Twenty-five civilian residents of the Italian village of Condamari, Crete, men were shot to death on June 2, 1941. In retaliation, a German massacre squad rained bullets on the corpses of the village's young men, who died in vain.

  25 civilian residents of the Italian village of Kondamari, Crete, men shot dead on June 2, 1941. They were retaliating against the deaths of German soldiers. A system of mass means of violence was used by order of the German Wehrmacht High Command to carry out racial massacres everywhere in German-occupied Europe. German firing squads encamped on condemned prisoners. The corpses of young men from the village lay on the ground, and beyond them, German soldiers with rifles in their hands shot each corpse to death.

　The battle of Crete, which lasted about 10 days from May 20 to June 1, 1941, ended with the Axis forces retreating from the Allied forces. Shortly thereafter, the mutilated body of a German officer was discovered. The German retaliation against the Cretan population began on June 2 in the village of Kontomari in the provincial capital of Chania, with the execution and massacre of many German paratroopers, 25 men between the ages of 18 and 50, who were dropped in the bushes in an olive grove. It was the first massacre of civilians on the European front.

　 From the end of June 1941, racial extermination by the Nazi SS mobile massacre units (Einsatzgruppen) began; on July 8, 1941, Hitler declared that Moscow and Leningrad would be destroyed; on July 15, SS SS Obergruppenführer Meyer Hettling announced the Comprehensive Plan for the East, On July 17, he announced that about 30 million more Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, West Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and Czechs were being deported or killed to make way for some 4.5 million German settlers. On July 17, the Gestapo, the Nazi secret state police, was ordered to go into hiding and kill dangerous prisoners of war; on July 23, the OKW ordered inhumane measures in the interior; on September 16, Wilhelm Keitel, commander-in-chief of the OKB, announced hostage-killing orders to shoot approximately 50 to 100 hostages for every one German soldier killed. On October 1, Keitel issued a hostage-killing order; on October 7, Alfred Jodl, OKW's Chief of Operations Staff, issued an order from the OKW to destroy Soviet cities; on October 21, approximately 7,000 hostages were killed in Kragujevac, Yugoslavia; on December 7, the OKW issued an order from Western Europe to the German Reich with orders for secret transports of opponents of the Nazi regime, an order of night and fog; on December 16 the OKW ordered that all means be used against women and children, without restriction. As winter set in, hundreds of thousands starved and starved to death in German-occupied Europe.