Axis occupation of Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  The Axis occupation of Greece has an unlikely prelude: a military defeat for the powers that would soon run the country. In the early hours of the 28th of October 1940, Italian ambassador Emanuele Grazzi woke Greek premier Ioannis Metaxas with an ultimatum. Metaxas refused. Italian forces crossed from Albania into Greece less than three hours later.

  Greece won that opening exchange. The Hellenic Army drove the Italians back across the mountains and occupied nearly a quarter of Albania before winter halted the advance. But on the 6th of April 1941, Germany entered the campaign. By the 1st of June, after the fall of Crete, all of Greece was under Axis control. The Greeks named what followed Katochi: a word drawn from a verb meaning to possess or control goods.

  Three powers divided Greece simultaneously, each with its own zone and its own methods. What they did in those zones, and what the Greeks did in response, would determine the fate of millions of people. The anniversary of Metaxas's refusal is a public holiday in Greece today. The full account of what came after that refusal does not resolve quickly.

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• 2. A Country Divided

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  Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, was too strategically important for Germany to share with either of its partners. The city and its surrounding region became the Salonica-Aegean Military Command under Curt von Krenzki. Athens and Crete stayed under direct German control as well. The German navy had particular designs on Crete, quickly designating it "Fortress Crete" and regarding it as a candidate for annexation after the war.

  Italy received the middle of the country, an arrangement Hitler had made as a gesture toward Mussolini. The Eleventh Army under Carlo Geloso administered three army corps covering Epirus, Thessaly, and the Peloponnese. The Italian plenipotentiary, Count Pellegrino Ghigi, and the German ambassador Gunther Altenburg both claimed authority over the puppet Greek government. Historian Mark Mazower described the result as "bureaucratic infighting of Byzantine complexity." German officers complained that their Italian counterparts were more interested in Greek girlfriends than in military discipline.

  Bulgaria was the only one of the three occupiers to formally annex its zone. On the 14th of May 1941, eastern Macedonia and most of Western Thrace, including the islands of Thasos and Samothrace, were officially incorporated into the Bulgarian state. This northeastern corner of Greece had been part of the country since 1913. Bulgaria intended to make the change permanent.

  Adolf Hitler had decided that a local collaborationist government would be the cheapest way to manage the country while German forces were needed elsewhere. General Georgios Tsolakoglou, who had signed the armistice with the Wehrmacht, became the first prime minister. Neither he nor his cabinet of generals had any previous political experience. Archbishop Chrysanthos of Athens refused to swear the regime in. In December 1942, Tsolakoglou was replaced by Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, a professor of medicine. His main qualification for the post appeared to be his marriage to the niece of German Field Marshal Wilhelm List.

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• 3. Famine and Plunder

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  Hitler gave his economic policy toward Greece a name: Vergeltungsmassnahme, meaning roughly "retaliation measures." The retaliation, in German eyes, was for Greece having chosen the wrong side. Teams of German advisers, businessmen, engineers, and factory managers arrived with orders to seize anything of economic value. Germany's Economic Ministry and its Foreign Office ran separate operations. Their personnel competed with each other, and with Italian counterparts, to extract whatever remained.

  In October 1942, Germany formalized its extraction through a trading company called DEGRIGES. Raw materials and food had been requisitioned since the start of the occupation, without equivalent payment. The collaborationist government was required to pay the full costs of the occupation, driving severe inflation. Two months after DEGRIGES was founded, the puppet government agreed to treat the accumulated debt as an interest-free loan. By the end of the war, that compulsory loan had reached 476 million Reichsmarks.

  The Allied blockade of Europe had cut off Greece's wheat imports, which covered roughly a third of the country's annual needs. Combined with Axis food requisitions and the collapse of agricultural distribution networks, these pressures created what Greeks call the Great Famine. In the greater Athens-Piraeus area, some 40,000 people died of starvation. Across the country, famine and malnutrition reduced the population by an estimated 300,000 below what it would otherwise have been.

  Sweden and Turkey, as neutral countries, were the first to send food aid to occupied Greece. From the summer of 1942, Canadian wheat began reaching Athens through the International Red Cross. Of Greece's 7.3 million inhabitants in 1941, an estimated 2.5 million received this aid, half of them in Athens. The countryside received very little of it. Rural Greece endured its own famine wave in 1943-44, compounded by Axis anti-partisan sweeps that burned fields and emptied villages. As historian P. Voglis wrote, those sweeps turned "producing areas into burned fields and pillaged villages."

  By the occupation's end, 80 percent of Greece's industry had been destroyed, along with 28 percent of its transport infrastructure and 90 percent of its bridges. Twenty-five percent of the country's forests had been cleared or stripped. What the economic accounting could not capture was what was simultaneously being done to the people living inside those devastated zones.

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• 4. The Holocaust in Greece

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  The Jewish community of Thessaloniki had lived in the city for centuries. Their ancestors had arrived as refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II welcomed them, ordering all regional governors to accept Jewish immigrants onto their shores. By the eve of World War II, the Sephardic community in Thessaloniki alone numbered about 56,000. Greece's total Jewish population before the war stood at between 75,000 and 77,000.

