Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret
When 28 civilians were killed in
Athens, it wasn’t the Nazis who were to blame, it was the British. Ed Vulliamy
and Helena Smith reveal how Churchill’s shameful decision to turn on the
partisans who had fought on our side in the war sowed the seeds for the rise of
the far right in Greece today
“I can still see it
very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Títos Patríkios. “The Athens police
firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament in Syntagma Square. The
young men and women lying in pools of blood, everyone rushing down the stairs
in total shock, total panic.”
And then came the
defining moment: the recklessness of youth, the passion of belief in a justice
burning bright: “I jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the
one that is still there, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse!
Victory will be ours! Don’t leave. The time has come. We will win!”
“I was,” he says
now, “profoundly sure, that we would win.” But there was no winning that day;
just as there was no pretending that what had happened would not change the
history of a country that, liberated from Adolf Hitler’s Reich barely six weeks
earlier, was now surging headlong towards bloody civil war.
Even now, at 86,
when Patríkios “laughs at and with myself that I have reached such an age”, the
poet can remember, scene-for-scene, shot for shot, what happened in the central
square of Greek political life on the morning of 3 December 1944.
This was the day,
those 70 years ago this week, when the British army, still at war with Germany,
opened fire upon – and gave locals who had collaborated with the Nazis the guns
to fire upon – a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with
whom Britain had been allied for three years.
The crowd carried
Greek, American, British and Soviet flags, and chanted: “Viva Churchill, Viva
Roosevelt, Viva Stalin’” in endorsement of the wartime alliance.
Twenty-eight
civilians, mostly young boys and girls, were killed and hundreds injured. “We
had all thought it would be a demonstration like any other,” Patríkios recalls.
“Business as usual. Nobody expected a bloodbath.”
Britain’s logic was
brutal and perfidious: Prime minister Winston Churchill considered the
influence of the Communist Party within the resistance movement he had backed
throughout the war – the National Liberation Front, EAM – to have grown
stronger than he had calculated, sufficient to jeopardise his plan to return
the Greek king to power and keep Communism at bay. So he switched allegiances
to back the supporters of Hitler against his own erstwhile allies.
There were others
in the square that day who, like the 16-year-old Patríkios, would go on to
become prominent members of the left. Míkis Theodorakis, renowned composer and
iconic figure in modern Greek history, daubed a Greek flag in the blood of
those who fell. Like Patríkios, he was a member of the resistance youth
movement. And, like Patríkios, he knew his country had changed. Within days,
RAF Spitfires and Beaufighters were strafing leftist strongholds as the Battle
of Athens – known in Greece as the Dekemvriana – began, fought
not between the British and the Nazis, but the British alongside supporters of
the Nazis against the partisans. “I can still smell the destruction,” Patríkios
laments. “The mortars were raining down and planes were targeting everything.
Even now, after all these years, I flinch at the sound of planes in war
movies.”
And thereafter
Greece’s descent into catastrophic civil war: a cruel and bloody episode in
British as well as Greek history which every Greek knows to their core –
differently, depending on which side they were on – but which remains curiously
untold in Britain, perhaps out of shame, maybe the arrogance of a lack of
interest. It is a narrative of which the millions of Britons who go to savour
the glories of Greek antiquity or disco-dance around the islands Mamma Mia-style, are unaware.
The legacy of this
betrayal has haunted Greece ever since, its shadow hanging over the turbulence
and violence that erupted in 2008 after the killing of a schoolboy by police –
also called the Dekemvriana – and created an abyss between the left and right
thereafter.
“The 1944 December
uprising and 1946-49 civil war period infuses the present,” says the leading
historian of these events, André Gerolymatos, “because there has never been a
reconciliation. In France or Italy, if you fought the Nazis, you were respected
in society after the war, regardless of ideology. In Greece, you found yourself
fighting – or imprisoned and tortured by – the people who had collaborated with
the Nazis, on British orders. There has never been a reckoning with that crime,
and much of what is happening in Greece now is the result of not coming to
terms with the past.”
