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00:00Thank you for listening.
02:02Or was he a malicious collaborator?
03:34A former minister of war, Metaxas modelled himself on Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy.
03:41It will be the best of the power and power.
03:48Come on!
03:49Everybody!
03:53Mussolini's fascist party and its armed militia, the Blackshirts, had already clashed with
03:58the communists in Italy and had successfully defeated them.
04:04Inspired by this, Metaxas now introduced the fascist salute and a Mussolini-style national youth
04:11movement.
04:12He made it quite clear that his would be a staunchly anti-communist dictatorship.
04:17He swiftly declared a state of emergency and closed down the Greek parliament and pronounced
04:26himself dictator.
04:32Rallis, who had once been a political ally of Metaxas, opposed this lurch towards fascism.
04:39At this stage, there was no inkling that this was a man who would ever collaborate with
04:44the Nazis.
04:46But before he could do anything about Metaxas, events occurred that would change everything.
05:00In September 1939, World War II began.
05:19The German war machine blasted its way into Poland.
05:25For the people of Greece, miles from the conflict, this must have seemed another world away.
05:37But they hadn't reckoned on the man Metaxas had so admired, Benito Mussolini.
05:49Although seen as a figure of fun today, he didn't seem that way back in 1939.
05:54He had one of the largest armies and navies in Europe.
05:59And he also had a plan.
06:03To recreate the old Roman Empire.
06:06An empire that included Greece.
06:09He had one of the largest armies of the centuries.
06:12And the starry of the generations.
06:14Go to the Nerms!
06:23On October 28, 1940, Mussolini made his move.
06:32Italian troops invaded Greece, attacking the north of the country from Albania.
06:40Metaxas was horrified at his hero's betrayal.
06:43He rejected an ultimatum that the Italians be allowed in to take over the country.
06:47But as the invasion got underway, Mussolini had not counted on the Greek army.
07:02Lacking tanks, the Greek army decided to hit the invading Italians on the run, in the mountains.
07:08It gave them a distinct advantage.
07:15In just six weeks, the Greeks scored a decisive victory as they pushed the Italians back into Albania.
07:22Cold steel and the sheer determination to win.
07:25These were the deciding factors.
07:27And here the hardy Greek mountain troops, with their formidable baronets, came into their own.
07:32Well done, Greece!
07:36The victory for the Greek military is regarded to this day by many as the first allied victory of the Second World War.
07:44It was the first signs of a resistance that would become legendary.
07:49For Mussolini has got just a teeny suspicion he's made a mistake, saying the Mediterranean was an Italian name.
08:01Oh, what a surprise for the Duce, the Duce, he can't put it over the queen.
08:09To this day, the Greek rejection of the Italians' demands is still celebrated as a national holiday every year.
08:16Then in November 1940, the Royal Navy arrived in Greece bringing hundreds of British troops to support the Greek army.
08:28A declaration by the British government, made a year earlier, stated that in the event of a threat to Greek independence,
08:35His Majesty's government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Greek government all the support in their power.
08:41At first, the British could only send a small force.
08:47Metaxas was keen to try and preserve his neutrality and not provoke Hitler.
08:52The British then added a number of Royal Air Force squadrons to the troops already in Greece.
09:05Their task was to help protect Greek cities, airfields and harbours from Italian air raids.
09:11Then, at the end of January 1941, Metaxas died.
09:23Churchill was now able to send a much bigger force to Greece.
09:27It consisted of 60,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops.
09:31At this stage, Adolf Hitler had advanced plans to invade Russia.
09:39But having just seen his ally Mussolini humiliated, he decided to act.
09:44Why did the Germans decide to invade Greece in spite of their plan to invade Russia or the Soviet Union at the time?
09:55Mainly because they were afraid of British aircraft stationed in Greece.
09:59That the Brits might and would most definitely bomb the oil fields of Romania,
10:08where the German forces had planned to refuel during their attack on the eastern part of the Soviet Union.
10:17I think that was the major reason.
10:18On April the 6th, 1941, German forces launched a blitzkrieg on Greece.
10:37The Greek and British Commonwealth forces facing the Germans were overwhelmed and forced to retreat.
