Introduction: Solidarity with “Free Greece”

On 31 January 1949, a solidarity rally for the liberation struggle of “Democratic Greece” – the label sympathizers of the soon-to-be defeated Democratic Army of Greece (Dimokratikos Stratos Elladas, DSE) used for themselves – took place at the Berlin State Opera. More than a thousand attending locals cheered the Greek delegation of “freedom fighters”, who had just started their four-week campaign tour across the lands of the Eastern Zone, with reportedly “never-ending applause” for the DSE representative, Major General Lambros. “[I]f we know that help is needed, we provide aid, like we would help brothers or sisters”, exclaimed Ernst Krüger, secretary general of the Free Federation of German Trade Unions (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, FDGB) and president of the recently founded Relief Committee for Democratic Greece (Hilfskomitee für das demokratische Griechenland), promising East German solidarity in the common “struggle against the Anglo-American imperialism”.Footnote ¹

In a strikingly similar description of events in the Czechoslovak media, a large crowd of “progressive citizens of Prague” welcomed with “thunderous applause” the high-level Greek communist Miltiadis Porfyrogenis during his appearance in the capital's Municipal House in March 1947. It is reported that his speech was repeatedly interrupted by ovations from the audience, showing “enthusiasm and sympathies for the fighting Greek nation”.Footnote ² While Porfyrogenis emphasized that the “democracy and freedom of the entire world is being decided in Greece today”, the president of the Union of Journalists, Otakar Wünsch, further affirmed the idea by depicting it as a continuation of the previous aid to “democratic Spain”. He added that “[i]t is not only our hearts and our sense for justice that command us [to help], but also our reason, because the future of our democracy is being decided in Prague, but also in Athens”.Footnote ³

Such discursive framing of the Greek Civil War as a battle for democracy, promoted by the USSR in its appeal to construct a new, communist world, was also endorsed by the other side in the emerging Cold War order. As Betts has pointed out, “Greece was once again hailed as the cornerstone of the West” and the civil war thus “became a principal theatre for staging the defence of the Western civilization itself”, where “the remaking of the Western alliance was directly connected” to the conflict.Footnote ⁴ The Greek Civil War enabled the US, as the supporter of the Athens-based anti-communist government, to assume the role of defender of the “Western” conception of democracy and freedom. At the same time, it provoked a parallel solidarity movement in the “East”, where countries constructed their own image of these ideas based on the opposite political affinity.

Both manifestations of “Eastern” solidarity described above were characteristic of the ongoing political transformation in East Central Europe in the aftermath of World War II, which once again brought to the fore the theme of internationalism. Solidarity with comrades across the globe was among the main legitimizing mechanisms constituting the identity of the emerging communist regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ) enjoyed a dominant position after the 1946 election and took power fully in February 1948. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) emerged in October 1949 from the Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ) of the defeated Third Reich and soon became a fully fledged state socialist regime headed by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). Accordingly, both countries joined the humanitarian campaign to aid Greek Civil War refugees – alongside Poland, Romania, the USSR, Hungary, and Bulgaria – based on their shared political convictions for the sake of global communism.

This aid campaign and the subsequent reception of refugees from Greece was transnationally organized by a network of national communist parties cooperating with the Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, KKE) and directed by the USSR.Footnote ⁵ As the first such action in the post-war period and thus operating in the shadow of World War II, it became an important bridge between the interwar internationalism, associated with anti-fascism and world revolution,Footnote ⁶ and the communist solidarity campaigns of the later Cold War period targeting particularly non-European recipients in the so-called Third World.Footnote ⁷ Both the earlier solidarity campaign with Spanish Republicans, in connection with the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the later one with North Koreans, during the Korean War (1950–1953), resonated with the aid to Greek partisans,Footnote ⁸ their families, and orphaned children, highlighting both its anti-fascist and anti-imperialist motives.

Despite these significant connections, the existing research on Greek Civil War refugees has been limited to providing national case studies of individual, ethnically defined groups with no effort to draw comparisons with others.Footnote ⁹ The same still holds true for the study of solidarity, where researchers have only recently made attempts at comparison and greater contextualization. For instance, as Toni Weis has argued, “address[ing] the variations of the solidarity discourse across other countries” would be useful to achieve a better understanding of common patterns and national specificities, ultimately bringing about a more nuanced view on the concept.Footnote ¹⁰

Concerning Czechoslovakia, internationalism and communist solidarity remain understudied topics that have been investigated mainly with respect to the interwar period and, more recently, the late Cold War.Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, aid to Greek Civil War refugees has rarely been framed in this vein, with research on the international political aspects of the humanitarian campaign limited to the activities of exiled Greek communists and the internationalization of the issue of child refugees.Footnote ¹² Similarly, there has only been limited acknowledgement by previous studies on the East German case of the contemporary framing of the reception of Greek refugees as a solidarity action, for example when the president of the main relief organization People's Solidarity (Volkssolidarität, VS), Helmut Lehmann, referred to hosting Greek children as “our first big international solidarity action” at a conference in Weimar in September 1949.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, scholarship has also failed to connect this early case to the broader discourse on GDR solidarity,Footnote ¹⁴ while research on GDR solidarity in turn has neglected it, too: its starting point is generally identified with the campaigns for Korea at the earliest, and, more commonly, with those for Vietnam as well as African independence movements in the wake of decolonization.Footnote ¹⁵ In fact, Achim Reichhardt, the last secretary-general of the quasi-official Solidarity Committee (Solidaritätskomitee der DDR, as of 1973) and one of the main protagonists of institutionalized GDR solidarity, only traced the beginning of East German international solidarity activities to the foundation of the Korea Relief Committee.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, as the previous examples demonstrate, internationalist solidarity was not only to become an essential element of more established socialist states in later periods,Footnote ¹⁷ but it also played an integral part in constituting their identities from the origins of their existence.

