Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana

War Arrives Under a Dictatorship

The invasion of 28 October 1940 did not interrupt a peaceful democracy. The Kingdom of Greece entered the war with politics already blocked. After the monarchy was restored in 1935, King George II revived parliament, but the conflict between Royalists and Venizelist republicans produced no stable majority. The 1936 election showed the deadlock clearly: 15 Communist Party of Greece (KKE) deputies held the balance between 143 Monarchists and 142 Liberals, Agrarians, and Republicans. In May, tobacco farmers in the north and industrial workers launched strikes. Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas presented the unrest as proof that public order was collapsing and, with the king's approval, suspended constitutional provisions and parliament on 4 August. The resulting 4th of August Regime banned parties and strikes, censored the press, and sought to dismantle KKE organizations and leadership through arrests, torture, and exile. Public Security Minister Konstantinos Maniadakis even created a counterfeit Communist party and counterfeit newspaper to confuse the underground party. Supporters understood the regime from inside as a New State that would end parliamentary fragmentation and social disorder and bind peasants and workers into one national community. Its cost, however, was the destruction of independent working-class organization and open political life. Thus resistance in 1940 was not simply a question of taking up arms. When occupation began, the KKE remnants had to start without a legal party base or parliamentary channel, from prisons, exile islands, and clandestine networks. Abroad, Metaxas borrowed some symbols and discipline from Italian Fascism, but he did not join the Axis and, together with the king, preserved Greece's traditional alignment with Britain. This contradiction, an anti-communist dictatorship at home but a formally neutral state aligned with Britain abroad, became the starting condition for the later question of who would own the state after liberation.

A war Greece could not refuse, and could not afford on two fronts

Greece's choice in the autumn of 1940 was not a free choice between fascism and democracy. The 4 August regime had closed parliament and repressed communists and the labour movement, yet the government of Ioannis Metaxas saw Italy's Balkan expansion as a direct threat to national sovereignty. After annexing Albania in April 1939, Italy massed troops near the Greek frontier, and on 15 August 1940 an Italian submarine sank the cruiser Elli. The Greek government did not publicly name the attacker, but an invasion was no longer difficult to foresee. A diplomatic telegram from the American legation in Athens, dated 11 June, recorded that Metaxas had reaffirmed Greece's determination to resist “whenever and wherever attacked.” This was not a democratic government's decision, but it was a defensive war chosen by a dictatorship confronting imperial coercion.

At dawn on 28 October, Emanuele Grazzi, the Italian ambassador acting on Benito Mussolini's orders, delivered an ultimatum demanding the occupation of strategic positions and communications sites as Italian forces moved from Albania. Metaxas's reply was later compressed into the national slogan “No,” but the essential point was not its dramatic wording. Rejection meant war. Surrender meant becoming an Italian protectorate; refusal meant fighting a much larger army. Metaxas expected material and naval assistance from Greece's traditional connection with Britain, while fearing that a large British landing might provoke Germany. The Greek army did more than hold the mountain frontier. It counterattacked and pushed Italian forces back into Albania. The victory strengthened the monarchy and dictatorship's claim to represent national defence, but it also tied men and ammunition to the western front.

German intervention therefore served both to rescue Italy's ally and to prevent Britain from acquiring a Balkan foothold. After Metaxas died in January 1941, the government moved toward accepting a British expeditionary force. Yet most Greek troops were committed in Albania, while the Metaxas Line in the northeast was defended by far fewer men than its establishment required. On 6 April German forces invaded through Bulgaria and, after meeting resistance at the fortified line, advanced south by routes that outflanked it. Facing encirclement, the Greek army withdrew and surrendered to Germany on 20 April. The defeat did not make the resistance of 1940 meaningless. It showed instead that a state willing to resist Italy could not simultaneously withstand Germany's superior operations with limited British aid. The material conditions of the later resistance grew from this contradiction: the will to defeat an invader existed, but the state and military resources needed to preserve that victory did not.

The night the flag came down, and the revolt against annexation

What came down from the Acropolis was a flag, but the act challenged more than the German army. On the night of 30 May 1941, eighteen-year-old Manolis Glezos and law student Apostolos Santas evaded the occupation guards, climbed the northwestern rock face, and tore down the swastika banner. They had neither an armed organization nor an order from the government-in-exile. The act therefore inflicted no significant military loss. Its target was the occupier's claim that it could turn Greece's symbolic space into a sign of its own authority. The German authorities did not immediately identify the perpetrators, but later sentenced both men to death in absentia. As Glezos recalled later, they wanted to answer Hitler's claim that Europe was free by showing that the fight had just begun. That recollection is a later self-interpretation, not direct proof of their thoughts that night, but it does show how the act helped organize the public memory of resistance.

