Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (54 page)

However, there was another side to EAM that was not quite so benign. To begin with, they would brook no competition. Unlike in France and Italy, where, generally speaking, the different resistance groups cooperated with each other to oust the Germans, EAM/ELAS spent much of their time fighting other resistance groups rather than the occupier. In April 1944, for example, ELAS units executed Colonel Dimitrios Psarros in Roumeli, not because he was a traitor but because he was the head of a rival resistance group. Many of the survivors of this group, which was called National and Social Liberation (EKKA), promptly joined the collaborationist ‘Security Battalions’ on the grounds that they now believed EAM/ELAS were a greater evil than the Germans.
¹⁷
The Communists also targeted the National Republican Greek League, EDES, a resistance group in central and western Greece, requisitioning their members’ food, their animals and eventually threatening their lives if they did not leave EDES and join EAM instead. As a consequence, many EDES members also defected to the Security Battalions; meanwhile many prominent EDES members, including their leader Napoleon Zervas, nurtured close ties with the collaborationist government and even the Germans in an unofficial anti-Communist alliance.
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After the war EAM members claimed that their excesses were merely ‘patriotic wrongful acts’ which, ‘since they are linked to the patriotic struggle … cannot be considered punishable’.
¹⁹
But the fact that they acted so violently against other resistance organizations shows that for all their nationalist rhetoric – even the acronym ELAS was a deliberate evocation of the Greek word for Greece,‘′Eλλ
ς’ – the majority of the resistance leadership was more concerned with the class war than it was with the war of national liberation. The Communists even opposed the British, despite the arms and money they supplied to Greek resistance groups of all political persuasions, because they were suspicious of Churchill’s monarchist sympathies.
²⁰

In areas where EAM/ELAS maintained absolute power, the people often found themselves subject to the whims of petty Communist dictators whose rule could be terrifyingly bloody. In the far north-east of the country, for example, a leader of an ELAS band who took the nom de guerre ‘Odysseus’ apparently went mad with power. After stamping out black-market activity in most of the Evros region, he turned his attention to ‘traitors’, a category that appeared to contain anyone who questioned his authority or who displayed any kind of Anglophilia. Many people were killed merely because members of Odysseus’s band had personal grudges against them. When a special mounted ‘Death Battalion’ was sent out with a list of ‘informers’ to be killed there was an argument amongst the battalion’s members over some of the names on the list. The intervention of their commander, ‘Telemachus’, is chilling: ‘This is a revolution,’ he said. ‘And things have to be done – even if a few innocents are killed, it won’t matter in the long run.’ The situation in Evros became so bad that eventually ELAS had to send a new leader to the area. Odysseus was arrested, tried and executed, and a more measured form of law and order was restored to the area.
²¹

Perhaps the most famous
andarte
of the war was Aris Velouchiotis, who ruled large parts of central Greece like a despot. One of the founders of ELAS, Aris had learned about the use of terror as a method of control in the years before the war when the police were cracking down on communism: he was arrested and tortured until he was willing to sign a renunciation of his party activities. The brutality he suffered appears to have rubbed off on him. Now himself in a position of power, he thought nothing of executing his own men for crimes as innocuous as stealing chickens – a form of exemplary justice that virtually wiped out indiscipline within the ranks of his band. Neither was he much concerned by the execution and torture of people he considered traitors or criminals. In the autumn of 1942, for example, he ordered the arrest of four respected family men in the village of Kleitso and tortured them mercilessly and unceasingly for almost a week. Their crime was the stealing of some wheat from the village storeroom – many years later, however, one of the store guards confessed to the village priest that all four men were innocent, because he himself had been the one to steal the wheat.
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Apologists for EAM often blame such excesses on rogues and mavericks who were impossible to control in a country fragmented by war. However, there is much evidence to suggest that such repression was more centrally organized – if not on a national level then at least on a regional one. In some parts of central Greece and the Peloponnese, terror was a deliberate and semi-official EAM method of controlling the population. Lists of names were drawn up by committees, submitted to other committees for approval and then passed on to special assassination squads who would execute the people on the list, often without even knowing what they were supposed to be guilty of. The bureaucratic nature of what would come to be known as the ‘Red Terror’ was chilling.
²³

In the Peloponnese, terror was directed not only at traitors but at ‘reactionaries’ – in other words, anyone who had voiced opposition to the Communist Party in the past. A distinction was made between ‘active’ reactionaries, who were executed, and ‘passive’ ones, who were supposed to be sent to concentration camps in the mountains – but in the event many of those who were sent to the mountains were executed when they got there.
²⁴
Many village mayors, village doctors, merchants and other notables were killed, whether or not they had ever opposed the Communist Party – it was enough that they were
potentially
disloyal to EAM/ELAS.