This article centres on the refugee-receiving Czechoslovak and East German societies as actors in the early Cold War bloc-wide internationalist campaign. The national level remains an important framework for analysis, as Pavel Kolář has suggested that “nation-states, its [their] institutions, agencies and identities are indispensable for understanding contemporary history [of communism], however shaped it was by transnational and global interactions”.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, a study of two national cases together can identify commonalities that testify to a broader chronology and systematics of socialist internationalism shared in the formative phase of the Eastern bloc. Simultaneously, giving due regard to the different starting positions of the two cases, with their opposing legacies of the war, can help to identify their individual pathways. This divergence has not been recognized so far due to previous studies of East German–Czechoslovak relations either ignoring any tensions under the banner of “socialist solidarity” or dismissing everything under the narrative of monolithic, imposed ideological “friendship”, forced upon both countries by the almighty Soviet Union, which sidelined any “national interests”.Footnote ¹⁹

The legacy of World War II, and especially the troubled heritage of the previous Nazi rule in the case of the GDR, stands out as a potential obstacle in their joint humanitarian efforts. This important yet neglected perspective deserves attention because aid is relational, revealing as much about the giver as it does about the receiver. It can tell us more about the actual motives of the giver's behaviour as well as the reasoning behind the internationalist campaign. Providing help to refugees from Greece brought the former enemies – the GDR as one of the two successor states of the Third Reich and its former collaborationist regimes on the one hand, and the countries that fell victim to their expansionism on the other hand – together as allies. Czechoslovakia, specifically, had faced the destruction of its statehood, resulting in the country's hostile relationship with its German neighbour and the expulsion of its own domestic German population.Footnote ²⁰ The emergence of the “befriended” regimes under a shared geopolitical ideology and reality enabled the countries to cooperate, however difficult it may have been for the people to do so against the background of the recent past. “Given the prevailing speechlessness between the two nations” and the “fragility of the relations in this initial phase”, as Volker Zimmermann has accentuated, symbolic gestures became particularly important for shoring up the bilateral relationship.Footnote ²¹ In the wider perspective, as we argue, the aid to Greek Civil War refugees thus contributed to rapprochement within the Eastern bloc on the symbolic level.

Based on press coverage and archival documents concerning the internationalist campaigns in both countries, we first examine how and by whom this solidarity was put into action, looking into the agents involved, the mechanisms of popular mobilization, and the responses. In this way, we demonstrate how solidarity was constructed in practical terms through a network of state institutions, professional organizations, and interest groups and thus affected diverse social strata as well as individuals across occupations, ages, and gender. While the policies and humanitarian measures undertaken by the two countries reveal a strong bloc logic, the ideological underpinning of the solidarity narratives, discussed in the second part of the article, uncovers their differing starting positions. Analysing how the Greek Civil War was narrated and framed in the respective information strategies, we highlight the change in solidarity narratives over time, from pre-war anti-fascist resistance to the new anti-imperial motifs. Yet, we also consider specificities regarding the motivations behind the provision of aid as well as the parameters of solidarity in the individual countries. In doing so, we emphasize how the solidarity campaign was instrumentalized by both countries as part of the effort to construct a novel narrative regarding their own legitimization. In the final part, we strive to proceed even further by exploring the interplay between the proclaimed internationalist solidarity and the strategy of strengthening social and political cohesion within the Eastern bloc: the action on behalf of Greek communists offered the potential to boost attempts to overcome the obstacle of the Nazi past as former aggressor states and their victims co-operated in the humanitarian aid campaign. This article thus contributes to a better understanding of how the Eastern bloc dealt with existing divisions and used internationalist solidarity as a platform to build bridges to overcome them.

Mobilizing the Masses and Organizing Resources: Creating a Solidarity Front

Based on the assessment of means, processes, and results of the political mobilization, it can be concluded that Eastern bloc countries’ responses to the Democratic Greeks’ struggle and defeat, and their search for refuge, were remarkably similar as a result of the centralized direction by Moscow and its transnational coordination. The solidarity movement consisted of two partially overlapping stages: while the military campaign was ongoing, the focus shifted to various manifestations of support, from political proclamations to economic and partial military backing. This solidarity then resulted in the eventual acceptance of refugees, creating a need for popular mobilization. In order to provide for the inclusion of a large number of refugees in the disrupted post-war societies, both regimes sought to ensure a positive reception by the population to facilitate the necessary resources through fundraising and voluntary work.

Despite the enthusiasm of the new socialist elites, at a time of severe domestic hardship, the creation of practical solidarity proved difficult, due not only to the persistent post-war scarcity of goods, but also to the large numbers of people displaced as a result of the war and in its aftermath. The SBZ/GDR, in particular, was dealing simultaneously with more than 4.3 million refugees and expellees from the former German territories in the East.Footnote ²² Though the overall numbers have been disputed,Footnote ²³ at least 55,881 refugees from Greece, of whom 17,913 were children,Footnote ²⁴ found shelter in the Eastern bloc countries – thus forming the biggest group of political refugees to the “East” at that time.Footnote ²⁵ Czechoslovakia welcomed 5,186 children in multiple transfers between April 1948 and December 1949, followed by 6,910 women and men who reached the country between August 1949 and January 1950.Footnote ²⁶ The GDR received two transports comprising mostly children and teenagers, accompanied by about two dozen adult teachers, shortly before the fighting in Greece ended: the first one, with 342 refugees, arrived in August 1949, followed by another transport with roughly 800 young Greeks in July 1950.Footnote ²⁷ Although these refugee numbers were the lowest among East European host countries, they were not inconsiderable given the parallel issue of the co-ethnic forced migration, which posed additional challenges in the East German case.