10:48Battered by constant air attacks and with the Germans hard on their heels,
10:53the Allied troops retreated to Greek ports to await evacuation.
11:01Before leaving, they destroyed as much of their equipment as they could.
11:09The majority managed to avoid capture, thanks to the Royal Navy.
11:18For those of mainland Greece, the war was over.
11:23On the 27th of April 1941, Hitler's troops marched into Athens.
11:31But still, the country did not surrender.
11:39Crete, a tactically important island in the Mediterranean, held out.
11:43Tens of thousands of Greek and Allied troops were stationed there.
11:48So Hitler ordered Operation Mercury, the largest airborne operation yet mounted.
11:56It began at dawn on May 20th, 1941.
12:0110,000 elite German paratroopers tumbled out of their low-flying transport planes over the north of the island.
12:16Their key objective was the airfield at Malame.
12:22But they met stubborn resistance.
12:26Then, after seven days of fighting, Crete finally fell.
12:4310,000 Allied prisoners were taken, together with all their heavy weapons.
12:54The Germans, too, had suffered heavy losses.
12:57More than 3,000 paratroopers dead or missing.
13:02As a German general said, Crete had become the graveyard of the German paratroopers,
13:08and a disastrous victory.
13:09It was a bloody mess.
13:13They lost most of their forces there.
13:16Mainly because the Brits and the natives fought tooth and nail to keep the island.
13:24The native Cretans, who used all kinds of weapons, including pitchforks,
13:30waited for the Germans when they landed and slaughtered them.
13:45Greece was now completely in the hands of Hitler and his troops.
13:49Its government had fled, and the Allies had withdrawn.
13:52Greece was now occupied by three Axis forces.
14:07Italy, Germany and Bulgaria.
14:10The Bulgarians took over the region of Thrace.
14:15The Germans occupied Salonica, Corinth and the Aegean Islands and Crete.
14:20And the Italians took the rest, including the capital, Athens.
14:24For the Germans, who now came flooding in, Greece was a kind of paradise.
14:32Many whiled away their times sightseeing.
14:37Swimming in the Aegean Sea became a popular pastime for the men and women of the German military.
14:46But the Germans also had a problem.
14:56They now had a country of eight million people to run.
15:01With Germany fighting Britain in the West, and about to invade Russia,
15:05they simply didn't have the manpower to rule Greece themselves.
15:10They needed a puppet government, manned by Greeks, who would do their bidding.
15:14Yonis Rallis now watched as the first of a series of collaborationist governments was set up.
15:27The official line to the Greek people was that it was better to work with the Nazis,
15:31rather than to continue fighting.
15:34That way, ordinary people could best be protected.
15:37But it was a claim that soon rung very hollow, indeed.
15:49The Axis powers imposed what they called reconstruction fees,
15:53meaning that the Greek people had to pay for the cost of being invaded.
15:56As the Greek coffers were very low, the Nazis took payment in the form of crops and goods.
16:03Food and materials that should have been feeding and clothing Greek men, women and children.
16:10I think the Germans looked at Greece as a country that should be looted, practically.
16:16They tried to extract as much as they could out of this country,
16:22and mainly they looted food stuff, and therefore deprived the population from basic food stuff.
16:29The lack of food was made even worse by the Allies.
16:36They were blockading Greece to starve out the Axis forces.
16:42The result became known as the Great Famine.
16:45As winter closed in, Greeks living in the cities found they couldn't get food.
17:08People were reduced to scavenging in bomb sites for anything to eat.
17:12The winter of 1942 was absolutely disastrous.
17:19People just dropped in the streets.
17:23I remember my parents were telling me that they went to church one day,
17:28and the church had this strange order.
17:31They realised that bodies were being stacked into the church
17:35in a decaying state of affairs.
17:37And this was commonplace.
17:39It happened every day, practically, that winter.
17:44Something in the vicinity of 400,000 or maybe 500,000 dead,
17:50was incurred because of lack of food.
17:54As their people starved, the collaborationist politicians did nothing.
18:13But others did.
18:16Resistance movements began springing up, mainly in the countryside and the mountains.
18:29These resistance groups reflected the fractured nature of Greek politics.
18:34Nationalists, liberal, socialist and communist fighters all began vying for power.
