Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944

A review of Mark Mazower's book

by Edmund Spevack

Yale University Press, 1993. 437 pp. Hardcover, $35. Paperback, $18.

The British historian Mark Mazower is a Reader in History at the University of Sussex and specializes in modern Greece. With Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, he has created an admirably researched, effectively organized, and elegantly written work on the Greek experience of World War II and its aftermath. The work covers the initial Italian and German occupations of Greece, the development of a powerful Greek resistance movement, German terror against the Greek civilian population including removal of Jews, the liberation of Greece by British forces, and the outcome of the Greek civil war of 1944-45.

The amount of research which Mazower conducted for his study is truly impressive: his work is based on archival sources found in a number of countries. In Greece, Mazower used several archives including the Army History Directorate, the Bank of Greece, the Central Board of Jewish Communities, and the Benaki Museum. In England, he examined political and military records at the Public Record Office branches at Kew and Holborn, the Wiener Library, and the Imperial War Museum. In Germany, Mazower visited the Berlin Document Center to read a great number of personal files of German political and military officials involved in the occupation of Greece. Mazower also conducted research at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv in Freiburg, and the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen at Ludwigsburg. Other related sources were examined in France, Italy, and Israel. At the U.S. National Archives in Washington, Mazower examined selected microfilms of the German war records series known as "Captured Enemy Documents, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials" records and OSS records, among other sources.

Even more remarkable is the range of topics which Mazower covers in order to present a broad and all-encompassing account of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Mazower turns effortlessly from his description of Greek civilian reactions to occupation and the formation of Greek resistance, to an analysis of the strategies developed by Nazi officials, to issues of motivation and morale in the German army, to the fate of the Greek Jews. The author does not shy away from combining a solid grounding in political and social history with heightened attention to the role of cultural concerns and patterns in war, occupation, and resistance. Thus, the reader acquires an expansive view of the various experiences, both civilian and military, in Greece during the Second World War.

The author effectively explores issues of "history from above" such as the role of German and Greek right-wing plans for occupied Greece within the German strategy for the "New Europe." The analyses of strategic plans by the Germanophile Greek politician Sotirios Gotzmanis (chapter seven) and by the SS Greece expert Walter Blume (chapter eighteen) are potent. Especially interesting to this reviewer, however, were the chapters examining issues using the methodology of "history from below": these are precise and focused accounts of personal reactions of Greek Foreign Workers sent to the Reich (chapter six) and of morale among German soldiers sent to occupy Greece (chapter seventeen).

Mazower is able to provide such a balanced and nuanced account of his subject matter because he considers a host of different viewpoints: he discusses the feelings of Greek civilians and politicians as documented in their papers, diaries, letters, and personal interviews with eyewitnesses. Mazower also allows the reader to enter into the mind of the German occupiers by elucidating their motivations and objectives, as well as the problems which plagued their attempts to control Greek popular resistance and combat the increasingly well-organized and violent Greek partisan movement.

The early chapters of the book, which cover the German take-over of power throughout Greece, make fascinating reading. Mazower documents the famine in Athens in 1941 which resulted from unilateral German exploitation of Greek food resources. It becomes clear to the reader that throughout their occupation the Germans viewed Greece primarily as a source of food and other resources which would aid the German war effort against the Russians on the Eastern front. Calls for the provision of foodstuffs directed to Berlin by the responsible German officials working in Greece were largely ignored by the Nazi government. Mazower convincingly argues that the German military planners in Berlin were less interested after June 1941 in controlling and restructuring Greek society and political life than in securing provisions for their armies in the East and coercing manpower to operate their munitions factories inside the Reich.

Chapter 19, which covers "Greek Jewry and the Final Solution," is one of the most somber, but also one of the most compelling chapters of Mazower's work. The pattern which emerges from the text is extremely interesting: Mazower argues that prior to German occupation, the Greeks did not have indigenous traditions of anti-semitism, and similarly, anti-semitism was not a defining factor in the ideological world-view or military combat strategy of the initial Italian invaders. Instead, Mazower convinces the reader that violent anti-semitism was imported into Greece only upon the arrival of the German military administration, the SS, and the German army. While the concentration of Jews in most areas of Greece was low before World War II, there was an ancient and populous Jewish community in Salonika. From this city, over 43,000 people of Jewish origin were deported to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz between March and August 1943. It was the Nazi administration which prevailed against purposeful Italian procrastination and even outright opposition and insisted upon the efficient and instant removal of Greece's Jewish citizens to concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