In response to the arrival of the refugees from Greece, the SED and the KSČ, as the national communist parties, developed very similar organizational structures. In the early stage, both parties were eager to present the ongoing humanitarian efforts related to the “Greek campaign” as the expression of the interests and the will of their countries’ populations, anticipating broad support that would contribute to their legitimization. In Czechoslovakia, the KSČ-led Ministry of Information initiated the Czechoslovak–Greek Society in March 1946 to take care of the incoming refugees. Formally, this agency was non-governmental, but in reality it was subsidized from the state budget and run by individuals with communist backgrounds.Footnote ²⁸ Its counterpart in East Germany, the Relief Committee for Democratic Greece, was founded in Berlin in November 1948 and, according to its very first mention, was originally designed as a “Relief Committee for Greece and Spain”.Footnote ²⁹ While the SED acted as its driving force, the committee, with its regional and local branches, was explicitly set up to be “above party lines” and structured as a wider front comprising all “anti-fascist” actors;Footnote ³⁰ that is, the various semi-independent bloc parties, trade unions, and mass organizations as well as economic associations, aiming to engage large parts of society and, ultimately, following Hong, to use this “mass participation in these actions as evidence of popular commitment to building socialism both at home and around the globe”.Footnote ³¹

In both countries there was increasing pressure for the professionalization of aid, especially that granted to children. In Czechoslovakia, this meant greater involvement of the Czechoslovak Red Cross, which initially assisted with medical care and distribution of humanitarian aid to refugee facilities and homes designed for refugee children. In 1951, it took over – together with the Ministry of Education – the childcare agenda from the Czechoslovak–Greek Society, which was criticized for its inefficiency.Footnote ³² Yet, by 1955, with the gradual integration of the refugee children into the Czechoslovak school system, this responsibility was divided between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health.Footnote ³³

In the GDR, the most important role in providing material care such as accommodation and food was played by the above-mentioned relief organization VS, which, in the early post-war period, had taken on many tasks of subsidiary public welfare.Footnote ³⁴ The Relief Committee additionally supported the care of refugees, for example by arranging for the provision of clothing. Eventually, the regional committee in Saxony, where the children came to be centrally housed as of summer 1950, was subsumed under the VS.Footnote ³⁵ A division of labour was established by which most funds to provide for the children were raised by the local relief committees or stemmed from the VS, while the Ministry of Education was in charge of all expenses related to the children's schooling and education. Ultimately, however – as also occurred in Czechoslovakia – the increasing ideologization and centralization of the state apparatus resulted in the Ministry of Education taking on full responsibility for the refugee children.Footnote ³⁶

In order to raise awareness of the civil war in Greece and its effects, and particularly to collect funds and mobilize support for humanitarian aid, both the Czechoslovak–Greek Society and the Relief Committee for Democratic Greece launched information campaigns on behalf of the communist parties, striving to create a sense of solidarity on the ground. In Czechoslovakia, public interest was stimulated by communist-style demonstrations organized by associations later affiliated with the so-called National Front, which was under the KSČ's leadership and represented the World War II resistance, workers’, youth, and women's movements, as well as professional, cultural, and sports organizations. Their involvement helped mobilize various social groups and encouraged their identification with the solidarity campaign. For instance, the Committee of Czechoslovak Women advocated for Greek female political prisoners in a protest letter addressed to the UN Secretary General, in which they appealed “in the name of humanity and civilization” and on behalf of women “sentenced solely for their political opinion”.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, the representatives of the intelligentsia protested against the persecution of researchers, writers, and artists in Greece,Footnote ³⁸ while employees organized fundraising campaigns and signed petitions in factories and other workplaces.Footnote ³⁹ Czechoslovak teachers encouraged schoolchildren to write letters to refugee children from Greece in which they often mentioned their experience of wartime suffering. As an example, a group of pupils signed their joint message, which was accompanied by a neatly written list of the clothing they were donating and a sum of money, saying that: “We, children from Silesia, from the city of Opava, know what horrors and poverty the war – which also went through our region – brings. We empathize with you and your country, which fights for its freedom.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Former political prisoners and resistance fighters from the Nazi era in both Czechoslovakia and the GDR were among the main groups supporting the cause of Greek partisans, who likewise suffered from imprisonment.Footnote ⁴¹ Having been victims of political oppression themselves and therefore enjoying particular recognition by the socialist society, they also claimed to understand the partisans’ situation best; as Artur Hofmann, from Dresden, argued, “[o]nly those can imagine what is happening in Greece, who themselves took part in the combat as partisans somewhere in the hinterland”.Footnote ⁴² In Czechoslovakia, the Association of National Revolution and the Association of the Liberated Political Prisoners and the Bereaved of the Victims of Nazism (Sdružení osvobození politických vězňů a pozůstalých, SOPVP) are prime examples of public actors related to World War II who had a mobilizing potential. In the GDR, the Relief Committee, having little organizational means of its own, relied on the already established structures of the mass organizations involved in solidarity work. At the forefront was the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VVN), which took on a leading role in the solidarity campaign, for instance by organizing and hosting events, but also selling special issue stamps in order to raise funds (Figure 1).Footnote ⁴³ While the involvement of victims of Nazism in the GDR naturally was not a large-scale phenomenon comparable with that in Czechoslovakia, some individuals who had faced exile or political imprisonment, or who had participated in the resistance (as part of the International Brigades in Spain or during World War II, such as the above-mentioned Artur Hofmann), strongly identified with the partisans based on their own experiences. At the Saxon Relief Committee's founding conference, the chair, Richard Gladewitz, explained in his opening address “[…] that especially he, as former fighter of the International Brigades in Spain, was very pleased about the founding of such a [Relief] committee, because he knew under which difficult conditions the people had to fight”.Footnote ⁴⁴

Figure 1.

“Your special contribution defends the peace – help democratic Greece”. Poster advertising special issue stamps marketed via bloc parties and mass organizations in East Germany in support of Greek partisans and refugee children (June 1949).

Source: Bundesarchiv Bilddatenbank – Plak 100-043-023.

The solidarity campaign had a profound effect on the Czechoslovak population, as is evident both from the great extent of fundraising and from the number of supportive letters from donors received by the Czechoslovak Red Cross and the Czechoslovak–Greek Society. These letters are diverse in form and their authors range from dedicated communists to socially responsible business owners, common people, and even children. They related to the cause of Greek Civil War refugees in more or less political terms, depending on their different perspectives, but often referred to their wartime experience, the post-war scarcity of goods, and their hopes for the new Czechoslovak regime. The members of the local KSČ women's committee in Kamenné Žehrovice, in Central Bohemia, for instance, believed that knowledge of the Czechoslovak people's loving reception of children from Greece would ease the minds of their parents and enable them to continue “their rightful struggle”.Footnote ⁴⁵ In another example, a man from Prague reflected on the bulletin of the Czechoslovak–Greek Society, saying that “[i]t is sad reading, and hard to believe, but true, unfortunately” and finished his message with the revolutionary slogan “Death to imperialism! Long live free Greece!”,Footnote ⁴⁶ similar to the DSE's slogan “Death to Fascism – Freedom to the people!”

