Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith - 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 hauntedGreece 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 (SOE):
“The right wing and monarchists were slower than their opponents in deciding to
resist the occupation, and were therefore of little use.”
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, ELAS.
There is no overstating the horror of occupation. Professor
Mark Mazower’s bookInside Hitler’s Greece describes hideous bloccos or
“round-ups” – whereby crowds would be corralled into the streets so that masked
informers could point out ELAS supporters to the Gestapo and Security
Battalions – which had been established by the collaborationist government to
assist the Nazis – for execution. Stripping and violation of women was a common
means to secure “confessions”. Mass executions took place “on the German
model”: in public, for purposes of intimidation; bodies would be left hanging
from trees, guarded by Security Battalion collaborators to prevent their
removal.
In response, ELAS mounted daily counterattacks on the Germans and
their quislings. The partisan movement was born in Athens but based in the
villages, so that Greece was progressively liberated from the countryside. The
SOE played its part, famous in military annals for the role of Brigadier Eddie
Myers and “Monty” Woodhouse in blowing up the Gorgopotomas viaduct in 1942 and
other operations with the partisans – andartesin Greek.
By autumn 1944, Greece had been devastated by occupation and
famine. Half a million people had died – 7% of the population. ELAS had,
however, liberated dozens of villages and become a proto-government,
administering parts of the country while the official state withered away. But
after German withdrawal, ELAS kept its 50,000 armed partisans outside the
capital, and in May 1944 agreed to the arrival of British troops, and to place
its men under the officer commanding, Lt Gen Ronald Scobie.
On 12 October the Germans evacuated Athens. Some ELAS
fighters, however, had been in the capital all along, and welcomed the fresh
air of freedom during a six-day window between liberation and the arrival of
the British. One partisan in particular is still alive, aged 92, and is a
legend of modern Greece... read more: