Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece, The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44,
Yale Univ. Press, 1995.
An excellent book covering the human drama as well as the political and military
events of tha period.
I lived in Greece during the war and this book not only revived
my memories but also provided the background and explanations of the horrible
happenings of those years. One
thing I learned from this book was that Hitler treated Eastern Europe
(including the Balkans of which Greece is a part) in a much harsher way than
Western Europe. Because Greece is the only one of these countries that stayed out
of the Communist block, it is also the only country where documents of that
period are accessible to historians. The Germans (including the Nazis) had high admiration for
ancient Greece, therefore they had a bit of a problem in dealing harshly with the modern
inhabitants of the country. They solved it by declaring that modern Greeks had
been “bustardized” by mixture with the Slavs and could not be considered as descendents
of the ancient Greeks. As a result they were fair game for mass
murder. The role of a certain Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim (of later United Nations
fame) in the occupation is well documented. Many, if not most of the
atrocities were committed by regular German troops rather than the SS. Thus
the postwar claims of German officers that they were innocent of the atrocities are shown to be
false. One
of Waldheim’s contributions was to change military reports so that all
references to civilians shot by the Wehrmacht were transformed into ‘bandits’
shot.
Another
reason for looking at this book is a detailed analysis of
the strife between the Greek left and the Greek right that started during the
Axis occupation and led to the 1946-49 civil war. The analysis
is objective and demonstrates that the
conflict was quite complex and influenced by other factors besides politics. It
includes an explanation of why the original
overwhelming support for the left waned in the last year of the occupation.
Such factors seem to be operating in other parts of the world as well, thus the reader
gains some understanding not only of the Greek conflict but also of civil
conflicts in the rest of word.
Theo Pavlidis
(June 2002 - first draft)
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