Female solidarity in the GDR was primarily channelled through the East German Democratic Women's Association (Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands, DFD). On behalf of its regional executive committee, “Frau Pfennig”, at the founding conference of the Saxon Relief Committee, pleaded that “[t]he reception of [Greek] children in our [children's] homes was a very nice duty, which the women of the DFD would be very glad to support”.Footnote ⁴⁷ While the trade union FDGB was put in charge of organizing practical solidarity actions in East German workplaces,Footnote ⁴⁸ the socialist youth organization Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ) emphatically appealed to all of its members in October 1948 to embrace the joint efforts on behalf of the Greeks:

As a result of the information campaigns, individuals – both as members of mass organizations and out of personal motivation – responded to calls for aid, making material and financial contributions or simply empathizing with the suffering of the refugees. Fundraising campaigns and collections of clothes, food, ration tickets, toys, and basic equipment were typically initiated by aid and mass organizations, while members of the local communist structures, business owners and their employees, factory workers, work and school collectives, families, and private individuals acted as donors (Figure 2). A 1951 newspaper article reflected on such examples of “practical solidarity” in the GDR, praising the variety of donations as a demonstration of “the ties between our workers with the courageous Greek nation and its youth”.Footnote ⁵⁰ The article stated that the regional FDGB executive committee had presented a group of young Greek refugees with a radio set, at the same time announcing that “100 factories have committed to covering the costs in the amount of 11,730 DM [marks]” for accommodating Greek children on a holiday. Other factories, an FDJ group, and the municipal administration donated books, a flag, and an iconic painting of a working man.Footnote ⁵¹ In Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, in April 1948, the employees of the automobile factory Avia in Prague made, in their own words, “a humble contribution” of 32,256 Czechoslovak crowns “for aid to children of democratic Greece”.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 2.

Greek girls being gifted leather schoolbags, manufactured as a present by Czechoslovak saddlers, during a publicity event at the Ministry of Labour and Social Care (18 May 1949).

Source: ČTK Fotobank.

While in later solidarity actions, such as those for anti-colonial support for Algerians as outlined by Hong, propagandistic publications specifically had to highlight and illustrate individual cases of aid to “put a face on the stilted proclamations of solidarity”, the hosting of Greek refugee children offered immediate and direct opportunities to establish a personal connection and thus “give a more tangible form to the otherwise abstract idea of socialist solidarity”.Footnote ⁵³ Staged by the authorities, the campaigns employed the children themselves to raise awareness of and, ideally, sympathy for the Greek communist cause by having them appear in public, sometimes in the presence of politicians and journalists. The children also participated in “cultural events”,Footnote ⁵⁴ mostly musical performances with traditional folklore costumes and often communist motifs. In East Germany, where the people in charge of the various children's homes held meetings at alternating locations to discuss their work, such conferences were spiced up by a “cultural programme” presented by the Greek children, who pledged to keep learning diligently.Footnote ⁵⁵ Shortly before the arrival of the second transport, the local population of the Saxon town Radebeul near Dresden was given the chance to attend an event at the main local theatre and, reportedly, more than 900 people did. Following words of welcome by an SED official and a political address by female partisan Foula Hadzidaki, the children “sang and danced for the Radebeulians”, about which the local Sächsische Zeitung commented in a slightly exoticizing manner: “One simply had to grow fond of the vivacious, sun-tanned gals and boys from Greece.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In Czechoslovakia, in April 1949, the agricultural newspaper Zemědělské noviny enthusiastically referred to the appearance of “sixty adorable children” who became “the living exclamation mark of the terrors of the war” in one of Prague's theatres, combining songs and dances celebrating the “heroic struggle against the occupiers”. The newspaper particularly applauded the scene in which the children, as industrious bees, liberated a field infested by grasshoppers, representing “Greece tormented by monarcho-fascists and saved by the Democratic Army”.Footnote ⁵⁷

Such performances could potentially be seen as exploiting the child refugees for propaganda purposes, as the responsible Relief Committee official who issued a warning to “not deploy the children tour-like” seemed to be aware.Footnote ⁵⁸ At the same time, they could also provide the children with a welcome change from the dull everyday reality of the children's homes and an opportunity to present their culture to their new surroundings.Footnote ⁵⁹ In either case, for the respective audiences, their presence in the countries and their presentations contributed to locally transmitting a sense of internationalism to the “lifeworld reality” of their host societies (Figure 3).Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 3.

Greek children participating in an FDJ cultural programme on the sports field in Dresden-Radebeul (August 1950).

Bundesarchiv Bilddatenbank – Bild 183-W0208-0504.

However, factors such as the strong involvement in the relief effort by victims of Nazism and allusions to the recent war demonstrate that this shared internationalism was still strongly overshadowed by World War II and the diverging national roles and experiences in it. Thus, the implementation of the Greek Civil War refugee campaign demanded that the respective legacies be dealt with and that the internationalism of the interwar period be adapted to the post-war situation with consideration for the countries’ different starting positions.

