The British in Salonika

By 1 November 1944 a British presence in Salonika (Thessaloniki) – Greece’s second city and the main port of Macedonia – was already a fact, though still a very modest one. The Germans had left the city a day or two earlier, and their rearguard was pushing north towards the Yugoslav border. Meanwhile in Athens, liberated in mid-October, the British military authorities were distributing food to a population worn down by three years of occupation, malnutrition and runaway inflation. A few days later, at the turn of October and November, the last units of the German Army Group E crossed the Greek border. The mainland was free, although German garrisons on Crete, Rhodes, Leros, Milos and several other islands were to hold out until the end of the war in Europe.

The statement, popular in chronologies, that on 1 November “British troops occupied Salonika” needs qualifying. The first British soldiers – a few dozen commandos – had entered the city as early as 30 October, together with ELAS partisans, and the main British forces did not reach the port until 8 November. In Salonika itself it was the left-wing ELAS that actually held power in those days. Likewise, 4 November, which chronologies give as the day the Axis forces withdrew from mainland Greece, is somewhat late: according to the American official history, the German rearguard crossed the Greek border during the night of 31 October – 1 November, and the last sub-units left northern Greece by 2 November.

The retreat of Army Group E

The decision to evacuate Greece was taken at Hitler’s headquarters in late August and September 1944, when after the coup in Romania and the coup in Bulgaria the Red Army stood in the Balkans and the German forces in the south of the peninsula were in danger of being cut off. According to German figures there were then some 300,000 soldiers in Greece, on Crete and on the Aegean islands under Colonel General Alexander Löhr, commander of Army Group E, who in turn answered to Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, Commander-in-Chief South-East.

The retreat was carefully prepared. Earl Ziemke, author of the US Army’s history of the war on the Eastern Front, notes that von Weichs’s hesitation for more than a month gave Löhr time to ship out his support personnel and surplus equipment and to requisition civilian lorries. When the main phase of the evacuation began on 10 October, every unit knew its place in the timetable. The British, entering the Peloponnese and Attica cautiously, did little to hinder the Germans – which some Greek historians explain by a tacit understanding, and others by London’s limited forces and priorities, above all the wish to occupy Athens before the Communists. The theory of an understanding remains disputed. The German rearguard left Athens on 12–13 October, paused briefly on 21 October on the line of the Metsovo pass and Larissa, and then moved on north. The columns marched through Thessaly and Macedonia towards Florina, Edessa and the Vardar valley, and from there into Yugoslav Macedonia – towards Skopje and Bitola, which the Germans left on 4 November. It may well be this date, which already concerns Yugoslav territory, that found its way into the chronologies as the day Greece was evacuated.

Salonika: 30 October

From April 1941 Salonika was the most important centre of the German occupation zone in northern Greece. It housed the military administration and the headquarters of Army Group E, and it was also the scene of the greatest tragedy of the occupation. The Jewish community of Salonika, which before the war numbered by various estimates between 50,000 and more than 55,000 people, was humiliated in July 1942 during the round-up in Liberty Square and from March to August 1943 was almost entirely deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fewer than 2,000 of Salonika’s Jews survived the war; the city, in which for centuries they had formed the majority or a large part of the population, emerged from the occupation without them.

In the autumn of 1944 most of the columns evacuating from the south passed through Salonika. The Germans shipped out soldiers and equipment through the port and, before leaving, destroyed its installations: scuttled ships blocked the approaches to the quays, and the shipyard and warehouses were blown up. According to the accounts of British participants, the last Germans left the city on 31 October; Greek tradition takes 30 October as the day of liberation – the date is borne today by one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

That same day units of ELAS entered Salonika, led by a member of the leadership of the Communist Party of Greece, Markos Vafiadis, later the Communist commander in the civil war. With them – and according to some accounts slightly ahead of them – a small British detachment drove into the city under a Danish officer in British service, Major Anders Lassen. The group, named Scrumforce, numbered according to surviving returns eight officers and 68 NCOs and men from the Special Boat Squadron and the Long Range Desert Group, plus a few sappers and sailors. It had sailed from Piraeus on 23 October and on 26 October landed at Nea Potidea on the Chalkidiki peninsula, some 55 kilometres from the city. Its equipment was modest – Lassen drove into Salonika on requisitioned fire engines – but the appearance of British uniforms carried political weight. At the harbour quays there was an exchange of fire with the German rearguard in which, according to participants, several dozen Germans were killed; a fuel dump was saved in the process.

Real power in the city, however, was taken over by EAM-ELAS. Its committees took over the offices, its militia kept order, and political opponents – especially people suspected of collaborating with the occupier – were arrested. Lassen had too few men to oppose this and no orders to do so. Under the Caserta Agreement of 26 September, partisans of all groups were subordinate to the government of national unity of Georgios Papandreou and, through it, to the British General Ronald Scobie. In northern Greece, however, this agreement existed largely on paper.

The main British forces arrived in Salonika late, delayed by mines in the gulf and the destruction of the port. On 8 November a force based on the 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade came ashore, and a few days later the 7th Indian Infantry Brigade took over responsibility for the city. Only then can one speak of a British military presence in Salonika on any scale – and even that amounted to only a few thousand soldiers, against tens of thousands of ELAS partisans in Macedonia.