The symbolic challenge in Athens and the armed revolt in the northeast arose from the same occupation crisis. On 14 May 1941 Bulgaria formally annexed eastern Macedonia and western Thrace. It did not merely station troops there. It attempted to remake schools and administration in Bulgarian form. The authorities first distributed food and milk in an effort to win local support, but forced Bulgarization that displaced Greek from public life soon stripped the promise of liberation of credibility. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, local organizations of the Greek Communist Party built mountain detachments and planned attacks intended to paralyze police stations and municipal offices. On the night of 28 September attacks began around Drama, Doxato, Choristi, and Prosotsani. The rebels lacked weapons and manpower, and had no preparation for connecting a local rising to a national revolt. The brief proclamation of a people's government at Prosotsani nevertheless meant that an alternative to occupation administration was being imagined. It ended the next day when leaders were killed or fled.

The Bulgarian response turned counterinsurgency into collective punishment. In Drama, troops arrested men aged eighteen to forty-five and executed hundreds. In Doxato and Choristi, 485 men were killed on 29 September alone according to the surviving record. Estimates for the total death toll range from about 1,600 in Bulgarian military reports to several thousand in Greek accounts. The difference reflects the character of the records and postwar politics of memory, but it does not obscure the consequences: villages were looted, and refugees fled from the Bulgarian zone into German-occupied territory. The defeat was not simply proof that resistance had been reckless. The occupier could not turn annexation into popular consent, and by transferring the cost of open revolt onto civilians it exposed the violence of the order it claimed to govern. Resistance thereafter carried two lessons at once: symbolic protest and an unprepared rising could not survive alone, and without organization, supply, and protection for civilians, liberation in its name could bring another massacre.

How an organization for bread became an army

The famine of the winter of 1941 was not a natural disaster caused simply by a lack of food. The occupiers treated Greece as a storehouse for their armies and a payer of war costs. German and Italian authorities requisitioned produce and transport, while Bulgaria prevented grain from its occupation zone from moving to other parts of the country. The Allied naval blockade cut imports. Farmers faced taxes in kind and compulsory sales, but fixed prices failed to keep pace with costs, so produce disappeared into hidden stores and the black market. Mass issuance of the occupation drachma drove inflation, and in Athens the price of bread rose nearly ninetyfold between April 1941 and June 1942. From December 1941 through February 1942, urban ration cards did not guarantee survival. The dead could not be counted precisely, but later studies estimate roughly 300,000 famine deaths during the occupation, while medical research confirms that malnutrition increased the severity and mortality of diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid.

Under these conditions, EAM’s first promise was closer to “for life and freedom, bread for our people” than to an abstract declaration of revolution. Founded on September 27, 1941, the National Liberation Front was led by the Communist Party of Greece, but presented itself from the beginning as a united front joining several left and republican forces. Its work was not limited to village and neighborhood committees, unions, and youth groups. Under the banner of National Solidarity, activists sought food, cared for the sick, and helped the families of prisoners. Traditional politicians could no longer alter occupation policy, whereas EAM organizers argued that residents had to organize relief and distribution themselves. EAM therefore did not treat the hungry merely as passive supporters. It turned them into members who attended meetings, raised funds, transported supplies, and struck.

Yet protecting survival also required the power to resist requisition and violence. Following a KKE decision in January 1942, ELAS, EAM’s military arm, was established on February 16, and Aris Velouchiotis took charge of its early organization in the mountains of Central Greece. ELAS was not a regular army at the outset. It was a guerrilla network connecting scattered weapons, former soldiers, and the food and shelters of villages against occupation patrols and collaborators. This choice cannot be explained only as a desire to mobilize people for war. When the state could not stop starvation and its police and administration were subordinated to the occupiers, EAM regarded relief committees and armed units not as separate projects but as two forms of the same sovereignty. That was why EAM rapidly became a mass movement, and also why the question of who would represent the state after liberation could no longer be avoided.