Between Guilt and Victimhood: Relating to the Continuous Anti-Fascist Struggle

The people's democracies in East Central Europe naturally sided with the Greek communists as they were pursuing a common political aim – to spread the Stalinist doctrine of communism by creating a broad internationalist front, which would eventually succeed in overthrowing the bourgeois political order and establish communist rule all around the world. The Eastern bloc derived its post-war legitimacy from the symbol of the victorious participation of the USSR in the anti-Hitler coalition and, more generally, the accomplishments of the left-wing resistance. The successes of Yugoslav and Greek partisans who independently liberated their countries from Nazi occupation belonged to its founding myths, at least prior to the 1948 Tito–Stalin split in the Yugoslav case.Footnote ⁶¹ The resistance in World War II, however, represented only a single stage in the continuous struggle against fascism, conceived in both the national and the global sense. For Greek communists, it was launched in the interwar years as a result of the right-wing authoritarian oppression and continued beyond the Axis occupation of the country, well into the civil war and its aftermath. As the following proclamation of the Relief Committee in the GDR, passed in November 1948, suggests, official statements across the bloc adopted an interpretation of the civil war as a fight of “Democratic Greeks” against the “monarcho-fascist” regime in Athens, which was perceived as a successor of the previous terror of the Axis occupation (1941–1944):

Given the changed geopolitical conditions of the Cold War, the anti-fascist rhetoric thus also suggested a link between interwar authoritarianism, Nazism, and “US imperialism”, associated with colonialism. Alongside the domestic enemy, consisting of the monarchy, the Far Right, and bourgeois conservatism, the US, as Greece's paternalistic ally, took on the role of the main external enemy, which fit well with it being the principal enemy of the Soviet-dominated “East”.

This narrative made the “Democratic Greeks” an exemplary role model for the socialist population to follow, and an ideal subject for internationalist solidarity. This is illustrated by the Czechoslovak media – pro-communist and facing growing censorship – which, like the media coverage across the Eastern bloc, depicted the Greek partisans as freedom fighters who “struggle for democracy of the entire world”,Footnote ⁶³ and, in parallel, as martyrs overcoming the atrocities committed by the Greek government and the US as its ally.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Czechoslovak public thus faced indoctrination by being exposed to detailed, yet emotionalized and biased stories of the Greek Left facing unlawful arrests, detentions, and torture, with particular interest in women suffering from political oppression. The appeal from a female political prisoner from Thessaloniki, “I plead you to help me by protesting or using any other means”,Footnote ⁶⁵ reported in the Czechoslovak labour unionist newspaper Práce, in early 1947, to raise alarm about her upcoming capital punishment by Athens, clearly attempted not only to provoke empathy and establish a connection by using a gendered theme, but also to motivate the population towards political action. The motif of suffering children, targeted by napalm attacks and “murdered” by Greece,Footnote ⁶⁶ while at the same time warmly welcomed and taken care of by the “East”, undoubtedly left an even deeper impression. The English-language propaganda magazine Czechoslovak Life, targeting a Western audience, wrote in August 1949: “In Greece children are dying […] The Greek people know who are their friends and who are their enemies [sic!]. They know whose planes strafed their children on the mountain roads. They know who gave their children a home, shelter and love.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In a similarly combative spirit, in September 1949, the SED mouthpiece Neues Deutschland featured the article “The Fascist Murderers [Will] End Up On the Scaffold”.Footnote ⁶⁸ It portrayed the fates of some children from Greece who had lost parents and siblings due to imprisonment in “hungercamp[s]” or “USA-bullet[s]” but who, “having found a rescuing future in our Eastern zone”, could now, “for the first time”, experience “white [in the sense of proper and fresh] beds […] and schooling!”Footnote ⁶⁹

The narrative of partisans from Greece being both heroes and indisputable victims particularly suited the Czechoslovak post-war self-image of a country betrayed by its allies in Munich in 1938, after which it was robbed of a significant part of its territory and, several months later, faced destruction by neighbouring Nazi Germany. During the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939–1945), the country suffered the immense loss of its Jewish and Roma populations in the Holocaust and the systematic and harsh repression of the domestic anti-Nazi resistance, including mass atrocities. The annihilation of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky in reprisal for the resistance's assassination of Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 is among the most formative moments of Czechoslovak history. Liberated in May 1945 by joint efforts of the US and, mostly, the USSR, Czechoslovakia set off on a new, illiberal path, quite dissimilar to its interwar democratic tradition. This wartime experience and gradual rapprochement with the USSR contributed to its rapid political transformation.

For East Germany, the legacy of World War II was equally important, albeit from the opposite vantage point deriving from Germany's indisputable role as aggressor and perpetrator. Despite being, just as West Germany was, a successor of the Third Reich (for reasons of inherited territory and population), the official discourse in the SBZ and later the GDR refused to face up to this past. With anti-fascist resistance as its major founding myth, despite it being limited mostly to the new political elite, all responsibility for active participation in the Nazi regime was simply transferred to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The latter, due to its Western capitalist orientation, was equated with a quasi-continuation of fascism on German territory.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, the motifs of anti-fascism and solidarity served as key values with which the GDR distinguished itself from both Nazi Germany and its post-war Western counterpart.

One mobilizing strategy to increase sympathy for the struggle of the “Greek Democrats” was to identify their goals of establishing a communist Greece with the policies of the GDR – from justifying specific efforts such as the current “Two Year Plan”,Footnote ⁷¹ to a fundamental parallelization of the two “national questions” in terms of gaining national unity and independence.Footnote ⁷² Under the implicit banner of anti-Americanism, even the National Democratic Party of Germany (National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, NDPD) was able to find an avenue to relate to the cause of the communist partisans. Founded in spring 1948 and intended as a gathering place for former officers of the Wehrmacht and, ultimately, as a means to integrate former members of the Nazi party, it was supposed to give voice to the most nationalistic convictions tolerated under the SED regime.Footnote ⁷³ Having posed the question whether it “would not be of higher priority for us Germans to team up for achieving unity and independence, peace and prosperity of our own homeland”, it then identified “the same powers” as “obstacles to the Greek people and us Germans on our path to national renaissance. Therefore, the victory of the Greek freedom fighters is not only the matter of the Greek people. The onus is on all freedom aspiring peoples and especially on the national and democratic forces of Germany”.Footnote ⁷⁴

While not always tinged by an explicit nationalistic background, the appeal to unite behind the partisans against “the West” was strong: “Same enemies – same goals!”, SED functionary Klaus Gysi consequently proposed at a Berlin solidarity event of the Kulturbund, the umbrella organization of the socialist intellectual and cultural elite, hosting the Greek communist delegation on its tour through East Germany. Meanwhile, in Neues Deutschland, an article reporting on what the Greek example should mean to the East Germans included the heading “Reminder and incitement”, not only urging further aid and support for the fighting Greeks, but also encouraging an emphatic alignment with anti-fascism and “all liberal-minded” people – given the ideological rivalry, thus ultimately with the Eastern camp.Footnote ⁷⁵

