Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (55 page)

Doris was no fool, and guessed what was about to happen to him. While members of the group were led away to the cave in twos he managed to untie his hands, so that when he was finally brought face to face with his executioners he was able to hit his guard and run away. In spite of the shots that were fired at him he escaped down the mountain and made his way to Argos. A day after his escape, EAM executed his other brother, Nikos, as an act of retribution.

Several months later, after the liberation, Doris got himself a weapon and returned to the area with the intention of avenging himself on Vassiliki Papadimitriou and her family once and for all. On 12 April 1945 he and a band of friends and relatives killed Panayotis Kostakis, a relative of the Papadimitriou family whom Doris believed had been involved in denouncing him to EAM. In reply, that June, two of the Papadimitriou brothers killed Doris’s brother-in-law. The following February, Doris and his band attacked the Papadimitriou house and killed Vassiliki’s mother and her young son Yorgos – and three months later they also hunted down and shot one of Vassiliki’s brothers, her brother-in-law and her three-year-old niece. In the words of one of the villagers, ‘Vassilis [Doris] and Vasso [Papadimitriou] began the whole affair; they survived, but everyone else around them was killed.’

This whole sorry story is a perfect example of how the war, and political forces that imposed themselves on a small Peloponnesian village, turned a minor personal problem into a cycle of violence and murder. Had the Italian occupiers of the region not acted on Doris’s malicious tip-off, his resentment at being rejected by Vassiliki would probably have melted away harmlessly over time. Likewise, had EAM not over-reacted to the equally malicious denunciations by Vassiliki’s family then the situation might not have become murderous. And finally, had the right-wing local authorities after the war arrested Doris rather than giving him carte blanche to hunt down his enemies, the cycle of violence could have been stopped in its tracks. When Doris and his associates were finally arrested and tried they were happy to pretend that they had been acting purely out of patriotism against a family who were violent EAM revolutionaries. It is a sign of just how comprehensive the anti-Communist backlash had become by 1947 that, despite the obviously personal nature of their crimes, both Doris and his accomplices were acquitted.

The Defeat of Communism in Greece

Given the entrenched positions of those at both ends of the political spectrum, and the intense and personal hatred that had developed between them, it was not entirely surprising that postwar attempts to steer the country back towards the centre failed. Papandreou’s ‘government of national unity’ came under increasing attack from both sides. Even the British were unable to keep control, and large parts of the country were plunged into varying degrees of chaos for several years after the war was over.

The British have often been condemned for the part they played in propping up those on the Greek right and facilitating their subsequent reign of terror. For all their distrust of Communists, however, the British were more guilty of political naivety than of outright suppression. Their biggest mistake was during December 1944 when they succumbed to the demands of monarchist army commanders to rearm the Security Battalions and other right-wing collaborationist militias who were being held in camps outside Athens. Under attack from guerrilla forces, the British were in no position to refuse an offer of help, even if it did come from dubious sources. But as a consequence they allowed the new National Guard to become suddenly swamped with those same right-wing collaborators whom they had only recently defeated.

EAM had also been guilty of naivety. By resigning from Papandreou’s government, they had committed the first of a series of grave political errors: their action, ironically, served to bring about the very development that they had been protesting to avoid – an openly right-wing National Guard. Over the following months many of these Guards joined forces with right-wing bands and unleashed a White Terror on the Greek countryside. Security Battalionists were released from prison, suspected leftists and their families were attacked, and the offices of left-wing groups were ransacked.