Before the war,
Greece was ruled by a royalist dictatorship whose emblem of a fascist axe and
crown well expressed its dichotomy once war began: the dictator, General
Ioannis Metaxas, had been trained as an army officer in Imperial Germany, while
Greek King George II – an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – was
attached to Britain. The Greek left, meanwhile, had been reinforced by a huge
influx of politicised refugees and liberal intellectuals from Asia Minor, who
crammed into the slums of Pireaus and working-class Athens.
Both dictator and
king were fervently anti-communist, and Metaxas banned the Communist Party,
KKE, interning and torturing its members, supporters and anyone who did not
accept “the national ideology” in camps and prisons, or sending them into
internal exile. Once war started, Metaxas refused to accept Mussolini’s
ultimatum to surrender and pledged his loyalty to the Anglo-Greek alliance. The
Greeks fought valiantly and defeated the Italians, but could not resist the
Wehrmacht. By the end of April 1941, the Axis forces imposed a harsh occupation
of the country. The Greeks – at first spontaneously, later in organised groups
– resisted.
But, noted the
British Special Operations Executive (
Britain’s natural
allies were therefore EAM – an alliance of left wing and agrarian parties of
which the KKE was dominant, but by no means the entirety – and its partisan
military arm,
There is no overstating
the horror of occupation. Professor Mark Mazower’s book Inside Hitler’s Greece describes hideous bloccos or “round-ups” – whereby crowds
would be corralled into the streets so that masked informers could point out
By autumn 1944,
Greece had been devastated by occupation and famine. Half a million people had
died – 7% of the population.
On 12 October the
Germans evacuated Athens. Some
In and around the
European parliament in Brussels, the man in a Greek fisherman’s cap, with his
mane of white hair and moustache, stands out. He is Manolis
Glezos, senior MEP for the leftist Syriza party of Greece.
Glezos is a man of
humbling greatness. On 30 May 1941, he climbed the Acropolis with another
partisan and tore down the swastika flag that had been hung there a month
before. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, was tortured and as a result
suffered from tuberculosis. He escaped and was re-arrested twice – the second
time by collaborators. He recalls being sentenced to death in May 1944, before
the Germans left Athens – “They told me my grave had already been dug”. Somehow
he avoided execution and was then saved from a Greek courtmartial’s firing
squad during the civil war period by international outcry led by General de
Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev Geoffrey
Fisher.”
Seventy years
later, he is an icon of the Greek left who is also hailed as the greatest
living authority on the resistance. “The English, to this day, argue that they
liberated Greece and saved it from communism,” he says. “But that is the basic
problem. They never liberated Greece. Greece had been liberated by the
resistance, groups across the spectrum, not just EAM, on 12 October. I was
there, on the streets – people were everywhere shouting: ‘Freedom!’ we cried, Laokratia! – ‘Power to the People!’”
The British duly
arrived on 18 October, installed a provisional government under Georgios
Papandreou and prepared to restore the king. “From the moment they came,”
recalls Glezos, “the people and the resistance greeted them as allies. There
was nothing but respect and friendship towards the British. We had no idea that
we were already giving up our country and our rights.” It was only a matter of
time before EAM walked out of the provisional government in frustration over
demands that the partisans demobilise. The negotiations broke down on 2
December.
Official British
thinking is reflected in War Cabinet papers and other documents kept in the
Public Record Office at Kew. As far back as 17 August 1944, Churchill had
written a “Personal and Top Secret” memo to US president Franklin Roosevelt to
say that: “The War Cabinet and Foreign Secretary are much concerned about what
will happen in Athens, and indeed Greece, when the Germans crack or when their
divisions try to evacuate the country. If there is a long hiatus after German
authorities have gone from the city before organised government can be set up,
it seems very likely that EAM and the Communist extremists will attempt to
seize the city.”