Some local ELAS leaders, such as Theodoros Zengos, who controlled the area around Argos and Corinth, appear to have demanded a fixed quota of ‘reactionaries’ to be executed in every village under their jurisdiction.
²⁵
In the absence of reactionaries and collaborators, their families would be targeted. In February 1944, the Communist newspaper of Achaia province ran an article warning members of the collaborationist Security Battalions to defect to the resistance. ‘Otherwise we will exterminate them, we will burn their houses and we will destroy all their kin.’
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Such terror baffled the population, because it was a completely new phenomenon. Political arguments, uprisings, even coups had happened before in Greece, but they had been relatively bloodless affairs; they had certainly not resulted in Greeks killing Greeks on anything like the scale that was now, suddenly, the norm. Suspected reactionaries were taken to camps in the mountains, often remote monasteries, which were every bit as horrific as the Gestapo prisons. Here they were frequently tortured, starved and finally executed by having their throats slit.
²⁷
Sometimes entire villages were written off as traitors, and massacres carried out on the population. In the Peloponnesian village of Heli, for example, ELAS took between sixty and eighty hostages, mostly old men and women, slaughtered them and threw their bodies into a well.
²⁸

Such terror was not unique to Greece, of course: terror was a method of control that the Nazis imposed upon most of occupied Europe, and Greece was no exception. Just as in other countries with large partisan movements, the Nazis were not the only ones to employ this tactic: it was also employed by those very Greeks who were supposed to be fighting to free the nation. And for a while, at least, it worked – dissent was stamped out in EAM-controlled areas, reactionaries and their families fled to the towns and Communist control became absolute. But it also drove many into the arms of the Germans, and particularly to the German-backed Security Battalions. One Battalion in the Peloponnese, for example, was set up by Leonidas Vrettakos, whose main motivation was to exact revenge for his brother, who had been killed by ELAS in the autumn of 1943.
²⁹
‘I went to the Germans,’ explained another Battalionist whose parents had both been killed by EAM. ‘What should I have done since there was no one else to turn to?’
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During 1943 and 1944 the collaborationist Security Battalions began to develop and expand, largely in response to Communist terror. Unfortunately the Battalions were often equally brutal, and in many areas launched a programme of random arrests, torture, execution, razing the homes of suspected EAM supporters and the general looting of food, livestock and possessions. Sometimes this was merely a case of indiscipline amongst troops that had been recruited from thuggish elements in the towns, but in other cases it was inspired by a rabid anti-communism that did not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty.

One British liaison officer in the Peloponnese summed up the escalating violence between the two sides as follows:

ELAS had at last found their real enemies – a Right Wing element armed … ELAS’ attitude to them was one of extreme hostility; and many of the worst ELAS atrocities were carried out against SB prisoners and against their families, who were normally removed to concentration camps. ELAS’ fury against the Security Battalions grew with what it fed on, and the Battalions themselves proved no less masters of the arts of intimidation and terrorisation.
³¹

Further north, in Thessaly and Macedonia, the growth of anti-Communist sentiments led to the formation of other German-backed organizations, such as the openly Fascist National Agricultural Federation of Anti-Communist Action, EASAD, which presided over a reign of terror in the city of Volos.
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In Macedonia, a far-right paramilitary group commanded by Colonel George Poulos conducted countless atrocities, including the massacre of seventy-five of their fellow Greeks at Giannitsa.
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In the face of such extreme violence from both sides it became increasingly difficult for the ordinary citizens of Greece to maintain any kind of moderation. As in those areas of Italy that were similarly contested between Communists and Fascists, many Greeks faced the difficult choice of joining collaborationist militias (and finding themselves on a Communist blacklist), or joining EAM/ELAS (and risking the lives, liberty and property of their families). There was often no middle way. This suited the Germans perfectly, who openly admitted that their intention was to sow dissension amongst the Greeks so that they ‘could sit back as spectators and watch the fight in peace’.
³⁴

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of all this was the highly personal nature of the violence. Villages across the country became split by their political standpoints, and disagreements that might in the past have been settled by an argument in the local
kafenia
now led to blood feuds that could see whole families murdered. Furthermore, while different families within the same village were often identified with one political group or the other, often their arguments had nothing to do with politics at all. Sharecroppers denounced one another to EAM in order to get their hands on each other’s crops; villagers accused one another of treachery in order to settle personal squabbles or feuds; professional rivals denounced one another in order to eliminate competition. In such instances, tensions that already existed in the community were allowed to escalate beyond all proportion, with EAM/ELAS (or their opponents) acting as the catalyst.

There are countless examples of how the influence of political forces allowed purely personal grudges to get out of hand. I shall give just one, which is the blood feud between the Doris and Papadimitriou families, as unravelled by the historian Stathis N. Kalyvas.
³⁵

In 1942 a young shepherd named Vassilis Doris fell in love with Vassiliki Papadimitriou, a girl who lived in the village of Douka in the mountains west of Argos. Unfortunately she did not return his affections, and fell for his brother Sotiris instead. Embittered, Doris decided to get his revenge on her. He told some local Italian troops that Vassiliki was hiding weapons, and as a consequence the troops went to her house and badly beat her up.

The following year, when EAM came to the area, Vassiliki’s family became prominent EAM supporters. They in turn wished to be avenged for what Doris had done, so they repeatedly denounced him as a traitor to EAM officials. Eventually one of their reports reached the provincial EAM committee. By now it was July 1944, and the regional Communist committee had begun their programme of weeding out reactionaries in the area. Accordingly, Vassilis Doris and his brother Sotiris were both arrested and taken to an EAM prison in the monastery of St George in Feneos. After a week here a guard came into the cells and called out twenty names, including those of Doris and his brother. They were told that they were being taken to the local ELAS headquarters, but in reality they were to be marched up the mountain to a cave where their throats would be slit.