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 consisting of one monk from each of its 20 stony retreats. If Adolf Hitler decides to dim this “Lighthouse of the Aegean,“ this greatest of world monastic experiments, he may well be doing only what the Greek Government would presently have done itself.