In his chapter on "The Logic of Violence" (chapter fifteen), the author proceeds to show how the Germans implemented tactics in order to counter the challenge of Greek partisans, the andartes, to German security. Mazower argues that the German forces deployed were not adequately prepared or trained in counter-insurgency tactics to carry out an effective anti-partisan campaign. They used methods such as hostage-taking, reprisals, and collective punishments of villagers by mass shootings (according to a rigid doctrine of collective civilian responsibility for guerrilla actions) which were inadequate to achieve their objectives and caused unnecessary harm to the often uninvolved civilian population. Mazower provides many examples for his thesis, among them a detailed reconstruction of the August 1943 massacre at Komeno (covered in chapter sixteen).

Mazower is also successful in showing the Greeks as having been more than merely passive victims of ruthless Nazi aggression. He cognently demonstrates the Greek efforts to construct a robust political and military resistance movement (EAM/ELAS) and introduces the reader to the key actors in that movement. The portrayal of Greek resistance leaders such as Aris Velouchiotis, one of the founders of ELAS, and a leader of the andartes, is remarkable in its vividness. When describing the positive achievements of the ELAS movement, Mazower does not fail to mention the brutality exercised and the ethically questionable tactics sometimes employed by this movement and its leaders (chapters twenty and twenty-one).

Mazower also does not shy from discussing the right wing of the Greek political spectrum which collaborated with the German occupiers and supported the forming of the Security Battalions after a law passed by the Rallis government on April 7, 1943. The policies and ideas of the German-supported candidate for the position of prime minister, Ioannis Rallis, and the actions of the leader of the brutal Security Battalions, General Georg Poulos, are both described with chilling clarity.

The book was well-received in Greece upon its publication in 1993 because it shows the Greeks as active shapers of their fate rather than as passive victims faced first with a superior German military machine and then with unequivocal British demands for what the future of their country was to be. While the Greeks were not completely free to shape their national destiny when occupied in 1941, upon liberation in 1944-45, or even at the moment of rightist political triumph in 1949, at critical junctures they did participate actively in influencing decisions of immediate concern to their national life.

An additional strength of the volume by Mazower is that it is richly illustrated. This photographic evidence used is particularly impressive since it helps portray the events of more than fifty years ago in a lucid and immediate fashion. Mazower has gathered his photographic evidence at the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as in other places. At the Berlin Document Center, moreover, Mazower has found file portraits of the major SS actors in the occupation of Greece such as Walter Schimana, Hans Drhage, and Walter Blume. Mazower's account is most fascinating when he manages to connect the experience in Greece to larger areas of concern and more well-known events. Thus, on page 220, Mazower provides a photograph of Jurgen Stroop, who is remembered primarily for his leading role in the complete destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in the fall of 1943 and his authorship of the notorious Stroop Report on that event. It is fascinating to read about Stroop's brief but nonetheless important assignment to SS anti-partisan warfare in Greece.

Mark Mazower does not end his history with the Allied liberation of Greece in 1944, but continues his account with a focus on the tragic turn of events which led directly from the exhilaration of liberation to the bloody violence of civil war. Mazower shows how, after liberation from German occupation, a sharp political conflict arose between the Greek left-wing resistance force EAM/ELAS and the British-backed conservative Papandreou government.

The Greek civil war and (with British and American help) the victory of the Right are shown at the end of the work. Once again, as in 1941, Greece became the stage on which a conflict of powerful international interests, this time the world-wide struggle between Western democracy and Communism, was played out by actors more powerful than the Greeks themselves. Engaged in fighting the leftist ELAS forces, the British did not hesitate to accept the help of the newly established rightist National Guard units which were often composed of former Battalion members and included many Nazi collaborators.

After the liberation of Athens on October 12, 1944, the political conflict between EAM/ELAS and the British-backed conservative government intensified. Fear of a Communist takeover swept through Greece and inspired the British to toughen their policies against the ELAS leadership and their soldiers, the andartes. Mazower does not hide his disgust at the fact that many andartes were imprisoned or executed in 1944-45 merely because it could be proved that they had fought against the Germans. Many andartes also fled behind the Iron Curtain and were forced by the extremely conservative postwar governments to leave Greece forever. The monograph conlcudes with another sour note: Mazower describes in some detail how a considerable number of Nazi officials were not effectively prosecuted or adequately punished after 1945 for their actions in occupied Greece.

Edmund Spevack is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. and specializes in modern German history.