A day that changed history: the bod

A day that changed history: the bodies of unarmed protestors shot by the police and the British army in Athens on 3 December 1944. Photograph: Dmitri Kessel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith

Sunday 30 November 2014 08.00 GMT
Last modified on Saturday 28 March 2015 18.22 GMT

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This article is the subject of a column by the readers’ editor.

“I can still see it very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Títos Patríkios. “The Athens police firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament in Syntagma Square. The young men and women lying in pools of blood, everyone rushing down the stairs in total shock, total panic.”

And then came the defining moment: the recklessness of youth, the passion of belief in a justice burning bright: “I jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the one that is still there, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse! Victory will be ours! Don’t leave. The time has come. We will win!”

“I was,” he says now, “profoundly sure, that we would win.” But there was no winning that day; just as there was no pretending that what had happened would not change the history of a country that, liberated from Adolf Hitler’s Reich barely six weeks earlier, was now surging headlong towards bloody civil war.

Even now, at 86, when Patríkios “laughs at and with myself that I have reached such an age”, the poet can remember, scene-for-scene, shot for shot, what happened in the central square of Greek political life on the morning of 3 December 1944.

This was the day, those 70 years ago this week, when the British army, still at war with Germany, opened fire upon – and gave locals who had collaborated with the Nazis the guns to fire upon – a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with whom Britain had been allied for three years.

The crowd carried Greek, American, British and Soviet flags, and chanted: “Viva Churchill, Viva Roosevelt, Viva Stalin’” in endorsement of the wartime alliance.

Twenty-eight civilians, mostly young boys and girls, were killed and hundreds injured. “We had all thought it would be a demonstration like any other,” Patríkios recalls. “Business as usual. Nobody expected a bloodbath.”
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Britain’s logic was brutal and perfidious: Prime minister Winston Churchill considered the influence of the Communist Party within the resistance movement he had backed throughout the war – the National Liberation Front, EAM – to have grown stronger than he had calculated, sufficient to jeopardise his plan to return the Greek king to power and keep Communism at bay. So he switched allegiances to back the supporters of Hitler against his own erstwhile allies.

There were others in the square that day who, like the 16-year-old Patríkios, would go on to become prominent members of the left. Míkis Theodorakis, renowned composer and iconic figure in modern Greek history, daubed a Greek flag in the blood of those who fell. Like Patríkios, he was a member of the resistance youth movement. And, like Patríkios, he knew his country had changed. Within days, RAF Spitfires and Beaufighters were strafing leftist strongholds as the Battle of Athens – known in Greece as the Dekemvriana – began, fought not between the British and the Nazis, but the British alongside supporters of the Nazis against the partisans. “I can still smell the destruction,” Patríkios laments. “The mortars were raining down and planes were targeting everything. Even now, after all these years, I flinch at the sound of planes in war movies.”

And thereafter Greece’s descent into catastrophic civil war: a cruel and bloody episode in British as well as Greek history which every Greek knows to their core – differently, depending on which side they were on – but which remains curiously untold in Britain, perhaps out of shame, maybe the arrogance of a lack of interest. It is a narrative of which the millions of Britons who go to savour the glories of Greek antiquity or disco-dance around the islands Mamma Mia-style, are unaware.
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The legacy of this betrayal has haunted Greece ever since, its shadow hanging over the turbulence and violence that erupted in 2008 after the killing of a schoolboy by police – also called the Dekemvriana – and created an abyss between the left and right thereafter.

“The 1944 December uprising and 1946-49 civil war period infuses the present,” says the leading historian of these events, André Gerolymatos, “because there has never been a reconciliation. In France or Italy, if you fought the Nazis, you were respected in society after the war, regardless of ideology. In Greece, you found yourself fighting – or imprisoned and tortured by – the people who had collaborated with the Nazis, on British orders. There has never been a reckoning with that crime, and much of what is happening in Greece now is the result of not coming to terms with the past.”

Before the war, Greece was ruled by a royalist dictatorship whose emblem of a fascist axe and crown well expressed its dichotomy once war began: the dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, had been trained as an army officer in Imperial Germany, while Greek King George II – an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – was attached to Britain. The Greek left, meanwhile, had been reinforced by a huge influx of politicised refugees and liberal intellectuals from Asia Minor, who crammed into the slums of Pireaus and working-class Athens.

