Greek Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Greek Civil War began not with a declaration or a battle line, but with a demonstration. On the 3rd of December 1944, at least 200,000 people marched through Athens on Panepistimiou Street toward Syntagma Square. British tanks and police units had been scattered around the area. When the marchers reached the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shots rang out. More than 28 demonstrators were killed. Another 148 were injured. That single afternoon lit the fuse for a conflict that would burn for three more years, leave at least 80,000 dead, and divide Greek society for decades.

  The Greek Civil War ran from 1946 to 1949, pitting a Communist-led insurgency against the royal government of Greece, backed first by Britain and then by the United States. It was the first proxy conflict of the Cold War. It was also the first postwar instance of the Western Allies intervening in the internal affairs of a foreign country, a policy later known as containment. How a nation already shattered by Axis occupation found itself tearing itself apart again, and what that struggle meant for the Cold War world, is the story this documentary will explore.

• 2. A Fractured Resistance

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  When Axis forces approached Athens in April 1941, King George II and his government fled to Egypt, leaving a power vacuum that resistance movements rushed to fill. The largest group to emerge was the National Liberation Front, known by its Greek initials EAM, founded on the 27th of September 1941 by representatives of four left-wing parties. Although the Communist Party of Greece, the KKE, controlled EAM, the organization spoke the language of democratic republicanism.

  EAM's military wing, ELAS, was founded in February 1942. Aris Velouchiotis, a member of the KKE's Central Committee, became its first military chief. By early 1944, ELAS could call on nearly 25,000 fighters, backed by another 80,000 serving as reserves or logistical support. Two other major resistance movements existed alongside it: the National Republican Greek League, EDES, led by Colonel Napoleon Zervas, and the social-liberal EKKA, led by Colonel Dimitrios Psarros. EDES and EKKA each had roughly 10,000 members.

  The Greek landscape favored guerrilla operations. By 1943, Axis forces controlled only the main towns and connecting roads. The mountainous interior belonged to ELAS. But the British Foreign Office, wary of ELAS growing into a conventional army outside Allied control, began funneling weapons and supplies to the rival anti-Communist groups instead. Eventually, the flow of support to ELAS stopped altogether. That shift set ELAS and the Western Allies on a collision course that would erupt violently in the streets of Athens.

• 3. The December Bloodshed

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  On the 1st of December 1944, the National Unity government of Georgios Papandreou issued an ultimatum: all guerrilla forces were to disarm by the 10th of December. EAM ministers resigned from the government on December 2. The next day, the march on Syntagma Square ended in gunfire.

  What followed was the Dekemvriana, a 37-day period of full-scale street fighting in Athens between EAM fighters and the combined forces of the British army and the Greek government. By the 12th of December, EAM controlled most of Athens and Piraeus, confining British and government forces to the city center. The British, caught off guard by the initial EAM advances, flew in the 4th Indian Infantry Division from Italy as emergency reinforcements.

  Across the Atlantic, the Dekemvriana generated furious criticism. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a public statement disapproving of the fighting. According to his son Elliott, Roosevelt said privately: "How the British can dare such a thing!... Killing Greek guerrillas! Using British soldiers for such a job!" American press coverage was overwhelmingly hostile toward the British. Churchill pushed back in a parliamentary speech, mocking the idea that Britain could be accused of exercising power politics when it no longer possessed the largest navy, air force, or gold reserves in the world.

  By early January 1945, EAM had lost the battle. Papandreou resigned. On the 15th of January 1945, General Scobie agreed to a ceasefire in exchange for ELAS withdrawing from Patras and Thessaloniki and demobilizing in the Peloponnese. The fighting stopped, but the underlying fractures in Greek society had only deepened.

• 4. The Interlude That Failed

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  In February 1945, the Treaty of Varkiza offered a path toward peace. All sides agreed to disarm ELAS and other paramilitary groups, grant amnesty for political offenses, and hold a referendum on the monarchy followed by general elections. KKE leader Nikolaos Zachariadis, who had just returned from the Dachau concentration camp at the end of May 1945, publicly committed the party to achieving a people's democracy through peaceful means.

  The peace held only on paper. The amnesty was narrower than it appeared: many actions during the occupation and the Dekemvriana were classified as criminal rather than political, leaving their perpetrators exposed. Lawsuits began. It is estimated that around 80,000 people were prosecuted. In 1945 and 1946, anti-Communist forces allegedly killed roughly 1,190 Communist civilians and tortured many others. Entire villages that had helped the partisans were attacked. Some anti-Communist forces openly described this as retaliation for suffering under ELAS rule.

  The KKE boycotted the March 1946 elections, which were won by the monarchist United Alignment of Nationalists. A September 1946 referendum backed the retention of the monarchy, though the KKE claimed it had been rigged. King George returned to Athens. Nigel Clive, then a British liaison officer who later headed the Athens station of MI6, described Greece at this point as "a kind of British protectorate." Within two years there would be six changes of prime minister. Armed bands of ELAS veterans had already begun infiltrating from Yugoslavia and Albania. The second, larger war had effectively begun.

• 5. The War Proper

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  Fighting formally resumed in March 1946 when a group of 30 ex-ELAS members attacked a police station in the village of Litochoro, killing the policemen, the night before the elections. The veterans reorganized under the name the Democratic Army of Greece, DSE. ELAS veteran Markos Vafiadis, known as "General Markos", took command from a base in Yugoslavia.

