My Brother's Keeper by Rod Gragg

Author:Rod Gragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion / Inspirational, History / Holocaust
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2016-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

PRINCESS ALICE OF BATTENBERG

When Germany invaded Greece, Princess Alice of Battenberg—the future mother-in-law of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II—defied Nazi threats and protected a Jewish widow and her children.

(CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

“Well, they tell me that you don’t hear the shot that kills you.…”

NAZI FORCES CONQUERED Greece easily. Hitler unleashed the invasion in April 1941, but he did so reluctantly and with seething frustration. He was coiling his military forces for a massive strike against the Soviet Union, and having to conquer Greece was a distraction. He did so only because his closest ally, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, had botched a surprise invasion of Greece. To fulfill his own vision for conquest—a new Roman Empire—Mussolini had already conquered Ethiopia and Albania, and had invaded Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya. He had also attempted to join Hitler’s 1940 blitzkrieg with his own fumbling invasion of a corner of France. Eager for more territory, he had ordered an Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940—without notifying Hitler in advance. Italian troops had been humiliated, however, by a stubborn Greek defense reinforced by British troops. In April 1941, Hitler felt it was necessary to bail out Mussolini, and ordered simultaneous invasions of Greece and Yugoslavia. German forces overwhelmed Yugoslavia in ten days, and conquered Greece in two weeks. When both countries were occupied by German troops, the familiar pattern of Nazi horrors toward the Jews progressively followed: All Jews were first identified, then persecuted, and finally deported to death camps. Of an estimated seventy-five thousand Jews in Yugoslavia, approximately sixty-six thousand were killed. In Greece 85 percent of the nation’s eighty thousand Jews died.1

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