A Staged Surrender In Crete - On July 8, 1941, just over a month after the end of the battle of Crete, a two-page photo report was published in issue 14 of the Luftwaffe magazine Der Adler. It was the first portrayal of an incident in which a party of British soldiers surrender to a squad of German paratroopers.
The nine images featured in this early photo report would be used again and again in numerous later publications. After the war, new images started to emerge, showing that the original series were part of a larger photo sequence. However, when viewed as a whole, the images revealed a number of inconsistencies between the actions depicted, and questions arose as to their authenticity.
Puzzled by these, our author Nikos Valasiadis in 2008 decided to undertake a systematic research project, combining photo analysis with field work, the aim being to identify the exact location of the photo shoot, shed light on the events depicted, and establish whether the action shown was true or false.
