanded that Paros round up 125 of their own to be shot.
Protests from the island’s civic dignitaries fell on deaf ears, but one of the Major’s staff, Lieutenant Zesse, hinted that his boss might listen to the Abbot of the Longovarda Monastery. Abbot Philotheos immediately picked up the phone;* and so it was that on July 23rd, a Sunday, von Merenberg left his staff car at the end of the road and, somehow maintaining his Prussian hauteur and surrounded by a six-man bodyguard, covered the last few yards to the monastery on a donkey.
* When he was ordained priest, Constantine Zervakos (1884-1980) took the name Philotheos, and is better known today as Blessed Philotheos Zervakos, a saint of the Orthodox Church. See also The Spy.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What had the islanders done to incur the wrath of the Germans?