The Full Catastrophe

by James Angelos

  The Greek conservative-led government, however, maintained that it would pursue reparations in international courts. Around the time of Schäuble’s visit, the Greek finance ministry announced that, under orders of the prime minister, it had assembled a team to go through piles of documents scattered and decaying in various Greek ministry basements—the Greek government version of archives—and it compiled 761 volumes of documents that could presumably be used as evidence in a legal claim for reparations. A secret report on the findings had been sent to Greece’s quasi-judicial State Legal Council, which would determine the best course of action, the government said. Speaking in the Greek parliament, the foreign minister at the time, Dimitris Avramopoulos, recounted the suffering of the Greeks during the war, the “economic pauperization, hunger, assault, the theft and destruction of our cultural wealth, the arson and violence of the occupiers.” Greece would “claim what belongs to us,” he said. Times may have changed, “but memories do not fade.”

  This was likely for domestic show. The conservative-led government did not want to upset Germany—its most powerful creditor, on whom it was completely reliant and with which it had allied itself. Months earlier, Prime Minister Samaras had hosted a visit of German chancellor Angela Merkel in Athens. It was the first such visit from the German leader since the crisis began, and it marked an important turning point for Greece. Until then, some of Merkel’s political colleagues had pushed for Greece’s ejection from the euro. Merkel, by the time of her visit, had decided that this would be too risky for the rest of the eurozone. Greece had to be rescued, even if the Greeks didn’t deserve it. She therefore silenced Greece’s critics in her government and began to praise the Greek reform efforts, despite the fact that they were lackluster. The existing Greek government, after all, seemed to be her only conceivable partner. Syriza, the next strongest party in Greece, vowed to fight her and reject the bailout agreement, which it deemed responsible for the economic catastrophe. The ruling coalition, on the other hand, drew its support from the shrinking plurality of Greeks who calculated that the country was better off cooperating with Germany, because they feared the alternative could mean a still more catastrophic euro exit. These voters revered Merkel’s power—providing a political reason for Samaras to host the chancellor—but that didn’t mean they liked her. One would be hard pressed to find a Greek who did.

  During her visit to Athens, Merkel was greeted by some 40,000 protestors, among them a small, grinning old man who walked around in front of parliament with a poster that read: GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY YOU BITCH. The protestors were kept at a distance from the chancellor as a large swath of the city center was closed to traffic and pedestrians, except for those with security clearance. Inside the blocked-off area, thousands of police officers lined the streets, one stationed every ten yards. Snipers peered from the rooftops. Helicopters hovered overhead. As this went on, and as the sound of street battles between protestors and police echoed in the downtown Athens air, Greek television showed Merkel and Samaras going for a casual stroll and chatting outside the presidential mansion. One television commentator on a channel friendly to the government remarked at how amiable and relaxed Samaras seemed. It is safe to assume he was not asking her for World War II reparations.

  While Syriza, with Glezos as the vanguard, made the reparations demand a main part of its platform, the then Greek government felt the need to pay lip service to the issue. So did all major Greek parties, for that matter. Golden Dawn, too, demanded reparations, even though its ideological predecessors were the ones who had inflicted the damage. The parties did this because it was immensely popular with Greek voters. According to one 2012 poll, 91 percent of Greeks believed their country should use all necessary means to obtain reparations. More than three-quarters of those polled said Germany was working on building a “fourth Reich.”

  Opinions like this underscored the vast gap and, often, the antipathy that had developed between the Greek and German electorates as the debt crisis strained European cohesiveness. Germans largely viewed the Greeks as overspending, irresponsible, and corrupt, more deserving of punishment than of help. After all, the German word for debt—Schulden—closely resembles the word for guilt, Schuld. The expression “Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist die Deutsche Mark nicht wert,” or “He who does not value the pfennig is not worth the deutsche mark,” also summarizes German attitudes on fiscal responsibility rather well, and during the boom years, Greeks were certainly not valuing their euro-cents. Merkel tried to alleviate her electorate’s moral and fiscal unease with the penny-denigrating Greeks by emphasizing the painful reforms demanded of them. As Merkel repeatedly put it to her voters, the Greeks had to “do their homework” in exchange for German financial support.

  To many Greeks, however, doing their homework meant losing their jobs or seeing their incomes dwindle. If this was the price for Germany’s help, many preferred not to have it. Inevitably, allusions to that previous instance of German domination became frequent, and images of Angela Merkel with a Hitler mustache or swastika armband began to appear rather often on the covers of Greek magazines and newspapers. In Greece, I often heard resentment toward Germany couched in terms of war. I heard it on the playground with my son, in the supermarket, and in taxis. “This time, it’s an economic war,” or “This is worse than what they did to us during the war.” The latter statement was a particularly ludicrous assertion—one that dishonored those who endured the massacres and famine of the wartime occupation—but one I nevertheless heard often.

