The Germans enter Athens

On the morning of Sunday 27 April 1941 German motorcyclists of the 2nd Panzer Division rode into Athens, followed by armoured cars, tanks and infantry. The city was deserted. The Athenians, who had been waiting for the Germans for several days, shut themselves in their homes and closed their shutters. In the suburb of Ambelokipi representatives of the city authorities handed the capital over to the Germans without a fight, and soon afterwards the Reich war flag with its swastika was raised over the Acropolis, where until then the Greek flag had flown. Three weeks after the Germans attacked Greece, its capital came under an occupation that was to last three and a half years and bring one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the war in Europe.

Popular chronologies record under this day: “Athens occupied by German troops. Greece capitulates.” The first sentence is accurate; the second needs correcting. The Greek army did indeed surrender, but earlier and elsewhere: the Army of Epirus capitulated on 20–23 April, and the Army of Eastern Macedonia as early as 9 April. The Greek state never capitulated. On 23 April King George II and the government of Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos moved to Crete, and from there, and later from Cairo and London, they waged war as an ally of Britain. In Athens, therefore, the Germans found no one who could sign a capitulation in the name of Greece. The government formed there three days later was a collaborationist government, not the country’s lawful authority.

The last days before the Germans arrived

In the second half of April Athens lived in expectation of defeat. On 18 April, Good Friday, Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis shot himself. For three days the country had no head of government, and on 21 April, when Tsouderos was sworn in, the British decided to evacuate their corps. On 23 April the Luftwaffe began bombing the naval base on Salamis and the ports of Attica, and the King and the government flew to Crete. Most of the Greek fleet sailed for Alexandria. Remaining in the capital were the civil administration, the police and the mayor, Ambrosios Plytas, whom the government had instructed to keep order and prevent any fighting in the city.

British, Australian and New Zealand troops passed through Athens or skirted it on their way to the ports from which, from the night of 24–25 April, warships and merchant ships were taking them off. The evacuation from Greece was carried out from the beaches and small ports of Attica, such as Rafina and Porto Rafti, and from the Peloponnese: from Nafplio, Monemvasia and Kalamata. Although the Athenians knew that the British were leaving, by many accounts they bade them a warm farewell, throwing flowers and offering them wine. In the north a rearguard was still holding the pass at Thermopylae, which the New Zealanders and Australians abandoned on the night of 24–25 April. The last barrier before Athens was an improvised position south of Thebes.

On the morning of 26 April German paratroops landed by the Corinth Canal to cut the British route to the Peloponnese. The bridge over the canal was blown up, but the town of Corinth and the isthmus fell into German hands. That same evening Athens radio broadcast the last message of free Greece: “Greeks, stand firm, proud and dignified. You must prove yourselves worthy of your history. […] Greece will live again and will be great, because she fought honestly for a just cause and for freedom.”

Into the city

The motorcycle battalion of the German 2nd Panzer Division had earlier crossed to the island of Euboea, taken the port of Chalcis and then returned to the mainland to get round the British rearguard near Thebes. It met only weak resistance and on the morning of 27 April rode into the outskirts of Athens. According to a German study prepared after the war for the US Army, the Germans captured intact in the city large stocks of fuel and lubricants, several thousand tons of ammunition, ten lorry-loads of sugar, ten lorry-loads of other food, and equipment, weapons and medical supplies.

According to Athenian tradition, the act handing over the city was signed in the Parthenon café on Kifisias Avenue in the Ambelokipi district. On the Greek side there was a commission that included Mayor Plytas and representatives of the state authorities who had remained in the capital. There was no fighting in Athens.

The first German units drove straight to the Acropolis. According to German biographies of General Ferdinand Schörner, the Reich flag was raised there by an advance detachment of his 6th Mountain Division, which reached the city the same day. Schörner later became commandant of Athens. Photographs of Wehrmacht soldiers in front of the Parthenon and of the swastika over the sacred rock went round the German press and newsreels as a symbol of victory; for the Greeks they became a symbol of humiliation.

The most famous Greek legend of the occupation is linked with this moment. According to it, the evzone guarding the Greek flag, Konstantinos Koukidis, lowered the flag on German orders but, instead of handing it over, wrapped himself in it and leapt from the rock of the Acropolis. The story appeared in the British press as early as 1941, and many Greeks believed it. The Greek army’s historical office, however, found no trace in the army archives of any such soldier or any such incident, and the German historian of the occupation of Greece Hagen Fleischer believed that the story grew out of a joke that circulated on the day the Germans entered. Modern historiography regards Koukidis as a legendary figure. Even so, in 2000 the Athens authorities placed a plaque in his honour at the foot of the Acropolis, openly acknowledging that research had not confirmed his existence.

General Tsolakoglou’s government

From the outset Adolf Hitler had no intention of ruling Greece directly. He needed his troops in the east, where the war against the USSR was to begin in less than two months, and wanted the day-to-day administration of the country to be carried on by the Greeks themselves, under the occupiers’ control. He would have preferred to reach an understanding with the lawful government, but it was already on Crete and fighting on. His chance came from General Georgios Tsolakoglou, the same man who a week earlier had surrendered the Army of Epirus without the government’s consent. On 26 April, while Athens was still free, he wrote a letter to Hitler, addressing him as “leader of the German nation”, in which he offered to form a government of senior officers. According to some historians, Hitler called the letter “a gift from heaven” and accepted the offer at once.

