Alexandros Koryzis

Alexandros Koryzis was a banker whom the war raised to the premiership of Greece in the most difficult months of its modern history. For almost forty years he worked at the National Bank of Greece and dabbled in politics only occasionally: he was Minister of Finance for a few days in 1933 and, for three years, Minister of Hygiene and Social Welfare in the government of Ioannis Metaxas. When Metaxas died on 29 January 1941, King George II entrusted him with the government. Within a few weeks Koryzis agreed to what his predecessor had refused: to accept a British expeditionary force. On 6 April 1941 he rejected the German demand that the British be removed from Greece, and twelve days later, as the front was collapsing and the Germans were approaching Athens, he took his own life. Greek tradition sometimes calls him “the prime minister of the second ‘No’”.

Family and youth

He was born in 1885 on the island of Poros in the Saronic Gulf, into a family with a long political tradition. His great-grandfather fought in the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, his grandfather Stamatios was a member of parliament for Troezen, and his father, Georgios Koryzis, was likewise an MP and mayor of Poros. His mother, Ekaterini, née Misirli, came from Pylos and was related to the nineteenth-century prime minister Alexandros Koumoundouros. She died when her son was seven.

From 1901 to 1905 Koryzis studied law at the University of Athens. As early as 1903, while still a student, he went to work at the National Bank of Greece (Ethniki Trapeza tis Ellados), the country’s largest commercial bank, which until 1928 also served as the bank of issue. He worked in the inspectorate and the organisation department and rose quickly. During the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 he served as a reserve artillery officer, first as a second lieutenant, then as a lieutenant. In 1914 he received the Silver Cross of the Order of the Redeemer.

Banker

From 1915 Koryzis helped to build up the National Bank’s agricultural credit department. When it was hived off in 1929 it became the Agricultural Bank of Greece, whose board, according to Greek sources, had him as its first chairman. After the wars he was a head of department, and in 1919 he became the bank’s inspector-general. In 1919–1920, when Greece administered western Anatolia after the Greek landing at Smyrna, he was economic adviser to the High Commissioner, Aristeidis Stergiadis, and founded a branch of the National Bank there. After the defeat in Asia Minor he dealt with the problems of the agricultural economy, on which hundreds of thousands of Greek families depended for their livelihood. From 1925 to 1928 he was the first president of the Autonomous Currant Organisation (ASO), which bought up dried currants, one of the country’s main exports, and sold them abroad. He wrote studies on agricultural credit and on the tobacco question.

On 12 May 1928 he became deputy governor of the National Bank of Greece. In that post he succeeded Emmanouil Tsouderos, who moved to the newly created Bank of Greece, the central bank, and who in April 1941 would succeed him as prime minister. At the government’s request Koryzis drafted the bill establishing the Supreme Economic Council, the first body to coordinate the state’s economic policy.

Metaxas’s minister

He first entered government in March 1933, in turbulent circumstances. On 6 March, after the Venizelists had lost the election, General Nikolaos Plastiras attempted to seize power. The coup collapsed the same day, and for a few days the country was run by a caretaker cabinet under General Alexandros Othonaios, in which Koryzis was Minister of Finance. On 10 March he returned to the bank.

He next joined the government in August 1936, the day after Metaxas established the 4th of August dictatorship. As Minister of Hygiene and Social Welfare, for almost three years he dealt with hospitals, social welfare and social legislation, which the regime paraded in its propaganda as proof of its concern for “the working people”. He was regarded as a competent minister who kept well away from political intrigue. On 12 July 1939 he resigned, and on 9 August 1939, after the death of Ioannis Drosopoulos, he became governor of the National Bank of Greece. He ran it during the war with Italy, when the bank financed the state’s war effort.

