Hitler’s troops lost more lives in one day in Crete, Greece than died in any single day in the 15 months prior of conquering 15 other countries. Overall, one out of ten Greeks gave their lives during WWII. Adolf Hitler said, “The Greek soldier, above all, fought with the most courage,” and Winston Churchill said, “Hence, we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.”
Greece’s disruption of Hitler’s war timetable forced him into the debilitating Russian winter where he met defeat. Leaders like Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, America’s Sumner Welles and even Adolph Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, credit Greece with bringing about Hitler’s defeat. Keitel said, “The Greeks delayed by two or more vital months the German attack against Russia; if we did not have this long delay, the outcome of the war would have been different.” Greece was the only “David” in WWII able to inflict a fatal wound that eventually brought down the Nazi “Goliath.”
President Franklin Roosevelt said, “When the entire world had lost all hope, the Greek people dared to question the invincibility of the German monster raising against it the proud spirit of freedom,” following the Greeks handing the seemingly invincible Axis Forces their first defeat in WWII. Hitler had previously soundly defeated France and routed the army of Great Britain, two of the world’s great powers. Life Magazine and publications around the world featured Greece on their covers.
Women and old men en masse gathered farm implements and whatever weapons they could find to attack Hitler’s elite paratroopers invading Crete. Over four thousand German soldiers lost their lives on Crete but so did 1,000 women. Cretan military personnel had gone to mainland Greece to fight the Axis Forces.
Only the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, Damaskinos, among all top religious leaders in occupied countries publicly challenged in writing the occupying Nazis’ Holocaust plans, according to the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. The Archbishop showed great courage in his response to the threat of death by Nazi firing squad. He told the Nazis that Greek clerics are not shot, but hanged, and he requested that they respect this custom. Time Magazine featured him on its cover.
Without Greece or the Big Three countries, Hitler’s unprecedentedly powerful war-machine probably would have won the war. In light of the enormity of Hitler’s capacity to implement his monstrous policies wherever he was in control, our world today would have been a very different place had the Axis forces won. Imagine a world without the many people Hitler wanted exterminated, people who were Jewish, gay or institutionalized, and those he wanted sterilized like non-Aryans and people with physical or mental differences.