18:43The largest resistance group to emerge was the National Liberation Front, the EAM.
18:50It was made up largely of communists and had its own military wing, known as Elas.
18:56The only organized force in Greece, organized in clandestine, let's say, activities, was the Communist Party.
19:10They had been under Metaxas's constant harassment.
19:14Many were imprisoned and when the Germans entered Greece, prisons were, even before the Germans entered Greece,
19:21prisons were opened and people were let free.
19:25Many of these people who were once interned and were being under surveillance,
19:31became the leaders of the new resistance force.
19:36The main rival to the communist Elas group was the right-wing National Republican Greek League, known as EDIS.
19:45The two rival groups clashed often, as their ideologies went head to head.
19:51But they did at least have one common cause.
19:55They loathed the occupying Germans, Italians and Bulgarians,
20:00and they would stop at nothing to drive them out.
20:11One way to strike a blow against the Axis forces was to attack their supply lines.
20:15Greece was a crucial route for the Germans supporting their troops in North Africa.
20:27Sever those lines, and it would be a major step in bringing the German war machine to a halt.
20:32The British soon realized that if they could get the resistance movements on side, it could prove decisive.
20:43So they selected a team from the SOE, the Special Operations Executive.
20:48They were highly trained specialists who carried out secret and daring missions.
20:57Experts in espionage and surveillance.
21:00Their speciality was sabotage behind enemy lines.
21:03On the night of November the 25th, 1942, an SOE unit was parachuted into Greece.
21:20It met up with both communist-backed Elas and nationalist EDIS fighters operating in the Greek mountains.
21:26The British believed that the more damage the resistance forces did against the Germans, the better for the cause of the war.
21:39So they didn't really differentiate initially between left and right, who was communist or non-communist.
21:47They gave money to both sides, they tried to help both sides.
21:50In time, they realized that there was another war going on, and that was between the Communist Party and the other resistance forces.
22:03Amazingly, the SOE team persuaded the two groups to work together.
22:08Their first mission was codenamed Operation Harling.
22:12Its target was the Giant Railway Viaduct at Gorgopotamus.
22:16The bridge was part of a major supply line linking Thessalonica in the north and Athens in the south.
22:25Guerrillas from the two groups, along with members of the British Special Operations Team, attacked the viaduct.
22:33And blew it up.
22:34The mission was a spectacular success.
22:49The vital viaduct was out of action for months.
22:52But it was the only time the two opposing guerrilla groups ever managed to cooperate.
22:57Italian and German troops were now sent out to put down the resistance.
23:10Their methods were vicious.
23:13For any Greek fighters who were caught, there could only be one outcome.
23:17Again, the collaborationist regime stood by and let it happen, as did Rallis.
23:33And the claim that they had only taken power in order to protect the Greek people would look even less convincing because of events elsewhere in the country.
23:41The city of Thessalonica had one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Europe.
23:51There were 50,000 Sephardic Jews living in the city at the outbreak of World War II.
23:57For years, they had lived peacefully, side by side with Greek Christians.
24:10But then the Germans arrived.
24:13Almost immediately, they began imposing anti-Jewish measures.
24:19Jewish newspapers were closed down.
24:21Jews were forced to wear a yellow star of David.
24:29And Jewish families were forcibly removed from their homes.
24:38All the while, the collaborationist government did nothing to help them.
24:42In July 1942, all Jewish adult males in Thessalonica were ordered to report to the city's main square to register for compulsory labor.
24:58Deprived of any shade, they were made to perform exercises by their SS captors.
25:03Any Jews unable to do the exercises were insulted and beaten.
25:17And it would get far worse.
25:29And it would get far worse.
25:30In December 1942, the main Jewish cemetery in Thessalonica was destroyed.
25:47The following March, the city's entire Jewish community was crammed into railway boxcars, along with Jews from Thrace, the part of Greece occupied by Hitler's Bulgarian allies.
26:07A total of 60,000 men, women and children were then sent in terrible conditions to Poland.
26:19There they died, in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
26:37Almost the entire Jewish community of Thessalonica was wiped out.
26:41While the collaborationist ministers were guilty mainly of doing nothing, soon they and Rallis would become actively implicated in Nazi crimes.