EAM’s second mistake, though they can hardly be blamed for it, was to stand by the terms of the Varkiza ceasefire agreement and hand over at least some of their weapons to the authorities. Once disarmed, former
andartes
were no longer in a position to defend themselves, and were often mercilessly pursued by their enemies. Those who refused to disband, such as Aris Velouchiotis, were denounced by the Communist Party, and eventually hunted down by government troops and massacred. In a scene of medieval barbarity, Aris’s severed head was displayed in the main square in Trikala.
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Greek right-wingers, by contrast, never even pretended to stand by the terms of the ceasefire. They appeared to believe that the British would support them ‘under any and all circumstances’, and therefore felt free to act in whatever way they chose.
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In the year after the Varkiza agreement, according to official sources, right-wing bands murdered 1,192 people, wounded 6,413 and raped 159 women – although the true numbers are undoubtedly greater.
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In some areas, particularly the north and the Peloponnese, the police embarked on a programme of mass arrests of anyone suspected of links with EAM. While the British were always highly critical of such blatant persecution, they exerted very little pressure on either the Greek government or rightist circles to put a stop to it.
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In the light of this, it is unsurprising that the Communists became extremely resentful of the British presence on Greek soil. In years to come they would characterize the period of the ‘White Terror’ as a ‘vast terrorist orgy of monarcho-fascism and the total enslavement of the Greek people by foreign imperialists’.
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In the following months the Greek right made a concerted effort to ensure that they controlled the country’s armed forces, the National Guard, the gendarmerie and the police. According to sources within the Papandreou government, Communists were prevented from joining any of these institutions because they could not be trusted not to betray Greek national interests – but the term‘Communist’ soon came to mean anyone with even moderately left-wing beliefs. Those already in the army or the police who were suspected of left-wing sympathies were immediately siphoned off into the reserves. These moves by the right were so extensive that many Allied observers began to fear that they were planning a coup d’état. At the very least they appeared to be trying to exercise improper influence over the forthcoming elections in March 1946.
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This brings us to the final great mistake of the Greek Communist Party. Incensed by the repeated breaches of the Varkiza agreement, the Communists decided to go against Soviet advice and abstain from the elections that March, thereby handing a massive victory to the royalist right. That autumn the monarchists secured the return of the king in a highly dubious referendum. At a local level right-wing officials used their new mandate to intensify anti-Communist repression. The gendarmerie expanded rapidly, and by September 1946 was more than treble the size it had been the previous year.
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Violence escalated to a point where the government no longer controlled what was happening in the provinces. By the end of 1946 it was clear that many Greek leftists had no choice but to flee their homes and take to the mountains once more. The Communist Party formed the Democratic Army of Greece (Dimokratikos Stratos Ellados, or DSE) – the natural successor to ELAS - and civil war returned to the country.
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I will not give a blow-by-blow account of the next two years, in which the cycle of violence and counter-violence generally continued in much the same way as it had done during the war. The main difference now was that it was no longer the Germans, Bulgarians and Italians who supported the forces of the right against the Communists, but the British and Americans, who saw the maintenance of anti-communism as the lesser of two evils. Western aid poured into the country, as did British and American materiel, and the Greek government eventually employed the age-old British method of quelling uprisings – that of forcibly relocating tens of thousands of villagers to internment camps in order to starve out the guerrillas. The Greek Communists, by contrast, struggled to win support from outside the country. When Stalin refused to help them, they began to rely instead on Tito’s Yugoslavian Partisans — an arrangement that lasted until 1948. But when the Greek Communist Party sided with Stalin after the Tito-Stalin split, even this backing was withdrawn, and the writing was on the wall. The civil war in Greece finally came to an end in 1949 with the complete collapse of the left.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole period of Greek history was the double standards that existed in the justice system. While the prosecution of Greek collaborators largely ceased in 1945, Greek Communists continued to be arrested and prosecuted in huge numbers. In September 1945, according to official figures, the number of leftists in prison outnumbered alleged collaborators by more than seven to one. The figures for executions were even worse. By 1948, according to American sources, only twenty-five collaborators and four war criminals had been judicially executed in Greece.
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More than
a hundred times
that number of death sentences were carried out on leftists between July 1946 and September 1949.
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Those who were not executed often languished in jail for years or even decades. By the end of 1945 some 48,956 EAM supporters were behind bars, and the number would remain at around 50,000 until the end of the 1940S.
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Even after the infamous internment camps on Makronisos were closed down in 1950 there were still 20,219 political prisoners in Greece and 3,406 in exile.
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As late as the 1960s there were still hundreds of men and women in Greek prisons whose only crime was to have been members of the resistance groups that fought against the Germans.
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This ‘trial of the resistance’, as Italian historians call it, occurred in several countries after the war – but nowhere was it as harsh as it was in Greece. For twenty-five years the country was ruled by a combination of conservative politicians, the army and shadowy American-backed paramilitary organizations. The ultimate low point was between 1967 and 1974, when the country was taken over by a military dictatorship. During this time a law was passed which provided the final insult to the men and women who had fought for the liberation of Greece during the war: EAM/ELAS partisans were formally defined as state ‘enemies’, while former members of the Security Battalions, who had fought on the side of the Germans, were made eligible for state pensions.
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The Curtain Descends

The Greek civil war was to have profound effects for the rest of Europe. It was the first and bloodiest clash in what was soon to become a new, Cold War between East and West, left and right, communism and capitalism. In some respects, what happened in Greece defined the Cold War. It not only drew the southern boundary of the Iron Curtain, but provided a stark warning to Communists in Italy and France, and indeed all over western Europe, about what might happen if they were tempted to try and seize control. But perhaps most importantly it drew the Americans back into Europe by forcing them to understand that isolationism was no longer an option. When the British announced that they could not afford to continue financing the Greek government’s war against the Communists, the Americans were obliged to step in. They would remain in Greece, and at strategic points across the continent, for the rest of the century.

It was America’s sudden involvement in Greece that gave rise to the Truman Doctrine – the US policy of containing what the American diplomat George F. Kennan called the Communist ‘flood’ that was threatening to wash over all of Europe.
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On 12 March 1947 President Truman gave a speech to Congress declaring that it should now be United States’ policy ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’, and that they should begin by granting a massive aid package to Greece and Turkey.
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This was effectively drawing a line in the sand: eastern Europe might be beyond rescuing from communism, but the eastern Mediterranean would not be allowed to follow suit.

The logical conclusion of this new American policy was the announcement of the European Recovery Programme, otherwise known as the Marshall Plan after the incumbent US Secretary of State George Marshall, in June 1947. This massive aid package was ostensibly open to every European country including the Soviet Union, provided they embark on greater economic cooperation with one another. But while the stated purpose of the Marshall Plan was to combat chaos and hunger across the continent, the Secretary of State hinted heavily that priority would be given to those countries who were struggling to resist ‘governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically’.
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In other words, while it professed to be a package of economic aid, the true purposes of the Marshall Plan were almost entirely political.
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