August 1943.

German-occupied Greece is gripped
by fear and repression.

As resistance activity spreads across the countryside, Nazi occupation
forces respond with collective punishment, branding entire villages as enemies
and using terror to maintain control.

In the region of Epirus, in western Greece,
the small village of Kommeno sits on the banks of the Arachthos River, its inhabitants
trying to endure life under occupation.

On 12 August 1943, partisans briefly pass through
Kommeno before vanishing into the hills.

German patrols soon learn of their presence, and fear
spreads through the village.

Though residents are told there will be no reprisals, anxiety lingers.

By the evening of 15 August, a wedding fills Kommeno with music and joy as families prepare for
the Feast of the Assumption, unaware that German troops are already on their way to murder.

At dawn, German troops encircle the village, hurl grenades into homes and machine-gun civilians
as they flee in panic.

Men, women, children, and infants are slaughtered in the streets, in
their beds, and at the riverbanks as houses are looted and set ablaze.

By the end of the massacre,
317 civilians lie dead, and the village is reduced to ashes, a crime that will become known as the
Massacre of Kommeno.

However, this crime will not remain unpunished, and some of the perpetrators
will pay for their crimes with their own lives.

The Second World War started on the 1st of
September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

The early stages of the war saw rapid German
advances in Europe, with the fall of Poland, the invasion of France, and the evacuation
of Allied forces from Dunkirk in 1940.

Following the successful campaign in France,
Hitler set his sights on the Soviet Union.

However, before he could launch Operation
Barbarossa, which was the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he needed to secure
the southern flank to ensure crucial supply routes and prevent any interference.

Therefore, on
6 April 1941, Germany invaded Greece with rapid and coordinated assaults.

The German 12th
Army, consisting of around 680,000 troops and spearheaded by armoured divisions, quickly
overwhelmed Greek and British Commonwealth forces.

Key locations such as Thessaloniki fell
swiftly, and German paratroopers played a crucial role in securing strategic positions.

By 27 April
1941, Athens – the Greek capital – had fallen, and mainland Greece was under Axis control.

After the occupation of Greece, German forces soon found themselves facing a persistent
and growing resistance movement.

Much of this resistance came from the Greek countryside,
where mountainous terrain provided excellent cover for guerrilla fighters.

These groups, known as
Andartes, carried out sabotage missions, ambushes, and raids on German patrols and supply lines.

The most significant among them was the ELAS, the military arm of the National Liberation
Front, which was politically dominated by the Communist Party of Greece.

To the Nazis,
this alignment with communism made the Andartes more than just local insurgents.

They were portrayed in both the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, and the SS as savages
and criminals who committed all sorts of crimes, and who needed to be hunted down without mercy.

As resistance to the German occupation of Greece intensified, the reprisals grew
more violent.

In the region of Epirus, this violence would culminate in a horrifying
atrocity in the village of Kommeno.

Until 1943, Kommeno had not been severely
affected by the occupation.

The village lay within the Italian-controlled zone around
the town of Arta, where authorities treated the local population with relative tolerance and
largely ignored the quiet presence of partisans.

Life remained harsh but stable.

Farmers worked
their fields, fishermen relied on the river, and the village served as a local
point where partisans occasionally requisitioned food to sustain their operations.

That fragile balance collapsed in mid-August 1943.

On 12 August, a small partisan detachment entered
Kommeno to collect food.

While they were in the village, a two-man German reconnaissance vehicle
passed through.

Upon seeing the armed partisans in the village square, the Germans made a sudden
turn and drove away, ending up in a ditch nearby.

No shots were fired, and no Germans were harmed.

Villagers rushed forward to help free the vehicle.

Still, the incident spread fear.

Expecting retaliation, many residents spent the night hiding in nearby fields.

The following
day, the head of the village council, the village priest, and the local schoolteacher travelled
to Arta to explain the situation to the Italian commander.

They were reassured that Kommeno was
not in danger and that no reprisals would follow.

Relieved, the villagers returned to their
homes and began preparing for the Feast of the Assumption.

At the same time, preparations
were underway for a wedding.

On the evening of 15 August, families gathered to celebrate
both the religious feast and the marriage.

Music filled the village, and guests from
surrounding settlements stayed late into the night.

It was meant to be a moment of joy
and a return to ordinary life under occupation.

Behind the scenes, however, German commanders
were preparing a very different response.

The Wehrmacht falsely reported the incident as
a partisan attack and forwarded it to divisional headquarters in the city of Ioannina.

German anti-partisan operations in the region had repeatedly failed, and the presence of
partisans near Kommeno was used as justification for a punitive action.

On 14 August, orders
were issued for the village to be destroyed.

Just after 5 AM on 16 August 1943, around
120 German soldiers from the 12th Company of the 98th Mountain Regiment of the 1st Mountain
Division advanced toward Kommeno in lorries.