Prime Minister

Metaxas died on 29 January 1941. There was no parliament, the parties had been dissolved, and King George II did not want to hand power back to the old politicians. Koryzis’s candidacy was backed by the late dictator’s closest associates, the Minister of Security Konstantinos Maniadakis and the dictator’s secretary Ioannis Diakos. The king concluded that he alone could take over Metaxas’s authority. Koryzis became Prime Minister that same day and, like his predecessor, also took over the ministries of foreign affairs, education and religion, and the armed forces. The composition of the government remained almost unchanged, and in his address to the nation the new Prime Minister promised to continue the “national programme” and to fight on to victory. The 4th of August regime carried on, with its censorship and Maniadakis’s political police.

Opinions of the new Prime Minister were divided. American observers praised him as a hard-working, honest administrator who had friends among both Venizelists and monarchists and despised party intrigue. The British minister, Michael Palairet, considered him a weak man. In practice the most important decisions were increasingly taken by the king and by the Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos.

The most important of them was the change of attitude to British help. In mid-January Metaxas had turned down an offer from General Archibald Wavell, fearing that a few British regiments in Macedonia would give the Germans a pretext to attack without being able to stop them. At the beginning of February, faced with the German build-up in Romania, Koryzis’s government confirmed that Greece would defend itself against Germany too, and asked the British for help. On 22 February 1941 the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, John Dill, arrived in Athens. At a night-long conference at the Tatoi palace, attended by the king, Koryzis and Papagos, the Greeks agreed to accept a British expeditionary force. Ambiguities over the defensive line in Macedonia, however, were never cleared up and weighed on the whole subsequent campaign. From the beginning of March British, Australian and New Zealand troops began arriving in Greece.

April 1941

At dawn on 6 April 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Half an hour after German troops crossed the frontier, the German minister in Athens, Prince Victor zu Erbach-Schönberg, handed Koryzis a note in which Berlin justified the attack by the presence of British troops in Greece. The Prime Minister replied that Greece would defend itself. This reply entered Greek memory as the “second ‘No’”, after Metaxas’s refusal of 28 October 1940.

The war with Germany moved fast. The Metaxas Line held out for a few days, but German armoured divisions outflanked it through Yugoslavia and took Thessaloniki on 9 April. The Greek army in Albania began its retreat too late, and the British fell back from their line on the Haliacmon river. Panic was growing in Athens, and some generals began to speak of the need to end the fighting. On 18 April Koryzis attended a cabinet meeting and then talked with the king in private. What was said is not known. It is presumed that they argued over continuing the war and moving the government to Crete or Cyprus. Koryzis left the meeting broken and drove to his home on Queen Sophia Avenue. The worried king sent Diakos after him. As Diakos was talking at the door with the Prime Minister’s wife, shots rang out from upstairs. Koryzis had shot himself; according to one version, with two shots to the heart, according to another, which some historians consider more likely, with a single shot to the head. To avoid spreading panic, the press initially reported that he had died of a heart attack.

After his death the king himself presided over the government for a few days, and in the second half of April Emmanouil Tsouderos became Prime Minister; he soon left with the king for Crete and then for exile. On 20 April General Georgios Tsolakoglou capitulated to the Germans without the consent of the high command, and on 27 April the Wehrmacht entered Athens. German propaganda later claimed that both Metaxas and Koryzis had been murdered by the British. There is no evidence whatever for this.

Family

Koryzis was married to Elisavet, née Tsitsara. They had four children: three daughters – Ekaterini; Eleni, later lady-in-waiting to Queen Frederica; and Irini, wife of the shipowner Stratis Andreadis – and a son, Georgios. The children gave the family house on Poros to serve as an archaeological museum. The Prime Minister’s brother, the engineer Stylianos Koryzis, was taken hostage by the communist ELAS partisans in December 1944 and murdered.

Significance

Koryzis was Prime Minister for less than three months and in that time had no independent political standing. He governed on behalf of a regime that was not of his making, in the shadow of the king and Papagos. Yet his name is linked to two decisions that settled the fate of Greece in 1941: the agreement in February to accept British troops, and the rejection of the German note on 6 April. The first drew Britain into a campaign it could not win; the second confirmed that Greece, the first country to defeat Axis forces, would not yield to Germany without a fight either. His suicide, at the moment the army was falling apart, became a symbol of the tragedy of April 1941.