Both dictator and king were fervently anti-communist, and Metaxas banned the Communist Party, KKE, interning and torturing its members, supporters and anyone who did not accept “the national ideology” in camps and prisons, or sending them into internal exile. Once war started, Metaxas refused to accept Mussolini’s ultimatum to surrender and pledged his loyalty to the Anglo-Greek alliance. The Greeks fought valiantly and defeated the Italians, but could not resist the Wehrmacht. By the end of April 1941, the Axis forces imposed a harsh occupation of the country. The Greeks – at first spontaneously, later in organised groups – resisted.

But, noted the British Special Operations Executive (SOE): “The right wing and monarchists were slower than their opponents in deciding to resist the occupation, and were therefore of little use.”

Britain’s natural allies were therefore EAM – an alliance of left wing and agrarian parties of which the KKE was dominant, but by no means the entirety – and its partisan military arm, ELAS.

There is no overstating the horror of occupation. Professor Mark Mazower’s book Inside Hitler’s Greece describes hideous bloccos or “round-ups” – whereby crowds would be corralled into the streets so that masked informers could point out ELAS supporters to the Gestapo and Security Battalions – which had been established by the collaborationist government to assist the Nazis – for execution. Stripping and violation of women was a common means to secure “confessions”. Mass executions took place “on the German model”: in public, for purposes of intimidation; bodies would be left hanging from trees, guarded by Security Battalion collaborators to prevent their removal. In response, ELAS mounted daily counterattacks on the Germans and their quislings. The partisan movement was born in Athens but based in the villages, so that Greece was progressively liberated from the countryside. The SOE played its part, famous in military annals for the role of Brigadier Eddie Myers and “Monty” Woodhouse in blowing up the Gorgopotomas viaduct in 1942 and other operations with the partisans – andartes in Greek.

By autumn 1944, Greece had been devastated by occupation and famine. Half a million people had died – 7% of the population. ELAS had, however, liberated dozens of villages and become a proto-government, administering parts of the country while the official state withered away. But after German withdrawal, ELAS kept its 50,000 armed partisans outside the capital, and in May 1944 agreed to the arrival of British troops, and to place its men under the officer commanding, Lt Gen Ronald Scobie.

On 12 October the Germans evacuated Athens. Some ELAS fighters, however, had been in the capital all along, and welcomed the fresh air of freedom during a six-day window between liberation and the arrival of the British. One partisan in particular is still alive, aged 92, and is a legend of modern Greece.
Commanding presence: Churchill leaving HMS Ajax to attend a conference ashore. Athens can be seen in the background.
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Commanding presence: Churchill leaving HMS Ajax to attend a conference ashore. Athens can be seen in the background. Photograph: Crown Copyright. IWM/Imperial War Museum

In and around the European parliament in Brussels, the man in a Greek fisherman’s cap, with his mane of white hair and moustache, stands out. He is Manolis Glezos, senior MEP for the leftist Syriza party of Greece.
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Glezos is a man of humbling greatness. On 30 May 1941, he climbed the Acropolis with another partisan and tore down the swastika flag that had been hung there a month before. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, was tortured and as a result suffered from tuberculosis. He escaped and was re-arrested twice – the second time by collaborators. He recalls being sentenced to death in May 1944, before the Germans left Athens – “They told me my grave had already been dug”. Somehow he avoided execution and was then saved from a Greek courtmartial’s firing squad during the civil war period by international outcry led by General de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev Geoffrey Fisher.”

Seventy years later, he is an icon of the Greek left who is also hailed as the greatest living authority on the resistance. “The English, t

