The order came down from the German high command in the autumn of 1943, and it was direct: the village of Lingiades was to be destroyed. A German officer had been killed by partisans, and the men of the First Mountain Division were sent to exact the price. They surrounded the settlement in western Greece, rounded up the inhabitants, and shot ninety-two of them, most of them women and children. Then they set the buildings alight.
Five villagers survived, hidden among the corpses until the flames drove them out, and they escaped by climbing up through the fireplace chimneys of the burning houses. The village itself was erased. It was a familiar pattern by then. In the summer and autumn of 1943 alone, the division had burned more than two hundred villages in western Greece and Albania, destroyed over 4,500 houses, and killed at least 2,000 civilians.
Only twenty-three German soldiers died in combat in that same period. These were not battles, whatever the official reports claimed. They were massacres. How an elite alpine formation, trained to climb peaks and fight regular armies, became an instrument of organized terror against civilians is a story that began years earlier and thousands of kilometers to the east.
The First Mountain Division was created in April 1938, an elite unit of the German army that took the Edelweiss flower as its identifying symbol. When the Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939, the division, nearly 25,000 men strong, took part in the invasion of Poland and distinguished itself in the fighting in the Carpathian Mountains. But the campaign was already stained with criminal acts. On September 8th, 1939, in the Polish village of Rozlucz, members of the division killed six civilians and three prisoners of war.
These were the first war crimes committed by the unit, and they grew out of a deliberate policy: German soldiers were trained to see Polish civilians not as people but as potential enemies. In the spring of 1940, the division joined the attack on Western Europe, fighting in the forests around the Meuse and the Aisne, where it gained a reputation for moving quickly and efficiently. When France surrendered after six weeks, parts of the division were held in reserve for a possible operation against Britain. They were formed into a combat group tasked with capturing the heavily fortified British fortress of Gibraltar and its strategically important naval base.
The proposed campaign, codenamed Operation Felix, could have decisively weakened Britain’s naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, had it ever been launched. But even during covert reconnaissance, Francisco Franco refused to cooperate. Adolf Hitler could not make concrete promises about Spanish territorial ambitions in the Pyrenees or the expansion of the Spanish colonial empire at the expense of French colonies. Operation Felix was never carried out.
The division was soon transferred for the attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941, where it won another quick victory when the country fell in just a few days. But the era of German quick victories was ending. The war that was coming would last far longer and turn far more savage. In June 1941, the First Mountain Division joined the invasion of the Soviet Union as part of Army Group South.
Its soldiers fought through the forests and fields of Ukraine, capturing towns such as Vinnytsia and Uman. Under the command of Generalmajor Hubert Lanz, they took part in the destruction of encircled Soviet armies and took tens of thousands of prisoners. Some of those prisoners were handed over to the SS and shot; others were left to die of hunger and cold in the camps established for captured Soviet soldiers in Lviv, in today’s Ukraine, which had fallen early in the German campaign. Members of the division and local Ukrainian militia joined in the pogroms that killed thousands of Jews in the streets.
The division’s command played a part in the violence, fueling hatred and turning away as atrocities against the civilian population took place. In 1942, the division took part in Hitler’s great southern offensive, advancing into the Caucasus toward the Black Sea. The mountain troops fought their way through passes over 3,000 meters high. In August 1942, they climbed Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Russia and Europe, and raised the Nazi flag on the summit, a symbolic victory celebrated in German newsreels across Europe.
The campaign itself ended in failure. The Soviet counteroffensive forced them to retreat through the same mountains they had conquered, leaving behind hundreds of dead and frostbitten men. By the spring of 1943, the division was a shadow of what it had been. More than 19,000 of its men had been killed.
The remnants who staggered back from the Eastern Front were veterans shaped by extreme cold, hunger, and violence, hardened to suffering and indifferent to it, shaped both by what they had witnessed and by what they had been ordered to inflict. In 1943, the division was withdrawn from the Eastern Front and sent to the Balkans, where a new kind of war awaited. Instead of fighting regular armies, the Edelweiss soldiers were ordered to crush partisan movements in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece. Under Generalmajor Walter Stettner Ritter von Grabenhofen, they received direct instructions from the German high command to use extreme measures.
