Beyond Greek Exceptionalism

While its postwar trajectory has significant distinguishing features, Greece is not an exception to the European history of the Second World War and its aftermath. As Martin Conway points out, ‘in many respects, the history of Greece between 1941 and 1949 can be regarded as a projection, albeit often in more extreme forms, of the history of much of Europe during that decade’.Footnote ³ Indeed, this period is crucial for comprehending the long process of the state's recognition of the National Resistance in Greece because it configured the postwar state and political system.

After the war, most European countries faced similar problems in transitioning from war to peace and legitimising postwar governments.Footnote ⁴ In Greece, however, the balance of power between political parties was severely disrupted, precipitating a large-scale fratricidal conflict. The Occupation (1941–4) and post-liberation period (1944–5), or what the Italians term the dopoliberazione, were pivotal in Greece's history because they created a substantially new political scene and a completely new political vocabulary.Footnote ⁵ During this period, the political space of the left and the centre was configured, while the prewar right had to be reconfigured to preserve its existence.Footnote ⁶ During the war, nationalism was also transformed into the exclusivist notion of ‘national-mindedness’ (ethnikofrosini).Footnote ⁷

‘National-mindedness’ represented the Greek state's ideology from the end of the civil war until the dictatorship of the colonels (1949–74). It was an amalgam of radical anticommunism and the expression of an extreme nationalism strongly related to the Greek Orthodox Church's values and the ancient glory of the nation combined with liberal and Western Atlanticist perceptions. ‘National-mindedness’ was used to accommodate the new regime of power-sharing that brought together the forces of the right and the centre parties under the hegemonic guidance of the United States. As such, the country was divided between the nationally minded (ethnikofrones) and those deemed harmful to society (miasmata).

Greece's internal conflicts during the Occupation expressed many of the tensions between resistance movements and governments-in-exile that existed, but were sometimes less visible, elsewhere in Europe.Footnote ⁸ These tensions contributed to poisoning domestic politics to the point of sparking civil war in Greece as well as in other countries, such as Yugoslavia and northern Italy. Α particular constellation of prewar divisions and endemic political instability that grew increasingly acute in the 1930s combined with the resistance's legacy – a vigorous resistance movement; the creation of state institutions of the ‘people's power’ in the liberated Greek countryside;Footnote ⁹ mass radicalisation; political fragmentation; and civil clashes – to profoundly transform the political landscape.

These developments, coupled with British influence – the resistance movement was largely armed and equipped from British sources; the exiled Greek government was in British-controlled Cairo; and the king was in London – and the growing influence of the Communist Party (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas; KKE), which threatened British plans for the return of the king to power and thus to keep communism at bay, led to an open civil war from 1946 and to the landslide victory in 1949 of the National Army, supported first by British and then by American forces, against the communist-backed Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), a conflict that caused more casualties and displaced more people than in the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁰ This three-year civil war, Europe's bloodiest between 1945 and the breakup of Yugoslavia, reflected the harsh social and political struggles that marked the ‘European Civil War’ and inverted many postwar European norms, including the politics of retribution.Footnote ¹¹

After the war, Europe embarked on a major historical experiment: the postwar justice meted out for collaboration and war crimes through lynch-mob justice, Allied tribunals and national courts. The Greek postwar anticommunist authorities, however, preferred to condemn or even execute resistance fighters from the communist anti-Nazi resistance.Footnote ¹² In Greece and Italy, where violent resistance to postwar regimes lasted the longest, suspected leftists were incarcerated even as collaborators were released from prison.Footnote ¹³ Thus Greece's purges of collaborationists were limited, with the lowest purge rate aside from Italy. Only twenty-five collaborationists were executed in Greece from 1944 to 1949.Footnote ¹⁴ Over the same period, special military courts executed between three thousand and five thousand communists and their sympathisers.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, in Greece, hundreds of armed collaborationists were integrated into the state apparatus to confront the communist threat before the purges began in earnest.Footnote ¹⁶

Reversing the politics of retribution changed the postwar political vocabulary. In postwar Greece, political prisoners or deportees were not the concentration camp survivors – most European countries’ most important symbolic group and the resistance's real spokespeople in many ways, ‘the best of the Nation’ – but the EAM/ELAS combatants interned in domestic ‘rehabilitation’ concentration camps.Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, in Greece – as in Poland, Albania and Yugoslavia – a virtual civil war within the resistance led both the left and the right to insist on their nationalist credentials.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, both during and after the civil war, the right and the communist left strove to prove that they were the only legitimate representatives of the nation.Footnote ¹⁹

Since purges of collaborators were limited and could not produce a new postwar morality, the legal process of recognising the National Resistance formed the backbone of the state's ‘policy for the past’. The state constructed a new official narrative, not only about the resistance, but also about the nation and who deserved to be called Greek. Recognition promoted new definitions of the nation and new hierarchies between social groups: the so-called patriots received valuable symbolic and political capital (the heroes), while the leftists, perceived as ‘anti-national’ elements, were scorned and politically excluded (the outcasts). Thus, recognition was primarily a tool for inclusion and exclusion. But it also functioned as a welfare policy for those who were considered part of the nation and served to control and surveil those who were not.

