On the morning of July 25, 1943, German troops from the 98th Regiment of the First Mountain Division surrounded the Greek village of Mousiotitsa at dawn. The soldiers, deployed in four groups, blocked every path out of the settlement of roughly 800 people, whom German commanders accused of supporting partisans. A German plane had circled above the village the day before, dropping leaflets that warned residents not to leave. It was a trap designed to ensure no one escaped.
When the troops entered Mousiotitsa, they fired into homes and dragged residents into the streets. Old men were beaten, women were forced to hand over valuables and food, and livestock was seized. Homes were looted and then set ablaze, sending smoke rolling down the mountain slopes as flames caught dry thatched roofs. Families who attempted to flee into the hills were hunted down and shot.
The surviving villagers were forced to march under guard to a plateau above the village known as Spithari, a place that had once served as a refuge during Ottoman raids. Mothers held babies, children clutched each other, and the elderly leaned on canes as soldiers with machine guns made them stand in rows. When the order was given, long bursts of gunfire swept through the crowd. Soldiers moved among the fallen and shot the wounded again.
By the time it was over, 136 bodies lay on the ground. Few young men were among the survivors, so the task of digging a mass grave was abandoned, and the corpses were thrown into a dry well. The massacre was ordered by Colonel Josef Salminger, commander of the 98th Regiment, in response to the deaths of nine German soldiers killed in an ambush near the village of Kopani on July 18, 1943. Major General Walter von Grabenhofen, commander of the division, approved the operation without hesitation.
A key role in the attack was played by a company commander known among his own men as “the Nero of 98” for his cruelty toward civilians and his pleasure in destruction. He was identified in postwar accounts as Willibald Rzer of the 12th Company. The Germans returned to Mousiotitsa on August 27, 1943, after another German officer was killed near the area. The same unit struck the village again, accusing several families of cooking for partisans.
Seventeen people were executed on the spot, shot in front of their homes, with their bodies left in the street as a warning. By the end of that summer, 153 villagers were dead, including 63 children under the age of 16. The official German report claimed that the 12th Company had come under fire and had destroyed a “bandit nest,” killing 100 “bandits. ” It was a typical falsification used by the Wehrmacht to disguise the massacre of civilians as a legitimate military action.
In reality, no German had been attacked from the village, and no partisans were found in homes or anywhere else in Mousiotitsa. The killings were deliberate, systematic, and designed to terrorize the population of the Epirus region into submission. The First Mountain Division, also known as the Edelweiss Division after the white alpine flower its soldiers wore on their caps, had earned a reputation for toughness and discipline. Formed as an elite unit of alpine troops from Bavaria and Austria, it had fought in Poland, France, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union since September 1939.
On the Eastern Front, it took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and in brutal anti-partisan warfare in the Caucasus. By the time it arrived in Greece in June 1943, it carried a simple order from the German high command: crush the resistance by any means necessary. The resistance in the Epirus region of northwestern Greece was led mainly by the National Republican Greek League, known as EDES. Founded by Napoleon Zervas, a veteran of the Greek army, EDES was a nationalist, anti-communist force.
Its fighters operated from mountain hideouts, ambushing German patrols and sabotaging bridges and roads. They were well organized but small in number and depended heavily on local villagers for food, shelter, and intelligence. In German eyes, any village that offered bread or a place to sleep was a partisan base, and its inhabitants were no longer civilians but enemies. Mousiotitsa was only the first in a series of atrocities committed by the First Mountain Division in western Greece.
The same pattern was repeated across the region: settlements surrounded, residents forced from their homes, and civilians shot on the spot or near their homes. Each time, orders came from above, and each time, civilians were murdered as examples to intimidate the wider population. Soldiers hardened by years of war in the east treated the killings as routine. The cycle of vengeance the Germans had set in motion soon turned against them.
On October 1, 1943, Colonel Salminger, the man who had demanded the destruction of Mousiotitsa, was ambushed and killed by Greek partisans. Two days later, German soldiers from the same division entered the village of Lyngiades and massacred 92 civilians, including infants. The youngest victim was six months old. Major General von Grabenhofen, the architect of the terror policy, remained in command of the division until October 18, 1944.
That month, during the Soviet Belgrade offensive, his unit was cut off, and he went missing in action near Belgrade. Unconfirmed reports suggest he was captured and executed by Yugoslav partisans, and his body was never recovered. Commandant Willibald Rzer, the leader of the massacre on the ground, survived until the final months of the war. He was killed in an Allied air raid on the German city of Freiburg in November 1944.
When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the remnants of the First Mountain Division surrendered to the British in Austria. Many officers tried to portray themselves as honorable soldiers who had fought partisans rather than as war criminals. Some were extradited to Yugoslavia, where they faced trial for atrocities committed there and were executed. After the war, the Cold War quickly overshadowed the crimes of the Wehrmacht in public consciousness.
For the people of Mousiotitsa, however, there was no forgetting. Survivors returned to the ruins of burnt houses and empty fields and rebuilt their homes stone by stone. Monuments commemorating the victims of the massacres have been erected on the execution site and in the village itself. To this day, those places stand as a reminder of the fate of the hundreds of people who were dragged from their homes and murdered by the occupiers of their country.
The massacre of Mousiotitsa remains one of the darkest chapters of the German occupation of Greece, a deliberate act of terror that took the lives of 153 villagers, most of them women, children, and the elderly, and whose perpetrators were never held fully accountable before the courts of the postwar era.
