Axis occupation of Greece
The occupation of Greece by the Axis powers began in April 1941 after Nazi Germany invaded the Kingdom of Greece in order to assist its ally, Italy, in their ongoing war that was initiated in October 1940, having encountered major strategical difficulties. Following the conquest of Crete, the entirety of Greece was occupied starting in June 1941. The occupation of the mainland lasted until Germany and its ally Bulgaria withdrew under Allied pressure in early October 1944, with Crete and some other Aegean Islands being surrendered to the Allies by German garrisons in May and June 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe.
The term Katochi in Greek means to possess or to have control over goods. It is used to refer to the occupation of Greece by Germany and the Axis Powers. This terminology reflects not only the military occupation but also the economic exploitation of Greece by Germany during that period. The use of "Katochi" underscores the notion of domination and control, highlighting how Greece was subjected to both military and financial subjugation under Axis occupation.
Overview
Fascist Italy had initially declared war and invaded Greece in October 1940, but had been pushed back by the Hellenic Army into neighbouring Albania, which at the time was an Italian protectorate. Nazi Germany intervened on its ally's behalf in southern Europe. While most of the Hellenic Army was located on the Albanian front lines to defend against Italian counter-attacks, a rapid German Blitzkrieg campaign took place from April to June 1941, resulting in Greece being defeated and occupied. The Greek government went into exile, and an Axis collaborationist government was established in its place. Greece's territory was divided into occupation zones run by the Axis powers, with the Nazi Germans administering the most important regions of the country themselves, including Athens, Thessaloniki and strategic Aegean Islands. Other regions of the country were run by Nazi Germany's partners, Italy and Bulgaria.The occupation destroyed the Greek economy and brought immense hardships to the Greek civilian population. Most of Greece's economic capacity was destroyed, including 80% of industry, 28% of infrastructure, 90% of its bridges, and 25% of its forests and other natural resources. Along with the loss of economic capacity, an estimated 7–11% of Greece's civilian population died as a result of the occupation. In Athens, 40,000 civilians died from starvation a total of 300,000 in the whole of the country and tens of thousands more died from reprisals by Nazis and their collaborators.
The Jewish population of Greece was nearly eradicated. Of its pre-war population of 75–77,000, around 11–12,000 survived, often by joining the resistance or being hidden. Most of those who died were deported to Auschwitz, while those under Bulgarian occupation in Thrace were sent to Treblinka. The Italians did not deport Jews living in territory they controlled, but when the Germans took it over from them, Jews living there were also deported.
Greek Resistance groups were formed during this occupation. The most important of them was ELAS, which was the military arm of the EAM. Both groups were strongly associated with the KKE. They were commonly named antartes from the Greek αντάρτης. Mark Mazower wrote that, the standing orders of the Wehrmacht in Greece was to use terror as a way to frighten the Greeks into not supporting the andartes.
This resistance group launched guerrilla attacks against the occupying powers, fought against collaborationist Security Battalions, and set up espionage networks.
Throughout the war against the Soviet Union, German propaganda portrayed the war as a noble struggle to protect "European civilization" from "Bolshevism". Likewise, German officials portrayed the Reich as nobly occupying Greece to protect it from Communists and presented EAM as a demonic force. The andartesof ELAS were portrayed in both the Wehrmacht and the SS as a "savages" and "criminals" who committed all sorts of crimes and who needed to be hunted down without mercy.
The British engaged in numerous intelligence deceptions designed to fool the Germans into thinking that the Allies would be landing in Greece in the near-future, and as such the German army forces were reinforced in Greece so as to stop the expected Allied landing in the Balkans. From the viewpoint of General Alexander Löhr, the commander of one Nazi Army Group in Greece, Army Group E, the attacks of the andartes, which forced his men to spread themselves out to hunt them down, were weakening his forces by leaving them exposed and spread out in the face of an expected Allied landing. However, the mountainous terrain of Greece ensured that there were only a limited number of roads and railroads bringing down supplies from Germany and the destruction of a single bridge by the andartes caused major supply problems for the German forces. The best known andarte operation of the war, namely the blowing up of the Gorgopotamos viaduct on the night of 25 November 1942, had caused Nazi Germans serious logistical problems as it severed the main railroad linking Thessaloniki to Athens. This interfered with overall operations of Nazi Germany, since Athens and its port Piraeus was used as a point of transporting supplies.
By early 1944, due to foreign interference by both Britain and U.S.,
the resistance groups began to fight amongst themselves. At the end of occupation of the Greek mainland in October 1944, Greece was in a state of political polarization, which soon led to the outbreak of civil war. The civil war gave opportunity to those who had prominently collaborated with Nazi Germany or other occupiers to reach positions of power and avoid sanctions because of anti-communism, even eventually coming to power in post-war Greece after the Communist defeat.
The Greek resistance killed 21,087 Axis soldiers and captured 6,463, compared to the death of 20,650 Greek partisans and an unknown number captured. BBC News estimated Greece suffered at least 250,000 dead during the Axis occupation.
