Mount Athos in 1941

The motorized Nazi hordes rumbled across the Salonikan peninsula, but they did not invade its 40-mile-long cape where the monks of Mount Athos have heard only vaguely of Adolf Hitler - “a great German king who slays the Bolsheviks and the Jews- a fulfillment of prophecy.“ Adolf Hitler gave no hint of what he proposed to do about this great religious prize which was his for the taking- the autonomous ecclesiastical republic of Mount Athos, 1,000-year-old capital of Greek Orthodoxy, governed by a council cons