But what the
freedom fighters wanted, insists Glezos “was what we had achieved during the
war: a state ruled by the people for the people. There was no plot to take over
Athens as Churchill always maintained. If we had wanted to do that, we could
have done so before the British arrived.” During November, the British set
about building the new National Guard, tasked to police Greece and disarm the
wartime militias. In reality, disarmament applied to
In conversation,
Gerolymatos says: “So far as
Any British notion
that the Communists were poised for revolution fell within the context of the
so-called Percentages Agreement, forged between Churchill and Soviet Commissar
Josef Stalin at the code-named “Tolstoy Conference” in Moscow on 9 October
1944. Under the terms agreed in what Churchill called “a naughty document”,
southeast Europe was carved up into “spheres of influence”, whereby – broadly –
Stalin took Romania and Bulgaria, while Britain, in order to keep Russia out of
the Mediterranean, took Greece. The obvious thing to have done, argues
Gerolymatos, “would have been to incorporate
“But the British
and the Greek government in exile decided from the outset that
Meanwhile,
continues Gerolymatos: “The Greek communists had decided not to try to take
over the country, as least not until late November/early December 1944. The KKE
wanted to push for a left-of-centre government and be part of it, that’s all.”
Echoing Glezos, he says: “If they had wanted a revolution, they would not have
left 50,000 armed men outside the capital after liberation – they’d have
brought them in.”
“By recruiting the
collaborators, the British changed the paradigm, signalling that the old order
was back. Churchill wanted the conflict,” says Gerolymatos. “We must remember:
there was no Battle for Greece. A large number of the British troops that
arrived were administrative, not line units. When the fighting broke out in
December, the British and the provisional government let the Security
Battalions out of Goudi; they knew how to fight street-to-street because they’d
done it with the Nazis. They’d been fighting
The morning of Sunday
3 December was a sunny one, as several processions of Greek republicans,
anti-monarchists, socialists and communists wound their way towards Syntagma
Square. Police cordons blocked their way, but several thousand broke through;
as they approached the square, a man in military uniform shouted: “Shoot the
bastards!” The lethal fusillade – from Greek police positions atop the
parliament building and British headquarters in the Grande Bretagne hotel –
lasted half an hour. By noon, a second crowd of demonstrators entered the
square, until it was jammed with 60,000 people. After several hours, a column
of British paratroops cleared the square; but the Battle of Athens had begun,
and Churchill had his war.
Manolis Glezos was
sick that morning, suffering from tuberculosis. “But when I heard what had
happened, I got off my sick bed,” he recalls. The following day, Glezos was
roaming the streets, angry and determined, disarming police stations. By the
time the British sent in an armoured division he and his comrades were waiting.
“I note the fact,”
he says, “that they would rather use those troops to fight our population than
German Nazis!” By the time British tanks rolled in from the port of Pireaus, he
was lying in wait: “I remember them coming up the Sacred Way. We were dug in a
trench. I took out three tanks,” he says. “There was much bloodshed, a lot of
fighting, I lost many very good friends. It was difficult to strike at an
Englishman, difficult to kill a British soldier – they had been our allies. But
now they were trying to destroy the popular will, and had declared war on our
people”.
At battle’s peak,
Glezos says, the British even set up sniper nests on the Acropolis. “Not even
the Germans did that. They were firing down on EAM targets, but we didn’t fire
back, so as not [to harm] the monument.”
On 5 December, Lt
Gen Scobie imposed martial law and the following day ordered the aerial bombing
of the working-class Metz quarter. “British and government forces,” writes
anthropologist Neni Panourgia in her study of families in that time, “having at
their disposal heavy armament, tanks, aircraft and a disciplined army, were
able to make forays into the city, burning and bombing houses and streets and
carving out segments of the city… The German tanks had been replaced by British
ones, the SS and Gestapo officers by British soldiers.” The house belonging to
actor Mimis Fotopoulos, she
writes, was burned out with a portrait of Churchill above the fireplace.
“I recall shouting
slogans in English, during one battle in Koumoundourou Square because I had a
strong voice and it was felt I could be heard,” says poet Títos Patríkios as we
talk in his apartment. “‘We are brothers, there’s nothing to divide us, come
with us!’ That’s what I was shouting in the hope that they [British troops]
would withdraw. And right at that moment, with my head poked above the wall, a
bullet brushed over my helmet. Had I not been yanked down by Evangelos
Goufas[another poet], who was there next to me, I would have been dead.”