  By late 1946, the DSE could field about 16,000 partisans, including 5,000 in the Peloponnese. Britain, which had spent £85 million in Greece since 1944, announced it could no longer sustain the burden. US President Harry Truman stepped in, announcing American support for the Greek government in what became the Truman Doctrine of 1947. The Marshall Plan of 1948 followed. Advisers, funds, and equipment flooded in from the Western Allies.

  In September 1947, the KKE leadership made a fateful decision: abandon guerrilla tactics and shift to conventional warfare. Vafiadis opposed the move. The KKE announced the formation of a Provisional Democratic Government with Vafiadis as prime minister. No foreign government recognized it. The shift proved disastrous. In December 1947, 1,200 DSE fighters were killed in the Battle of Konitsa during a failed attempt to seize a major town as a seat of government.

  Despite Konitsa, the DSE reached its peak strength in 1948, drawing on more than 20,000 fighters, both men and women, and extending operations to Attica, within 20 kilometers of Athens. The DSE's III Division in the Peloponnese, with 20,000 men in 1948, controlled 70 percent of that region politically and militarily.

• 6. The Children and the Camps

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  About 30,000 children were forcibly taken by the DSE from territories they controlled to Eastern Bloc countries. A United Nations Special Committee found that "some children have in fact been forcibly removed." The Communist leadership maintained that children had been evacuated at the request of parents and popular organizations. A KKE directive dated the 7th of March 1948 framed the evacuations as protection from the dangers of war. Critics described it as abduction to create a new generation of Communist fighters, calling the children Communist Janissaries.

  The Greek government under Queen Frederica ran its own parallel program. A UN committee reported that Queen Frederica had prepared "special reform camps" for 12,000 Greek children in the Greek islands. More than 25,000 children, most with parents in the DSE, were also placed in 30 child towns under her direct control. Some of these children were later given up for adoption to American families.

  Several United Nations General Assembly resolutions called for the repatriation of children to their homes. After 50 years, many returned to Greece between 1975 and 1990, carrying varied and complicated views toward the Communist faction. The fate of those children became one of the most emotionally charged elements of the entire conflict, and remained contested long after the fighting ended.

• 7. Collapse from the Inside

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  The DSE's defeat came not only from the battlefield. In June 1948, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito. At a Kremlin meeting during the Soviet-Yugoslav crisis, Stalin told Yugoslav representatives that he was unequivocally opposed to the Greek uprising. He explained that Greece's position in the Mediterranean had always been different: the US and Britain would "never permit" it to fall outside their sphere. Stalin used the Russian word "svernut," meaning "fold up," to describe what the Greek Communists should do. It was no idle suggestion: Churchill and Stalin had already agreed in 1944 that Greece would fall within the British zone of influence.

  KKE leader Nikolaos Zachariadis chose loyalty to the Soviet Union over the alliance with Tito. In January 1949, Vafiadis was removed from all political and military positions and replaced by Zachariadis. In July 1949, Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the DSE and disbanded its camps inside Yugoslavia. The loss of Yugoslavia, the Communist bloc's most important supporter, was catastrophic. Inside the KKE, suspicion of "Titoites" triggered a witch hunt that demoralized the DSE's ranks and drained support in urban areas.

  In summer 1948, DSE Division III in the Peloponnese suffered a decisive defeat. Cut off from ammunition and having failed to capture government depots at Zacharo, its 20,000 fighters faced nearly 80,000 National Army troops. The National Army's operation, codenamed "Peristera," the Greek word for dove, crushed the southern insurgency. In August 1949, General Alexander Papagos, commander of the Greek Army during the Greco-Italian War, launched Operation Pyrsos, or Torch, against DSE forces in northern Greece. By September 1949, the main DSE divisions had retreated to Albania. On the 16th of October, Zachariadis announced a "temporary ceasefire to prevent the complete annihilation of Greece." The war was over.

• 8. Aftermath and Memory

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  The Civil War left at least 80,000 dead and Greece in deeper economic ruin than the end of the German occupation alone had caused. KKE leaders and DSE loyalists fled to the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc, while captured Communist commanders faced death sentences. DSE fighters and suspected sympathizers were imprisoned, exiled, or persecuted, most prominently on prison islands such as Gyaros and Makronisos. Repression peaked during the military dictatorship that ran from 1967 to 1974, when army officers led by Georgios Papadopoulos, a member of the right-wing military organization IDEA, seized power on the 21st of April 1967.

  The polarization the war created shaped Greek politics for a generation. The 1963 murder of left-wing politician Gregoris Lambrakis became the inspiration for the Costa Gavras political thriller Z. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Konstantinos Karamanlis led Greece through what became known as the metapolitefsi, abolishing the monarchy and legalizing the KKE. In 1981, the centre-left government of PASOK allowed DSE veterans who had taken refuge in Communist countries to return and recover their former estates. Former DSE commander Markos Vafiadis was honorarily elected to the Greek parliament under PASOK's flag.

  In 1989, a coalition government passed a law unanimously recognizing the 1946-1949 conflict as a civil war, replacing the older official term, Bandit War, with the phrase Fighters of the DSE. The rural devastation of the war years drove much of mainland Greece's population toward the cities, contributing to the subsequent Greek economic miracle. In a 2008 Gallup poll, 43 percent of Greeks said it was better that the right wing won the Civil War, while 20 percent answered neither and 24 percent did not respond at all. The numbers themselves suggest how much the war still sits unresolved in Greek memory, nearly eight decades later.