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Professor Arthur Butz
author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,
a must-read for those who still believe in the Holocaust story,
available at http://vho.org/GB/Books/HHS.html
From: ArtButz@aol.com
Sent: Monday, 26 September 2005 10:49 AM
Subject: Crete
This column in today's Chicago Tribune is about a new "documentary film" on the German invasion and occupation of Crete.
I visited Crete in 1977 and spoke to Cretans - they hate that word! - who were aware of my The Hoax of the twentieth Century book. I don't recall their telling me any stories of mass slaughter by the Germans.However I do recall one story that was evidently widely believed there, namely, that the Germans took the Jews away in a ship and then sank the ship.
I haven't heard that story since then, and it's not in this column. It has stuck in my mind as an example of one of the propaganda concoctions that was dropped, together with the electrocution baths and others.Too many extermination methods spoil the broth!
A.R. Butz
John Kass
Movie gives life to little told tale of WWII heroism
Published September 25, 2005
In the stirring new documentary film The 11th Day, an old woman in black talks about the pretty colors falling from the sky on a day in May.
Then, she was a young girl hiding in an olive grove, when the bombing of the Greek Island of Crete finally stopped. Villages and cities had been ruined. Survivors were trembling and afraid.Suddenly, the sky cleared. The silence was audible. She looked up.
"I was only 15," says Kaliopi Kapetanakis, remembering sitting in the olive tree while talking to a friend. "Oh, I said, `Look. The whole sky is full of umbrellas.'"
They weren't umbrellas. They were parachutes, carrying more than 8,000 of Adolf Hitler's elite paratroops, the Fallschirmjäger, the Sky Hunters. They were the tip of the German spear.
Hitler's plan was to take Crete, protect his southern flank and then quickly turn his attention to the east, to the invasion of Russia. With the Greek army decimated in Albania, the operation was to take only a day or so. His war planners didn't take into account the will of the Cretan people.
"They started ringing the bells," George Tzikas, a veteran of one of the most successful resistances in history, says in the film. "The church bells. Freedom! Save the city! Stop the Germans! And men and women, children, with no equipment, we stopped the advance."
They confronted the Germans with whatever they could grab. They lunged at the Fallschirmjäger as they hit the ground, gripped by a terrible and desperate rage. Not only the men, but also the women and the children.
"We did not have many guns," Manolis Paterakis says through his white beard in the film. "Still, we went to fight, women and men, children, young and old. They went with hoes. They went with stakes. With anything we could find."
Of the 8,100 German paratroopers who jumped out of their planes that day, 3,764 were killed. Another 1,600 were wounded. What was left of the elite German paratroops was never used as the point of the spear again.
The French Resistance has been chronicled, and the Dutch, the Polish and others, but what happened in Greece has been less trumpeted.
If you're interested in what fuels an insurgency--and the news is full of that today--you'll want to see this film.
Funded by San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos, The 11th Day is about the children and adults who fought. They tell it in their own voices, in translation, with film footage illustrating how they harassed the Germans for years.
The Germans did not build schools or encourage democracy. Instead, they responded by burning entire villages in reprisal. The survivors were ordered to dig mass graves and then were put into those graves. Priests at funeral processions were gunned down by German soldiers, as were women and boys and girls.
The barbarism prompted a backlash, and captured Germans were slaughtered. There were more reprisals, and ditch after ditch was filled. Crete, which only 45 years before had been washed in blood during the uprising against the Ottoman Empire, was washed in blood again. In World War II, France fell in a week. But Crete never surrendered.
"There was fear, no question about that," Tzikas, then a young soldier, says in the film. "But that fear brought anger. Let me tell you: The iron that was coming down, and the fire made the Cretan heart harder than the German steel and the Cretan spirit hotter than the German fire. And when they came down, May 20, 1941, the Cretan people were ready for them."
His eyes are full of pain and pride while on the screen farmers rush into the fields where the paratroopers were falling. The villagers wear long boots and run across the hard ground, clutching farm tools.
One of the farmers holds a short hoe, on a handle about three feet long. They used what they had. Then they stripped the German dead of their guns and used those.
The resistance fighters organized themselves. They worked with British commandos to pass intelligence to Allied commanders.
One of the more fascinating parts of the film is the story of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British intelligence officer who lived among the Cretans and helped organize a stunning coup: The capture of the German commanding general who later was smuggled off the island for interrogation. The guerrillas had German uniforms, but they did not have the proper insignia for the mission. So the Cretan women embroidered the necessary insignia.
The guerrillas wanted the German general's head on a pike, but Fermor protected him.
"Why is something relevant today that happened 60 years ago?" director Christos Epperson told me. "It is one of the great untold stories of World War II. It is a story that has been buried for too long."
"The 11th Day" will be shown at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday and again on Thursday at the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge. Tickets are $10. For more information, go to www.crete1941.com or call 800-791-2858.
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jskass@tribune.comCopyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
From: Biophilos
Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2005 6:16 AMSubject: Re: Professor Arthur Butz reminded of Crete
Go to Creta today and ask the Cretans what they think of the Germans.
I do not think that such a film tells the entire story. Though it is known all over Greece how fierce and independent the People of Creta are, such atrocities and stories for example are not known in Paros or Naxos near by Islands which the Germans and Italians occupied.