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Την ημέρα που άλλαξε την ιστορία: οι φορείς των άοπλων διαδηλωτών που γυρίστηκε από την αστυνομία και ο βρετανικός στρατός στην Αθήνα, στις 3 Δεκεμβρίου 1944. Φωτογραφία: Dmitri Kessel/ώρα & ζωή εικόνες/Getty ImagesEd Vulliamy και Ελένης SmithΚυριακή 30 Νοεμβρίου 2014 08.00 GMTΤελευταία τροποποίηση στις Σάββατο 28 Μαρτίου 2015 18.22 GMT Μοιραστείτε την Pinterest Μοιράζονται σε LinkedIn Κοινή χρήση στο Google +Μετοχές74kΣχόλια1.010Αποθηκεύσετε για αργότερα Αυτό το άρθρο είναι το θέμα μιας στήλης από το συντάκτη των αναγνωστών."Μπορώ ακόμα να δείτε αυτό πολύ καθαρά, δεν έχουν ξεχάσει," λέει ο Títos Patríkios. "Η Αθήνα πυροδότηση της αστυνομίας στο πλήθος από την οροφή του Κοινοβουλίου στην πλατεία Συντάγματος. Τους νέους άνδρες και γυναίκες που βρίσκονται σε πισίνες του αίματος, όλοι σπεύδουν κάτω από τις σκάλες συνολικά σοκ, συνολικός πανικού."Και στη συνέχεια ήρθε η καθοριστική στιγμή: την απερισκεψία της νεολαίας, το πάθος της πίστης σε μια δικαιοσύνη που καίει λαμπερό: "πήδηξα επάνω στην κρήνη στο κέντρο της πλατείας, το ένα που είναι ακόμα εκεί, και άρχισα να φωνάζουν: «σύντροφοι, δεν το διαλύσει! Νίκη θα είναι δική μας! Μην αφήνετε. Έχει έρθει η ώρα. Θα νικήσουμε!"«Ήμουν,», λέει τώρα, "βαθιά είμαι σίγουρος, ότι θα κερδίσουμε." Αλλά δεν υπήρξε καμία νίκη εκείνη την ημέρα? ακριβώς όπως δεν υπήρχε καμία προσποιείται ότι όσα συνέβησαν δεν θα άλλαζε την ιστορία μιας χώρας που, απελευθερώθηκε από την εκλογή του Αδόλφου Χίτλερ Ράιχ μόλις και μετά βίας έξι εβδομάδες νωρίτερα, τώρα ογκούμενος ολοταχώς προς αιματηρό εμφύλιο πόλεμο.Ακόμη και τώρα, στο 86, όταν Patríkios "γελάει στο και με τον εαυτό μου που έχω φτάσει τόσο ηλικία", ο ποιητής μπορεί να θυμηθεί, σκηνή-για-σκηνή, πυροβόλησε για πυροβολισμό, τι συνέβη στην κεντρική πλατεία της ελληνικής πολιτικής ζωής, το πρωί της 3 Δεκεμβρίου 1944.Αυτή ήταν η ημέρα, εκείνοι πριν από 70 χρόνια αυτή την εβδομάδα, όταν ο βρετανικός στρατός, ακόμα σε πόλεμο με την Γερμανία, άνοιξαν πυρ κατά – και έδωσε τους ντόπιους που είχαν συνεργαστεί με τους Ναζί τα όπλα στη φωτιά: ένα πολιτικό πλήθος αποδεικνύοντας για την υποστήριξη τους παρτιζάνους, με τους οποίους είχαν Συμμαχία Βρετανία για τρία χρόνια.Το πλήθος που Ελλήνων, αμερικανικών, βρετανικών και σοβιετικών σημαίες και φώναζαν: "Viva Τσώρτσιλ, Ρούσβελτ Viva, Viva αμείωτη" στην έγκριση της Συμμαχίας εν καιρώ πολέμου.Είκοσι οκτώ αμάχους, κυρίως νεαρά αγόρια και κορίτσια, σκοτώθηκαν και εκατοντάδες τραυματίστηκαν. "Είχε όλα σκεφτήκαμε θα ήταν μια επίδειξη όπως και κάθε άλλο," Patríkios υπενθυμίζει. "Business as usual. Κανένας δεν περίμενε ένα λουτρό αίματος."ΔιαφήμισηΗ λογική της Μεγάλης Βρετανίας ήταν βάναυση και άπιστη: πρωθυπουργός Ουίνστον Τσόρτσιλ θεωρείται η επιρροή του ΚΚΕ μέσα στο κίνημα αντίστασης που αυτός είχε υποστηρίξει σε όλο τον πόλεμο-του Εθνικού Απελευθερωτικού Μετώπου, ΕΑΜ – να έχουν αυξηθεί ισχυρότερη από ό, τι είχε υπολόγισε, αρκεί για να θέσει σε κίνδυνο το σχέδιό του για να επιστρέψει ο Έλληνας βασιλιάς στην εξουσία και να κρατήσει τον κομμουνισμό στον κόλπο. Έτσι μεταπήδησε υποταγές στον πίσω οι υποστηρικτές του Χίτλερ κατά τη δική του πρότερον συμμάχους.There were others in the square that day who, like the 16-year-old Patríkios, would go on to become prominent members of the left. Míkis Theodorakis, renowned composer and iconic figure in modern Greek history, daubed a Greek flag in the blood of those who fell. Like Patríkios, he was a member of the resistance youth movement. And, like Patríkios, he knew his country had changed. Within days, RAF Spitfires and Beaufighters were strafing leftist strongholds as the Battle of Athens – known in Greece as the Dekemvriana – began, fought not between the British and the Nazis, but the British alongside supporters of the Nazis against the partisans. “I can still smell the destruction,” Patríkios laments. “The mortars were raining down and planes were targeting everything. Even now, after all these years, I flinch at the sound of planes in war movies.”And thereafter Greece’s descent into catastrophic civil war: a cruel and bloody episode in British as well as Greek history which every Greek knows to their core – differently, depending on which side they were on – but which remains curiously untold in Britain, perhaps out of shame, maybe the arrogance of a lack of interest. It is a narrative of which the millions of Britons who go to savour the glories of Greek antiquity or disco-dance around the islands Mamma Mia-style, are unaware.AdvertisementThe legacy of this betrayal has haunted Greece ever since, its shadow hanging over the turbulence and violence that erupted in 2008 after the killing of a schoolboy by police – also called the Dekemvriana – and created an abyss between the left and right thereafter.