  As Greece’s troubles deepened, so did crass, cross-party expressions of anti-German sentiment. One morning in early 2012, the popular commentator Giorgos Tragas, a round, graying, right-wing populist, began his radio show with this greeting: “Citizens of the German protectorate, good day!” With suspenseful background music, he added: “We don’t have a government. We don’t have a democracy. The will of our people applies nowhere. We don’t have our own laws. We are slaves. Vassals. A colony.” His voice rose to a scream. “From Thrace to Laconia, the foreigners are trampling our country. The Germans are torching again! They are burning Greece again!” This was an ordinary morning for Tragas, who also appeared on Greek television giving an ironic Hitler salute. Tragas referred to the Greek parliament as “collaborators,” Angela Merkel as the “dog of Berlin,” and he was fond of splicing into clips of her speeches archival sounds of Nazi rallies and German crowds yelling “Sieg heil!” Nazi symbolism also became a fixture of Greek street protest. I once walked by the German embassy in an upscale part of central Athens and noticed two large banners hanging on the residential building across the street from it. One depicted Hitler’s face, a swastika, and a Greek flag covered with a splotch of blood. APRIL 27, 1941, THE GERMANS ENTERED ATHENS. WE RESISTED, it said. The second banner depicted a stern-looking Angela Merkel superimposed over a German flag and pointing her index finger. IN 2013, it said, THE GERMANS ARE IN ATHENS AND WE’RE SLEEPING. Certainly, German embassy workers did not particularly enjoy being greeted with a sizable image of Hitler’s face every morning when arriving for work. Greek authorities eventually had the banners removed.

  At times, the antagonism turned aggressive. During a conference of German and Greek mayors in Thessaloniki, protestors, some yelling “Nazis Out!,” attacked German consul Wolfgang Hoelscher-Obermaier, pelting him with water bottles and iced coffee. The assailants had been incensed by the comments of another German, Hans-Joachim Fuchtel, Merkel’s special envoy to Greece, who earlier had told reporters: “One needs three thousand Greeks for work which in German municipalities is performed by a thousand workers.” Greeks tend to be incredibly sensitive to frequent accusations—often coming from Germany—that they are lazy, and in fact view themselves as quite industrious. In a 2012 Pew survey of eight European nations, people in seven of them said Germany was the most “hardworking.” Only Greece differed with this assessment, saying that Greeks, in fact, were the most hardworking. (Actually, Greeks, according to an OECD report
, do work longer hours than all other Europeans, though this does not equate to high productivity.) Fuchtel’s statement—perceived as an insult to Greeks’ work ethos—was covered with great interest by the Greek media and stirred a lot of fury. Fuchtel later said he was referring to “unproductive structures” in Greek municipalities, and did not mean to imply anything about the Greek work ethic.

  Some attacks against German targets were far more serious. One early morning at the end of 2013, gunmen opened fire on the German ambassador’s residence in Athens with two Kalashnikovs, spraying some sixty bullets in front of his gated suburban home. A few of the bullets ended up in the room of the ambassador’s teenage daughter, the Greek media reported. An organization calling itself the Popular Fighters Group later claimed responsibility for the attack, delivering a long anticapitalist, anti-imperialist manifesto declaring war on the “German capitalist machine.” The group also claimed to have launched a rocket at the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz outside of Athens, though the rocket missed and instead landed in a nearby field. Leftist terrorist groups have long operated in Greece—since the fall of its military dictatorship in 1974—and have often targeted Americans. The most lethal of these has been the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, which over nearly three decades killed twenty-three people, including the CIA’s station chief in Athens and other American officials. In 2007, one terrorist group fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. embassy. Now German targets were becoming more of a focus. While these terrorist acts were by no means supported by the Greek public, they were undeniably another manifestation of the rising discord.

  Greece’s debt crisis was testing European unity, and the results weren’t looking particularly good. As European leaders spoke of the importance of solidarity and further European integration, resentments between Greeks and Germans, between the debtors and the creditors, were growing. The vast differences weren’t limited to sentiment; they were materially evident in the economic and fiscal conditions of the two nations. As Germany enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate since its reunification, Greece was experiencing the highest unemployment in Europe. As panicked investors bought German ten-year government bonds at interest rates so low that investors were essentially paying Germany to hold on to their money, interest rates on equivalent Greek bonds peaked at around 37 percent. This meant that, for Greeks, borrowing from the market was impossible, while for Germans it was profitable. Germany was able to both increase spending on some social programs and have extra money left over to attain a fiscal surplus, while Greece’s debt burden continued to rise despite the fact that it was deeply slashing its expenditures.

  In Germany, these differences were largely seen as evidence that Greece ought to try to imitate German policies in order to achieve the same result. In Greece, you could frequently hear an opposing idea: that these disparities proved the Germans were benefiting from the euro at others’ expense. Germany, in other words, was plundering Greece again, but this time without an army. It was in this environment that Glezos, “the fighter for democracy” or “the symbol of national resistance,” as his admirers called him, appeared to be trying to finish a fight that he had begun when he tore down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis. Contemporary Germans, Glezos often said, bear no guilt for the sins of their forefathers, and the demand for restitution was not driven by bitterness or vengefulness. Still, sometimes a clear tinge of acrimony seeped into his words, one that reflected the tension of the times. “They say we owe them,” Glezos said at one point during a visit to the Peloponnesian city of Nafplio. “They owe us. We don’t owe anything to anyone. In particular, we don’t owe anything to Germany, which owes us for the death of the Greek people.”