  German occupation of Thessaloniki began on the 8th of April 1941. Within days, the city's Jewish leadership was arrested. In June, the Rosenburg Commando began confiscating Jewish manuscripts and artworks and shipping them to Germany. Formal anti-Semitic legislation was not applied in the first year, but a systematic intelligence operation was already underway. Hans Reegler, a half-Greek half-German agent posing as a British Jew named William Lions, assembled a network of informants cataloguing the community's members and assets.

  In July 1942, Max Merten, the German chief civilian administrator of Thessaloniki, ordered all Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 to report to Eleftherios Square at eight in the morning. Some 9,000 men were forced to perform what Merten called a "gymnastics drill" for six and a half hours in extreme heat. They were required to stare into the sun; those whose eyes moved were beaten. In the days that followed, several men died from brain hemorrhages or meningitis. Merten, who was 28 years old at the time, also accepted large cash payments brought to his office by wheelbarrow, granting exemptions from forced labor to those who could pay.

  In December 1942, the old Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki was demolished. The cemetery dated to the fifteenth-century Spanish expulsions. Its tombstones were used as building material for sidewalks, walls, a public bath, and a swimming pool. The site today is occupied by the campus of Aristotle University. In early 1943, Jews were crowded into a ghetto called Baron Hirsch, named after the Jewish railroad builder of the Habsburg Empire. By early March, 2,500 people had been squeezed into 593 small rooms. The railroad Baron Hirsch had originally built to help Jews flee Russian pogroms was then used to send Thessaloniki's Jews north to Auschwitz.

  In the Bulgarian zone, deportations were nearly total. In March 1943, Bulgarian occupation authorities rounded up 4,058 of the zone's 4,273 Jews and sent them first to camps in Bulgaria, telling them they would be sent to Mandatory Palestine. Five died in those camps. The rest were shipped to Treblinka and killed within days of arrival. By the end of March 1943-97 percent of the local Jewish community had been exterminated.

  The Italian zone operated differently. Italian forces protected Jews under their control and refused to apply German-style measures. Joseph Goebbels recorded his frustration in his diary on the 13th of December 1942, writing that the Italians were "extremely lax in the treatment of the Jews." After the Italian armistice in September 1943, Germany took over the formerly Italian zones. In Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos ordered his clergy to ask congregations to shelter Jews and sent a formal letter of protest to the collaborationist authorities. Elias Barzilai, the Grand Rabbi of Athens, was summoned to the Department of Jewish Affairs and ordered to submit a list of community names and addresses. Instead, he destroyed the community records, and was then spirited out of the city by EAM-ELAS fighters.

  In Volos, the German consul tipped off the local bishop, who coordinated with Rabbi Pesach to move the Jewish community into hiding. The survival rate in Volos was 64 percent. In Zakynthos, all 275 Jews survived by hiding in the island's interior. These were exceptional cases. Across Greece as a whole, at least 81 percent of the pre-war Jewish population perished, around 60,000 people in total. In Thessaloniki, only 1,950 individuals survived. EAM-ELAS fighters helped hundreds of Jews escape the deportations; many of those who survived joined the resistance as fighters or interpreters.

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• 5. Resistance Underground

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  On the 27th of September 1941, the National Liberation Front, known as EAM, was founded in occupied Athens. It was nominally a coalition of the Communist Party of Greece and five other left-wing parties, but the Communist Party controlled it from the beginning, initially concealing this fact. EAM's military wing, the Greek People's Liberation Army or ELAS, formed its first guerrilla band in Central Greece under the declared Communist Aris Velouchiotis.

  The first major act of organized armed resistance came on the night of the 25th of November 1942. Working alongside a British mission, Greek resistance fighters destroyed the Gorgopotamos viaduct in Central Greece. The viaduct carried the main railroad linking Thessaloniki to Athens. Athens and its port Piraeus were critical transit points for Axis supplies, and severing the rail link caused significant logistical disruption for German forces. The British called this operation Harling.

  By September 1943, ELAS had been reorganized along conventional military lines by Stefanos Sarafis, a former Greek army officer and non-communist brought in to take command. Its strength by that point was about 15,000 fighters with an additional 20,000 reserves. EAM eventually incorporated 90 percent of the Greek resistance movement. It claimed more than 1.5 million members and deployed 50,000 armed guerrillas across rural mainland Greece.

  EDES, the National Republican Greek League, was the main rival organization. Led by Napoleon Zervas, a former army officer, EDES was formed on the 9th of September 1941 and depended heavily on British logistical support. Its main theatre of operations was Epirus. When EDES was dissolved in the fall of 1944, it had about 12,000 fighters.

  Colonel Dimitrios Psarros led the third major resistance group, EKKA. ELAS killed Psarros in the spring of 1944 as part of its campaign to monopolize the armed resistance. From its founding, ELAS had sought to absorb or eliminate all competing organizations, clashing with rival groups nearly as often as it engaged the occupation forces.

