The Church of Greece under Axis Occupation

The Church of Greece under Axis Occupation
Author: Panteleymon Anastasakis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2014-12-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823262014

Axis forces (Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria) occupied Greece from 1941 to 1944. The unimaginable hardships caused by foreign occupation were compounded by the flight of the government days before enemy forces reached Athens. This national crisis forced the Church of Greece, an institution accustomed to playing a central political and social role during times of crisis, to fill the political vacuum. Led by Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens, the clergy sought to maintain the cultural, spiritual, and territorial integrity of the nation during this harrowing period. Circumstances forced the clergy to create a working relationship with the major political actors, including the Axis authorities, their Greek allies, and the growing armed resistance movements, especially the communist-led National Liberation Front. In so doing the church straddled a fine line between collaboration and resistance—individual clerics, for instance, negotiated with Axis authorities to gain small concessions, while simultaneously resisting policies deemed detrimental to the nation. Drawing on official archives—of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department, and the Greek Holy Synod—alongside an impressive breadth of published literature, this book provides a refreshingly nuanced account of the Greek clergy’s complex response to the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. The author’s comprehensive portrait of the reaction of Damaskinos and his colleagues, including tensions and divisions within the clergy, provides a uniquely balanced exploration of the critical role they played during the occupation. It helps readers understand how and why traditional institutions such as the Church played a central social and political role in moments of social upheaval and distress. Indeed, as this book convincingly shows, the Church was the only institution capable of holding Greek society together during World War II. While The Church of Greece under Axis Occupation elucidates the significant differences between the Greek case and those of other territories in Axis-occupied Europe, it also offers fresh insight into the similarities. Greek clerics dealt with many of the same challenges clerics faced in other parts of Hitler’s empire, including exceptionally brutal reprisal policies, deprivation and hunger, and the complete collapse of the social and political order caused by years of enemy occupation. By examining these challenges, this illuminating new book is an important contribution not only to Greek historiography but also to the broader literatures on the Holocaust, collaboration and resistance during World War II, and church–state relations during times of crisis.

The Holocaust in Greece

The Holocaust in Greece
Author: Giorgos Antoniou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108679951

For the sizeable Jewish community living in Greece during the 1940s, German occupation of Greece posed a distinct threat. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around ninety percent of the Jewish population through the course of the war. This new account presents cutting edge research on four elements of the Holocaust in Greece: the level of antisemitism and question of collaboration; the fate of Jewish property before, during, and after their deportation; how the few surviving Jews were treated following their return to Greece, especially in terms of justice and restitution; and the ways in which Jewish communities rebuilt themselves both in Greece and abroad. Taken together, these elements point to who was to blame for the disaster that befell Jewish communities in Greece, and show that the occupation authorities alone could not have carried out these actions to such magnitude without the active participation of Greek Christians.

The Axis Occupation of Europe

The Axis Occupation of Europe
Author: Winston Ramsey
Publisher: After the Battle
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1399076116

Dr Raphael Lemkin was a Polish émigré and the person who coined the term ‘genocide’ during his study of international law concerning crimes against humanity which he began in 1933 — the year that the Nazis assumed power in Germany. His much-acclaimed work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published in 1944 and extracts from it now form the framework on which we have built this ‘then and now’ coverage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, Danzig, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Monaco, the Channel Islands, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Soviet Union, Romania, Italy and Hungary. Individual chapters also cover the most serious crimes committed by the occupier: the destruction of whole villages in Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands and Greece, and the genocidal acts carried out in Italy, Greece, Belgium, although nothing can equal the wholesale slaughter enacted in the Balkans and the USSR. It has been estimated that the Axis occupation of Europe cost between 20 and 25 million civilian lives, apart from the deaths of at least 16 million servicemen and women who paid the ultimate price in trying to put Europe back together again. It is a debt that can never be repaid.

