Greece's highest-ranking military officer stood inside the Kerdyllia Holocaust Museum on Saturday and showed the German ...

Greece's highest-ranking military officer stood inside the Kerdyllia Holocaust Museum on Saturday and showed the German ambassador a photograph of his own great-grandfather, one of 230-plus men and teenage boys executed by German troops 85 years ago. General Dimitrios Choupis, Chief of the Hellenic National Defence General Staff, personally guided German Ambassador Andreas Kindl through the museum in Nea Kerdyllia, Serres, during the town's commemoration of the October 17, 1941 massacre. His family is from Kerdyllia, and his ancestors were among those killed. His mother and his brother, retired Major General Konstantinos Choupis, attended the ceremony, with Konstantinos delivering a historical account of what happened that day. On October 17, 1941, German troops surrounded the villages of Ano and Kato Kerdyllia, separated the men and boys from women and children, and executed them at sites called Alonia and Koutres. The villages were then burned to the ground. German forces claimed the killings were reprisal for civilian support of resistance groups. The original villages were never rebuilt. Survivors founded Nea Kerdyllia roughly a decade later. The memorial there now stands with 238 marble crosses, one for each recorded victim. Deputy Foreign Minister Anastasios Chatzivassiliou represented the Greek government at the ceremony, and MP Fotini Arampatzi represented parliament. The events were organized by the Municipality of Amphipolis and the local community. The image of Greece's top general guiding a German ambassador through a museum bearing his own family's wartime loss, and pointing to his great-grandfather's face on a wall, is the kind of moment that rarely happens in formal diplomacy. #Kerdyllia #Greece #WWII