While Czechoslovak unity, unlike in the German case, was not at stake, public actors exploited the theme of the Greek partisans’ struggle for domestic political purposes as well to define current internal and external enemies. The domestic World War II resistance associations naturally endorsed the Greek Civil War as a continuation of the anti-Axis resistance and a heroic struggle for “national liberation”. Framing his speech with a general optimism about the post-war reconstruction process in East Central Europe, chairman of the above-mentioned SOPVP Ladislav Kopřiva criticized the Western and Greek imperialists for failing to expel – after “foreign fascists” – their own “domestic fascists” and for caring only about their own personal interest and benefit, thus once again highlighting the common enemies. As a result, he claimed, Athens had started a “war of extermination against partisans and democratic citizens”.Footnote ⁷⁶

His words held significant weight due to the large-scale persecution of the left-wing anti-Axis resistance launched by the post-war Greek governments as part of their staunchly anti-communist campaign, which the earlier-mentioned Miltiadis Porfyrogenis strove to make clear in his public speech in Prague.Footnote ⁷⁷ The KSČ, on the other hand, swiftly instrumentalized his visit in March 1947 (before eventually assuming power) to discredit three leading political parties with strong interwar democratic traditions, now its main opponents. Given their refusal to support the event, the KSČ accused them of treason and compared their “outrageous” behaviour, in opposition to the claimed “progressive” worldviews of the population, to UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's failure to support Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference (1938).Footnote ⁷⁸ In this way, the KSČ – like the SED – managed to employ the theme of internationalist solidarity in the domestic political struggle while, at the same time, exploiting the memory of the troubled past. It served not only to determine the common enemy, but also to build empathy using this negative sentiment. Accordingly, the themes for ideological education issued by the Ministry of Education in August 1951 encouraged the children from Greece, accommodated in Czechoslovak children's homes, to liken the collaborationist Greek bourgeoisie to the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie, “selling freedom of Czechoslovakia to Hitler”.Footnote ⁷⁹

The manifestations of internationalist solidarity adopted by the post-1948 Czechoslovak communist regime thus not only contained elements of a communist utopia, but also strongly reflected the dual Czechoslovak interpretation of its wartime experience of heroism and victimhood. The affinity of the Czechoslovak and Greek narratives constructed by the communist propaganda established a common ground to produce empathy through shared past experiences (Figure 4). Firstly, the Czechoslovak media established a clear connection between the struggle against Hitler and the fight against the Greek monarchy as the ally of the “expansive” and “imperialist” US, portrayed as the new occupier of Greece. The regime in Athens was put on a par with Nazi Germany, labelled as “Nazi”, or accused of being sustained by “former collaborators” who behaved just as their “teachers-Nazis” had taught them.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such an abundance of references to Nazism had a mobilizing effect because they resonated with the population.

Figure 4.

Greek children and youth joining a march of Czechoslovaks celebrating the “Days of Happiness of the Liberated Borderland” in Liberec, a predominantly German-populated city in the interwar years and subject to ethnic cleansing after World War II (28 August 1949).

Source: ČTK Fotobank. Photographer: Josef Mucha.

Alongside the heroic partisans, the child refugees from Greece figured as quintessential victims.Footnote ⁸¹ In expectation of their arrival in Czechoslovakia in spring 1948, Mladá Fronta, a newspaper representing left-wing youth, summarized the objectives of the aid campaign for Greece as follows: “What does fighting Greece need? – Medicine, clothes, shoes, food, [and] aid for children. Fascists do not protect mothers and children, on the contrary, they kill them purposely.”Footnote ⁸² Another newspaper, Svobodné noviny, even compared the plight of the child refugees arriving from Greece by train to the horrors of Jewish transports to Nazi extermination camps:

The mass annihilation of Czechoslovak non-Jewish citizens by the Nazis was repeatedly used as a motif by fundraisers to illustrate the suffering of “Democratic Greeks”, aiming to attract the attention of donors despite the post-war economic scarcity.Footnote ⁸⁴ It also appeared in the media in references such as “Spanish Lidice” and “Greek Ležáky”, invoking the horrific fate of these destroyed Czechoslovak villages and connecting it with the suffering of refugees from Spain and Greece.Footnote ⁸⁵

Referencing Nazi atrocities in order to encourage identification with the refugees and gain sympathy for the solidarity actions seemed like an audacious attempt in the German case. Yet, the SED's instrumental approach to dealing with the Nazi past enabled a propagandistic equation of different victimhoods. The fate of children was an especially preferred motif in propagandistic materials such as the press and literature, which foregrounded orphans of German victims of the Nazis in an attempt to create some common ground for a bond with the new allies in the Eastern bloc who had suffered so terribly from German cruelties in the war. This strategy is also apparent regarding the hosting of refugee children from Greece: an article calling for peace made no distinction between the fate of little “Kostas” and “Eleni”, orphaned in the civil war or due to the political persecution of their parents; that of the German “Helga”, whose father “was killed in Buchenwald”, implying that he had been sent to the concentration camp for anti-fascist activity; and the suffering of “twelve year old Hans, whose parents fell victim to the Anglo-American bombing raids on Dresden on 13 February 1945”.Footnote ⁸⁶ While, in a more general sense, war experiences indeed constituted links in these children's life stories, the article as well as the propaganda connected to the bombing of Dresden categorically ignored the connection between German casualties and the Allies’ fighting against fascist Germany.Footnote ⁸⁷ Again, the regime's dissociation from the inconvenient past and the self-image it portrayed of East Germany as a stronghold of communist anti-fascism, refusing to accept any responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Germans during the war, opened up avenues to assert a “tie of togetherness” with the refugee children from Greece,Footnote ⁸⁸ as the regional newspaper Sächsische Zeitung emphasized, to foster solidarity, even on rather biased grounds.