“The 1944 December uprising and 1946-49 civil war period infuses the present,” says the leading historian of these events, André Gerolymatos, “because there has never been a reconciliation. In France or Italy, if you fought the Nazis, you were respected in society after the war, regardless of ideology. In Greece, you found yourself fighting – or imprisoned and tortured by – the people who had collaborated with the Nazis, on British orders. There has never been a reckoning with that crime, and much of what is happening in Greece now is the result of not coming to terms with the past.”Before the war, Greece was ruled by a royalist dictatorship whose emblem of a fascist axe and crown well expressed its dichotomy once war began: the dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, had been trained as an army officer in Imperial Germany, while Greek King George II – an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – was attached to Britain. The Greek left, meanwhile, had been reinforced by a huge influx of politicised refugees and liberal intellectuals from Asia Minor, who crammed into the slums of Pireaus and working-class Athens.Both dictator and king were fervently anti-communist, and Metaxas banned the Communist Party, KKE, interning and torturing its members, supporters and anyone who did not accept “the national ideology” in camps and prisons, or sending them into internal exile. Once war started, Metaxas refused to accept Mussolini’s ultimatum to surrender and pledged his loyalty to the Anglo-Greek alliance. The Greeks fought valiantly and defeated the Italians, but could not resist the Wehrmacht. By the end of April 1941, the Axis forces imposed a harsh occupation of the country. The Greeks – at first spontaneously, later in organised groups – resisted.But, noted the British Special Operations Executive (SOE): “The right wing and monarchists were slower than their opponents in deciding to resist the occupation, and were therefore of little use.”Britain’s natural allies were therefore EAM – an alliance of left wing and agrarian parties of which the KKE was dominant, but by no means the entirety – and its partisan military arm, ELAS.There is no overstating the horror of occupation. Professor Mark Mazower’s book Inside Hitler’s Greece describes hideous bloccos or “round-ups” – whereby crowds would be corralled into the streets so that masked informers could point out ELAS supporters to the Gestapo and Security Battalions – which had been established by the collaborationist government to assist the Nazis – for execution. Stripping and violation of women was a common means to secure “confessions”. Mass executions took place “on the German model”: in public, for purposes of intimidation; bodies would be left hanging from trees, guarded by Security Battalion collaborators to prevent their removal. In response, ELAS mounted daily counterattacks on the Germans and their quislings. The partisan movement was born in Athens but based in the villages, so that Greece was progressively liberated from the countryside. The SOE played its part, famous in military annals for the role of Brigadier Eddie Myers and “Monty” Woodhouse in blowing up the Gorgopotomas viaduct in 1942 and other operations with the partisans – andartes in Greek.Από το φθινόπωρο 1944, Ελλάδα είχε καταστραφεί από την κατοχή και την πείνα. Μισό εκατομμύριο άνθρωποι είχαν πεθάνει-7% του πληθυσμού. ΕΛΑΣ είχε, ωστόσο, απελευθερώθηκε δεκάδες χωριά και να γίνει ένα ΠΡΩΤΟ-κυβέρνηση, τη διαχείριση περιοχές της χώρας, ενώ η επίσημη κρατική μαραθεί μακριά. Αλλά μετά από το γερμανικό απόσυρση, ΕΛΑΣ, διατηρούνται τα 50.000 ένοπλες παρτιζάνους έξω από την πρωτεύουσα, και το Μάιο 1944 συμφώνησε να την άφιξη των βρετανικών στρατευμάτων, και να τοποθετήσετε την άνδρες κάτω ο αξιωματικός που διοικούσε, Lt Gen Ρόναλντ Σκόμπι.Στις 12 Οκτωβρίου οι Γερμανοί εκκένωσαν την Αθήνα. Μερικοί μαχητές του ΕΛΑΣ, ωστόσο, είχαν στην πρωτεύουσα όλοι μαζί, και καλωσόρισε τον καθαρό αέρα της ελευθερίας κατά τη διάρκεια ένα παράθυρο έξι ημερών μεταξύ απελευθέρωσης και την άφιξη των Βρετανών. Μία κομματική ειδικότερα είναι ακόμα ζωντανός, ηλικίας 92, και είναι ένας θρύλος της νεότερης Ελλάδας.Επιβλητική παρουσία: Churchill αφήνοντας HMS Ajax να παραβρεθώ σε ένα συνέδριο στην ξηρά. Αθήνα μπορεί να δει στο παρασκήνιο.FacebookΠειραχτήριPinterestΕπιβλητική παρουσία: Churchill αφήνοντας HMS Ajax να παραβρεθώ σε ένα συνέδριο στην ξηρά. Αθήνα μπορεί να δει στο παρασκήνιο. Φωτογραφία: Crown Copyright. IWM/αυτοκρατορική Πολεμικό ΜουσείοΜέσα και γύρω από το Ευρωπαϊκό Κοινοβούλιο στις Βρυξέλλες, ο άνθρωπος σε μια ελληνική ψαρά ΚΓΠ, με την χαίτη άσπρα μαλλιά και μουστάκι, ξεχωρίζει. Αυτός είναι ο Μανώλης Γλέζος, ανώτερος βουλευτής του Ευρωπαϊκού Κοινοβουλίου για το κόμμα ΣΥΡΙΖΑ της Ελλάδας.ΔιαφήμισηGlezos is a man of humbling greatness. On 30 May 1941, he climbed the Acropolis with another partisan and tore down the swastika flag that had been hung there a month before. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, was tortured and as a result suffered from tuberculosis. He escaped and was re-arrested twice – the second time by collaborators. He recalls being sentenced to death in May 1944, before the Germans left Athens – “They told me my grave had already been dug”. Somehow he avoided execution and was then saved from a Greek courtmartial’s firing squad during the civil war period by international outcry led by General de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev Geoffrey Fisher.”Seventy years later, he is an icon of the Greek left who is also hailed as the greatest living authority on the resistance. “The English, t

