Lingiades massacre
nazi killing of Greek civilians
The Lingiades massacre, on 3 October 1943, was a Nazi German war crime committed by members of the 1st Mountain Division of the Wehrmacht Heer during the Axis occupation of Greece. The village of Lingiades (Greek: Λιγκιάδες), near Ioannina in northwestern Greece, was arbitrarily chosen as a target for reprisals by the Wehrmacht due to the killing of a German officer by members of the Greek Resistance. The vast majority of the victims were children, women, and elderly.
Background
Greek resistance groups were active in northwestern Greece (Epirus) during World War II. On 1 October 1943, a unit of the National Republican Greek League (EDES) ambushed a German convoy near Preveza. In the firefight, the commander of Mountaineering Regiment 98, Lieutenant-Colonel Josef Salminger, was killed by Greek partisans. Salminger, an ardent Nazi, was notorious for conducting attacks against civilians, such as the massacre of Kommeno which resulted in the murder of 317 villagers.
Salminger's death prompted General Hubert Lanz, commander of the 1st Mountain Division, to order reprisals within a 20 km radius of the ambush. Lingiades, a tiny mountain village 13 kilometres northwest of Ioannina, overlooks Ioannina Lake and Ioannina from an elevation about 940 m above. The village could not be linked to resistance activity by German intelligence. It may have been chosen as a target due to its visibility from Ioannina.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lingiades massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.