The Untold History of Greek Collaboration with Nazi Germany (1941-1944)

The Untold History of Greek Collaboration with Nazi Germany (1941-1944)
Author: Markos Vallianatos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2014-01-27
Genre: Greece
ISBN: 9781304845795

This book explores Greek collaboration with the Nazis during the Axis occupation of Greece in the Second World War, a topic that continues to be one of the biggest taboos in Greek society. It tells the mostly unknown story of the Greek quislings, an heterogeneous amalgam of fascists, germanophiles, anti-Semites, criminals and opportunists, but also of genuine patriots and ordinary citizens. It provides a clear picture on the Axis-held puppet governments in Athens and the court of radical Greek Nazi political organizations that supported them. It also examines specific aspects of collaboration, from the issuing of German-sponsored propaganda to the creation of paramilitary units to fight along the Wehrmacht, from the intrigues within the collaborationist government to the questionable economic profiteering of some locals. The book explains why so many Greeks chose to ally themselves with the enemy instead of choosing Resistance and reveals the most occult secrets of Greece.

Hitler's Orphan: Demetri of Kalavryta

Hitler's Orphan: Demetri of Kalavryta
Author: Marc Zirogiannis
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2014-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 131222259X

Historical fiction relating the role of the author's grandparents, Panagiotis and Vasiliki Zirogiannis, in the resistance to the Nazi occupation of Greece, and their death in the Kalavryta Massacre.

Antisemitism in Greece

Antisemitism in Greece
Author: Source Wikipedia
Publisher: University-Press.org
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2013-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781230839332

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 50. Chapters: Greece in World War II, The Holocaust in Greece, Massacre of the Acqui Division, Axis occupation of Greece during World War II, Ohrana, Adriatic Campaign of World War II, Hartwig von Ludwiger, Rhodes blood libel, Middle East Command, Greek People's Liberation Army, Haidari concentration camp, Alois Brunner, Jurgen Stroop, Chameria Battalion, SS Kurtulu, Selahattin Ulkumen, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Hellenic State, Montague Woodhouse, 5th Baron Terrington, The Guns of Navarone, N. G. L. Hammond, Hellmuth Felmy, Walter Schimana, Security Battalions, 117th Jager Division, Theodor Dannecker, Paul Otto Radomski, Reginald Leeper, National Union of Greece, Emil Jaeger, Eddie Myers, Organization of National Resistance of the Interior X, Dieter Wisliceny, Gunther Altenburg, Alexander Belev, Inigo Campioni, Greek government in exile, National-Socialist Patriotic Organisation, United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, Rolf Gunther, Operation Alpenveilchen, Eleventh Army. Excerpt: The Massacre of the Acqui Division (Italian: Greek: , Hi Sfagi tis Merarchias Akoui), also known as the Cephalonia Massacre (Italian: , German: ), was the mass execution of the men of the Italian 33rd Acqui Infantry Division by the Germans on the island of Kefalonia, Greece, in September 1943, following the Italian armistice during the Second World War. About 5000 soldiers were massacred and others drowned or otherwise murdered. The massacre provided the historical background to the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which later became a Hollywood film. It was one of the largest prisoner of war massacres of the war, along with the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Poles, and one of the largest-scale German atrocities to be committed by Wehrmacht troops (specifically, the 1. Gebirgs-Division). General Antonio Gandin, commander of the Acqui...

Time on the Mountain

Time on the Mountain
Author: Kyriakos Nalmpantis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2010
Genre: Greece
ISBN:

Using the wartime reports produced by various field agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), this dissertation attempts to rebut the currently hegemonic notion that the communist-led EAM/ELAS resistance organization was unprepared to militarily challenge the British and their anticommunist Greek clients for control of Greece after the German evacuation in late 1944. It also seeks to counter the related assumption that EAM/ELAS's wide popularity after the end of the Axis occupation made a fight with the British unnecessary. The fact that conflict erupted anyway is cited by many historians sympathetic to EAM/ELAS as proof positive that EAM/ELAS's supposedly hapless, naïve, and inexperienced leadership was manipulated into starting a revolution by the preternaturally clever British. The OSS reports from various parts of wartime Greece collected in this dissertation refute this supposition. By restoring historical agency to EAM/ELAS, this study also implicitly broaches the broader question of the origin of revolutionary violence. Despite the stated commitment of EAM/ELAS's leaders to the concept of the Popular Front, the organization as a whole was responsible for conducting numerous ideological witch-hunts against its perceived domestic enemies during the war. In contrast, opposing the Axis appeared in many instances to be a secondary concern for many within the organization. Ultimately, this study argues that the beguiling utopian vision of a communist future for Greece created a kind of revolutionary imperative that dragged many members of EAM/ELAS, whether leaders or rank-and-file, along in its inexorable wake. Unfortunately for Greece, at the end of that path lay civil war.