26:58By April 1943, the resistance to the occupiers was growing.
27:03The Germans decided to turn to the one Greek they thought could help them deal with the guerrillas, Jonas Rallis.
27:11He now became Prime Minister.
27:15They appoint collaboration governments.
27:18The third was under Ioannis Rallis, a politician of the royalist variety, the populist or people's party variety, who understood very well that the war was more or less ending at the expense of Germany.
27:35But he feared the takeover by the communist-led resistance forces.
27:45So his major, I think, concern was to prepare Greece for the post-war state of affairs.
27:52But he was nevertheless in cahoots with the Germans.
28:06Rallis was right about one thing.
28:08By the time he came to power, the German army was indeed in trouble.
28:17In Russia, its army was trapped in Stalingrad.
28:21In North Africa, its forces were now close to defeat.
28:26It couldn't fight on two major fronts and deal with Greek guerrillas.
28:30So it asked Rallis to form his own army.
28:35And he did.
28:39Rallis set up units known as security battalions.
28:43The security battalions were mostly thugs that would brutalize people who were considered friends or left-leaning people or friends of the Communist Party or simply disinterested in giving information or shirked from giving information against their fellow citizens.
29:11So they were not well liked by the population, obviously.
29:18Armed and trained by the Nazis, the mission of the security battalions was to liquidate the resistance groups in the Greek countryside.
29:27On the face of it, this was a patriotic movement designed to combat communism.
29:34And the security battalions did prove popular.
29:3622,000 men volunteered.
29:41But any idea that they were fighting for Greece was quickly dispelled.
29:47On joining up, each member had to swear an oath of loyalty not to Greece, but to Adolf Hitler.
29:55Rallis objected to the oath on the grounds that Greek military forces couldn't put themselves in the hands of a foreign government.
30:05But he was simply ignored.
30:10By the time Rallis became Prime Minister, the Communist-dominated Elas had already gained control of a third of the country.
30:21Rallis was now in the bizarre position of being a Greek patriot, providing Greek soldiers to attack Greek freedom fighters.
30:35And Rallis's position would soon become even more invidious.
30:42For the Nazis would make him complicit in their greatest crime of all, the Holocaust.
30:49The Holocaust.
30:56In 1943, the Jewish community in the capital city of Athens suddenly came under threat.
31:03Right on Rallis's doorstep.
31:04The Allied invasion operations began from the beaches of the Axis Sicilian stronghold.
31:19Operations which are now nearing completion, which resulted in the downfall of Benito Mussolini.
31:23And which will go forward until Italy and then Germany lay down their arms with unconditional surrender.
31:36Ironically, it was a series of Allied victories that led to the Germans turning on the Athenian Jews.
31:41In the summer of 1943, the Allies had landed in Sicily.
31:48They fought their way up through southern Italy, and by September, Mussolini's regime had collapsed.
31:54Italy, in effect, now changed sides and joined the Allies.
31:59Hitler had to act fast.
32:12Right across France, Yugoslavia and Greece, German troops disarmed their former Italian friends.
32:17They now seized control of territories that had previously been occupied by the Italians.
32:22By the end of October 1943, the Germans had regained control over the Aegean, including Athens.
32:33Now the city's Jews lay at their mercy.
32:39The Germans take over all the territories under Italian occupation, including Athens.
32:46And that is where the Jews of Athens are threatened with extinction, because their turn would come with the Germans.
32:57The Italians were less severe in persecuting the Jews, as opposed to the Germans.
33:06Fortunately, the Athenian Jews were old Jews.
33:10They were from Roman times, they spoke the Greek language, and they were not distinguishable.
33:19But still the Nazis stepped up the pressure on the city's Jewish community, demanding that the Greek authorities help round them up.
33:28Many Greek police officers simply ignored instructions to arrest Jews and turn them over to the Germans.
33:33The Archbishop of Athens and Greece, Damaskinos Papandreou, also defied the Nazis.
33:41He instructed his priests to get their congregations to rescue Jews.
33:46He also sent a strongly worded letter of protest to Prime Minister Rallis and to the Germans.