He can now smile at
the thought that only months after the killing in the square he was back at
school, studying English on a British Council summer course. “We were enemies,
but at the same time friends. In one battle I came across an injured English soldier
and I took him to a field hospital. I gave him my copy of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Kidnapped which I
remember he kept.”
It is illuminating
to read the dispatches by British soldiers themselves, as extracted by the head
censor, Capt JB Gibson, now stored at the Public Record Office. They give no
indication that the enemy they fight was once a partisan ally, indeed many
troops think they are fighting a German-backed force. A warrant officer writes:
“Mr Churchill and his speech bucked us no end, we know now what we are fighting
for and against, it is obviously a Hun element behind all this trouble.” From
“An Officer”: “You may ask: why should our boys give their lives to settle
Greek political differences, but they are only Greek political differences? I say:
no, it is all part of the war against the Hun, and we must go on and
exterminate this rebellious element.”
Cabinet papers at
Kew trace the reactions in London: a minute of 12 December records Harold
Macmillan, political advisor to Field Marshal Alexander, returning from Athens
to recommend “a proclamation of all civilians against us as rebels, and a
declaration those found in civilian clothes opposing us with weapons were
liable to be shot, and that 24 hours notice should be given that certain areas
were to be wholly evacuated by the civilian population” – ergo, the British
Army was to depopulate and occupy Athens. Soon, reinforced British troops had
the upper hand and on Christmas Eve Churchill arrived in the Greek capital in a
failed bid to make peace on Christmas Day.
“I will now tell
you something I have never told anyone,” says Manolis Glezos mischievously. On
the evening of 25 December Glezos would take part in his most daring escapade,
laying more than a ton of dynamite under the hotel Grande Bretagne, where Lt
Gen Scobie had headquartered himself. “There were about 30 of us involved. We
worked through the tunnels of the sewerage system; we had people to cover the
grid-lines in the streets, so scared we were that we’d be heard. We crawled
through all the shit and water and laid the dynamite right under the hotel,
enough to blow it sky high.
“I carried the fuse
wire myself, wire wound all around me, and I had to unravel it. We were
absolutely filthy, covered [in excrement] and when we got out of the sewerage
system I remember the boys washing us down. I went over to the boy with the
detonator; and we waited, waited for the signal, but it never came. Nothing.
There was no explosion. Then I found out: at the last minute EAM found out that
Churchill was in the building, and put out an order to call off the attack.
They’d wanted to blow up the British command, but didn’t want to be responsible
for assassinating one of the big three.”
At the end of the
Dekemvriana, thousands had been killed; 12,000 leftists rounded up and sent to
camps in the Middle East. A truce was signed on 12 February, the only clause of
which that was even partially honoured was the demobilisation of
Títos Patríkios is
not the kind of man who wants the past to impinge on the present. But he does
not deny the degree to which this history has done just that – affecting his
poetry, his movement, his quest to find “le mot juste”. This most measured and
mild-mannered of men would spend years in concentration camps, set up with the
help of the British as civil war beckoned. With imprisonment came hard labour,
and with hard labour came torture, and with exile came censorship. “The first
night on Makronissos [the most infamous camp] we were all beaten very badly.
“I spent six months
there, mostly breaking stones, picking brambles and carrying sand. Once, I was
made to stand for 24 hours after it had been discovered that a newspaper had
published a letter describing the appalling conditions in the camp. But though
I had written it, and had managed to pass it on to my mother, I never admitted
to doing so and throughout my time there I never signed a statement of
repentance.”
Patríkios was among
the relatively fortunate; thousands of others were executed, usually in public,
their severed heads or hanging bodies routinely displayed in public squares.
His Majesty’s embassy in Athens commented by saying the exhibition of severed
heads “is a regular custom in this country which cannot be judged by western
European standards”.
The name of the man
in command of the “British Police Mission” to Greece is little known. Sir
Charles Wickham had been assigned by Churchill to oversee the new Greek
security forces – in effect, to recruit the collaborators. Anthropologist Neni
Panourgia describes Wickham as “one of the persons who traversed the empire
establishing the infrastructure needed for its survival,” and credits him with
the establishment of one of the most vicious camps in which prisoners were
tortured and murdered, at Giaros.
