Dodecanese campaign (surrender), the Italian garrisons on most of the Dodecanese Islands either wanted to change sides and fight with the Allies or go home. Anticipating Italian surrender, German forces, based largely in mainland Greece, had been rushed to many of the islands to maintain control. The German forces were part of Army Group E commanded by "Luftwaffe" General Alexander Löhr. The most important German force in the Dodecanese was the 7,500-strong "Sturm-Division Rhodos" (Assault Division Rhodes, "Generalleutnant" Ulrich Kleemann) commanding. This division was formed during the summer on the island of Rhodes, which was the administrative center of the Dodecanese Islands
Island of the Jewel Island of the Jewel The Island of the Jewel () or Island of Sapphires () was a semi-legendary island in medieval Arabic cartography, said to lie in the Sea of Darkness near the equator, forming the eastern limit of the inhabited world. The island does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's "Geography" nor other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced "Book of the Description of the Earth" compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833. Ptolemy's map ended at 180° E. of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lay on the imagined eastern