On 29 April Tsolakoglou announced the formation of a government, and at 11 a.m. on 30 April he was sworn in at the former royal palace in Athens. The swearing-in, however, required a clergyman, and the Archbishop of Athens, Chrysanthus, refused. He declared that Greece already had a national government, which he himself had sworn in and which was on Greek soil, on Crete, and he forbade other bishops and clergy to stand in for him. In the end the oath was administered by the priest of an Athens parish. The government included, among others, the two generals who together with Tsolakoglou had brought about the capitulation of the Army of Epirus, Panagiotis Demestichas and Georgios Bakos, and the deputy prime minister was a professor of medicine, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, related by marriage to Field Marshal Wilhelm List. As early as 30 April The Times of London called Tsolakoglou “the Greek Quisling”.

The new government called its state the Hellenic State, avoiding the word “kingdom”. Its power was illusory from the start. Real control lay with the plenipotentiaries of the Reich and Italy, Günther Altenburg and Pellegrino Ghigi, and with the military commanders of the three occupying powers. Despite the efforts of Tsolakoglou, who warned the Germans that the Greeks would not tolerate occupation by the Italians, whom they had beaten in Albania, Hitler put his alliance with Mussolini first. A directive of 13 April had already provided that most German troops would leave Greece once the campaign was over. On 28 April the Italians began occupying the Ionian and Aegean islands, and in June the Peloponnese, Thessaly and most of Attica. The Germans kept Athens with Piraeus, Thessaloniki with central Macedonia, some of the islands and, once it had been taken, most of Crete. Bulgaria, which on 20 April had entered Greek Thrace without a fight, occupied the lands between the Strymon and the Evros and soon effectively annexed them. The Germans also made sure that Italian soldiers marched in the victory parade in Athens.

Chivalry and plunder

The first weeks of the occupation had two faces. The Germans wanted to appear as magnanimous victors. Hitler wrote that the Greeks had fought “like the heroes of ancient Hellas” and ordered the Greek prisoners to be released, and Greek officers were allowed to keep their side arms. Field Marshal List, impressed by the courage of the Greek soldiers, reportedly ordered that surrendering units be accorded military honours. The note delivered in Athens on 6 April had already proclaimed that the Reich was entering Greece not against the Greeks but to drive the British out.

At the same time groups of German economists, businessmen and engineers arrived in Greece and seized everything of economic value. Historians of the occupation describe this policy as revenge for Greece having chosen the wrong side, and as a race with the Italians over who would grab the spoils first. Above all, however, food was requisitioned for the occupying forces. A country that before the war had imported about a third of the grain it needed lost its stocks, its transport and its access to imports within a few weeks. The consequences of this plunder were to prove tragic as early as the first winter.

Place in the war

The German entry into Athens ended the three-week campaign on the mainland. On 28 April the spearhead of the 5th Panzer Division burst into Kalamata, where the next day several thousand British and Australian soldiers who could not be evacuated laid down their arms, and by 30 April the Germans had overrun the whole Peloponnese. Some 50,000 Commonwealth soldiers had sailed to Crete and Egypt. Crete was the Germans’ next objective: on 25 April Hitler signed the directive for its capture from the air, and on 20 May the Battle of Crete began, after which the King and the government moved to Egypt.

The fall of Athens also completed the German conquest of the Balkans, begun on 6 April simultaneously in Yugoslavia and Greece. Britain lost the last ally fighting alongside it on the European continent, and its presence in Europe shrank to Crete, Malta and Gibraltar. The attack on the Soviet Union, for which preparations were to have been completed by mid-May according to Hitler’s directive of December 1940, began on 22 June. For decades historians have argued over how far this delay was caused by the Balkan campaign and how far by the wet spring and shortages of equipment. Most present-day scholars believe that the Balkan effect was smaller than German generals claimed after the war, but the campaign did absorb armoured and air forces that then had to be hastily transferred east.

For the Greeks, 27 April marked the beginning of an occupation remembered above all as a time of hunger. The Germans and Italians requisitioned food for their troops, the occupiers broke up the distribution network, and the British blockade cut off grain imports. In Athens and Piraeus alone some 40,000 people are estimated to have died of hunger, most of them in the winter of 1941–1942, and across the country the Great Famine and malnutrition cost, by various estimates, up to 300,000 lives during the occupation. Tsolakoglou’s government was unable to prevent this and quickly lost what little support it had. Discredited, it resigned in December 1942.

The swastika did not hang undisturbed on the Acropolis. On the night of 30–31 May 1941 two Athenian students, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, climbed the rock and tore down the German flag. This is regarded as one of the first acts of Greek resistance. A few months later the first underground organisations were formed; in time they grew into a strong partisan movement, and their rivalry led after the liberation of 1944 to civil war. The occupation of Athens lasted until 12 October 1944, when the last German units left the city and the Greek flag once again flew over the Acropolis.