The founding of EAM

On 27 September 1941 four men met in secret in a small house at the end of Hippocrates Street in Athens. Lefteris Apostolou represented the illegal Communist Party of Greece (KKE), Christos Chomenidis the Socialist Party of Greece, Ilias Tsirimokos the Union of People’s Democracy, and Apostolos Voyiatzis the Agrarian Party. They signed a short founding document of a new organisation: the National Liberation Front (Greek: Εθνικό Απελευθερωτικό Μέτωπο, Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo), known by its initials as EAM. Five months after the Germans occupied Athens, occupied Greece thus acquired an organisation that within two years would become the largest mass movement in the country’s history and the main force of the Greek resistance, and after the war a party to a bloody internal conflict.

The date of 27 September agrees with the founding document and with the findings of historians. It should be added, however, that 27 September was a founding act concluded in secret. EAM announced its existence publicly only in a manifesto of 10 October 1941.

The communists after defeat

The Communist Party of Greece entered the occupation weakened as no other party was. The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, established in August 1936 as the 4th of August Regime, banned all parties but persecuted the communists most harshly. The security minister, Konstantinos Maniadakis, broke up the party’s structures, infiltrated them with his agents and even created a fake central committee that issued its own proclamations. More than two thousand communists were imprisoned or exiled to the islands of the Aegean, and many were forced to sign public “declarations of repentance”. The party’s leader, its general secretary Nikos Zachariadis, had been in prison since 1936, latterly on Corfu.

The party’s response to the war with Italy was wavering. At the end of October 1940, when Italy attacked Greece, a letter from Zachariadis was published calling on Greeks to defend their country. Part of the leadership regarded it as a police forgery, and in later letters the prisoner called the war “imperialist”. This stance followed the line of the Communist International, which since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had forbidden communists to provoke the Reich. Rank-and-file party members, however, fought in Albania like everyone else.

The defeat of April 1941, which ended with the capitulation of the Army of Epirus and the Germans’ entry into Athens, changed the party’s position. In the chaos of the state’s collapse several hundred communists managed to escape from prisons and places of exile and go underground, although the authorities handed many others over to the occupiers together with entire camps. The Germans took Zachariadis in 1941 to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he survived the war. The party was rebuilt in Athens by second-rank figures. As early as 28 May an associated relief organisation, National Solidarity (Ethniki Allilengyi), was founded to help prisoners, the families of those arrested and the starving.

The turning point was the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. For the communists the war ceased to be a conflict of “imperialists” and became a struggle in defence of the homeland of the proletariat. A plenum of the central committee meeting in Athens from 1 to 3 July declared the party’s main task to be organising the struggle for the “national and social liberation” of Greece and called on all parties and organisations to form a common national front. On 16 July the communists founded the Workers’ National Liberation Front (EEAM), which brought together the underground trade unions.

The old parties refuse

The communists wanted to repeat what they had not managed to achieve in 1936: to create a popular front with the parties of the centre and the moderate left. In the summer of 1941 their emissaries visited the leaders of the great pre-war parties, the Liberals (Venizelists) and the monarchists. Everywhere they were turned down. The pre-war politicians considered resistance to German might to be madness, were waiting for the war to be decided outside Greece, and did not trust the communists. One KKE activist, Thanasis Hatzis, remembered a conversation with a former prime minister, General Stylianos Gonatas, who reportedly called their plan “sheer madness” and threatened that if they set up such an organisation he would call on officers to crush the “rebellion”.

This passivity was not due to caution alone. Greek politics before the dictatorship had rested on clientelist networks: deputies and their families handed out posts and favours in exchange for votes. The parties, apart from the KKE, were loose coalitions of notables, with no structures that could operate clandestinely. Under occupation, when no politician could arrange anything with the Germans, Italians or Bulgarians, this system ceased to function. The communists had what the others lacked: discipline, experience of underground work and cells in many towns.

Only three small groups agreed to cooperate. The Socialist Party of Greece (SKE) was a small Marxist party. The Union of People’s Democracy (ELD) had been founded only in 1941 by republican intellectuals, with the law professor Alexandros Svolos as chairman and Ilias Tsirimokos, a pre-war Liberal Party deputy, as general secretary. The Agrarian Party of Greece (AKE) represented some of the radical peasants. When efforts to build a broader front showed no sign of success, the KKE leadership decided to set up the organisation without the great parties.

The document of 27 September

The founding act, signed on 27 September by the four representatives, was short and moderate in tone. It named as EAM’s aims “the liberation of the Nation from the foreign yoke” and “the guarantee of the sovereign right of the Greek people to decide on its form of government”. The second phrase was aimed at King George II and the government-in-exile, which to a large part of the Greek public remained a continuation of the Metaxas dictatorship. EAM undertook to sustain the “spirit of liberation” among the people and to seek cooperation with other nations fighting the Axis powers. The document stated that any party or organisation accepting its principles could join the front on equal terms. The door to cooperation was thus left open, but it was clear from the start who made the decisions in the new front. The KKE was many times larger than its three partners put together, and it was the KKE that supplied the organisation with cadres, money and a communications network.

