Yet a new terror now began to strike the country; for while collaborators preserved their posts at the head of the army, the police, and the organs of state power, the partisans were persecuted, deported, and executed anew. For long years, up until 1974, the Greek resistance was presented as a criminal enterprise by successive governments. While the Resistance was finally recognized in 1982, it is still not the object of any official commemoration.

On May 8, 1945, Hitler’s successors signed Germany’s capitulation. By that point, Greece had already been liberated for six months. Across more than three years, the Greek people had waged a mass resistance against the fascist occupiers — the Italians, the Bulgarians, and above all the Germans — in which they had shown heroic courage in the face of a boundless terror.

Fear of a Red Greece

You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens and for neutralizing or destroying all EAM-ELAS [National Liberation Front – Greek People’s Liberation Army] bands approaching the city. You may make any regulations you like for the strict control of the streets or for the rounding up of any number of truculent persons…. It would be well of course if your command were reinforced by the authority of some Greek Government…. Do not, however, hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress…. We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.

The man who wrote these lines was none other than British prime minister Winston Churchill. This was in December 1944: Nazi troops were still resisting the Allies, which were making slow progress in Italy and being pushed back in the Ardennes faced with the Wehrmacht’s final counter-offensive. Yet the “bands” here targeted by Churchill were not groups of collaborators, but the partisans of the great National Liberation Front (EAM), which had for three years mounted mass resistance against the German occupiers.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean had been the center of a rivalry between Britain and Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 having put an end to the latter country’s ambitions in the region, in the early 1940s, Greece was under unchallenged British influence. In this context, the country was of some strategic importance.

The development of a Resistance allying the Communists with small pro-socialist parties had very quickly caused alarm within the British Foreign Office, which feared “Russian” penetration in the Mediterranean. In disgrace among the population and associated with general Ioannis Metaxas’s 1936-41 fascist dictatorship, the Greek monarchy seemed to Churchill to be the only force capable of assuring the maintenance of British domination.

In this context, London’s allies allowed it to act as it pleased. Despite the Wilsonian tradition — which was officially hostile to spheres of influence, above all when they troubled the penetration of US capital and US goods — Franklin D. Roosevelt supported Churchill. As for Joseph Stalin, he aimed above all to put an end to the war, seeking to avoid compromising his fragile “grand alliance” with the United States and the British. Ever since May 1944, Churchill had sought an arrangement over the Balkans; Stalin could accept this all the more easily as his interlocutor left him a free hand in Romania and Bulgaria.

Throughout the war, Churchill was subject to the “Greek storm.” As early as March 1941, when the German threat to the Balkans became clear, he had ordered his Near-East HQ to detach fifty thousand men to be sent to Greece. This initiative interrupted the victorious British offensive in Libya, albeit without preventing the Wehrmacht’s advance over Greek territory the following month.

The King of Greece, George II, took up exile in London together with his government — which was largely the same as under Metaxas’s dictatorship. His armed forces were partly reconstituted in Egypt and fought by the side of the British, who kept a close watch over them; indeed, the soldiers challenged the fact that most of the officers leading them were royalists.

In Greece itself, a mass resistance movement rapidly developed. The National Liberation Front emerged in September 1941. It organized imposing demonstrations in the big cities, and in spring of 1942, it moved to the creation of maquis units under the leadership of its people’s army, ELAS. At the same time, the agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) — created by Churchill in 1940 to carry out sabotage actions behind enemy lines, in collaboration with the resistance movements in the occupied countries — developed their own activities in relative autonomy.

The British tried without great success to encourage — or create — organizations competing with the EAM. But the leaders of the other parties were little tempted by active resistance. The EAM-ELAS remained by far the main resistance organization, indispensable from a military point of view. In exchange for its participation in the operations planned by the British, its representatives were received in Cairo in August 1943, in view of an accord with the exile government.

Here the British got a measure of the importance the EAM had taken on, as well as the extent of the desire for change among the population. At the same time, during the Quadrant Conference with Roosevelt in Quebec (August 17-24, 1943), Churchill saw his last hopes of an Allied landing in Greece vanish. Meanwhile, the Red Army’s advance beyond the USSR’s own frontiers was no longer in doubt. Churchill now took matters directly in hand, despite his advisers’ reticence, blocking off any possibility of negotiation and sending the EAM delegates home. At the same time, in a note to his high command, he drafted what would later become the MANNA plan: namely, to send an expeditionary corps to Greece after the German troops’ withdrawal.

Henceforth, the British agents’ mission was to damage ELAS by all means available. They tried to poach its partisans by bribing them with gold sovereigns — a convincing argument in these times of hyperinflation, when the British pound had reached 2 million drachma. They financed small competitor organizations, including those who called themselves “nationalist,” but were in fact accomplices of the Germans. They placed their own men within the collaborationist government as well as in the “security battalions” created by Athens.

These militias took part in the Nazi troops’ operations, with their procession of massacres and burned-down villages. In the towns, they took part in the bloko of whole neighborhoods, encircling a district in the middle of the night, picking out the partisans with the aid of masked informers, and then shooting them. The double game of the British — allowing the militias’ leaders to claim to be serving both them and the King — sowed the seeds of the civil war as early as the winter of 1943-44.

The EAM-ELAS nonetheless succeeded in liberating a large part of the country. It established popular institutions which formed a counter-state. The worries among the British peaked in March 1944, when a “government of the mountains” was created that organized elections. Conversely, this approach awakened the enthusiasm of the Greek armed forces in Egypt, who immediately demanded that the Resistance be included in the exile government. Churchill replied with pitiless repression. He had “rebellious” elements deported to camps in Africa, and set up a praetorian guard prepared to return to Greece with the King and the British troops upon Liberation.

Unable to eliminate the EAM by force within Greece itself, the British resorted to political maneuvers to which its leaders in the mountains — little experienced in this domain — struggled to respond. Caught between their unity strategy and their consciousness of the danger of a coup coming from the Right and the British, they fell into a trap at the carefully pre-arranged conference held in Lebanon in August 1944.

After a great deal of hesitation, they agreed to participate – represented only as a small minority — in a national unity government led by Churchill’s man George Papandreou (grandfather of the Socialist prime minister of the same name). The following month, the EAM leaders went as far as to recognize the authority of a British military governor, Ronald Scobie, who would arrive in Greece upon liberation.