From Yorkshire,
Wickham was a military man who served in the Boer War, during which
concentration camps in the modern sense were invented by the British. He then
fought in Russia, as part of the allied Expeditionary Force sent in 1918 to aid
White Russian Czarist forces in opposition to the Bolshevik revolution. After
Greece, he moved on in 1948 to Palestine. But his qualification for Greece was
this: Sir Charles was the first Inspector General of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary, from 1922 to 1945.
The RUC was founded
in 1922, following what became known as the Belfast pogroms of 1920-22, when
Catholic streets were attacked and burned. It was, writes the historian Tim Pat
Coogan, “conceived not as a regular police body, but as a counter-insurgency
one… The new force contained many recruits who joined up wishing to be ordinary
policemen, but it also contained murder gangs headed by men like a head
constable who used bayonets on his victims because it prolonged their agonies.”
As the writer
Michael Farrell found out when researching his book Arming the Protestants, much material pertaining to Sir
Charles’s incorporation of these UVF and Special Constabulary militiamen into
the RUC has been destroyed, but enough remains to give a clear indication of
what was happening. In a memo written by Wickham in November 1921, before the
formation of the RUC, and while the partition treaty of December that year was
being negotiated, he had addressed “All County Commanders” as follows: “Owing
to the number of reports which has been received as to the growth of
unauthorised loyalist defence forces, the government have under consideration
the desirability of obtaining the services of the best elements of these
organisations.”
Coogan, Ireland’s
greatest and veteran historian, stakes no claim to neutrality over matters
concerning the Republic and Union, but historical facts are objective and he
has a command of those that none can match. We talk at his home outside Dublin
over a glass of whiskey appositely called “Writer’s Tears”.
“It’s the narrative
of empire,” says Coogan, “and, of course, they applied it to Greece. That same
combination of concentration camps, putting the murder gangs in uniform, and
calling it the police. That’s colonialism, that’s how it works. You use
whatever means are necessary, one of which is terror and collusion with
terrorists. It works.
“Wickham organised
the RUC as the armed wing of Unionism, which is something it remained
thereafter,” he says. “How long was it in the history of this country before
the Chris Patten report of 1999, and Wickham’s hands were finally prised off
the police? That’s a hell of a long piece of history – and how much suffering,
meanwhile?”
The head of MI5
reported in 1940 that “in the personality and experience of Sir Charles
Wickham, the fighting services have at their elbow a most valuable friend and
counsellor”. When the intelligence services needed to integrate the Greek
Security Battalions – the Third Reich’s “Special Constabulary” – into a new
police force, they had found their man.
Greek academics
vary in their views on how directly responsible Wickham was in establishing the
camps and staffing them with the torturers. Panourgia finds the camp on Giaros
– an island which even the Roman Emperor Tiberius decreed unfit for prisoners –
to have been Wickham’s own direct initiative. Gerolymatos, meanwhile, says:
“The Greeks didn’t need the British to help them set up camps. It had been done
before, under Metaxas.” Papers at Kew show British police serving under Wickham
to be regularly present in the camps.
Gerolymatos adds:
“The British – and that means Wickham – knew who these people were. And that’s
what makes it so frightening. They were the people who had been in the torture
chambers during occupation, pulling out the fingernails and applying
thumbscrews.” By September 1947, the year the Communist Party was outlawed,
19,620 leftists were held in Greek camps and prisons, 12,000 of them in
Makronissos, with a further 39,948 exiled internally or in British camps across
the Middle East. There exist many terrifying accounts of torture, murder and
sadism in the Greek concentration camps – one of the outrageous atrocities in
postwar Europe. Polymeris Volgis of New York University describes how a system
of repentance was introduced as though by a “latter-day secular Inquisition”,
with confessions extracted through “endless and violent degradation”.
Women detainees
would have their children taken away until they confessed to being “Bulgarians”
and “whores”. The repentance system led Makronissos to be seen as a “school”
and “National University” for those now convinced that “Our life belongs to
Mother Greece,’ in which converts were visited by the king and queen, ministers
and foreign officials. “The idea”, says Patríkios, who never repented, “was to reform
and create patriots who would serve the homeland.”
