'Bricklayer' was a British special forces operation to capture the commander of the 22^nd Luftlande-Division in Crete (26 April/14 May 1944).

In January 1944 the Cairo East section of the British Special Operations Executive conceived a plan to kidnap Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, currently commanding the division. After parachuting into Crete early in February, Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, leading the operation, was joined four weeks later by his second-in-command, Captain W. Stanley Moss, and two Greek SOE agents, all of whom arrived by sea.

Although Generalmajor Karl Heinrich Ferdinand Kreipe had succeeded Müller on 1 March, the SOE elected to continue with the kidnap mission. Joining with Cretan partisans, the SOE agents studied Kreipe’s working habits and the travel route from his quarters at Knossos to the divisional headquarters at Ano Arkhanais.

On the evening of 26 April, Leigh Fermor and Moss, dressed as German military policemen, halted Kreipe’s staff car on a hairpin turn under the guise of a routine traffic control point. After pulling the general out of the car and throwing him into the back seat, the agents drove him to an isolated spot where he was taken on an arduous cross-country trek over the mountains to the island’s southern coast.

On 14 May 1944, the SOE agents and their captive German general were finally picked up by a British motor launch on a deserted beach near Rodakino and transported to Mersa Matruh, Egypt.