The front’s leadership stayed in the shadows. In Zachariadis’s absence the party was led in turn by activists who had spent the years of the dictatorship in prison. The most important of them became Georgios Siantos, a veteran of the trade-union movement who had escaped from prison on Corfu and from January 1942 was acting general secretary of the KKE. The British historian David Close observed that EAM became a unique party in Greek history: it won mass support even though its leaders remained unknown.

The first months

On 10 October 1941 EAM issued a manifesto “to the Greek people, to all Greeks whose hearts beat for the liberation of the homeland”, calling on them to join the front and fight the occupier. It promised that the reward for their sacrifices would be “a new Greece, free and independent, the property of its people”. In the autumn the organisation expanded throughout the country, through existing communist cells or through spontaneously formed “people’s committees”. Territorial committees were created, from the village and the city district upwards, as well as occupational organisations. The first great demonstration in occupied Athens came on 28 October 1941, the first anniversary of the rejection of the Italian ultimatum, in commemoration of the victories in Albania.

EAM’s strongest argument proved to be hunger. The occupiers requisitioned food for their armies, the country, divided into three occupation zones, lost its internal trade, and the British blockade cut off the grain imports on which Greece depended. As early as mid-September German officials in Athens were warning of disaster. In the autumn of 1941 the Great Famine began, which in the winter of 1941–1942 killed an estimated 40,000 people in Athens and Piraeus alone. In December 1941, according to German figures, some 300 people a day were dying in the capital; according to the Red Cross, more. The government of Georgios Tsolakoglou asked the occupiers to bring in grain but obtained little. In this situation EAM’s first slogan became the struggle for survival. An Athenian activist recalled years later that the front’s first song was one “for life and freedom, bread for our people”. The front’s organisations ran soup kitchens, collected food, and organised strikes and protests against requisitions.

EAM was not the only resistance organisation founded that autumn. As early as 9 September 1941 Colonel Napoleon Zervas, a Venizelist dismissed from the army after the failed coup of 1935, founded with two comrades the National Republican Greek League, or EDES. Its nominal leader was General Nikolaos Plastiras, then in exile in France. EDES too proclaimed a republican, even “socialist”, programme, but it rested on officers and had a much narrower base. Talks on merging the two organisations came to nothing.

Place in the war

From the four-man agreement of September 1941 grew a movement such as Greece had never known. On 16 February 1942, in accordance with a decision of the KKE’s January plenum, EAM created its armed wing, the Greek People’s Liberation Army, or ELAS. In June 1942 the party veteran Aris Velouchiotis appeared with a dozen or so men in the village of Domnista in Evrytania and proclaimed the beginning of a guerrilla war against the occupiers. In November 1942 ELAS and EDES partisans, together with British commandos, blew up the railway viaduct over the Gorgopotamos river in Operation Harling, one of the most celebrated acts of sabotage in occupied Europe. In February and March 1943 strikes and demonstrations organised by EAM forced the collaborationist government and the Germans to abandon a plan to send Greeks to forced labour in the Reich.

At its peak, at the end of 1944, EAM’s organisations numbered, by various estimates, between half a million and two million members, and ELAS several tens of thousands of armed partisans. In the mountain areas freed from the occupiers’ control and known as “Free Greece”, the front introduced its own administration with elected village councils and people’s courts. In March 1944 it set up there the Political Committee of National Liberation, in practice a rival government, and in the elections to its National Council women voted for the first time in Greek history. The same “revolutionary justice”, however, also served to eliminate political opponents, and from 1943 ELAS fought armed battles with other resistance organisations, above all EDES – what historians call the first round of the civil war.

Relations with the British and the government-in-exile were marked from the start by mutual distrust. After liberation in October 1944 EAM controlled most of the country, and from September its representatives sat in Georgios Papandreou’s government of national unity. In December 1944 a dispute over disarming the partisans turned into fighting in Athens between ELAS and British and government troops, known as the “Dekemvriana”. ELAS lost and, after the Varkiza Agreement of February 1945, laid down its arms. The persecution of the left during the so-called White Terror led in 1946 to the outbreak of the civil war, which ended in 1949 with the defeat of the communists.

The memory of EAM still divides Greeks. For decades after the civil war the state portrayed the front as an anti-national organisation whose aim had been not to liberate the country but to bring it into the Soviet bloc, and its members were sent into internal exile and barred from public service. Only in 1982 did the government of Andreas Papandreou officially recognise EAM as a resistance organisation. Historians today stress both sides of this history: EAM was the largest and most effective resistance movement in occupied Greece, giving millions of people their first experience of organised political action, and at the same time an instrument of a communist party that saw the struggle against the occupier as also a road to power after the war.