The division retrained as 22nd Air Landing Division for rapid tactical deployment to capture enemy airbases and performed in that role during the invasion of the Netherlands suffering heavy losses during the failed Battle for The Hague (operation “Fall Festung”), and afterward advanced into France operating as ordinary ground infantry.

On 26 April 1944 the divisional commander, Generalmajor Heinrich Kreipe, was abducted by a British Special Operations Executive team led by Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and Captain W. Stanley Moss.

Kreipe's car was ambushed at night on the way from the divisional headquarters at Ano Archanes to the Villa Ariadne at Knossos and he was taken cross-country over the mountains to the south coast where he and his captors were picked up by a British vessel near Rodakino on 14 May.

This operation was later portrayed in the book Ill Met by Moonlight (1950) written by Moss based on his wartime diaries, later adapted as a film of the same name.

Infanterie-Division spent the rest of the war in anti-partisan operations in Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in southeastern Europe, was renamed 22.