As elsewhere, disputes over the meaning of the Second World War continue in Greece; the war ‘retain[ed] its grip on memory and myth’.Footnote ²⁰ The National Resistance is a site of memory that has concerned Greek society intensely and emotionally since the war ended. We suggest that this passionate debate was fuelled largely by the distortions created by the state recognition process – collaborationists or groups that had not participated in the resistance were recognised as resistance combatants, while the largest resistance organisation, the EAM/ELAS, was excluded and penalised. Thus, the Greek resistance's history cannot be fully understood without examining its postwar recognition. However, compared to the voluminous literature on National Resistance history, research on its official recognition has been limited, despite being the main process that defined the National Resistance as both ‘national’ and ‘resistance’.Footnote ²¹

Recently, some scholars have investigated the recognition laws as an autonomous subject, significantly contributing to our understanding of their political implications.Footnote ²² While these studies have been valuable, they have not provided a comprehensive overview of this long period's continuities and ruptures and many aspects remain uncharted, such as the left's ongoing demand for recognition and the link between recognition of the ΕΑΜ's resistance (Law 1285) and previous legislation. Furthermore, the existing literature lacks a wider reflection on the very process of recognition as a political tool, not only for legitimising the state but also for nation building.

Our analysis draws on a variety of sources. The army oversaw the first two Recognition laws because it was one of the central political actors during the postwar period and the dictatorship. Thus, we explored the military archives of the Directorate of Reservists, Soldiers, Victims, and Disabled (DEPATHA), particularly the Archive of National Resistance (ANR), which houses the National Resistance Fighters Registers, related certificates and honorary awards. This was the first time that the Ministry of Defense permitted access to these archives for such an extensive investigation. We also conducted archival research at the Attica and Aegean Prefectures because they oversaw the recognition of resistance combatants after 1982. Finally, we explored a number of private and public archives, including the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Gennadius Library Archives, and the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI), which includes the archives of the United Democratic Left (Eniaia Dimokratiki Aristera; EDA) as well as part of the archives of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).

Finally, we examined the overall legislation that stemmed from implementing the sixty-five basic recognition laws; the legislation's benefits for ex-combatants; the documentation that resistance organisations and individuals provided for recognition; the resistance organisations that were recognised or rejected (537 in total); the records, announcements, newspapers and periodicals from veterans’ resistance associations from across the political spectrum; Greek parliamentary records; and the press from 1946 through 2006.

Liberation 1944: The Coexistence of War and Peace

Ending a war is complicated, especially when guerrilla warfare is involved. In 1944, a paramount issue in Greece was the need to recreate the national army, which had been dismantled after the capitulation of Greece in 1941, in order to secure state control of the armed forces. Within this process, the official promise to recognise resistance combatants became an important tool for negotiating with the armed guerrillas. From the beginning, disarmament and recognition were connected. On 20 October 1944, the military commander in Herakleion, Crete, ordered local guerrilla leaders to surrender their weapons and return to peasant life. He accompanied his order with a promise: ‘The homeland expresses gratitude to the brave guerrillas for their sacrifices . . . Every leader of a guerrilla group [must keep] a record of the men who served with gallantry, so that it can be submitted on time for moral and material compensation’. That promise was made by an official from the government-in-exile in Cairo, headed by King George II, which was about to return to Greece in an effort to reinstate the Greek authorities, who lacked both an army and the means of persuading the guerrillas to surrender control.Footnote ²³

Although both wings of the fragile Government of National Unity, established in September 1944 and led by liberal Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, wanted to reestablish the Greek army, the communist-led resistance organisation of EAM/ELAS aimed to create a national army that would include its guerrilla forces, while the rest of the political forces, which dominated the government and enjoyed British political support, strove to end communist influence. In the weeks immediately after liberation, the issue of recognition was mainly raised by noncommunists to argue that ELAS should be demobilised honourably. The communists focused on purging Nazi collaborators, which, beyond its moral necessity and alignment with European trends, was the most effective way of ensuring their permanent exclusion from the new army and the postwar state in general.Footnote ²⁴

At the end of November 1944, negotiations over the army between the communists and the prewar political establishment – mainly liberals but also pro-royalists – collapsed. The situation escalated to the so-called December events (Dekemvriana), an armed battle between EAM/ELAS and a coalition that included noncommunist resistance organisations, collaborationist organisations, and state forces such as the gendarmerie, also accused of collaboration. The latter were supported by the British army, whose intervention was crucial. The battle raged in Athens for over a month and resulted in the EAM/ELAS's defeat by Greek and British troops. The subsequent Treaty of Varkiza ended the conflict and dismantled all guerrilla bands, communist and noncommunist alike. However, the disarmament was only partial. Some EAM/ELAS combatants hid their weaponry, while anticommunist bands found ways to conceal their armed activity. For example, the National Republican Greek League (EDES), which had the second largest guerrilla army, and ‘X’, a pro-royalist, semi-collaborationist Athenian group, both became political parties and expanded their networks to include local collaborationist groups seeking protection.Footnote ²⁵ Just months after Greece's liberation, a yawning chasm emerged between the communists and all the other political forces, shifting much of the latter closer to the collaborationists.Footnote ²⁶

Because the negotiated disarmament of the guerrilla groups was largely nominal, particularly in rural areas, ‘a sort of miniature counter-revolution’ continued the mass persecution of the leftists involved in the resistance.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, the EAM formed a political coalition with active front organisations, which had considerable strength in the unions, thus retaining political influence. In December 1945, the EAM organised a massive public rally to demand recognition of its part in the resistance, which meant amnesty for its members who were accused of crimes during the Occupation.Footnote ²⁸