The sabotage that made an alliance, and the surrender that changed the war

The destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct was more than the cutting of a railway line. In 1942 the Special Operations Executive in Cairo wanted to slow supplies moving through Greece toward the North African front, and sent a small team led by engineer officer Edmund Myers. But the British could not overcome the roughly eighty Italian guards and the expected reinforcements alone. Myers and Christopher Woodhouse therefore had to persuade two armed Greek organisations that already distrusted one another, Aris Velouchiotis's ELAS and Napoleon Zervas's EDES. For Zervas, the operation could win British support and demonstrate that republican national resistance mattered. The EAM leadership suspected Britain's ties to the monarchy, but Velouchiotis saw a chance to prove that armed struggle in the countryside could actually unsettle the occupation, and joined despite cautious instructions from above.

On the night of 25 November, 86 ELAS fighters, 52 from EDES, and the British demolition team assembled. While guerrillas held the garrison at both ends of the bridge, the sappers placed the explosives. The work took longer than expected because the girders were stronger and differently shaped than the planners had assumed. The first blast, at 1:30 a.m. on 26 November, brought down the central pier and two spans; a second at 2:21 destroyed the remaining section. The partisans also stopped an Italian troop train carrying reinforcements, and the force escaped with four wounded. Its military effect was smaller than the original plan suggested, since the Battle of El Alamein had already ended in early November, but its political effect was substantial. Britain did not withdraw, as originally intended, but kept a military mission in Greece, while cooperation between the two major resistance forces collapsed within a month. The price was immediate: German forces publicly executed nine Greek hostages at the bridge site in reprisal.

The Italian Armistice of 8 September 1943 shifted the balance much further. When the Italian garrison system across large rural areas disintegrated, German troops took over, and rifles, machine guns, artillery, and other equipment from disarmed Italian units reached the resistance. Most notably, EAM secured the men and matériel of the Pinerolo Division, sharply increasing ELAS's firepower. This was a gift that could hasten liberation, but it also armed a contest over what liberation would mean. EAM leaders now judged that they could command Athens when the Germans left; EDES and Britain read that prospect as a threat to the monarchy and to a non-communist government. Fighting between ELAS and EDES began in the mountains in October 1943, while Greece was still under German occupation. Gorgopotamos had been the last joint operation against a common enemy. Italy's collapse was the turning point at which the same weapons were aimed at rival futures.

The mountain government and the Cairo government: who represented liberation?

The creation of the Political Committee of National Liberation, or PEEA, on 10 March 1944 was more than the establishment of a provisional administration in occupied territory. In the “Free Greece” controlled by EAM, the question of who would represent the country after the Germans were driven out had already become an immediate political issue. PEEA's founding charter promised to intensify the struggle against the conquerors, restore national independence and territorial integrity, and destroy domestic fascism and armed traitorous formations. This did not necessarily mean that the Communist Party was openly proclaiming a revolution. It meant that the resistance movement claimed the governing space left empty by both the royal government in exile and the collaborationist administration.

That claim acquired institutional form. In the secret elections organised by PEEA in late April 1944, roughly 1.5 to 1.8 million people voted in liberated areas and occupied cities. Women were allowed to vote for the first time in Greek history. Meeting at Koryschades in May, the National Council declared that “all powers derive from the people and are exercised by the people,” and presented local self-government, popular courts, and equal political and civil rights for men and women as fundamental institutions. For rural communities, this language was persuasive because it was joined to the practical experience of schools, food distribution, hospitals, and security operating under resistance administration. PEEA also included not only communists but progressive liberals and the constitutional scholar Alexandros Svolos. EAM therefore presented itself not as a one-party government, but as a provisional institution of popular sovereignty created by the force that had carried out liberation.

The Cairo government and Britain saw a different danger. In their view, ELAS's armed strength and PEEA's elections created a de facto dual state that could make restoration of the monarchy and the existing state apparatus impossible after liberation. The Lebanon Agreement of May 1944 postponed the confrontation by creating a government of national unity and assigning EAM six ministerial seats, but it did not settle the question of political legitimacy. EAM chose compromise, joined the government formed in August, and in the Caserta Agreement of September recognised the Government of National Unity as the sole legal authority. In return, ELAS and EDES placed their forces under government control, while Papandreou transferred that control, after liberation, to the British commander General Ronald Scobie. EAM's leaders hoped to avoid a direct clash with the Allies and preserve their influence through elections after the German withdrawal. Yet the concession converted neither military predominance into political guarantees nor the rival claims into one sovereign authority. When the government entered Athens in October, two powers arrived together. One possessed the elected institutions of the mountains and an armed liberation army. The other possessed international recognition and British troops. Liberation therefore began not with an agreed settlement of power, but with the two unresolved claims to sovereignty facing each other.