Fall of Greece
In the early morning hours of 28 October 1940, Italian ambassador Emanuele Grazzi woke Greek premier Ioannis Metaxas and presented him an ultimatum. Metaxas rejected the ultimatum and Italian forces invaded Greek territory from Italian-occupied Albania less than three hours later. Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini launched the invasion partly to prove that Italians could match the military successes of the German Army and partly because Mussolini regarded southeastern Europe as lying within Italy's sphere of influence.Against Mussolini's expectations, the Hellenic Army successfully exploited the mountainous terrain of Epirus. Greek forces counterattacked and forced the Italians to retreat. By mid-December, the Greeks had occupied nearly one-quarter of Albania, before Italian reinforcements and the harsh winter stemmed the Greek advance. In March 1941, a major Italian counterattack failed. 15 of the 21 Greek divisions were deployed against the Italians, leaving only six divisions to defend against the attack from German troops in the Metaxas Line near the border between Greece and Yugoslavia/Bulgaria in the first days of April. They were supported by British Commonwealth troops sent from Libya on the orders of Winston Churchill.
On 6 April 1941, Germany came to the aid of Italy and invaded Greece through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, overwhelming Greek and British troops. On 20 April, after cessation of Greek resistance in the north, the Bulgarian Army entered Greek Thrace without firing a shot, with the goal of regaining its Aegean Sea outlet in Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia. The Bulgarians occupied territory between the Strymon River and a line of demarcation running through Alexandroupoli and Svilengrad west of the Evros River. The Greek capital Athens fell on 27 April, and by 1 June, after the capture of Crete, all of Greece was under Axis occupation. After the invasion, King George II fled, first to Crete and then to Cairo. A Greek right-wing government ruled from Athens as a puppet of the occupying forces.
Triple occupation
Establishment of the occupation regime
Although the German army was instrumental in the conquest of Greece, this was an accident born of Italy's ill-fated invasion and the subsequent presence of British troops on Greek soil. Greece had not figured in Adolf Hitler's pre-war plans as a target for German annexation: the country was poor, not adjacent to Germany, and did not host any German minorities. The Greeks themselves were seen by Nazi racial theory as neither valuable enough to be Germanized and assimilated, nor as sub-humans to be exterminated. Indeed, Hitler opposed the diversion of efforts towards western and southern Europe, and focused on the conquest and assimilation of Eastern Europe as the future German "Lebensraum". Coupled with admiration for the Greek resistance to the Italian invasion, the result was that Hitler favoured postponing a final territorial settlement of Italy's claims on Greece to after the war. In the meantime, a local puppet government headed by Lt. General Georgios Tsolakoglou would be installed as the most efficient way to run the country.Eager to pull German troops out of the country in view of the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union, and to shore up his relations with his most important Axis partner, Hitler agreed to leave most of the country to be occupied by the Italians. This was undertaken by the Eleventh Army under Carlo Geloso, with three army corps: XXVI Army Corps in Epirus and western Greece, III Army Corps in Thessaly, and VIII Army Corps in the Peloponnese. The northeastern parts of the country, eastern Macedonia and most of Western Thrace, were handed over to Bulgaria, and were de facto annexed into the Bulgarian state. However, a band of territory along the Evros River, on Greece's border with Turkey, remained under control of the collaborationist Greek government to give the Turkish government a pretext for disregarding her obligations to assist Greece in case of a Bulgarian attack according to the 1934 Balkan Pact. Entry to this zone was forbidden to the Bulgarians, and the Germans maintained only a police and administrative staff there. The Germans also retained control of a patchwork of strategically important areas across the country. The region of Central Macedonia around Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki, was kept under German control both as a strategic outlet into the Aegean as well as a trump card between the competing claims of both Bulgarians and Italians on it. Along with the eastern Aegean islands of Lemnos, Lesbos, Agios Efstratios, and Chios, became 'Salonica-Aegean Military Command' under Curt von Krenzki. Further south, the 'South Greece Military Command' under Hellmuth Felmy comprised isolated locations of Athens and the Attica region, such as the Kalamaki Airfield, parts of the port of Piraeus, and the offshore islands of Salamis, Aegina, and Fleves; the island of Milos as a mid-way stronghold to Crete; and most of Crete, except for the eastern Lasithi Prefecture, which was handed over to the Italians. Crete, quickly named "Fortress Crete", came to be regarded as a de facto separate command; upon the insistence of the Kriegsmarine, it was regarded as a target for eventual annexation after the war. The islands of Euboea and Skyros, originally allotted to the German zone, were handed over to Italian control in October 1941; southern Attica was likewise transferred to the Italians in September 1942.
From the outset, the so-called preponderanza, 'preponderance') granted to Italy by Hitler proved an illusion. The Italian plenipotentiary in Greece, Count Pellegrino Ghigi, shared control over the Greek puppet government with his German counterpart, Ambassador Günther Altenburg, while the fragmented occupation regimes meant that different military commanders were responsible for different parts of the country. As the historian Mark Mazower comments, "The stage was set for bureaucratic infighting of Byzantine complexity: Italians pitted against Germans, diplomats against generals, the Greeks trying to play one master off against the other". Relations between the Germans and Italians were not good and there were brawls between German and Italian soldiers; the Germans regarded the Italians as incompetent and frivolous, while the Italians considered the behaviour of their ostensible allies as barbarous. By contrast, the Italians had no such inhibitions, which created problems among Wehrmacht and SS officers. German officers often complained that the Italians were more interested in making love than in making war, and that the Italians lacked the "hardness" to wage a campaign against the Greek guerrillas because many Italian soldiers had Greek girlfriends. After the Italian capitulation in September 1943, the Italian zone was taken over by the Germans, often by attacking the Italian garrisons. There was a failed attempt by the British to take advantage of the Italian surrender to reenter the Aegean Sea with the Dodecanese Campaign.