As the EAM was marginalised from the central political scene, the dominant political forces had to reach a new political consensus on the resistance and decide whether the resistance should be omitted entirely from public discourse, a view that was promoted by pro-royalists but intensely criticised by liberal circles.Footnote ²⁹ For liberals, the resistance represented important moral and political capital that they did not want to relinquish. The reconstituted national army also took an active interest in the resistance; it began to gather evidence and formed a military committee to prepare an official record of resistance organisations. Evidently, military circles strongly believed that after a war they were entitled to control the entire process of honouring these fighters.Footnote ³⁰

What Unites Us? The Parliamentary Battle over Resistance on the Way to Civil War

After the first postwar elections on 31 March 1946, the Greek parliament began officially defining the National Resistance. From the start, the royalist majority and the liberal opposition engaged in a moral battle. Communists as well as other minor socialist and agrarian parties, which had abstained from the elections, denouncing widespread episodes of left-wing voter intimidation, were excluded from these debates. The first point of friction concerned the very meaning of the resistance, whether it should be described as the entire nation's collective effort or whether its leaders should be recognised personally. The liberals wanted to expose the king as detached from the Greek people's suffering and solely concerned about his throne.Footnote ³¹ For their part, the royalists often accused prominent liberal leaders of wartime collaboration with the communists based on anti-royalism, paving the way for the communist insurgence.

The parliamentary confrontation reflected postwar Greece's central dilemma: Would postwar political legitimacy depend on the National Resistance's political capital, or would it stem from more traditional sources, such as the Crown? The answer was not clear. On the one hand, even royalists understood that the National Resistance was a considerable weapon for the territorial demands that Greece was about to make at the International Paris Peace Conference as it underlined Greece's constant struggle on the side of the Allies. On the other hand, the liberals realised that if the National Resistance acquired a central political value, this would greatly benefit the Communist Party.

Eventually, on 23 July 1946, the parliament unanimously passed the 7th Resolution, ‘On the Recognition of the Actions of the National Guerrilla Groups as a War Act Worthy of the Homeland and Worthy of the Nation's Gratitude’.Footnote ³² It was a working compromise between the two parliamentary rivals amidst imminent international challenges. More importantly, it expressed the groups’ unity against the communists. The conservative government finally acknowledged resistance fighters, provided they could prove that they had acted ‘nationally’, that is, lawfully, according to the orders of the royal government-in-exile and the British army's Middle East Command.Footnote ³³ The EAM/ELAS was denounced as an unlawful movement since it had clashed with the Middle East Command, during the December events. Thus, the EAM/ELAS was excluded from the nation, and ‘National Resistance’ could only mean noncommunist resistance. The government also moved to criminalise left-wing activities and the Communist Party with a series of laws that criminalised its political activity as a threat against the ‘existing social system’, as Emergency Law 509/1947 stated, including death sentences that marked the beginning of the civil war.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, the parliamentary debate over the specific details of the 7th Resolution took place throughout the civil war, until its end in 1949.

The first issue that had to be addressed was the former guerrilla leaders’ growing demand to battle the communists.Footnote ³⁵ However, in 1947, the army was given total control over dealing with the communist threat. Thus, ‘national’ (noncommunist) guerrilla leaders, a powerful social and political subject in the making, lost an important tool for negotiating with the state. The second issue was whether the National Resistance's initial definition as the battle against the Occupation forces should also incorporate the fight against communists, which would lay the groundwork for recognising collaborationist units, including the infamous Security Battalions, which had been established in 1943 by the collaborationist government to fight against the resistance under the command of the German army.Footnote ³⁶ The third matter was whether the law should honour all resistance groups equally or prioritise guerrilla warfare. Last, there was the pressing question of what kind of gratitude Greece owed its former combatants and whether it should be expressed symbolically or include material benefits, namely pensions for veterans and killed or disabled victims’ families.

Thus, recognition of the resistance became a field of competition among several sociopolitical groups and state institutions. The government had to navigate carefully and produce a law that would satisfy most of these groups without relinquishing its own political power. By September 1949, when Emergency Law 971/1949 ‘On Granting Moral Awards to the National Guerrilla Bands and the National Organisations of Internal Resistance’ was ratified, the end of the civil war had established Greece's power structure. The army – already a central political actor – had been given full control over the recognition process.

A Land of Discontent: Resistance Veterans and Law 971/1949

Emergency Law 971/1949 formed the basis for all subsequent resistance-related legislation. Rather than a symbolic act of inclusion and reconciliation, the legislation was designed as a tool for ostracism. The whole process, which occurred between 1949 and 1965, was primarily concerned with preventing the recognition of any ‘anti-national element’.Footnote ³⁷

What qualified as an ‘anti-national’ element was determined by numerous preconditions that targeted the EAM/ELAS. For instance, the law required ‘national behavior during December 1944’, a political criterion that had nothing to do with Greece's struggle against the Axis powers.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, the legislation defined both the nation and the resistance according to the ruling parties’ memories of the 1940s. Political opponents of the government-in-exile and postwar governments became ‘enemies of the nation’, while loyalty to the state – even by former collaborationists – could be honoured as membership in the National Resistance. Unlike other European legislation, Greek law did not clearly exclude collaborationists, only deserters and ‘anti-national’ actors.