From blood on the pavement to the trap of disarmament

The December 1944 conflict cannot be explained simply as communists trying to seize power after liberation. EAM feared not elections without an army in the abstract, but a situation in which it disarmed while royalist and collaborationist personnel remained inside the state’s police and military. On 1 December, British commander Ronald Scobie ordered ELAS to dissolve and disarm under the Caserta Agreement. Yet the government’s proposal preserved the British-backed Third Mountain Brigade and Sacred Band, while incorporating only selected resistance units into a national army. EAM demanded simultaneous disarmament of every armed force. This was why EAM ministers in Georgios Papandreou’s government resigned on 2 December. In their view, simultaneous disarmament was the minimum condition for avoiding civil war and restoring democratic politics, while unilateral dissolution meant accepting defeat first.

About 200,000 people gathered in central Athens on 3 December. Police fire killed 28 and wounded 148, turning a constitutional dispute between the government and EAM into street warfare. The identity of the first shooter was disputed from the beginning, but eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence strongly support the conclusion that police fired on an unarmed procession. ELAS then attacked police stations and the collaborationist armed group Organization X, while British troops moved beyond protecting the government and deployed artillery and aircraft. Although EAM controlled most of Athens and Piraeus by mid-December, Britain brought in the 4th Indian Infantry Division from Italy. Winston Churchill’s Christmas visit to Athens presented itself as mediation, but negotiations failed between EAM’s demand for a reconstituted political order and the framework of monarchy that Britain sought to preserve. The Soviet representative did not openly support EAM. The great-power understanding that Greece lay in Britain’s sphere prevailed over EAM’s military predominance.

After the ceasefire of 15 January, EAM negotiated from a position in which it could no longer continue the fight. The Varkiza Agreement of 12 February 1945 promised amnesty for political offences, freedom of the press and association, a purge of the civil service and security forces, and a plebiscite and elections during 1945. Yet Article III excluded ordinary criminal offences against life and property from the amnesty, while Article VI required the immediate dissolution and surrender of weapons by the regular and reserve ELAS and other armed resistance formations. The EAM delegation led by Georgios Siantos accepted these terms as a legal route back to national reconciliation, but disarmament removed the means to enforce the promises. Right-wing police and paramilitary groups soon launched the White Terror, and the agreement’s liberty clauses did not protect the Left. Varkiza therefore meant neither only the failure of EAM’s revolutionary transformation nor simply a British victory. It was the moment when a mass organization of liberation chose legalization in order to obtain state power, then surrendered its military leverage before foreign firepower and a partisan state apparatus. That unequal compromise helped create the conditions for civil war in 1946.

The fighting ended, but the state did not

What the Varkiza Agreement settled was less peace than the balance of force. Signed by government and EAM representatives on 12 February 1945, it promised the lifting of martial law, freedom of assembly, the press, and trade unions, an amnesty for political crimes, a purge of the civil service and police, and a free plebiscite on the monarchy followed by Constituent Assembly elections during 1945. The EAM delegation had a coherent calculation: if armed struggle stopped, legal political space could be recovered, the state could be cleansed of collaborationist and dictatorial inheritances, and the popular strength built during liberation could be transferred into institutions through elections. The text itself named its aim the “reconciliation of the Greek people” and the restoration of normal political life.

The price, however, was paid in an unequal order. Article III granted amnesty for political crimes while excluding ordinary crimes against life and property. Article VI required the immediate demobilisation and disarmament of ELAS, regular and reserve, ELAN, and the National Civil Guard. The recorded surrender included 100 artillery pieces, 81 heavy mortars, 419 machine guns, and 48,973 rifles and pistols. The state removed its opponent’s organized coercive power before changing the personnel of the police and army. The agreement proclaimed national unity, but did not settle who would control the state.

That is where historical interpretations divide. One line of interpretation treats British pressure and the failure of right-wing state institutions to comply as decisive. The subsequent record supports it: the promised amnesty and purge of the security services were not properly implemented, while White Terror soon brought arrests, beatings, and killings of EAM supporters and drove many into the mountains. Another interpretation stresses the KKE leadership’s misjudgment of the international and domestic balance. Once the Soviet Union had effectively accepted Greece as Britain’s priority sphere, disarmament exchanged the Left’s force for political guarantees that it had no effective means to enforce. Neither interpretation can be drawn from the agreement alone. The document promised liberties, but did not secure the character of the institutions that were to enforce them or the safety of the disarmed. The Dekemvriana therefore ended the fighting through EAM’s defeat while postponing the questions of liberated sovereignty and class power until the Greek Civil War of 1946.