We've covered World War II-era Greece in previous videos,
from the Axis occupation to their withdrawal later in the war, but we haven't really gone
into the specifics of the infighting which occurred in the country during the war
and after it. In this video, we provide you with an overview of the Greek Civil War, as well as
an intimate insight into the Macedonian side of the conflict you definitely haven't heard before.
In October 1940, Fascist Italy invaded Greece from occupied Albania.
It did not go well. The Hellenic Army broke the Italian offensive over the Greek-Albanian border,
then drove the Italians back into Albania and fought them there. Mussolini was a wreck,
and Hitler wasn't too happy with him either. According to Italian historian Mario Toscano,
"The consequences of this error were so serious as to bring about Italy's complete subjection
to Germany as far as the political and military direction of the war was concerned." In April
1941, Hitler took the reins, invading Greece using Blitzkrieg tactics. By June, the country was in
Axis hands, divided into a German occupation zone, an Italian one, and a Bulgarian one. King George
II of Greece and the Greek government—except for Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas, who died
back in January—fled to Egypt, and the Germans set up a collaborationist government in Athens.
The occupation was brutal, especially in the German zone. The Axis powers destroyed
Greek industry, infrastructure, and the economy; facilitated the starvation of tens of thousands
of civilians; and outright murdered tens of thousands more, including some 60,000 Jews.
The Greek people didn't just sit around and let it happen, though.
Loathing the puppet government, and with their own government in exile in Egypt,
the people created several major resistance movements with a range of political inclinations.
Some shared the inclinations of the late Metaxas's regime and the king, some sat firmly on the left,
and some occupied the grey area in between. The largest left-aligned organisation was the National
Liberation Front or the EAM, with its military wing the Greek People's Liberation Army or ELAS,
both effectively controlled by the Communist Party of Greece or KKE. The National Greek Republican
League or EDES opposed communism but didn't stand with the monarchist government in exile. National
and Social Liberation or EKKA was another one of the big three resistance organisations, along with
the ELAS and the EDES. Greece's various resistance organisations, of which there were more than the
ones mentioned above, fought not only against the Axis and their puppets but also among themselves.
Initially, the British gave most of their military support to the communist resistance organisation
ELAS because they thought they were the best equipped to fight the Axis.
But the ELAS grew so rapidly that the British began to fear a communist Greece,
thus shifting their support primarily to the EDES. Still, in June 1943, the ELAS
all but crushed the EKKA, and in July that same year, the British tried to get the ELAS, the EDES,
and what remained of the EKKA to band together against the Axis under a joint British HQ.
The three resistance organisations signed what was called the National Bands Agreement on the 5th,
but evidently, the agreement didn't mean jack to the ELAS, which continued to expand and soon
dwarfed the other organisations. The fighting continued from October 1943 through to February
1944, when the British negotiated a ceasefire between the resistance organisations. This was
known as the Plaka Agreement, and it didn't last all that long. As the Axis withdrew from
Greece in October 1944, the British understood that they had a major problem on their hands.
The ELAS encompassed 90% of the Greek resistance by this stage, amounting to some 50,000 resistance
fighters and as many as 1.5 million total members. The EDES and EKKA, to put it in perspective,
boasted just 10,000 resistance fighters each. Many Greeks had joined ELAS not necessarily
because they were communists but because they simply wanted the Axis out of their country.
With the Axis gone, the exiled Greek government, now headed by George Papandreou,
returned to Greece and, with British forces entering the country,
tried to put the ELAS and EDES under the government's control. This next agreement
was called the Caserta Agreement and despite conflict within the ELAS, all parties signed it.
When Papandreou tried to disarm the ELAS, however, tensions grew. Wanting to maintain relations with
Britain, Stalin encouraged the Communist Party of Greece to prod the ELAS towards cooperation.
Simultaneously, Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito was poking the hornets' nest by trying to
get the ELAS to resist disarmament. On the 2nd of December 1944, some 200,000 ELAS members marched
into Athens to protest. It became violent, and someone fired the first bullet, after which
there erupted a 37-day clash in Athens between the ELAS and the British-supported Greek government.