Beyond excluding the EAM/ELAS, the legislation first sought to limit the guerrilla leaders’ widespread influence and then to empower the recognised leaders of resistance organisations in a controlled manner. By law, the committee could only examine applications from organisation leaders, not individuals. Recognition was a formative process that accepted, denied and created resistance leaders. Subsequently, it entitled the leaders to file membership lists. Throughout Greece, the recognition process established or consolidated local power networks and sparked feuds among those who claimed leadership in their territories.Footnote ³⁹

Moreover, recognition was a formative process for the resistance groups themselves because the law demanded coherence and structure. Resistance groups were separated into three major categories: National Guerrilla Bands, National Organisations of Intelligence and Sabotage, and National Internal Organisations. Applications required information on each organisation's history, hierarchy and structure, logistics, area and timeline of activity, relationship with the Allied forces and the government-in-exile and links to other resistance groups.Footnote ⁴⁰ To meet the requirements and successfully obtain their groups’ recognition, applicants had to create coherent and therefore selective stories about a complicated, controversial past. That process, with its restrictive rules but often flexible and shady implementation, could reject relevant documentation or overlook its absence. Thus, it gave resistance leaders the opportunity to form narratives about their past and receive official validation.

While Greek legislators attempted to create a coherent narrative of mass Greek resistance, excluding the EAM/ELAS left a vacuum because no other organisation had had so many members or such wide-ranging activity and dispersal throughout the country. The narrative of a nationwide nation-minded guerrilla movement was based on the EDES and its military branch, the National Bands of Greek Guerrillas (EOEA), despite the fact that it had been active mainly in northwestern Greece.Footnote ⁴¹ Its leader, Napoleon Zervas, was recognised as the National Resistance's General Leader and the military recognition committee accepted twenty-five EDES groups from around the country, including local committees without resistance activity and independent groups under its aegis.Footnote ⁴²

The initial resistance legislation failed to achieve a consensus among those defined as national-minded veterans as it failed to provide the symbolic and material awards, such as pensions, that they believed they deserved in recognition of their significant national contributions during the Second World War. As recognition became a military process that granted medals and promotions, it affected the balance of power among army officers. The military leadership's support for a highly restricted, controlled process antagonised ex-combatants. While constant pressure from leaders, resistance associations and politicians resulted in extending application deadlines and, eventually, the official recognition of 108 organisations with over 75,000 members, a sense of injustice and dissatisfaction remained.Footnote ⁴³

That discontent came mainly from former guerrilla leaders who were prominent, politically influential local elites, and they pressured the committees to recognise more members than the groups actually had. For leaders, presenting an organisation as having hundreds or thousands of members maintained power networks. The unequal treatment of applicants, which depended on their lobbying power and ties to the military committee, fomented constant grievances.Footnote ⁴⁴ Applicants who really had participated in the war were rejected, while nonexistent groups were approved and exaggerated membership numbers were tolerated. Additionally, the recognition of infamous Axis collaborators caused angry debates in the press and even violent outbursts in the parliament.Footnote ⁴⁵

The perception that recognition and its benefits were insufficient was common to groups with different political leanings within and beyond the ‘national’ sociopolitical space. Although the benefits were expanded by connecting resistance legislation to laws for war victims and included grants/subsidies for land purchase, housing and promotions for army members and public servants, they did not satisfy the veterans’ major demand for a large pension programme and were regarded as mainly moral, not material. For many, the promise of recognition remained unfulfilled if the measures failed to deliver a major social welfare policy. Meanwhile, former EAM/ELAS members experienced extreme persecution and discrimination.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their demand for recognition – voiced through public protests and campaigns, special features in the press and books – which meant their acceptance as part of the nation, eventually combined with contemporary international developments, including decolonisation and the peace movement, to find support across the political spectrum and prompted loud calls for democratisation.

Resistance Recognition as a Demand for Democracy (1950–1967)

Across Europe, the Cold War shaped histories and memories of the Second World War. Two interconnected but distinct discourses emerged: antifascism and antitotalitarianism.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Greece, the ideology of national-mindedness that dominated the post-civil war period accorded with the West's Cold War discourse. The anticommunism that polarised Greek society generated powerful political and ideological identities.Footnote ⁴⁸ In that context, Greece's ‘policy for the past’ reflected both a certain view of the national past and a strategy of governmentality. Past actions and relationships were penalised, as the 1940s were seen through the distorting lens of ‘three rounds’ of communist treachery. For the state, the resistance period represented the first round – preparation for the communist attack; it was followed by a second round, the December events; and it culminated with the third round, the civil war and the KKE's most serious attempt to seize power. The post-civil war state considered communists to be un-Greek and ‘eternal enemies of the nation’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The state's repressive practices sought to control and prevent subversive behaviour by ‘rehabilitating’ or marginalising those who were perceived as ‘national outcasts’.

Although the civil war's consequences dominated postwar politics and society in Greece, throughout that period there were developments that challenged the narrative of national-mindedness. In fact, the new era started with two consecutive centre-left governments, led by liberal army general Nikolaos Plastiras. Plastiras promised peace, reconciliation, amnesty and the ‘forgetting’ of the contentious past in order to move on, but after two brief terms he left office in October 1952. During his tenure, some of Plastiras's deputies stressed the need to recognise the EAM/ELAS as part of the National Resistance. Plastiras himself favoured distinguishing among the thousands of ‘purely patriotic’ EAM/ELAS members and its communist leadership.Footnote ⁵⁰ Eventually, those attempts were stymied by the government and the powerful right-wing opposition, both of which pointed to the evils that the communists had caused during and after the Second World War. In 1952, the torch was passed to Alexandros Papagos, the army's commander-in-chief during the 1940 Greco-Italian War and the Greek Civil War. His electoral victory initiated a period of right-wing exclusionary dominance, which continued with his successor, Konstantinos Karamanlis, and the National Radical Union (Ethniki Rizospastiki Enosi; ERE) until 1963.