In this territory, villages suspected of helping partisans were to be destroyed, their livestock seized, and their inhabitants executed. This was no longer war in the traditional sense, but organized terror against the civilian population. The division’s reputation for brutality grew rapidly as they fought partisans in Montenegro, where they shot prisoners without trial. In Albania, members of the unit committed the Borove massacre on July 6th, 1943, considered the worst war crime in the country’s history.
Soldiers of the 98th Regiment of the First Mountain Division, armed with flamethrowers, set every house in the village on fire. Some victims were shot and killed; many were grouped inside the village church and burned alive. After that massacre, in the summer of 1943, the unit was transferred to Epirus in northwestern Greece. This region, with its steep mountains and isolated villages, was suspected of harboring resistance fighters of the EDES movement, a Greek nationalist organization under Napoleon Zervas that fought both the Germans and, at times, the communist ELAS partisans.
The German command decided to destroy any village connected with them. On July 25th, 1943, soldiers from the 98th Regiment surrounded the village of Mousiotitsa, home to shepherds and farmers who lived off the land. The troops divided into four groups and attacked from all sides. They looted homes, set fire to buildings, and rounded up the villagers on a plateau above the town.
In the late afternoon, the captives were lined up and shot with machine guns. One hundred and thirty-six people were killed that day: elderly, women, and children. The bodies were thrown into a dry well, because there were too few survivors left to dig graves. A month later, on August 27th, 1943, the same unit returned and murdered seventeen more people, including entire families.
The German report later claimed they had killed one hundred bandits, a lie repeated to justify the killings. The Mousiotitsa massacre was only the beginning of the terror in Epirus. In the following weeks, the First Mountain Division destroyed village after village. In the village of Kommeno, on August 16th, 1943, 317 civilians were murdered, among them pregnant women, the elderly, and small children.
Ninety-four of those killed were children under the age of fifteen. The division’s greatest crime came after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943. The Italian troops stationed on the Ionian Islands refused to surrender to the Germans. The Edelweiss division was ordered to disarm them on Kefalonia.
Between September 21st and 24th, 1943, the division massacred around 5,200 Italian soldiers of the 33rd Acqui Division, who had previously been their allies in the conquest of Balkan territory. A few weeks later, in Sarandë, a city in Albania, members of the division executed the officers of the Italian 151st Perugia Division after they had surrendered. The dead of the massacres were not counted in the unit’s combat losses. The division’s soldiers called these operations Bandenkampf, bandit fighting, but they were in fact acts of extermination.
Women, children, and the elderly were often killed first, and entire communities were left in ruins. By late 1944, the war was turning against Germany. The division, still fighting in Yugoslavia and later in Hungary, faced heavy losses. The reckoning had already begun.
General Stettner Ritter von Grabenhofen went missing in September 1944 and was probably killed during the fighting near Belgrade. Willibald Roser, the officer responsible for the killings in Mousiotitsa and known among his comrades as the Nero of the 98th Regiment, was killed during an Allied air raid on the German city of Freiburg in November 1944. On March 12th, 1945, the division was renamed the 1st Volksgrenadier Division and fought its last battles on Austrian territory. When the war in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, the remaining soldiers surrendered to the Americans.
But some were pursued beyond surrender. Joseph Kübler, a former commander of the division, was hanged in Ljubljana on February 26th, 1947, for the crimes committed in the Balkans. Thousands of the division’s men never came home at all; they had already paid for what they had done with their own lives. The villages did not stay dead.
Mousiotitsa, Kommeno, Lingiades, and Borove rose again from the ashes, and their inhabitants gather every year to honor the victims. Monuments mark the execution sites. The scars of these atrocities endure in graves and in ruins that remain to this day. The story of the First Mountain Division is the story of how a proud elite formation, born in the snowy Alps and trained for climbing peaks, was transformed into an instrument of massacre.
Its soldiers ended up burning homes and shooting villagers, carrying with them the habits of the Eastern Front: obedience, hardness, and the belief that any act could be justified as part of the struggle against the so-called bandits. By the end of the war, the Edelweiss they wore was no longer a symbol of purity, but of guilt and murder.