However, the burden of the past was too heavy to be ignored completely. Behind official proclamations, in internal circles, a sense of guilt did shine through in various ways. Interestingly, this was not at all in line with the otherwise prevailing “externalization of historical liability” that denied any continuities of Nazism in East Germany.Footnote ⁸⁹ A report by the secretariat of the Relief Committee, for instance, reveals a telling degree of surprise at the manifestations of solidarity shown by the East German people towards the Greek delegation: with a sense of relief, it noted that “the idea of international solidarity is more deeply ingrained in our people than we could have hoped for after the years of Hitlerite fascism”,Footnote ⁹⁰ subtly admitting to the fact that the past ideology had not necessarily been completely erased from the (East) German mindset by the change of regime.

While the term “Hitlerite fascism” was characteristic of the GDR's official repudiation of any historical “German” liability for the Nazi cruelties and consequent refusal to pay any reparations (besides what was taken by the Soviet Union),Footnote ⁹¹ this official reading could even be publicly transcended. An article in the local Sächsische Zeitung cited the Saxon Minister of Interior explicitly placing “the reception of children of Greek freedom fighters” in this context: “[F]or the population of the Eastern Zone”, this was “not only an act of solidarity, but first and foremost a small contribution to the compensation which the German people owes to the nations afflicted by Hitlerite fascism” (emphasis added).Footnote ⁹² Furthermore, internal documents reveal that this framing was used to mobilize solidarity when purely ideological reasoning reached its limits. It was possible for individuals from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), such as Saxon Minister of Trade and Supply Georg Knabe, who acted as the second president of the regional Relief Committee,Footnote ⁹³ to be actively involved in supporting the campaign for solidarity with and provision for Greek children; at the same time, however, the CDU bloc party as a whole was initially reluctant to participate in the Relief Committee.Footnote ⁹⁴ A report by the secretary of the Saxon Relief Committee from October 1949 thus suggested the following inclusive argument: “By our solidarity action, we shall demonstrate our willingness to pay our debt to the Greek people [emphasis added]. This is something [even] the CDU should not be able to avoid.”Footnote ⁹⁵

It was not a debt, but a moral obligation to help, imposed on those who could – as recent heroes and victims – empathize with the “Democratic Greeks” as “heroes under threat”; that is how a reporter of the Czechoslovak trade union newspaper Práce reflected on his 1947 visit to the partisans in the mountains of north-western Greece. In an attempt to provoke solidarity, he made a reference to the dreadful Nazi crimes against humanity of the past:

This reasoning found its way into other solidarity campaigns as well. Comparing the Nazi extermination camps to “the torturing and murdering of [Greek] children by monarchofascists” made it possible to establish new parallels with the ongoing suffering of North Korean children in Korea's “concentration camps”.Footnote ⁹⁷ Apor and Mark make a similar observation regarding the Polish solidarity campaign, which spoke of Korea as the “American Auschwitz”. They suggested that “the images of mass destruction and extermination [in Korea] were all too familiar to their [Polish] citizens”.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, this line of argument appeared repeatedly during the early Cold War era, both highlighting the transnational connectedness of different campaigns and testifying to the potential of expanding the anti-fascist solidarity in anti-imperialist contexts.

As this section has shown, in providing humanitarian aid and receiving refugees from Greece, the post-war cooperation of the Eastern bloc, and Czechoslovakia and the GDR in particular, could not be detached from the wartime memory, with the sources referring to the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, including the Holocaust as a symbol of ultimate suffering. The shared memory was far too troubled to be simply overcome by the new partners, as much as the GDR attempted to obliterate or only reluctantly acknowledge its involvement. Against these existing divisions, however, the solidarity campaign opened space for cooperation as well.

In Search of Internationalist Unity

Due to its lack of a fascist past, post-war Czechoslovakia naturally was in a better position to join the socialist camp and embrace the internationalist character of the solidarity action for “Democratic Greece”. But the same endeavour created an exceptional and welcome opportunity early on for the SED authorities to inscribe themselves and the emerging GDR into the political structure to which it now belonged. Participating in this bloc-wide campaign gave them the chance to “prove” their ideological affiliation and level of integration in practice and thus to tone down the GDR's “German” legacy in World War II. The proclamation of the central Relief Committee postulated: “In the entire world, there is a movement for peace, security and freedom of democracy in Greece. We align ourselves with this movement”,Footnote ⁹⁹ thus declaring their democratic and anti-war spirit to show that they were now on the “right” side of history. The above-cited call for “solidarity action” by an FDJ group motivated their appeal for donations in the same vein, presenting this solidarity as an opportunity to demonstrate the new, internationalist German approach: “Now it is up to us to prove that we indeed are connected with the youth of other peoples.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Czechoslovak regime made some effort to acknowledge these pledges to represent a “better Germany”. As of February 1950, official propaganda promoted President Klement Gottwald's slogan from his speech to the Central Committee of the KSČ, “Not all Germans are the same”,Footnote ¹⁰¹ an attempt to generate appreciation for the new, peaceful “democratic forces in Germany [meaning the GDR]”.Footnote ¹⁰² Despite these political efforts, however, mutual trust between the former aggressor and its victims could not be built overnight.Footnote ¹⁰³ Further affected by the post-war expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans, the reconciliation between Czechoslovakia and the FRG had to be postponed to the post-Cold War period, while the relationship with the GDR was constructed under pressure from Moscow.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Lack of trust equally burdened the relationship between the GDR and Greek communists. KKE representatives, too, while invoking solidarity between “comrades” in the novel conditions of the Cold War, were making emotional references to Nazism. In February 1951, when expressing gratitude to the KSČ for its support, they proclaimed: “Dear friends, in our souls – the souls of political emigrants – the affections of solidarity, love and tenderness of the Czechoslovak people will remain carved forever; [shown] towards our badly suffering nation and its heroic children that fight every day and every moment against the death in American Dachaus.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Equating the US with Nazi Germany, the KKE still cooperated with the SED as it did with other befriended parties. The party repeatedly demonstrated its support for the idea of the GDR; for example, the leader of the KKE, Nikos Zachariadis, attended celebrations of the eightieth birthday of East German President Wilhelm Pieck in January 1955, stopping in Czechoslovakia on his way there.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Yet, once again, these high-level political bonds did not necessarily reflect the sentiments of the people. Greece suffered greatly from Axis occupation, including the extermination of local Jews and Roma, severe famine, and countless massacres of civilians. To this day, the term katochi (occupation) remains deeply ingrained in public memory.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Being aware of the overarching need to foster a positive image of the GDR among the refugees from Greece, the Czechoslovak authorities included interrelated themes in their political education. They also tried to establish connections between Czechoslovak Greek and East German youth,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ for example by sending a 300-member delegation of Greek children from the children's home in Kyselka to the World Festival of Democratic Youth and Studentship for Peace in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet, the case of one Greek refugee in the GDR who sought asylum in Czechoslovakia in 1958 because “the Germans are too nationalist”, and therefore he did not get along with them, undermines this flawless East German image. Regardless of its individual importance, it suggests that such a claim was still considered a valid strategy to gain a residency permit in another socialist country.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Moreover, when a group of Greek parliamentarians from Athens visited Czechoslovakia in June 1957, to learn more about the living conditions of Greek Civil War refugees, the “friendly relationship” between Czechoslovakia and the GDR was among the most debated topics between them and their Czechoslovak counterparts. This delegation from Greece, unlike the exiled Greek communists, still struggled to understand such an alliance “after all we suffered from the Germans”.Footnote ¹¹¹

