Throughout the German occupation in the years that followed , reprisals in retaliation for the involvement of the local population in the Cretan resistance continued . On several occasions , villagers were rounded up and summarily executed . In one of the worst incidents , around 20 villages east of Viannos and west of the Ierapetra provinces were looted and burnt in September 1943 , with more than 500 of their inhabitants being massacred . These massacres were among the deadliest during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II . In August 1944 , more than 940 houses in Anogeia were looted and then dynamited . The same month , nine villages in the Amari valley were destroyed and 165 people killed in what is now known as the Holocaust of Kedros . All these reprisals were ordered by '' Generalleutnant '' Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller , who was nicknamed " The Butcher of Crete " . After the war , Müller was tried by a Greek military court and executed
massacred
Viannos massacres
Battle of Crete