33:51Rallis himself was no anti-Semite, but he was caught in a trap, eager to work with the Nazis to defeat communism.
34:04He tried to tread a fine line.
34:09In public, he supported the Nazis' anti-Jewish measures.
34:12In private, though, he didn't punish fellow Greeks for defying them.
34:18It gained him few friends.
34:25To escape persecution, many Athenian Jews headed for the mountains to join the partisans.
34:33Others left the city by boat.
34:36Many went into hiding.
34:37But by the end of the war, around 800 Athenian Jews had been rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
34:50But it wasn't just the Jewish population which was a target for the German troops that had taken over the areas once occupied by the Italians.
35:00The Germans now gave orders to crush the Greek resistance.
35:03All armed men are to be shot on the spot.
35:08Villagers from where shots have been fired or where armed men have been encountered are to be destroyed.
35:14And the men of the village are to be shot.
35:17The Germans took heavy reprisals. It was their policy to do so.
35:20They would kill, let's say, 20, 50 Greeks for one German soldier or officer, even more.
35:32So reprisals was in line for any attack against the Germans.
35:40If the Germans couldn't find the perpetrators, then they would turn on ordinary villagers.
35:48They would be arrested and publicly executed.
35:53These reprisals set ordinary Greeks against the resistance.
35:58How does one explain to the rest of society that we kill one German and then we have 50 or 20, whatever, Greeks shot for that?
36:15Hence, we had many occasions when the Germans practically eradicated villages in order to make them an example, to set an example for other resistance activities.
36:28In December 1943, the bloodiest massacre on Greek soil during World War II took place.
36:42After LS forces had killed 81 German soldiers, a German unit was dispatched to the town of Calavrita in the Peloponnese.
36:50When they reached the town, they locked all women and children in the local school.
37:07They then ordered all men and boys over 12 to a hill overlooking the village.
37:12There, the German troops machine gunned them down.
37:21696 men and boys were massacred.
37:30Only a handful survived to tell the tale.
37:37Then the German troops set about destroying the entire village.
37:40burning every building.
38:01Today in Calavrita, there is a memorial to those who were slaughtered.
38:04It's called the place of sacrifice, and the events of that fateful day in December 1943 are still commemorated every year.
38:17But if they thought these atrocities would stop the resistance, the Germans were wrong.
38:33The guerrillas kept attacking them, and the Germans kept burning villages.
38:37By the end of the war, hundreds of Greek villages had been destroyed.
38:44These attacks were a disaster for Rallis.
38:49What little credibility he had as a protector of his people was lost.
38:54But again, instead of saying anything, he just stood by and did nothing.
39:07By now in Russia, the Germans were on the run.
39:12In the West, the Allies had landed at Normandy.
39:14An Allied invasion of Greece seemed only weeks away.
39:19The majority of Greeks were looking forward to the day of their liberation.
39:23For the Germans in Greece, it was time to get ready for a last ditch defence of the fatherland.
39:42This meant protecting the roads and railways, which they would use to withdraw to Germany.
39:46For Rallis, this could have been a time for him to have distanced himself.
39:55He could have resigned as Prime Minister and saved something of his reputation.
40:00Instead, he chose to continue his collaboration.
40:05He still believed it was his duty to destroy the Communists.
40:10And for him, the only route to achieve his aim was with the Germans.
40:16In August 1944, the Soviet army burst into the Balkans, swiftly overrunning Romania and forcing Bulgaria to sue for peace.
40:42The Bulgarian forces in northern Greece immediately disintegrated.
40:49The Germans were now in danger of being cut off from their homeland.
40:53They began to retreat north.
40:56Along the way, they left a trail of devastation.
40:58Well, the first thing the Germans did while withdrawing was to demolish everything they could demolish.
41:05They blew up all railroad stations that they could do so.
41:17They destroyed power companies, everything.
41:20So, Greece was in total shambles after that.
41:32Key targets were strategic installations like the Corinth Canal.
41:39Months, if not years, would pass before they could be used again.
41:42One of the Germans' last acts in Athens was to remove the swastika flag that had flown from the Acropolis.
41:52At the same time, the premiership of Ionis Rallis finally came to a quiet and inglorious end.
42:04On October 16th, 1944, British and Greek forces landed in Greek ports.