Minors in the
Kifissa prison were beaten with wires and socks filled with concrete. “On the
boys’ chests, they sewed name tags”, writes Voglis, “with Slavic endings added
to the names; many boys were raped”. A female prisoner was forced, after a
severe beating, to stand in the square of Kastoria holding the severed heads of
her uncle and brother-in-law. One detainee at Patras prison in May 1945 writes
simply this: “They beat me furiously on the soles of my feet until I lost my
sight. I lost the world.”
Manolis Glezos has
a story of his own. He produces a book about the occupation, and shows a
reproduction of the last message left by his brother Nikos, scrawled on the
inside of a beret. Nikos was executed by collaborators barely a month before
the Germans evacuated Greece. As he was being driven to the firing squad, the
19-year-old managed to throw the cap he was wearing from the window of the car.
Subsequently found by a friend and restored to the family, the cap is among
Glezos’s most treasured possessions.
Scribbled inside,
Nikos had written: “Beloved mother. I kiss you. Greetings. Today I am going to
be executed, falling for the Greek People. 10-5-44.”
Nowhere else in
newly liberated Europe were Nazi sympathisers enabled to penetrate the state
structure – the army, security forces, judiciary – so effectively. The
resurgence of neo-fascism in the form of present-day far-right party Golden
Dawn has direct links to the failure to purge the state of right-wing
extremists; many of Golden Dawn’s supporters are descendants of Battalionists,
as were the “The Colonels” who seized power in 1967.
Glezos says: “I
know exactly who executed my brother and I guarantee they all got off
scot-free. I know that the people who did it are in government, and no one was
ever punished.” Glezos has dedicated years to creating a library in his
brother’s honour. In Brussels, he unabashedly asks interlocutors to contribute
to the fund by popping a “frango” (a euro) into a silk purse. It is, along with
the issue of war reparations, his other great campaign, his last wish: to erect
a building worthy of the library that will honour Nikos. “The story of my
brother is the story of Greece,” he says.
There is no claim
that
In December 1946,
Greek prime minister Konstantinos Tsaldaris, faced with the probability of
British withdrawal, visited Washington to seek American assistance. In
response, the US State Department formulated a plan for military intervention
which, in March 1947, formed the basis for an announcement by President Truman
of what became known as the Truman
Doctrine, to intervene with force wherever communism was considered a
threat. All that had passed in Greece on Britain’s initiative was the first
salvo of the Cold War.
Glezos still calls
himself a communist. But like Patríkios, who rejected Stalinism, he believes
that communism, as applied to Greece’s neighbours to the north, would have been
a catastrophe. He recalls how he even gave Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader
who would de-Stalinise the Soviet Union “an earful about it all”. The occasion
arose when Khrushchev invited Glezos – who at the height of the Cold War was a
hero in the Soviet Union, honoured with a postage stamp bearing his image – to
the Kremlin. It was 1963 and Khrushchev was in talkative mood. Glezos wanted to
know why the Red Army, having marched through Bulgaria and Romania, stopped at
the Greek border. Perhaps the Russian leader could explain.
“He looked at me
and said, ‘Why?’
“I said: ‘Because
Stalin didn’t behave like a communist. He divided up the world with others and
gave Greece to the English.’ Then I told him what I really thought, that Stalin
had been the cause of our downfall, the root of all evil. All we had wanted was
a state where the people ruled, just like our [then] government in the
mountains, where you can still see the words ‘all powers spring from the people
and are executed by the people’ inscribed into the hills. What they wanted, and
created, was rule by the party.”
Khrushchev, says
Glezos, did not openly concur. “He sat and listened. But then after our meeting
he invited me to dinner, which was also attended by Leonid Brezhnev [who
succeeded Khrushchev in 1964] and he listened for another four and a half
hours. I have always taken that for tacit agreement.”
