The PEAN bombing in Athens

At around noon on Sunday 20 September 1942, in the centre of occupied Athens, a dynamite charge exploded in a building on the corner of Patission and Gladstonos streets, a few steps from Omonia Square. The first and second floors housed the headquarters of ESPO (the National Socialist Patriotic Organisation) – the largest Greek Nazi organisation, which was trying to raise a volunteer legion to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. The attack was carried out by a small Athenian resistance organisation, the Panhellenic Union of Fighting Youths (PEAN), led by the air force officer Kostas Perrikos. The leader of ESPO, the physician Spyros Sterodimas, was gravely wounded and died soon afterwards. The organisation never recovered.

The attack thwarted the attempts to form a Greek volunteer legion for the Eastern Front. That is the usual assessment in the literature: after Sterodimas’s death ESPO ceased to count, and the legion never came into being. This judgement should nevertheless be treated with caution – it is not known how many volunteers ESPO had really managed to gather – and on the number of casualties the sources diverge very widely, from a few dozen wounded to a few dozen killed.

Athens under occupation

From the German entry into Athens in April 1941 the Greek capital lay in the German zone of occupation, although most of the rest of mainland Greece was controlled by the Italians. Formally the country was governed by the collaborationist government of General Georgios Tsolakoglou, in practice dependent on the occupiers. In the winter of 1941–1942 Athens went through the Great Famine, in which an estimated 40,000 people died in the capital and Piraeus alone. Hunger, requisitions and the humiliation of defeat drove young Athenians into the underground. The first celebrated act of resistance was the removal of the German flag from the Acropolis on the night of 30–31 May 1941 by two students, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas. In the autumn of 1941 EAM was founded, and in 1942 the first partisan units appeared in the mountains – ELAS and EDES.

Collaborators who openly professed Nazism were a fringe in Greece. ESPO, founded in the summer of 1941 and led at first by Georgios Vlavianos and later by Sterodimas, was the largest of them. It spread Nazi propaganda, helped recruit Greek workers for labour in Germany and, from the summer of 1942 – as the Wehrmacht pushed towards the Volga and the Caucasus and the first fighting was already under way at Stalingrad – tried to gather volunteers for a Greek legion that was to fight the Red Army. The organisation’s offices shared the building with German agencies; according to some sources it housed a post of the Wehrmacht’s Secret Field Police.

PEAN

PEAN was founded in October 1941 by Kostas Perrikos and a group of his friends. Perrikos, born on Chios in 1905, was an air force officer and an ardent republican; after the failed Venizelist coup of March 1935 he was dismissed from the forces, to which he returned as a volunteer during the war with Italy. After the defeat he was at first active in one of the earliest underground organisations in Athens, but left it because it refused to take a stand against the return of the monarchy. PEAN’s leadership included lawyers, merchants and doctors, and the group’s political patron was Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, later Prime Minister. The organisation proclaimed the ideals of social justice, opposed the return of King George II and published an underground paper, Doxa (“Glory”).

What set PEAN apart from other urban resistance groups was that from the outset it called for active struggle – sabotage and attacks. The communists of EAM at that time rejected such methods as “urban terrorism” that brought reprisals down on the population, and this dispute ran on throughout the occupation. In the summer of 1942 PEAN’s so-called destruction squad blew up the headquarters of another, smaller collaborationist organisation, OEDE, without killing anyone. ESPO was to be the next target.

Sunday 20 September

According to Greek studies, the timing was chosen so that as many ESPO members and as few bystanders as possible would be in the building: the organisation had called a meeting for Sunday morning, and the other offices in the building were closed. The bomb – about 12 kilograms of dynamite with a long fuse – was assembled the previous evening by Antonis Mytilinaios and Spyros Galatis in the flat of a young teacher, Ioulia Bimba. In the morning Bimba and Mytilinaios carried the disguised charge across the city, while other members of the group took up positions around Omonia Square to cover the bombers. Perrikos halted the operation when it turned out that lawyers from a neighbouring office were on the half-landing where the charge was to be placed. Only when they had left and the ESPO meeting was drawing to a close did Galatis and Mytilinaios go in through an unguarded entrance on Gladstonos Street, place the charge beneath the ESPO offices, light the fuse and walk away.

The explosion destroyed much of the building. The sources differ on the casualties. After the war members of PEAN claimed that 29 ESPO members and 43 Germans from an upper floor had been killed. The British considered this figure exaggerated and wrote of 43 Greeks and two Germans killed. The German historian Hagen Fleischer, author of the standard work on the occupation of Greece, established that about 40 Greeks were seriously wounded and six Germans lightly wounded; an Italian police report spoke of 44 wounded, six of them in a critical condition. What is certain is that Sterodimas was among the seriously wounded and died soon after the attack.

Echoes and reprisals

The bombing was the most spectacular action yet by the urban resistance in occupied Greece. Allied radio stations broadcasting from London and Moscow presented it as proof that the Greeks had not been broken. In confidential assessments, however, the British were sceptical: they considered the action brave but premature and uncoordinated, threatening reprisals out of proportion to the damage done to the occupiers. EAM publicly condemned the attack as a provocation “in the style of the Reichstag fire”, intended to give the Germans a pretext for persecution.

The Germans and the ESPO leaders initially blamed the communists and “Jewish circles”. About 35 people were arrested, among them communists and twenty Jews, but for lack of evidence they were released. It was only a gendarme, Polykarpos Dalianis, who, for money, put the occupiers on the trail of the perpetrators. On 11 November 1942 the Germans arrested almost the entire PEAN leadership and the destruction squad; those detained were tortured in custody in Piraeus. Mytilinaios betrayed no one, escaped twice and made his way to the Middle East. On 31 December a court martial sentenced Perrikos, Bimba and Galatis to death.

Place in the war

Punishment also fell on people whom the court had acquitted. On 7 January 1943 the Germans shot four of them – among them PEAN’s president, Thanasis Skouras – in reprisal for another act of sabotage in Piraeus. Kostas Perrikos was shot on 4 February 1943 at the firing range in Kaisariani, one of the sites of mass executions during the occupation. Ioulia Bimba was taken to Vienna and beheaded on 26 February 1943. Galatis escaped death: after the intercession of Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and the payment of a thousand pounds to the Germans by his family, his sentence was commuted to hard labour. The traitor Dalianis was later killed by members of another underground organisation.

After Sterodimas’s death ESPO never regained any importance, and no Greek legion for the Eastern Front was formed. When in 1943 the occupiers needed Greek collaborators under arms, they turned to a different form: the Security Battalions, sent not against the Red Army but against the Greek resistance. PEAN never regained its former strength after the arrest of its leaders; in 1944 it resumed sabotage, and in December 1944, during the fighting in Athens, it sided with the government and the British against EAM-ELAS. The attack on ESPO nevertheless left a lasting mark on Greek memory as one of the boldest acts of resistance in occupied Europe – in 1987 a bust of Perrikos was unveiled near the former ESPO headquarters. At the same time the dispute it provoked between PEAN and EAM foreshadowed the deeper split of the Greek resistance into communists and their opponents, which in the following years turned into open civil war.