However, the emergence of a strong leftist opposition and a new centrist political force contributed to questioning the civil war-based divisions in politics and society. In the 1958 elections, the Unified Democratic Left (EDA) became the major opposition force.Footnote ⁵¹ As the only legal noncommunist leftist party, the EDA was the main political representative of the EAM/ELAS's legacy. At the same time, the EDA retained close ties to the illegal Communist Party in exile and amplified the voice of its adherents in Greece. During the 1950s, the EDA collaborated with figures from across the political spectrum, many of whom were renowned for their resistance activity. To an extent, this cooperation stemmed from common discontent over the resistance fighters’ postwar fate and their growing demands for ‘real recognition’.Footnote ⁵² However, the government reacted fiercely to the EDA's success, initiating a period of further state repression of its opponents in the form of prosecutions, trials and political violence.

The second development that changed Greek political culture in the 1960s was the founding of the Centre Union (Enosi Kentrou; EK) in 1961, which united the centrist political space. The Centre Union, led by Georgios Papandreou, the first prime minister of liberated Greece, accused the government of using autocratic methods and unfair electoral practices and creating a powerful parallel state (parakratos). During this time, a number of parastatal groups – some of which were recognised as organisations for resistance veterans and victims – ruled parts of rural Greece. The Centre Union appealed to left-wing voters and won two back-to-back elections in 1963 and 1964.

Claiming part of the resistance's legacy and accusing the right of harbouring collaborationism, Papandreou turned two anniversaries, the liberation of Athens and the Gorgopotamos operation, into national holidays. The latter – in which the Gorgopotamos bridge was blown up – represented a rare moment of national unity, because both major resistance groups, ELAS and EDES, had participated in it under British command. This attempt was also a response to the EDA's effort to make the anniversary of the establishment of the EAM the National Resistance's official anniversary, as the EDA criticised the government for appropriating the National Resistance's legacy.

The emergence of the Centre Union and the EDA aroused a broad public debate over the National Resistance.Footnote ⁵³ For the left, this discussion provided an opportunity to change the official narrative of the resistance, which two bodies had been attempting to do since the end of the 1950s: the exiled KKE's history department in Bucharest and the EDA's resistance bureau in Greece. Their aims were similar and included data gathering and creating an ambitious National Resistance publishing program.Footnote ⁵⁴ Through publications, memorial ceremonies, rallies, campaigns with veterans from across the political spectrum and establishing front organisations, such as the Panhellenic Union of National Resistance Fighters, the EDA pressured the state to recognise the left-wing resistance and accept the communists as part of the nation's past and present. Additionally, the communists attempted to internationalise the Greek case through its affiliation with the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR).

Resistance veterans, the ‘troublesome heroes’, as Lagrou terms them, played a central role in the communists’ efforts.Footnote ⁵⁵ Resistance agents emerged during war but shaped their identities during peace, through their individual and collective action as participants ‘in a social group constructed for the purpose of commemoration’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Experiences of struggle, persecution and suffering moulded left-wing veterans’ identity and mentality. They drove the demand for ‘real recognition’, which peaked in 1964–5. Internationally, 1965 – the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War – symbolizes the end of the Cold War's antifascist and antitotalitarian memories and the gradual transition from the era of heroes to the era of victims, a shift accompanied by more self-critical or even revisionist narratives in many European countries.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Greece, the July 1965 ‘palace coup’, when Papandreou's government was overthrown as a result of his conflict with King Constantine II, ended a democratic reform process which was poised to enact a new recognition law and led to the 1967 military coup.

Dictatorship, 1967–1974: Ensuring State Continuity without Rupture?

In post-civil war Greece, the army's intervention was always a possibility. When the coup finally occurred on 21 April 1967, it paralysed the country's dynamic civil society. While left-wing resistance veterans’ associations, mainly affiliated with the EDA party, were dismantled almost immediately, many non-left resistance associations and their leaders rushed to welcome the ‘National Revolution of 1967’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Their stance was partly determined by their deep-seated anticommunism, a feature that they shared with the new regime, which presented itself as the nation's saviour from the new ‘red threat’.

At first, the dictatorship did not seek to appropriate the memory of the resistance, but its stance shifted in 1968 following a clash with the king over who would control the state. Thereafter, the dictatorship promoted the image of a regime with wide popular acceptance. On 20 June 1968, the government reshuffled its cabinet and proudly presented six of the ten new members to the general public as ex-resistance combatants. Their résumés highlighted their activity during the Occupation as ipso facto evidence of their bravery and willingness to serve the nation without personal rewards.Footnote ⁵⁹

One month later, on 23 July 1968, the dictatorship's leader, Georgios Papadopoulos, visited Ioannina to participate in the EDES anniversary, a calculated publicity stunt that was widely covered by all the news media. The EDES veterans’ association president named him the National Resistance's honorary leader. As such, Papadopoulos gave a public speech, claiming that the ‘1967 revolution’ represented the reincarnation of the National Resistance. The national government, he said, was aware of the problems that ex-combatants had faced in the previous decades and he announced the government's decision to ‘recognise National Resistance’ by giving its veterans the same privileges that army soldiers enjoyed, notably pensions.Footnote ⁶⁰ On 26 April 1969, the government issued Decree 179/1969 ‘On National Resistance’. Instead of establishing rules for distributing pensions, however, the decree restarted the recognition process from scratch. Each organisation had to submit a new application, as if Emergency Law 971/1949 had never existed.

