A military leader between wartime resistance and anti-communist politics
In November 1942, he committed his forces to the Gorgopotamos operation, where British saboteurs joined Aris Velouchiotis's ELAS fighters.
A former Hellenic Army officer, Napoleon Zervas founded the National Republican Greek League (EDES) in 1941 and led non-communist resistance to the Axis occupation. In 1942 he cooperated with the British Special Operations Executive and ELAS in the destruction of the Gorgopotamos bridge, but soon shifted from republicanism toward loyalty to the monarchy as British support and confrontation with the communist movement became decisive. After liberation, he carried his wartime military authority into right-wing politics and public-order administration during the Greek Civil War.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1910–1914Volunteered for the army, served in the Balkan Wars, and graduated from the NCO school.
- 1916–1920Joined the Movement of National Defence, served on the Macedonian Front, and rose to major.
- 1925–1926Served as Athens garrison commander and a battalion commander of the Republican Guard under Pangalos.
- 1941Founded the National Republican Greek League (EDES) with Venizelist officers.
- 1942–1944Organized the EOEA, directed armed resistance in Epirus, and took part in Operation Harling.
- 1946–1947Elected to parliament and served in the Maximos cabinet as minister without portfolio and Minister for Public Order.
- 1950–1951Served as Minister of Public Works in the cabinets of Sophoklis Venizelos.
Related historical events
Securing the Ionian coast and the expulsion of the Cham Albanians (1944–1945)
After losing Aetolia-Acarnania in a mini-civil war with ELAS in 1943, Zervas's EDES was confined to Epirus. When the German forces withdrew from the western front in the summer of 1944, EDES moved, with British support, to secure the Ionian coast. On 18 June 1944, forces under Zervas, backed by the Allies, attacked Paramythia in Thesprotia and, after a short engagement with combined Cham and German forces, took the town; the advance continued through the summer. In the course of this operation some 20,000 Muslim Cham Albanians were expelled from Epirus.
The Muslim Chams were Albanian-speaking inhabitants who had converted to Islam in the late Ottoman period. They had not been integrated into the Greek state and were exposed to Italian-sponsored Albanian irredentism, and a part of them collaborated with the Axis, taking part in reprisal actions against the Greek population. After the war a special collaborators' court in Greece condemned 2,109 Cham Albanians in absentia. The expulsion, however, amounted to collective punishment of the region's Muslim Albanian population: estimates of the number expelled range from 14,000 to 35,000, and the number of civilians killed by EDES forces in 1944 and 1945 is given variously as 200 to 300, over 1,200, or about 2,000 in Albanian sources.
Records indicate that the EDES leadership and the British military mission did not encourage these killings and in fact opposed them, yet were unable to prevent them. Claims that Zervas personally ordered the expulsion and the massacres come from Albanian nationalist circles; scholarship identifies the perpetrators as elements of EDES and, in 1945, EDES veteran resistance fighters, and treats both the causes of the expulsion and the extent of collaboration as matters still debated among historians.