For Patríkios, it
was not until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, that the penny dropped: a
line had been drawn across the map, agreed by Churchill and Stalin. “When I saw
the west was not going to intervene [during the Budapest uprising] I realised what
had happened – the agreed ‘spheres of influence’. And later, I understood that
the Dekemvriana was not a local conflict, but the beginning of the Cold War
that had started as a warm war here in Greece.”
Patríkios returned
to Athens as a detainee “on leave” and was eventually granted a passport in
1959. Upon procuring it, he immediately got on a ship to Paris where he would
spend the next five years studying sociology and philosophy at the Sorbonne.
“In politics there are no ethics,” he says, “especially imperial politics.”
It’s the afternoon
of 25 January 2009. The tear gas that has drenched Athens – a new variety,
imported from Israel – clears. A march in support of a Bulgarian cleaner, whose
face has been disfigured in an acid attack by neo-fascists, has been broken up
by riot police after hours of street-fighting.
Back in the
rebel-held quarter of Exarcheia, a young woman called Marina pulls off her
balaclava and draws air. Over coffee, she answers the question: why Greece? Why
is it so different from the rest of Europe in this regard – the especially
bitter war between left and right? “Because,” she replies, “of what was done to
us in 1944. The persecution of the partisans who fought the Nazis, for which
they were honoured in France, Italy, Belgium or the Netherlands – but for
which, here, they were tortured and killed on orders from your government.”
She continues: “I
come from a family that has been detained and tortured for two generations
before me: my grandfather after the Second World War, my father under the Junta
of the colonels – and now it could be me, any day now. We are the grandchildren
of the andartes, and our
enemies are Churchill’s Greek grandchildren.”
“The whole thing”,
spits Dr Gerolymatos, “was for nothing. None of this need have happened, and
the British crime was to legitimise people whose record under occupation by the
Third Reich put them beyond legitimacy. It happened because Churchill believed
he had to bring back the Greek king. And the last thing the Greek people wanted
or needed was the return of a de-frocked monarchy backed by Nazi collaborators.
But that is what the British imposed, and it has scarred Greece ever since.”
“All those
collaborators went into the system,” says Manilos Glezos. “Into the government
mechanism – during and after the civil war, and their sons went into the
military junta. The deposits remain, like malignant cells in the system.
Although we liberated Greece, the Nazi collaborators won the war, thanks to the
British. And the deposits remain, like bacilli in the system.”
But there is one
last thing Glezos would like to make clear. “You haven’t asked: ‘Why do I go
on? Why I am doing this when I am 92 years and two months old?’ he says, fixing
us with his eyes. “I could, after all, be sitting on a sofa in slippers with my
feet up,” he jests. “So why do I do this?”
He answers himself:
“You think the man sitting opposite you is Manolis but you are wrong. I am not
him. And I am not him because I have not forgotten that every time someone was
about to be executed, they said: ‘Don’t forget me. When you say good morning,
think of me. When you raise a glass, say my name.’ And that is what I am doing
talking to you, or doing any of this. The man you see before you is all those
people. And all this is about not forgetting them.”
Timeline:
the battle between left and right
Late summer 1944 German forces withdraw from most of Greece, which is
taken over by local partisans. Most of them are members of
October 1944 Allied forces, led by General Ronald Scobie, enter Athens, the last
German-occupied area, on 13 October. Georgios Papandreou returns from exile
with the Greek government
2 December 1944 Rather than integrate
3 December 1944 Violence in Athens after 200,000 march against the
demands. More than 28 are killed and hundreds are injured. The 37-day
Dekemvrianá begins. Martial law is declared on 5 December
January/February 1945 Gen Scobie agrees to a ceasefire in exchange for
1945/46 Right-wing gangs kill more than 1,100 civilians, triggering civil war when
government forces start battling the new Democratic Army of Greece (DSE),
mainly former
1948-49 DSE suffers a catastrophic defeat in the summer of 1948, with nearly
20,000 killed. In July 1949 Tito closes the Yugoslav border, denying DSE
shelter. Ceasefire signed on 16 October 1949
21 April 1967 Right-wing forces seize power in a coup d’état. The junta lasts until
1974. Only in 1982 are communist veterans who had fled overseas allowed to
return to Greece