The suicide of Alexandros Koryzis

On 18 April 1941, Orthodox Good Friday, the Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis left a cabinet meeting and a conversation with King George II, drove to his house in Athens and shot himself. At 5.35 p.m. the British Minister, Sir Michael Palairet, cabled London that the Prime Minister had “just committed suicide, having told the King that he had failed in the task entrusted to him”. It was the thirteenth day of the German invasion of Greece. The Greek army in Epirus and western Macedonia was disintegrating in retreat, its commanders were demanding an armistice, and the British corps of General Henry Maitland Wilson was falling back to a position at Thermopylae. The Prime Minister’s death left the state without a head of government for the three worst days of the campaign.

War chronologies also link this day with British plans for a “great evacuation of Greece”. Such plans were indeed being drawn up: the staff in Cairo had been studying the possibility of embarking the troops for several days, and on 17 April Rear Admiral Harold Baillie-Grohman was sent to Greece to prepare the naval side of the operation. The decision to evacuate, however, was not taken until 21 April, and the first ships took soldiers off on the night of 24–25 April.

A front falling apart

The crisis began at the front. The German armoured divisions had passed through southern Yugoslavia, entered Thessaloniki on 9 April and three days later, at Vevi, broken the left wing of the line along the Aliakmon river, opening the way into the rear of fourteen Greek divisions fighting the Italians in Albania. The Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, did not order them to withdraw until the morning of 12 April. The retreat soon turned into a disorderly flight. The Greek historian Ioannis Koliopoulos, who studied the army’s archives and the British legation’s dispatches, describes how mass desertions began from 15 April. The commander of the 5th (Cretan) Division reported tersely: “There is no 5th Division.” After five months of fighting in the mountains the soldiers were exhausted and convinced that the government and the high command had abandoned them to their fate.

The senior commanders believed that further resistance was pointless. Capitulating to the defeated Italians was out of the question for them, so they wanted an honourable armistice with the Germans. As early as 11 April the commander of the Army of Epirus, Lieutenant General Ioannis Pitsikas, passed on to Papagos the view of his corps commanders that a “solution” had to be found that would save the “victorious army”. The commander of the Army of Western Macedonia, Lieutenant General Georgios Tsolakoglou, thought the same. Papagos replied that capitulation was out of the question while the British were fighting in Greece. Yet on 16 April, without consulting the government, he himself suggested to Wilson at a meeting in Lamia that the British should consider leaving Greece and so spare it destruction. According to the memoirs of the front commanders’ emissary, Colonel Theodoros Grigoropoulos, the Commander-in-Chief told him that day that a way out would be found within a few days, once the government had left Athens and a new authority had empowered him to negotiate with the Germans.

Good Friday in Athens

In Athens the King, who since the death of Ioannis Metaxas in January had been in practice the main centre of power, faced, as Palairet reported, frightened ministers and resigned generals. On 16 April it was decided that the government would leave the capital. Palairet then urged George II to form a genuine national government including the old parties, which would have meant the end of the 4th of August Regime. The King refused. On 18 April the departure was postponed, because the British commander gave assurances that the capital was in no danger for at least a week.

In the morning Koryzis took a telephone call from Pitsikas, who begged for an immediate decision, and promised that by noon he would send the front the government’s consent to a truce. The consent never came. Pitsikas cabled: “The situation has reached its extremity. Units of the 17th Division are abandoning their positions. […] For God’s sake, save the army from the Italians.” In the afternoon the council of ministers met under the King’s chairmanship. The Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry, Nikolaos Papadimas, read out the dispatches from the front and declared that even if the British held Thermopylae for a few days, it would change nothing in view of what was happening in Epirus. Some ministers proposed that the King and the government should sail at once for Crete and thereby open the way for the commanders to seek a truce. Others wanted the government itself to take responsibility for a capitulation. The King rejected this second idea, since it would have meant a break with Britain and a stain on the country’s honour. No decision was taken. At the end Koryzis reportedly proposed forming a military government, and the King promised to consider it.

After the meeting there was one more conference, attended by the King, the Prime Minister, Papadimas and the Minister of Security, Konstantinos Maniadakis. It too settled nothing. Koryzis then spoke with the King in private. What was said is not known. The Prime Minister emerged from it broken and drove to his house on Queen Sophia Avenue. Alarmed, the King sent after him Ioannis Diakos, a member of the government and Metaxas’s former secretary. While Diakos was talking at the door with the Prime Minister’s wife, shots rang out upstairs. According to one version Koryzis shot himself twice in the heart; according to another, considered more likely by some Greek writers, once in the head. To avoid causing panic, the press at first reported that he had died of a heart attack.