This was known as the Dekemvriana. By January 1947, the ELAS had lost the battle, and in
February, they signed the Treaty of Varkiza, which called for a complete demobilisation of the ELAS.
Many of its fighters hid their guns, however, anticipating
future developments. Such developments came after the end of the Second World War.
After World War II, relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies went down the toilet,
precipitating the start of the Cold War. This bolstered the resolve of some ex-ELAS veterans,
who— after the Communist Party of Greece failed to defeat the returned king and the
United Alignment of Nationalists in the March 1946 elections—attacked a police station in the
village of Litochoro near Mount Olympus. This action set the wheels of war back in motion,
marking the start of the deadliest stage of the Greek Civil War. From March 1946 onwards,
the ex-ELAS veterans reorganised themselves under the so-called Democratic Army of Greece
or DSE, a force backed by Tito's Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania. Opposing the DSE was
the Kingdom of Greece, backed initially by Britain and later the United States.
It soon became a full-blown war. But the DSE was severely outnumbered, boasting just
23,000 combatants at its height, as opposed to the monarch's peak strength of over 230,000.
To bolster its numbers, the DSE turned to the people of Greece, notably the Slavic
Macedonians of Greek Macedonia. And this is where the aforementioned "intimate insight" comes in.
One of our team member's grandfathers, Steve, was a boy in Greek Macedonia during the Civil War.
He lived in a small mountainside village near what is now Florina. In an interview, Steve spoke about
how the Greeks sent spies into the village to ensure the villagers were speaking Greek and not
Macedonian. If anyone was suspected of standing against the Greeks, the Greek police would
come into the village and beat the suspects—or worse. When the communists—which Steve referred
to as the partisans—came to the village, they promised the villagers freedom from the Greeks.
Fighting for the partisans, they would win their language back, their schools. They would be,
quote, "a nation within a nation." Wanting to fight for freedom and recognition,
Steve's oldest brother signed up willingly. He fought against the Hellenic Army using weapons
supplied to the partisans by Yugoslavia and went on to become a partisan commander. As
the war progressed, the Greeks strafed the mountainside village in a British plane
and subjected it to an artillery bombardment. The partisans came for Steve's second-oldest brother
too, forcing him to join their cause, but his first-oldest brother used his newfound power to
spare his sibling from the same fate, sending him to safety in what is now the Republic of Greece.
In March 1948, Steve's parents feared their son might get killed if he stayed in the village,
so they sought the help of the partisans, who had been working with the Red Cross to
transport children to safety in the neutral states outside of Greece. A boy of six, Steve ended up
in a monastery on the edge of a dark forest in Slovenia. He stayed there for two years,
separated from his mother and father, who had to push through six months of bureaucracy at the end
of the war just to prove that Steve was theirs. He was just one of the tens of thousands of children
removed from their homes for their own safety during the Greek Civil War. Some argue that the
children were forcibly taken from their families, but this wasn't the case with Steve, at least.
In mid-1948, Stalin and Tito had a public falling out, and Stalin, who'd managed to keep the USSR
out of the Greek Civil War, made it clear that he was opposed to the communist uprising in Greece.
This fractured the DSE, with some members taking Stalin's side and others Tito's. Tito soon closed
Yugoslavia's borders to the DSE, leaving only the Albanian border open to them. Bolstered
by the Americans, the Hellenic Army rallied and inflicted a series of severe defeats on the DSE,
which crumbled throughout the rest of 1948 and 1949. Many partisans, including Steve's oldest
brother, fled over the Albanian border and ultimately ended up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
But the damage was done. Following on from the Axis occupation of the country,
the Greek Civil War left Greece wounded and divided. Many families emigrated to the UK,
the US, Australia, and elsewhere to seek a better life. In the post-World War
II phase of the Greek Civil War alone, some 158,000 civilians lost their lives.
As always, we'd love to know what you think. Did you know about the Greek Civil War before today?
Do you know anything about it that we didn't cover in this video?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.