Massacre of Distomo

It must have been horrific scenes on June 10, 1944, in Distomo, near Delphi. An SS unit had come under fire from Greek partisans that day, shortly after leaving the village. The Germans then returned to take revenge on the population. They did so thoroughly. The Swedish diplomat Sture Linner described years later in his memoirs, My Odyssey, what Distomo looked like when he arrived there on the morning of June 15, 1944.

‘Vultures flew slowly and hesitantly along the road when they saw us approaching. Bodies hung from every tree, pierced with bayonets. The stench was unbearable. (…) In the village itself, the last remnants of the houses were still smoldering. Hundreds of dead bodies lay among the rubble. The victims were of all ages, from the elderly to babies. Young women had been butchered with bayonets, their wombs torn apart, their breasts cut off. Others had been strangled with their own intestines. It seemed as if no one was alive anymore.’

More than 220 innocent villagers were slaughtered by the Nazis that day. Distomo was no exception. In Kommeno, on the western Greek coast, the Germans also showed their most sadistic side, resulting in 150 deaths. An Austrian member of the twelfth company of the Wehrmacht testified after the war in a court in Munich. ‘When I am asked whether it is true that children were burned by stuffing gas-soaked cotton in their mouths and then setting it on fire, I say that I indeed saw little bodies that showed horrific burns around the mouth area. Whether these children were tortured alive, or whether they were already dead, I do not know.’

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