Kilkis: a war before the war

The dominance of ELAS in Macedonia showed itself in full force a few days later. Several thousand members of the collaborationist Security Battalions and other anti-communist armed units, together with their civilian supporters, had gathered that autumn in the small town of Kilkis, some 50 kilometres north of Salonika – according to various accounts, about 10,000 people took refuge there. The Caserta Agreement had declared the Security Battalions enemy forces that were to lay down their arms. On 4 November ELAS units attacked Kilkis and took the town after several hours of street fighting. The defenders’ losses were heavy, and after the battle some of the prisoners were killed by the partisans; their number has never been established, and estimates vary greatly with the political sympathies of the authors. The Battle of Kilkis is regarded as the bloodiest clash between the Communists and their Greek opponents on the eve of the civil war, and it still divides the memory of the region’s inhabitants.

Athens: food and money

As the Germans were leaving Macedonia, the most pressing issue in Athens was feeding the city. Greece still remembered the Great Famine of the winter of 1941–1942, which by various estimates claimed from over 100,000 to about 300,000 victims. From 1942 the situation had been eased by grain shipments organised by Sweden and the International Red Cross, but in the autumn of 1944 supplies broke down again: the departing occupiers had destroyed ports, bridges and rolling stock, and the countryside was cut off from the towns. The term “famine” as applied to November 1944 must therefore be understood with caution – the mass deaths of 1941–1942 were not repeated, but the population of the capital was severely undernourished and dependent on outside help.

In the first months after liberation that help was organised by the British military authorities, through the so-called Military Liaison – the Allied apparatus that brought in and distributed food, clothing and medicines until the UNRRA took over the task in 1945. Ships carrying grain and flour put into Piraeus, and rations were distributed through Greek offices and social organisations. Yet politics also attached to these deliveries: EAM accused the authorities of directing aid mainly to government supporters, while the government and the British accused the left of controlling districts and distribution committees.

The second affliction was the currency. The occupation had ruined Greek money: the occupiers had financed their expenditure by printing drachmas, and by the end of 1944 banknotes with a face value of 100 billion were in circulation. That autumn inflation in Greece turned into hyperinflation that ranks, according to economists’ tables, among the most violent in history – prices doubled within a few days, and people went back to barter and gold sovereigns. Papandreou’s government, in which the finance portfolio was held by the EAM socialist Alexandros Svolos, carried out a currency reform: under a law of 10 November, on 11 November a new drachma was introduced at a rate of one to 50 billion old ones, pegged to the pound sterling. The reform brought only temporary relief – in the following months prices began to rise again.

The islands that stayed German

The withdrawal from the mainland did not end the occupation of all of Greece. Some island garrisons had been evacuated earlier by air and sea, but where transport was lacking or where the islands mattered for the defence of the approaches to the Aegean, the Germans stayed. According to Ziemke, some 45,000 men remained on the islands, about a third of them Italians who after Italy’s surrender had continued to fight on the German side. The command designated these enclaves “fortresses” (Festung), to lend their survival a semblance of strategic purpose.

The largest of these remnants was the western part of Crete around Chania and Suda Bay, where more than ten thousand soldiers had concentrated after the German withdrawal from the east of the island in October. Strong garrisons also held out on Rhodes and other islands of the Dodecanese, including Leros, taken by the Germans in November 1943, and on Milos in the Cyclades. Cut off from supplies and harassed by British aircraft, warships and special forces and by Greek partisans, these garrisons no longer posed a military threat, but they held on. It was above all the islands’ civilian population, sharing the food shortages with the occupiers, that suffered. The garrisons of Crete, the Dodecanese and Milos did not surrender until May 1945, after Germany’s capitulation.

Rising tension

The autumn of 1944 in Greece was a time of the euphoria of liberation, but also of growing mistrust. The British had entered the country with small forces, relying on political agreements: the Caserta Agreement and the informal division of influence that Winston Churchill had agreed with Joseph Stalin in October at the Moscow Conference. In the famous “percentages agreement” Greece was placed 90 per cent in the British sphere of influence – and Stalin did indeed withhold support from the Greek Communists. On the ground, however, the dominant force was ELAS, which had grown out of the National Liberation Front founded in 1941 and controlled most of the provinces and, in Macedonia, Salonika as well.

The events in Salonika and at Kilkis showed both sides of this situation. ELAS dealt with collaborators and political rivals, often without trial, while the British accepted the surrender of the Security Battalions, saving their members from revenge – which the left saw as proof that London was shielding the men of the occupation. The key problem was becoming the disarming of the partisans and the creation of a new national army. In November this was being negotiated within Papandreou’s government, which included EAM ministers; the government and the British demanded the demobilisation of ELAS, while units of the émigré army returned to Greece, above all the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, loyal to the government. EAM demanded that these formations be disbanded too.

Significance

The first days of November 1944 closed the period of German occupation of mainland Greece that had lasted since April 1941. From the German point of view the retreat of Army Group E was a success: Löhr brought most of his troops and equipment out of Greece, and his divisions reinforced the defence of Yugoslavia, where they fought on for another six months. For the Greeks, liberation came not as the result of a great battle but through the occupier’s departure, in a country that was devastated, impoverished and politically divided.

The negotiations on disarming the partisans broke down at the turn of November and December. The EAM ministers left the government, and on 3 December police opened fire on a left-wing demonstration in Syntagma Square in Athens. Weeks of fighting between ELAS and British and government troops in the capital followed, known in Greece as the Dekemvriana, which ended only with a truce in January and the Varkiza Agreement in February 1945. The fragile peace did not last long: in 1946 the Greek Civil War broke out, in which Markos Vafiadis led the Communist Democratic Army of Greece. Salonika, where on 30 October 1944 the British and ELAS partisans had still entered together, became one of the places where it first became clear how quickly the alliance of the occupation years could fall apart.