42:14Final proof that four years of Axis oppression and cruelty were finally over.
42:20Carpets are spread in the street in front of the jeeps and they are bombarded with flowers and fruit.
42:30Corinth, cleared of the enemy, receives with overwhelming enthusiasm the Greek and British troops.
42:40The return of the British also brought the guerrilla groups into the Greek capital.
42:43Though they'd spent most of their time fighting the Germans in the mountains, they'd also been fighting each other,
42:53with the communist-backed Elas jockeying for position to take control of the country after the war.
42:59It's a rather complicated state of affairs because there were several wars being fought simultaneously.
43:06One was against the occupying forces by everybody,
43:09and then there was a war between the resistance movements for the future of Greece after the war.
43:19Who would take over the country after the war?
43:22Would it be a republican regime?
43:27Would it be a royalist democracy?
43:30Or would it be a communist-led regime?
43:33For two months, an uneasy calm existed between British forces on the Greek mainland and Elas.
43:43But then early in December 1944, the one thing Rallis had been afraid of finally happened.
44:03Elas forces rose up in Athens and attempted to seize control.
44:09It meant a new war, this time communists against the British.
44:19Churchill ordered British troops to crush the Elas uprising.
44:23Look at these pictures.
44:25British soldiers, comrades of the men who fought with Greeks against the Hun,
44:29are here engaged in fighting those same men.
44:31Airborne troops occupying a rooftop position, fire their machine gun into a street of Athens to prevent the movement of Elas forces.
44:41Churchill went to Athens to oversee the creation of a pro-British government.
44:48The man he chose to lead it was Archbishop Damaskinos,
44:52who had done so much to protect Greek Jews from the Nazis.
44:55Now, a fierce battle began.
45:00The British unleashed a concentrated attack on the communist forces.
45:07RAF planes were even sent to attack their strongholds in the capital.
45:12After several weeks, the communist guerrillas were defeated.
45:27Archbishop Damaskinos and his government could at last establish itself.
45:31Order was restored, but it didn't last long.
45:39A forward battalion moves up and there goes the signal for the attack.
45:44Every type of modern weapon is brought into play as the bitter warfare surges back and forth over the desolate mountain passes.
45:50In 1946, Greek communists once more took up arms.
45:57A fully-fledged civil war broke out.
46:01It lasted three years and cost the lives of thousands of people.
46:06To end the civil war, the Greek government turned to the men who had served in Rallis' security battalions.
46:12They were released from prison to join Greek government forces fighting the communists.
46:19Eventually, in 1949, the civil war subsided.
46:26Greece remained free from communism.
46:29By then, Ionis Rallis was a forgotten relic of the past.
46:34He was tried as a Nazi collaborator in 1946 and sentenced to life in prison.
46:45Rallis' defence to his people was that he was right to fear communism.
46:51The uprisings after the war and the lives they cost certainly seemed to be proof of that.
46:56But does fear of communism justify standing by when over half a million ordinary Greeks were starved to death?
47:09Does it justify supporting the Nazis' policy of transporting the Jews to the death camps?
47:16In terms of percentage of the population, Greece suffered amongst the worst of any country in World War II.
47:22Over 800,000 people, that's 10% of Greece's pre-war population, perished.
47:33And of course, in the end, communism, the thing Ionis Rallis most feared,
47:39was defeated not by the Nazis, but by the Western Allies.
47:44His driving force was mainly anti-communist.
47:47He was an anti-communist to the point of collaboration.
47:50That was his main fault.
47:53He ought to have realised that during that period,
47:57being an anti-communist didn't mean what it might have meant 10 years later.
48:04It meant that he was, he made his, a very silly kind of, or strange kind of decision,
48:12to collaborate with the German forces.
48:16And the German forces were the ogre.
48:23It wasn't anyone else then, it was the Germans, who starved 500,000 Greeks to death.
48:30It's hardly surprising then, that Ionis Rallis died in 1946, just one year after being imprisoned.
48:40A lonely and forgotten figure.
48:42A lonely and forgotten figure.
48:43A lonely and forgotten figure.
48:44A lonely and forgotten figure.
48:47A lonely and forgotten figure.
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