Against this background, German supporters of this solidarity identified additional benefits for their own society. As Fritz Große, president of the regional VVN, laid out in his address at the founding conference of the Saxon Relief Committee, a first necessary step towards solidarity with Greece would be to “fight the reaction in our own country” because much remained to be accomplished in the “fight against antisemitism etc.”.Footnote ¹¹² As an active communist since the interwar period, after a brief exile he had spent almost the entire Third Reich imprisoned and was one of the key SED functionaries in post-war reconstructing Saxony. These trustworthy credentials of camp experience and long-term party membership qualified him, more than any diplomatic experience, to become the first head of the diplomatic mission in Prague and hence the first GDR ambassador in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹¹³ When he, promoting the Relief Committee, went on to suggest providing more concrete material and financial aid – as well as the reception of Greek partisans’ children – he also pointed out the re-educational benefit it would have for the German public: “By this [hosting refugee children], we would not only grant great help to the Greek people, but we would give good examples of solidarity to the people in our own country and thereby recover moral forces that had been buried” (emphasis added).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Solidarity, specifically in terms of caring for refugee children from a country that had suffered so much from German atrocities, thus could now be turned into an instrument for the moral re-education of the Germans after the violent past.

Furthermore, hosting the refugees served as a tangible way of “demonstrating” or “proving” East Germany's international integration. Several references to solidarity activities by other socialist states in Neues Deutschland underlined the coordinated character of the reception of these refugees,Footnote ¹¹⁵ further urging the East German public to follow their good example: “Not only [East] Germany has received Greek children. In the Soviet Union and the People's Democracies, this relief action has been going on for considerable time already”.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The desired effect of international recognition was somewhat anticipated when the daily Berliner Zeitung reported, on 27 January 1949, on the SED's party convention, which hosted, among others, the above-mentioned delegation from Greece. With this appearance being the emotional “highlight” of the day, the article's headline proclaimed: “The German people does not stand alone anymore”, as the “impressive manifestations of international solidarity” showed that now, it was finally “on equal footing with the other peoples in the fight for peace”.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Aid for the refugee children was to provide additional space for Eastern bloc cooperation, offering the opportunity for care-related information exchange. Throughout 1953, correspondence was conducted between the Diplomatic Mission of the Czechoslovak Republic and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the GDR about policies and experiences regarding the Greek children. The German authorities seemed delighted about Czechoslovakia's interest and, moreover, the recognition it thereby demonstrated. Mutually exchanging information on, for instance, literature in Greek, they ended a detailed four-page report as follows:

Furthermore, in a letter from May 1955 found in Czech archives, representatives of the Leipzig home for apprentices “Grammos” addressed their thanks to the Central Committee of the KSČ for having arranged a visit of Greeks from the GDR to Czechoslovakia. Here again, they emphasized the “friendly relation of [Czechoslovakia and the GDR as] peace-loving nations” that were now “bound in mutual solidarity”, once more assuring them of the new role the “better Germany” aimed to play in “maintaining peace in Europe”.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Contacts such as these were still conducted within socialist structures and cannot necessarily be taken at face value, but the joint effort of hosting and caring for the refugees offered opportunities for positive interaction and communication and helped, over time, to overcome the initial post-war “speechlessness” and thus consolidate the community of Eastern bloc peoples.

This issue gained particular relevance because of the integrating character of the solidarity campaigns in favour of “Democratic Greeks”: even though they were principally inspired from above and communicated through the language of communist propaganda, it should not be overlooked that the mobilization of public resources, creating similar processes of societal engagement in both countries, often took place on the ground. The commitment within communist “grassroots” organizations and the manifold responses to calls for donations demonstrate the involvement of a large number of people in the provision of aid, meaning the solidarity campaign was not merely a top-down enterprise. Yet, it is difficult to assess the precise scale of authenticity due to the lack of informative sources as well as our limited capacity to deconstruct such a complex interconnected process, involving various, sometimes also strategic, motivations of participants under authoritarian conditions. Voices of individuals, perhaps taking a ritualistic form, were still impressive in their extent, suggesting a considerable degree of genuine resonance among the manifestations of solidarity. The anti-fascist framing enabled each country to project its own historic experiences, making the campaign relatable and mobilizing. Moreover, the joint endeavour ultimately provided common ground for constructing a novel, shared foundation for the legitimization of the emerging communist regimes. Building on the ashes of World War II, anti-fascist solidarity offered a social model for the societies to follow, which could foster a new internationalist unity between the former aggressor and its victim.