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μια μέρα άλλαξε την ιστορία: άοπλων διαδηλωτών από την αστυνομία και τις 3 Δεκεμβρίου 1944 πυροβολήθηκε στην Αθήνα το πτώμα του βρετανικού στρατού.Φωτογραφία: Dmitry - Kessel / ώρα η ζωή φωτογραφίες / Getty Images

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"μπορεί ακόμα να δεις πολύ καλά, δεν το έχω ξεχάσει, είπε:" δεν í í kg TOS μέρος.", Αθήνα πυροβολείς την αστυνομία από το Κοινοβούλιο το πλήθος στην Πλατεία Συντάγματος στην οροφή.Οι νέοι και οι γυναίκες δίπλα στην πισίνα, όλοι κάτω από τις σκάλες, πάντα πολύ έκπληκτος.και μετά ήταν η καθοριστική στιγμή: την απερισκεψία της νεολαίας, στο φως της δικαιοσύνης καύσης παθιασμένη πίστη: "πήδηξα πάνω στην κεντρική πλατεία. ένα σιντριβάνι, είναι ακόμα εκεί, άρχισε να μου φωνάζει:" σύντροφοι, μην διασπορά!!!!!!!Η νίκη θα είναι δική μας!Μην φύγεις.Έχει έρθει η ώρα.Θα κερδίσουμε!είπε: "εγώ", είπε, "σίγουρα θα κερδίσουμε.