France and Yugoslavia , Yugoslavia in April 1941 to take control. On 15 February 1940, he was posted as Chief of Staff for the
XVIII Corps. On 1 October, he was awarded the
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his performance in this position during the
Battle of France. On 26 October, he assumed command of the
1st Mountain Division, which was earmarked for
Operation Felix, the assault on
Gibraltar. With Felix cancelled, the division was transferred East, where it took part in the
Invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 as part of the
2nd Army.
Eastern Front In June 1941, Lanz led his division in the
invasion of the Soviet Union. On 30 June, his division conquered
Lvov. There, the Germans discovered several thousand bodies of prisoners who had been executed by the
NKVD, as they could not be evacuated. As the news spread, a large-scale anti-Jewish
pogrom broke out, in which the town's Ukrainian population participated, stirred up in part by German and
OUN posters and proclamations calling for revenge against the "Jewish
Bolshevik murders". Relieved of command on 17 December 1942, he was awarded the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross on the 23rd. Following the collapse of the German front after the
Battle of Stalingrad, on 26 January 1943 Lanz was promoted to general and placed in command of the Army Detachment Lanz (
Armeeabteilung Lanz), a formation made up of various German forces after the collapse of the
Italian 8th Army, including the elite troops of the
II SS Panzer Corps under General
Paul Hausser. Lanz was tasked by Hitler to hold the area of
Kharkov, even though he was outnumbered by almost 4:1. Following the loss of the city to the advancing
Red Army, he was again dismissed on 20 February, although the decision to abandon the city without a fight had been taken by Hausser against Lanz's orders. The Germans feared an Allied landing in Greece (a belief reinforced by British
disinformation measures like
Operation Mincemeat), and were engaged in continuous anti-
partisan sweeps, during which several hundred villages were depopulated and often torched. just a few days prior to Lanz assuming command, men of the 98th Regiment of
1st Mountain Division under Lieutenant-Colonel Josef Salminger, an ardent Nazi, had executed 153 civilians in the village of
Mousiotitsa and another 317 shortly before in the village of
Kommeno. Lanz himself was often at odds with his new subordinates. A conservative officer of the old school, and a devout
Catholic, he had little in common with the energetic and fanatical young officers of the division like Salminger. Compared to some devout Nazi Generals, Lanz was more ambivalent about Hitler; after the failure of the
20 July plot he was said to sleep with a revolver under his pillow. Despite Lanz's personal misgivings and his clashes with his subordinate, General
Walter von Stettner, over the treatment of civilians, reprisals remained a standard tactic: following the death of Salminger in a guerrilla ambush in late September, Lanz issued an order demanding "ruthless retaliatory action" in a 20 km area around the place of the ambush. As a result, at least 200 civilians were executed, including 92 in the village of
Lingiades alone. Although these large-scale operations proved to have little permanent effect on the guerrilla groups themselves, the reprisals instilled sufficient terror in the local population to deter cooperation with the guerrillas. Furthermore, in late 1943, pressed by both the Germans and rival leftist
ELAS guerrillas, General
Napoleon Zervas, the leader of
EDES, the dominant guerrilla group in Epirus, reached a tacit agreement with Lanz and restricted his forces' operations against the Germans.
Cephalonia and Corfu massacres On 8 September,
Italy surrendered to the Allies. This began a race to
disarm and intern the Italian garrisons of the Balkans before the Allies could take advantage of it. Lanz was tasked with overcoming the Italian forces in Epirus and the
Ionian Islands. In two cases, in
Cephalonia and
Corfu, the Italians offered resistance. Lanz himself was initially in favour of negotiating the Italian surrender, but in the end followed his orders and stormed these islands. In Cephalonia, the battle raged for a week before the Italians surrendered. After their surrender, and according to a directive from Hitler,
more than 5,000 Italians were executed by the Germans. Lanz was present in Cephalonia both during the battle and the subsequent massacre. In Corfu, resistance lasted only for a day, but all 280 Italian officers on the island were shot and their bodies were disposed of in the sea, on Lanz's orders.
End of the war After the German retreat from Greece in October 1944, Lanz and his troops moved through the Balkans towards
Hungary, where they participated in
Operation Margarethe, and the Austrian
Alps, where he surrendered to the
US Army on 8 May 1945. == Trial and subsequent life ==