Real Crete Guy

How wet is London vs. Europe?

Shocking revelations of how in 1941, Australian prisoners of war on Crete were subjected to non-consensual medical experiments were first aired by the ABC in 2016, but after gaining exclusive access to a new evidence, Neos Kosmos can reveal further details of this horrific story.

While it is well-known that some of the most infamous Nazi atrocities in WWII involved enforced experiments by the SS in concentration camps, the evidence presented shows for the first time how similar actions were inflicted on Australian POWs by the German military.

Originally published in the Journal of Law and Medicine, an updated article detailing the evidence, written by Professor Konrad Kwiet, Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum, and Sydney surgeon Mr George Weisz, is about to be published by the Australian journal Genocide Perspectives.

The article, which is the culmination of years of research into German scientific records, and Australian military archives by Professor Kwiet and Mr Weisz, presents a stack of evidence that shows within days of the Allied surrender of Crete in June 1941, Nazi physician Dr Friedrich Meythaler selected five Australian POWs and injected them with the blood of hepatitis-infected German soldiers. The tests were carried out in Rethymno hospital, where Meythaler, a bacteriologist, was attempting to establish how jaundice and hepatitis were transmitted.

Per capita consumption of beef, pork, poultry and fish in Europe

today I found a Sad Bug Friend flipped on his back and flailing his little leggies in a puddle after a torrential downpour

so I picked him up and put him on a tree outside my building because cicada nymphs only come aboveground when they’re ready to complete their final molt and enter the adult instar

I came back an hour later and he’d done the thing and I’m so proud :’) he’s tired and drying off but he should be up and flying soon!

A FAMOUS ANECDOTE, told by Patrick Leigh Fermor himself in his book Mani, relates how on one furnace-hot evening in the town of Kalamata, in the remote region for which that book is named, Fermor and his dinner companions picked up their table and carried it nonchalantly and fully dressed into the sea. It is a few years after World War II, and the English are still an exotic rarity in this part of Greece. There they sit until the waiter arrives with a plate of grilled fish, looks down at the displaced table and calmly—with an unflappable Greek stoicism—wades into the water to serve dinner. Soon the diners are surrounded by little boats and out come the bouzouki and the wine. A typical Fermor evening has been consummated, though driving through Kalamata today one has trouble imagining the scene being repeated. The somniferous hamlet of the far-off 1950s is now filled with cocktail bars and volleyball nets. The ‘50s, let alone the war, seems like another millennium.

In the present crisis over Greece there is a furious argument about whether the Greek people should be allowed to vote on the proposed solution. Many of the voices against this come from the world of finance and economics. They say that the crisis is too dangerous to leave to the will of the people.

I just wanted to show why some Greek politicians - and especially George Papandreou, even though he may have retreated from a referendum - might think it important to allow the people a voice.

I have discovered a film in the archives that dramatically tells you why. It was made in 1974 and is an engrossing history of the Colonels’ coup in Greece in 1967 - and what life was then like for the Greek people under the military dictatorship that held power for seven years.

As you watch it you realise, given what the Greeks have been through, it is no wonder that politicians, especially Papandreou, think the mandate of the people is important.

The present language of the finance technocrats, and their supporters in the media, portray the Greek people as just another group of lazy southern Europeans who have fed too long at the trough of state money. A bit like us - but more crap.

Nick Lapatas spent 18 years living in Chicago. Then he returned home to Greece and bought a small farm. Today he and his son sell tomatoes in an open-air market in Athens. Despite the depressed economy and cheaper imports from Bulgaria and Albania, he’s doing OK.

“I don’t know how, but we are making some money,” he says. “Now, what is going to happen a month from now, I don’t know.”

The Greek government has long allowed farmers like Lapatas to charge their customers lower taxes, but under the terms of the nation’s bailout by European creditors, that exemption is expected to be phased out.

Lapatas is dreading the change.

“For us, when they do that, we’re going to stay home,” he says. “I’m going to take a few chickens. I’m going to put [in] a little tomatoes for myself. I’m going to have my land. You cannot do that.”

Country leaders diplomatically for/against German Reunification in 1990.