I would guess that Spanos is probably being a good businessman as is the U.S. Congress in appeasing the will and demands of the " masters".Though it is true that the Germans did commit atrocities in Greece, but in wars many atrocities are committed, there were many among the Greeks themselves after WWII when Greek fought Greek over Communism. A book was written and published by the most famous Cretan author, Nikos Kazantzakis, The Fracticides, about this period in modern Greek History.
I have been to Crete when I was young, and stayed in the mountain villages at the base of Psiloritis. Even then 30 years ago, the villages were absent of men due to the war and the reprisals done by the Germans towards the Cretan resistance.But today, the picture has changed dramatically, and unlike the Jews who "do not forget" the Greeks being Christians have not forgotten but forgive, and moved on, welcoming Germans to their land and offering the traditional hospitality for which they are famous for.
Germans do not visit Greece with shame, nor are they made to bend their heads before Greek inquisitors, only the Jews continue with this deafening dirge, and wailing at the wall of WWII, as if they were the only ones that suffered so greatly from human ignorance, created conflict and brutal barbarity.
This film just sounds like another OZ propaganda film, and I would believe that Spanos, who does not even have a Cretan name, probably is a good businessman, and did what he must to appease the " trella" [fanatical madness ] of his fellow Jewish businessmen.
What can you say - obsession - Mania in Greek.
It is this pandering and groveling and sycophancy, the bending of truth and the exaggeration of events to explosive proportions - as in from 10 who died to thousands - that continues this vassalage and ritual of bending the knee to Jewish suffering. Yes we can be sympathetic to these people, but not at the expense of Reason by denying it of others.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "The sufferance, which is the badge of the Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth."
May the gods give us the power to forgive, and right the wrongs, but also the intelligence to think and examine, to demand the facts and not the propaganda which leads the judgments of people away from resolution and the promise of healing...
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Hi Fredrick,
Thanks for this message.
What a fascinating yarn Mr. Kaas of the Chicago Tribune has spun.
My father in law, Obergefreiter Franz Bubl of the 85th Gebirgsjäger Regiment (Passau) was one of those "elite paratroopers" who parachuted over Crete.
Problem is, he belonged to a mountaineer regiment, and that "jump" over Crete was the one and only time that he was ever in an airplane.
We have his Wehrpaß to prove that he was a member of the 85th Regiment when he parachuted over Crete.
One fine day he was strapped into a parachute and pushed out of the airplane, and that was that.
He promised Jesus while in the airplane that if he ever got back safely to earth he would never set foot in an airplane again, and he kept the promise.
He was everywhere the Wehrmacht was, awarded Eiserne Kreuz II, wounded 3 times, etc. but he always said that airplane trip was the worst experience of his life.My mother in law "Oma" visited Hannelore and me in Texas three times, but nothing could persuade "Opa" to climb into an airplane -- not even a visit with his grandchildren!
Opa remembered his parachute opening and the British shooting at him, but if the "Cretans" disliked Germans, it escaped his notice.
What strange yarns one hears about World War II. As if it had taken place 600 or 6,000 years ago, instead of just 60!
Regards, jmd===========
I have the book The Fall Of Crete by Allan Clark, an English historian, buddy of Margaret Thatcher and NO friend of ours, that´s for sure. (William Morrow & Com, Library of Congress Number 62-14621, Copyright 1962) He says NOTHING about any atrocities and has nothing but positives to say about our troops! What he DOES say however is, that the prison camps with the worst conditions during the entire war, were camps on mainland Greece run by ITALIANS. This is insane.
Another thing, Greece was allied with Britain who had declared war on us. Furthermore, Germany ignored this little tidbit of information and was forced by treaty obligations to invade Greece, after Italy attacked, essentially without reason and without the proper resources.
It was us who had to rescue our ally (as per usual). The German mountain troops suffered horrendously under Greek partisan activity. One of the Greeks favorites was to first mutilate and then burn alive German prisoners. Those people have absolutely nothing to cry about. If anyone committed atrocities, it was the Greek resistance. These incidents are well documented. An English Major wrote the definite book on our mountain troops. It's called The Alpine Elite, by James Lucas, copyright 1980 Cooper & Lucas Ltd., no ISBN number. The book is chock full of admiration for our mountain troops. Major Lucas himself fought against them in Italy and it was their fierce resistance against incredible odds, which awoke his interest.
As far as German atrocities are concerned, those troops that committed them ere severely punished, some by execution. NO American, NO English, NO Italian, NO Russian, NO troops ANYPLACE were even reprimanded by their superiors for atrocities committed versus the German population or German prisoners.
Ernest Hemingway (Mr. ¨-I shot 122 Krauts-) as a non-combatant war correspondent, shot a 15 year old German boy in the back (!), because he wore a ¨Nazi¨ jacket! He bragged about this!! Today he is a literary hero. I wonder how much money was paid to these Crete patriots to make these outrageous, totally unsubstantiated claims. As I stated in a previous correspondence, Allan Clark, English anti-German historian didn't mention a single atrocity in his book, -The Fall of Crete-. Not one! and he hates us!
Sorry, but America makes me sick, sick, sick, with their sanctimonious, collective dishonesty. Please pass this on to Professor Butz and to the Chicago Tribune. Thanks ... Ger
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