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  On a sunny morning in late April of 1941, the Germans entered Athens from the north in a single-file convoy of tanks, cars, and motorcycles. Shorty after their arrival in the city center, they raised a war flag over the Acropolis, the “Holy Rock,” as Greeks call it, the place where “human culture found its beginning,” as Hitler once put it. The German flag’s red and black over the city in lieu of the Greek blue and white confirmed that the “barbarians”—Greeks’ term for the invaders—had arrived.

  At the time, Manolis Glezos was about to enter college in Athens to study business and economics. He was slender, wore a narrow black mustache, and exhibited a tendency to defy authority. In school, he was a member of an antifascist student group that had written slogans on the blackboard against the authoritarian, far-right 4th of August Regime of General Ioannis Metaxas, which ruled in the years preceding the Axis invasion. Now, with Athens under Nazi occupation, Glezos’s subversive acts would grow more daring. The night the Germans arrived, Glezos recalled many years later, he went out in his working-class Athens neighborhood of Metaxourgeio with a friend to survey the scene. He noticed that wooden German-language traffic signs had been put up for the benefit of the occupying troops. Glezos thought the signs ought to be destroyed and, without informing his friend beforehand, knocked one down. The friend then decided it would be a good idea to leave, though Glezos stayed and continued to knock down signs. As he was doing this, he heard the footsteps of someone approaching in the street, and hid in a doorway. The passerby was an old man who had seen what Glezos was doing. “Bend down so I can kiss you,” the old man said, Glezos recalled. The man kissed him on the forehead. To Glezos, it felt like all of Greece would support resistance.

  Over the next couple of weeks, Glezos repeatedly met a friend and like-minded classmate, Apostolos Santas, to discuss what actions they could take against the occupiers. They thought about stealing a pistol from a German soldier, or setting a tank or a plane on fire. At one point, they threw Molotov cocktails at some parked German vehicles, but their incendiary-making skills proved deficient, and nothing happened. Finally, what seemed like a very good idea came to them. From their frequent rendezvous point near the Greek parliament building, they could clearly see the Holy Rock and the German war flag fluttering above it. The pair decided they would climb up one night and take the flag down.

  A few weeks later, on May 30, Crete was succumbing to German paratroopers after a bloody ten days of battle. The Germans were declaring the Third Reich’s enemies in Greece defeated. “So that’s how you are?” Glezos thought at the time, he told me more than seven decades later in his living room. “We’ll show you that today, the fight begins.” Late that night, under a crescent moon, Glezos and Santas climbed the steep north slope of the Acropolis, pausing in a cave, before reaching the surface near the Ionic-order temple, the Erechtheion, where Athena and Poseidon were worshipped. When they saw the ancient temples of the Acropolis in the faint moonlight, Santas later said, they became emotional with the thought that they were the “descendants of our great progenitors.”

  The pair found no guards, and crept along the citadel’s perimeter to the eastern precipice, where the flagpole stood. They yanked on the cables keeping the war flag in place, and after quite a bit of difficulty and some climbing up the pole, the banner finally fell on top of them. The two friends kissed, embraced, and did a quick dance before heading back down the way they came, with the flag. They threw most of the banner down a dry well, keeping one piece of it—a corner decorated with an Iron Cross—as a memento of the feat.

  The next day, a notice appeared in Athens newspapers announcing the offense: a waving German flag had been torn down and an investigation was taking place. The culprits would face the death penalty. Printing this was a mistake on the Germans’ part, Glezos said later. Otherwise, no one would have known about it. Instead, the act became famed across the nation and abroad, blemishing the sheen of German invulnerability. While Glezos was imprisoned a few times during the occupation, the Germans never found out who took the flag down until after they withdrew. Greece, after the war, fell into another one, a civil war between the communist partisans that had fought the Germans and the right-wing, anticommunist government backed by the United States. Even after that war ended in 194
9 with the communists’ defeat, the ideological conflict underlying it lasted for a quarter century, during which time communists were persecuted or exiled to distant Greek islands. Glezos, for his political activities, spent a total of sixteen years in prison or exile, and was twice condemned to death as part of the Greek government’s fight against what it called “red fascism.” He may well have been executed had not the Acropolis feat won him international acclaim and advocates like Jean-Paul Sartre, Picasso, and Charles de Gaulle, who once called him “Europe’s first partisan.” In 1963, while out of prison for at least a while, Glezos traveled to Moscow to receive the Lenin Peace Prize. The same year, New York Times journalist C. L. Sulzberger, in an article about the Greek communist threat, called Glezos “heroic but dangerous.”