It is not known exactly what drove him to this decision. Koryzis, a banker rather than a politician, had agreed in February to accept a British corps and on 6 April had rejected the German note. Now he had to choose between a fight the army was no longer waging and a capitulation that would mean betraying an ally. The words passed on by Palairet suggest that he saw this as his own personal failure.

That same night the three corps commanders of the Army of Epirus, backed by the Metropolitan of Ioannina, Spyridon, resolved to present the government with a twelve-hour ultimatum. If the government did not decide, they would themselves form a government in Ioannina, with the Metropolitan as prime minister, in order to conclude a truce.

Three days without a prime minister

After Koryzis’s death the King himself took over the duties of prime minister, and was now also foreign minister and head of the three service ministries. Palairet again urged him to form a government of national unity, to no avail. On the evening of 18 April George II told the Minister that Konstantinos Kotzias, Minister for the Capital in Metaxas’s governments, would become deputy prime minister, because at such a moment a “demagogue” was needed to raise the people’s spirits. Palairet objected, since Kotzias was regarded as pro-German and few were willing to work with a man so closely tied to the dictatorship. Palairet in turn suggested the former dictator General Theodoros Pangalos, but the King would not have him.

On 19 April the task of forming a government was given to a retired general, Alexandros Mazarakis-Ainian, a Venizelist, but he returned the mandate the next day. At noon on 20 April Admiral Alexandros Sakellariou was sworn in as deputy prime minister under the King’s chairmanship. The Foreign Office, meanwhile, was considering Emmanouil Tsouderos, a former governor of the Bank of Greece whom Metaxas had removed in 1939. Tsouderos was a Venizelist, a Cretan and a friend of Britain, and this mattered, because the government was to move to Crete, the island of Eleftherios Venizelos, which was hostile to the monarchy. He was sworn in on 21 April. He later wrote that he had been encouraged to accept the office by the spirit of Venizelos at a séance.

During those three days the commanders at the front took matters into their own hands. On 20 April Tsolakoglou, having pushed Pitsikas aside and without Papagos’s consent, signed the first protocol of capitulation of the Army of Epirus with Sepp Dietrich, commander of the SS “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler”.

The British prepare to evacuate

Papagos’s proposal did not take the British by surprise. When the Germans entered Belgrade on 13 April, Cairo judged the situation in the Balkans to be extremely dangerous and began to study how the corps might be embarked. General Archibald Wavell halted the dispatch of supplies to Greece and asked London for instructions. On 17 April Winston Churchill replied that if the Greek government endorsed Papagos’s suggestion, the evacuation should go ahead, and that Crete must be held in strength. The British could not, however, propose withdrawal themselves. The request had to come from the Greek government, and after Koryzis’s death there was none. On 18 April Wilson, summoned to the King, even advised, with Papagos’s agreement, that the King and the government should stay in Athens as long as possible to sustain the spirit of resistance.

On 19 April Wavell flew to Athens. With Wilson, Rear Admiral Baillie-Grohman and the air commander in Greece he concluded, with great reluctance, that they had to leave: the Luftwaffe’s superiority was overwhelming, and the army would also have had to feed the population. In the afternoon, in a conversation with the King and Palairet, Papagos repeated that the Greek army was no longer capable of resistance and that the British should leave as soon as possible. The King answered that only a new government could take that decision. It came on the morning of 21 April, when George II admitted in Tsouderos’s presence that no Greek unit would be able to cover the left flank of the Thermopylae position in time. Wavell then declared that it was his duty to embark as many troops as he could. The evacuation, named Operation Demon, was planned for 28 April, but after the news from Epirus it was brought forward by four days.

Place in the war

Koryzis’s suicide marked the political end of the regime that Metaxas had built in 1936. The King refused to dissolve it even in its last days, and its men, as Koliopoulos writes, paralysed by indecision and fear of responsibility, failed to rise to the moment of trial. On 23 April the King and Tsouderos’s government moved to Crete, and after its loss in the Battle of Crete to Cairo and London, as a government-in-exile recognised by the Allies. On 27 April the Germans entered Athens, and a few days later Tsolakoglou became head of a collaborationist government. By the end of April British and Greek ships had taken out of Greece some 50,000 of the roughly 62,000 British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers, but without their heavy equipment.

In Greek memory Koryzis remained the man who said “no” to the Germans on 6 April, and a victim of the April defeat. German propaganda later claimed that the British had murdered him, but there is no evidence whatever for this. The dispute over responsibility for the collapse of the Army of Epirus, between the supporters of Papagos, of the King and of Tsolakoglou, went on in Greek memoirs and historiography for decades.