  General Alexander Lohr, commander of Army Group E in Greece, recognized what the guerrillas were doing to his forces. Andarte attacks compelled his men to spread thin across the country in anticipation of an expected Allied landing. The mountainous terrain of Greece reduced the road and rail network to a small number of critical chokepoints, meaning the destruction of a single bridge could cause major supply disruptions. Mark Mazower noted that the Wehrmacht's standing orders in Greece were to use terror as the primary means of discouraging civilian support for the guerrillas.

  On the 29th of February 1944, EAM, EDES, and EKKA signed an agreement at Plaka Bridge in the Pindus, pledging to direct all efforts against the Germans and stop attacking each other. A conference in Lebanon in May 1944 agreed on a Government of National Unity under Georgios Papandreou, with EAM granted one-fourth of the cabinet posts. The Caserta Agreement, signed on the 26th of September 1944, placed all resistance forces under British Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie for the final push against the Axis. By the occupation's end, Greek resistance fighters had killed 21,087 Axis soldiers: 17,536 Germans, 2,739 Italians, and 1,532 Bulgarians. They had captured 6,463 more.

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• 6. Reprisal and Atrocity

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  On the 16th of August 1943, soldiers of the 1. Gebirgs-Division entered the village of Kommeno and executed 317 of its inhabitants before burning it to the ground. Kommeno was one entry in a systematic campaign. By June 1944, Axis anti-partisan sweeps had completely wiped out 879 towns, boroughs, and villages. More than one million Greeks had been left homeless.

  The Massacre of Kalavryta on the 13th of December 1943 was among the most deliberately total. Wehrmacht troops of the 117th Jager Division killed the entire male population of the town, then destroyed the town itself. Three months earlier, from the 14th to the 16th of September 1943, the 22nd Air Landing Infantry Division had executed more than 500 civilians from villages in the Viannos and Ierapetra region of Crete. On the 10th of June 1944, units of the Waffen-SS Polizei Division looted and burned the village of Distomo in Boeotia, killing 218 civilians. On the 3rd of October 1943, German soldiers murdered nearly 100 people in Lingiades, a village 13 kilometres outside Ioannina.

  The Bulgarian occupation zone carried its own record of atrocity. Bulgarian forces executed approximately 40,000 Greeks during the occupation. Bulgaria had banned the Greek language, changed place names to Bulgarian equivalents, defaced gravestones bearing Greek inscriptions, and expropriated land and homes from Greeks to distribute to settlers arriving from pre-war Bulgaria. By late 1942, more than 100,000 Greeks had been expelled from the Bulgarian zone.

  Axis violence also extended to Italian forces after Italy's armistice in September 1943. On the 13th of September, elements of the 1. Gebirgs-Division attacked the 12,000-strong Italian 33rd Infantry Division "Acqui" on Cephalonia with Stuka air support. The Acqui Division surrendered on the 21st of September after about 1,300 casualties. The Germans began executing the prisoners the following day. More than 4,500 Italians were shot. Of the roughly 4,000 survivors placed aboard ships for the mainland, around 3,000 more were lost when several vessels struck mines in the Ionian Sea. The Cephalonia massacre became the historical setting for the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The strategic rationale for Germany's continued occupation of Greece would be overturned not from within the country but by events in Romania.

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• 7. Liberation and Its Costs

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  On the 23rd of August 1944, Adolf Hitler met with Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, commander of German forces in the Balkans, at his headquarters. Hitler told von Weichs that with the Romanian oil fields at Ploiesti now in Soviet hands, and the Greek resistance inflicting serious casualties, there was no longer any point in occupying Greece. He ordered preparations for withdrawal to begin at once.

  The strategic logic that had brought Germany into Greece had disappeared. Germany had occupied the country in 1941 partly out of fear that British bombers based there would strike the Romanian oil fields. The coup in Bucharest on the 23rd of August 1944 had sealed those fields' fate. German troops evacuated Athens on the 12th of October 1944. British forces arrived two days later. The Greek government-in-exile returned to the capital on the 18th of October.

  On the 1st of December 1944, the government decreed that all guerrilla groups were to be disarmed. The six EAM ministers in the Government of National Unity resigned in protest on the 2nd of December. On Sunday the 3rd of December, an unauthorized EAM demonstration in Syntagma Square turned violent when gunfire erupted. Papandreou resigned on the 4th of December. General Scobie ordered all ELAS units out of Athens within seventy-two hours and declared martial law. Fighting in the capital continued through early January. The civil war the occupation had incubated had arrived.

  The Treaty of Varkiza, concluded on the 12th of February 1945, provided a temporary halt to open fighting but left Greece profoundly divided. During 1945, more than 80,000 people were prosecuted. The judges, many of whom had themselves served during the occupation, sentenced leftists harshly and wartime collaborators lightly. Alexandros Lambou, head of the special security police during the occupation years, was sentenced to death; most of his co-defendants received only short prison terms. BBC News estimated that at least 250,000 Greeks died during the Axis occupation. About 8 percent of Greece's roughly 7 million people died from the conflicts and the occupation combined. Aris Velouchiotis was denounced by the Communist Party, hunted down by government forces, and killed. The civil war created an opening for wartime collaborators to rehabilitate themselves and avoid sanction. That opening shaped Greek politics for years to come.

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