While the 1949 law had provided the legal framework for excluding left-wing organisations, the new law explicitly denounced the left in general as the enemy, equating it with the Occupation forces. The legislation expanded the resistance's timeframe through 1949. For the first time, the paramilitary bands that had hunted down communists until the end of the civil war could claim resistance fighter status.Footnote ⁶¹ Article 21 of the law also redefined the resistance's ‘enemy’ to include ‘communism in any form and manifestation as well as those who have served communism since the liberation of the country’. To a degree, the 1969 law responded to the ultraconservative anticommunist circle's criticism of the 1949 law as insufficiently severe and therefore enabling communists to take advantage of it.Footnote ⁶²

Meanwhile, the law's definition of communism as the enemy also excluded from recognition those who had ‘served communism by any means’ after Greece's liberation. This formulation denied recognition to anyone who was deemed as cooperating with the left between 1944 and 1969. After the coup, this vague description could include any of the dictatorship's opponents, even royalists.Footnote ⁶³ The dictatorship was radically redefining the nation in even more exclusionary terms.

While the new committees largely adhered to earlier recognition decisions and previously recognised organisations retained their status, they now recognised organisations that submitted applications for the first time, as well as new independent divisions of already recognised organisations. As a result, the number of recognised organisations increased from 108 to 246, but the number of recognised fighters dropped significantly. Under the 1949 law, 75,000 veterans had been recognised, but only 41,250 additional veterans were recognised by the 1969 law.Footnote ⁶⁴ The new regime eagerly expanded the imagined National Resistance map with all kinds of organisations but remained cautious about awarding titles that granted people pensions.

Although public critique of the recognition process was limited under the dictatorship, many recognised ex-combatants felt that the initial promises about pensions had not been honoured. In 1970 pensions were granted to disabled veterans and the families of fallen soldiers, but their time in the resistance was not pensionable and many existing privileges such as provisions that made it easier for their children to go to university were abolished. Angry letters flooded the newspapers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Again, the announcement of recognition created expectations that went unfulfilled.

The most serious challenge to the military committees’ decisions occurred in 1971 when Komninos Pyromaglou, a prominent EDES leader who had cooperated with the EDA, appealed to the Council of the State to annul the recognition of Thessaly's most brutal armed band during the civil war, the Nationalists of South East Thessaly.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Pyromaglou testified, its leader, the notorious Grigoris Sourlas, had not participated in ‘national activity’, as proved by the fact that in 1946 the Ministry of Public Security had declared him an outlaw and demanded his surrender. Although the Council of State postponed examining this case until the fall of the dictatorship, the episode showed that even under authoritarian control, recognition of the National Resistance continued to arouse public debate.

The dictatorship faced even more criticism over recognition from abroad. In November 1971, international newspapers including the London Times and Washington Post published a letter by American Senator Lee Metcalf describing the dictatorship's inner circle as former Nazi collaborators and expressing outrage ‘that one nation in the NATO alliance refuses to honor Greek resistance fighters or respect those who died fighting the nazi invaders’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The letter also claimed that on assuming power Papadopoulos had issued a decree that ‘the time spent in the Security Battalions would count towards pensions’.

Indeed, members of the Security Battalions were recognised individually as resistance fighters, since many who had joined noncommunist guerrilla bands were later drafted into the Security Battalions. In other instances, members of collaborationist bands were recognised as resistance fighters, as in the case of the EDES department in Macedonia, a practice that had been introduced by Emergency Law 971/1949.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, since 1946 the families of fallen Security Battalion soldiers had received military pensions just like those of fallen members of regular army units.Footnote ⁶⁹ In fact, Decree 179/1969 excluded the Security Battalions from recognition because they were part of the regular army, and the law only addressed voluntary organisations. Of course, the dictatorship continued to provide pensions to members of the Security Battalions, albeit not as members of the resistance but as members of the regular army, complying with a common pre-dictatorship practice. Nonetheless, the impression that the dictatorship had endowed collaborationists with resistance fighter status became widely accepted, thus discrediting the law as a mere manoeuvre that allowed the dictatorship to honour Nazi collaborators.Footnote ⁷⁰

Ultimately, the dictatorship intended the 1969 law as a gesture to so-called national-minded citizens to emphasise their common past. However, the effort generated disaffection instead of unity. It allowed the dictatorship's opponents to ascribe past mishandling of the recognition process to the dictatorship alone. After the dictatorship fell, those who demanded recognition of the left-wing resistance attributed long-standing anticommunist provisions solely to the dictatorship's ‘fascist character’. Demands for recognition therefore reappeared, with new force, as demands for democratisation.