The commander of the 12th Company was Oberleutnant
Willibald Röser, a fanatical Nazi known among his comrades as the ‘Nero of 12/98.

’
As they had done three weeks earlier during the massacre of civilians
in the village of Mousiotitsa, they were heavily armed with machine guns,
mortars, grenades, and automatic weapons.

The commander of the 98th Mountain Regiment Oberst
Josef Salminger gave the men a short and fierce speech alleging that they were going to wipe out
a partisan nest and ordering them to spare no one.

That morning, Kommeno was crowded.

Alongside
the villagers, more than thirty visitors from neighboring communities were present for the
religious feast and the wedding celebrations.

The soldiers surrounded the village from three
directions, leaving only the path toward the Arachthos River unguarded.

Without warning,
they began the attack despite the fact that there were no partisans in the village.

Grenades
were thrown into houses as families slept.

Machine guns cut down villagers as they stumbled into
the streets in panic.

Anyone who tried to flee through the German-controlled exits was shot.

Men were executed in front of their families.

Women were killed while trying to protect their
children.

Infants and young children were shot in their beds or torn from their mothers’ arms.

Among the first victims was the village priest, murdered by Oberleutnant Willibald Röser
as he begged for mercy.

Eyewitnesses later described rapes, beatings, and the humiliation of
corpses.

Around forty wedding guests, still awake from the night’s celebration, were also killed.

The only escape lay across the Arachthos River.

Shielded by dense vegetation, some villagers
managed to flee by swimming or using small boats as gunfire echoed behind them.

The massacre lasted six hours.

By the time the shooting ended, Kommeno had
been annihilated.

Of the 657 people present that morning, 317 were dead.

Among them were
172 women, 97 children under the age of fifteen, two priests, entire families, and newlyweds.

Nearly three hundred houses were burned to the ground.

Only seven remained standing.

After the killings, German clearance units moved through the ruins, seizing livestock
and looting valuables before departing.

The day after the massacre, the first outsiders
arrived in Kommeno.

Italian army sergeant Ugo Turri entered the destroyed village,
where survivors described what had taken place.

Burned homes still smouldered, bodies
lay scattered among the ruins, and the scale of the slaughter was impossible to ignore.

The Italian military leadership protested to Generalmajor Walter Stettner Ritter von
Grabenhofen, the commander of the 1st Mountain Division.

Stettner denied that German soldiers had
committed atrocities against civilians.

Instead, the massacre was immediately buried beneath
false reports and deliberate distortions.

The 98th Mountain Regiment sent a radio
report to divisional headquarters in Ioannina, falsely claiming that a battle had taken
place between German troops and partisans, and that 150 civilians had been killed
in the fighting.

On 17 August 1943, Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim recorded in his unit’s
war diary that Allied forces had been “very active” and that Kommeno had been captured after
“intense enemy resistance.

” Through successive falsifications, the mass murder of civilians
was presented as a legitimate act of warfare.

On 18 August, German soldiers returned to
Kommeno with orders to bury the bodies.

This was not done out of respect for the dead,
but to conceal the crime.

Graves were dug, remains were collected, and the physical traces
of the massacre were reduced as much as possible.

Within the company itself, reactions to the
massacre were divided.

Some soldiers later admitted that they regarded the executions
as unjustified.

Others defended the killings, convinced that the village supported the partisans
and that its inhabitants therefore constituted potential enemies.

Despite any feelings of doubt
or guilt, no soldier openly opposed the orders, and no serious resistance emerged within
the unit.

The massacre was carried out, accepted, and officially denied.

Although not everyone behind the Kommeno massacre was held accountable, for
some, justice or even revenge eventually came.

On 1 October 1943, Josef Salminger, the officer
who had given his men the fierce speech to wipe out the village, was ambushed and killed by
Greek partisans.

His death triggered yet another reprisal.

Two days later, German soldiers
from the same division entered the village of Lingiades and massacred ninety-two civilians –
men, women, and children, including infants.

The youngest victim was only six months old.

Generalmajor Walter Stettner Ritter von Grabenhofen, the architect of this policy of
terror, remained in command of the division until 18 October 1944.

During the Soviet Belgrade
Offensive, his unit was cut off, and Stettner went missing near Belgrade.

Unconfirmed reports
suggest he was captured and executed by Yugoslav partisans.

His body was never recovered.

Willibald Röser, the officer who commanded the unit that carried out the massacre at Kommeno,
survived until the final months of the war.

He was killed in November 1944 during an
Allied air raid on the German city of Freiburg.

When Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945,
the remnants of the 1st Mountain Division surrendered to British forces in Austria.

While
many officers attempted to portray themselves as honourable soldiers fighting partisans rather than
civilians, some were extradited to Yugoslavia, where they were tried for war crimes and executed.

The Kommeno massacre is considered one of the worst crimes committed by German forces in
occupied Europe.

Every year on 16 August, memorial services and ceremonies take
place in remembrance of the massacre.

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