Metapolitefsi: Ruptures within the Continuities (1974–1981)

In July 1974, following the dictatorship's collapse amid the crisis created by Turkey's invasion of Cyprus, the military handed over the reins of power to conservative politician Konstantinos Karamanlis and Greek democracy was restored. As in all transitions from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones, the new democratic state had to shift the boundaries and patterns of social and political inclusion and exclusion; in the process, Greece experienced both social and political continuities and discontinuities.Footnote ⁷¹

However, the regime change – known as Metapolitefsi – did not generate a climate of consensus with regard to Greece's traumatic past; quite the opposite. Since all parties had strong historical identities, the past became a field of intense political confrontation.Footnote ⁷² Even the formation of new parties, such as Konstantinos Karamanlis's New Democracy (Nea Dimokratia; ND) and Andreas Papandreu's PanHellenic Socialist Movement (Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima; PASOK), were strongly connected to the past in terms of membership as well as historical identity. ND maintained and reinforced its anticommunist past, while PASOK tried to form a left-wing identity by recalling the communist-led resistance.Footnote ⁷³ For their part, the communists had already split into two parties (the KKE and KKE Interior) in 1968; each of them claimed the resistance's legacy and celebrated the anniversary of the EAM's founding separately.Footnote ⁷⁴

When Karamanlis took office in 1974, his government enacted some democratic reforms. These included restoring the democratic 1952 Constitution, holding the referendum that led to the monarchy's abolition, partially ‘de-juntifying’ the state apparatus, trying the 1967 coup's ‘ringleaders’ and legalising the communist left. Nonetheless, the government retained the post-civil war state's anticommunist discourse.

Repealing the ban of the communist parties was the sine qua non for the country's democratisation and Europeanisation.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, the right's stance on the communist left had not changed. ND still considered leftists to be traitors; the government was willing to forget that treasonous past but under no circumstances would ND incorporate the communist left's past into the nation's history.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Minister of Interior Konstantinos Stefanopoulos asserted, ‘Greeks would never forgive those who had taken up arms against the Nation’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The right did not want to incorporate the left into Greece's ‘national’ resistance narrative because it was still clinging to its own version of that history. ND did not believe that a civil war had taken place but rather a ‘contra-bandit’ war; the government believed that the ‘bandits’ who had left Greece after the war were ‘fugitives’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Accordingly, the ND government maintained and reinforced all the divisive commemorations of the national past, including the events of December 1944, the end of the civil war, and even the battles between the Security Battalions and ELAS forces in Meligalas. For the right, these celebrations represented the defence of democracy and liberty against communist efforts to impose totalitarianism. But for socialists and communists, these commemorations represented a continuity of the civil war's divisions, hate and resentment.Footnote ⁷⁹

ND endeavoured to ensure that integrating the communist parties would not entail altering the right's interpretation of the 1940s, according to which discrimination against the communists had not taken place.Footnote ⁸⁰ For that reason, they refused to recognise the EAM/ELAS as part of the resistance,Footnote ⁸¹ abolish the dictatorship's decree-law or permit the unconditional repatriation of civil war political refugees, as demanded by both the communist parties and the newly founded PASOK.

However, above all, the communists and socialists wanted to make the National Resistance a focal point of national history. PASOK, the communist parties, local authorities, various resistance veterans’ associations and even some well-known right-wing politicians repeatedly broached the topic of recognising the resistance. Between 1974 and 1981, the issue was addressed by parliament alone on nineteen occasions, only to receive the same answer each time: the matter was closed, and a new debate ‘would open up an unsettling discourse that would kindle passions that have been dormant for years’.Footnote ⁸² The opposition responded to this effort to shut down the discussion by asserting that the dictatorship had recognised the Security Battalions and, in so doing, had distorted the National Resistance's meaning. ‘The state had honored the traitors, not the heroes’.Footnote ⁸³

Meanwhile, the ND government essentially continued the dictatorship's escalation of anticommunism by recognising paramilitary groups – which had brutalised the communists during the civil war – as resistance organisations. In total, 8957 members of various right-wing resistance organisations were recognised between 1974 and 1980.Footnote ⁸⁴

Creating a New and Inclusive Myth (1981–1989)

PASOK, another new political force that emerged after the dictatorship, built its left-wing credentials around the communists’ perennial demands, especially recognition of the National Resistance.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Greek socialists’ triumphant rise to power in 1981 changed the state's memory policies. It created a new political space for new actors and old social actors who had been disenfranchised by the exclusionary postwar system.Footnote ⁸⁶

The PASOK government first abolished all formal civil war commemorations and, after three historic parliamentary sessions on 17, 18 and 19 August 1982, it passed a law that incorporated the communist-led resistance into national history.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this context, the National Resistance became an almost abstract concept. It was patriotic, united and purged of collaborationism, internecine conflicts and social and political stakes and based on a broader, more inclusive definition of the nation.

Despite PASOK's efforts to present the resistance as a national, broadly inclusive phenomenon, the right reacted strongly to the 1982 law. The ND deputies walked out of parliament, angrily denouncing the bill as a ‘shameless attempt to whitewash communist crimes during and after the war’ and they promised ‘to repeal it as soon as they came to power’.Footnote ⁸⁸ To further clarify its position, ND made its presence felt at all right-wing commemorations, even though the celebrations had been officially abolished.Footnote ⁸⁹

At the same time, the PASOK government abolished the dictatorship's law but not the 1949 law. That meant that two different laws were in effect at the same time, which caused a great deal of confusion. For instance, the semi-collaborationist organisation ‘X’ was recognised under Law 971/1949, which remained in force, while Law 1285/1982 excluded those who had collaborated with the Occupation forces.Footnote ⁹⁰ The recognition of the resistance in a democratic context also implied the democratisation of the recognition process. Civil servants and veterans would be responsible for overseeing that process in each prefecture. Those who wanted to be recognised had to demonstrate their resistance activity by providing formal documentation, as well as two formal statements from previously recognised resistance veterans.Footnote ⁹¹

The recognition process started in 1985. The process was so slow that many of the elderly veterans died before receiving the recognition status. In addition, the process was decentralised; there were fifty-four recognition committees scattered around the country, which caused numerous problems. At the same time, leftist veterans were not the only ones who applied for recognition; previously recognised veterans from the ‘national’ organisations did as well. The latter also wanted to receive the new benefits, particularly pensions, despite the fact that the 1982 repeal of Decree-Law 179/1969 had not prevented former collaborationists and paramilitary members from continuing to receive pensions and other benefits.

The newly recognised resistance veterans had demanded this kind of material restitution and, as early as 1982, the PASOK government had announced plans to implement it.Footnote ⁹² But it was only in 1985 that Law 1543 established retirement pensions for disabled resistance veterans and their families. However, ND MPs argued that ‘[r]emuneration is being sought for those who fought against democracy and their pensions [come] at the expense of democracy!’Footnote ⁹³ ND deputies continued to invoke ‘red terror’ and communist crimes and they justified collaborationism on the grounds that it had stopped the communist threat.Footnote ⁹⁴ According to the new ND leader Konstantinos Mitsotakis, who was elected in 1984, the post-civil war right-wing regime had been more democratic and moderate than the PASOK government.Footnote ⁹⁵

A Vote Industry? (1990–2006)

New Democracy never recognised the EAM/ELAS's incorporation into the new narrative of a united National Resistance, much less the group's primacy in it. In this context, the ND government attempted to downplay the EAM/ELAS role in the resistance; instead, it highlighted the ‘national’ resistance and its combatants’ demands. This diminishing of the communist left's role in the resistance took place through its questioning of the practical application of resistance legislation and the logic of restoring and granting privileges to resistance combatants. Thus began a period of impugning and overhauling the process that had recognised the communist-led resistance.

For ND, ‘the process of granting resistance pensions has been turned into a major political and moral scandal after some turned the National Resistance into a vote industry’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Deputy Prime Minister Tzanis Tzannetakis claimed that the National Resistance's recognised combatants reached the impressive figure of 300,000, but that number included several people who were only two or three years old at the time of the Occupation.Footnote ⁹⁷

The PASOK government was aware of the irregularities and malfeasance in the recognition process since 1987, as official DEPATHA documents indicate. There were accusations that resistance veterans’ associations and crooks had falsified the entire process: seven- to nine-year-old children were recognised as resistance veterans and resistance veterans’ associations issued false certificates and testimonies in exchange for payment. The right-wing veterans’ associations also accused the recognition committees of recognising only EAM/ELAS members and rejecting right-wing resistance combatants.Footnote ⁹⁸

The number of recognised resistance combatants and pensioners was the main point of contention among the government, the opposition, and resistance combatants. The unusually high number of left-wing veterans recognised through 1990 (220,000) gave the ND government the perfect excuse to withdraw resistance pension entitlements.Footnote ⁹⁹ Law 1976/1991 cancelled the pensions of 58,000 resistance veterans and farmers and ‘froze’ the authorisation of new pensions. The law triggered a storm of protest from the opposition and resistance veterans’ associations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Despite ND's accusations, the total number of recognised left-wing combatants (220,000) until 1990 was modest compared to how many right-wing combatants had been recognised under the previous laws (116,000), since EAM/ELAS was the largest resistance organisation by far. Moreover, the earlier recognition laws had also recognised children under fifteen years old as resistance veterans.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Resistance was an ill-defined, flexible category, and laws were unclear about who counted as a resistance fighter and what constituted an act of resistance.

As was to be expected, reorganising the institutional process provided ND with an opportunity to recognise their own. The ND government not only refused to withdraw the pensions of right-wing veterans who had been granted them under the previous laws; it also changed the composition of the recognition committees by appointing new members to them. It was not uncommon for a veteran of a communist-hunting paramilitary organisation – who had been recognised by the dictatorship's law – to determine the recognition status of an EAM/ELAS resistance fighter.Footnote ¹⁰² ND also granted allowances to those who had been injured in the ‘war against bandits’ (i.e. the civil war) whose pensions had been cancelled.Footnote ¹⁰³

The ND's main argument was that only those who belonged to leftist parties had been recognised as resistance combatants, while ND members had been excluded. Indeed, all resistance veterans’ associations, both on the left and the right, were essentially branches of political parties,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and the government appointed the members of the recognition committees. However, despite some grains of truth about the politicisation of the recognition process, the ND accusations reflected the right-wing historical perception of the resistance as a struggle against the communists.

Although PASOK regained power in 1993, the government waffled for a long time before proceeding to reinstate the veterans’ pensions. In 1995, Law 2320 restored most pensions and accepted responsibility for irregularities and malfeasance. Nevertheless, veterans’ associations, local deputies and patrons pressured the authorities to complete the legislation for resistance veterans and conclude the recognition process. Elderly veterans – including many women who, until the 1989 ‘national reconciliation’ between the left and the right, had feared that acknowledging their EAM/ELAS participation could have negative consequencesFootnote ¹⁰⁵ – waited over ten years to receive responses to their applications. Thus, in 2002, recognition committees were still evaluating applications from 1989.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On 29 December 2006, sixty-two years after Greece's liberation, the recognition committees finally completed their work. The end of the third cycle of recognising the National Resistance coincided with the biological death of the combatants’ generation.