The Full Catastrophe

by James Angelos

  I met Glezos at his home in a tree-lined suburb of Athens on a Sunday morning in the spring of 2014. When I arrived, he rose off the couch in his pajamas from underneath a mound of newspapers, shuffled over to a desk cluttered with books, and cleared a space for me to sit down. He then signed a copy of one of his recent works, The Black Book of the Occupation, which contains a grim registry of the massacres, executions, and hangings that took place in Greece during the World War II occupation, beginning in June 1941 with the leveling of the Cretan village of Kandanos, and ending with the hanging of a man and woman in April 1945 on the island of Kos. After signing the book, Glezos outlined for me the argument he said he made to the German president at the Grande Bretagne, breaking down into categories Germany’s debts to Greece (he refrained from using the term “war reparations,” which he deemed misrepresentative of Greek claims for damages inflicted during the occupation). The categories were stolen archaeological treasures, damage to the economy, a forced loan, and further subcategories stemming from these. He spoke with the rote, drummed-up passion of someone who had given a presentation on the matter hundreds of times. At one point, he stood up to retrieve a folder containing a reichsmark bill, the currency used by German soldiers in occupied Greece and elsewhere. The bill, a fifty, featured images of a Prussian castle and a somber woman in a white headscarf. Glezos pointed to Gothic script on the bill that said Reichskreditkassen, or “Reich credit office,” and added: “Do you see a signature?” There was none. He waited for me to answer no before proceeding. “It’s fake,” said Glezos, tapping his finger on it, “counterfeit.” Barbers, said Glezos, preferred to give German soldiers free shaves rather than accepting the bills—which were pegged to the local currency. Honoring the bills would have in effect amplified the loss, said Glezos, because change would be given in Greek currency, drachmas, which, at least during the beginning of the occupation, still had some worth. This was another way the Germans stole from the Greek people, Glezos said. I looked at the bill through Glezos’s magnifying glass and asked him where he’d found it. He sat in silence for a moment without looking at me, seemingly irritated with the question. “Say I stole it from the Germans,” he said. Glezos’s younger wife, Georgia, who was sitting on the couch reading a newspaper, emitted the raspy laugh of a heavy smoker. “I was a fighter during the occupation,” Glezos went on, starting to raise his voice. “So I could look and find whatever. I had a lot more and lost them.” I then asked how he’d lost them. This seemed to him like another stupid question, and he raised his voice further. I was angering Greece’s hero of the resistance. “I was caught three times during the occupation! What could I have done? My mother was afraid and burned them.”

  Georgia intervened. “Quiet down please, Manoli!”

  Glezos at the time had announced his candidacy for the European Parliament, and the fact that he was doing so at ninety-one added to his admirers’ devotion. His “special reason” for running, said Glezos, was to bring to Europe the “escalating struggle for the claiming of Germany’s debts to Greece.” While the struggle was escalating, Glezos wanted me to understand he had been raising the issue for a long time. In fact, Glezos said, he had brought it up to East German leader Walter Ulbricht during a visit to the German Democratic Republic in 1965. Glezos at the time was a national parliamentarian for the United Democratic Left—which was formed as a proxy for the banned communist party. “Don’t think that because I’m a communist and you’re a communist, that you won’t pay for everything you did in Greece, what the Third Reich did,” Glezos said he told Ulbricht. “You owe us.” Like Gauck, Ulbricht remained silent, according to Glezos’s recollection.

  This point about visiting Ulbricht reminded me of the intrinsic differences between Glezos, his party, and Germany’s current leaders. Both Merkel and Gauck grew up in East Germany, and both, to varying degrees, have defined their political careers in opposition to it. That is particularly true of Gauck, who rose to prominence as a dissident of the East German regime. Glezos, though no advocate of authoritarianism and a professed believer in direct democracy, had been on the opposite side of that ideological fight. Syriza, while encompassing a broad cross section of leftist ideologies, from Trotskyism to ecosocialism, largely traces its roots to a rupture among Greek communists following the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party of Greece remained unyieldingly loyal to the Soviet Union, and today it pretty much remains that way as it continues to persist with a stable allotment of Greek parliamentary seats. A milder spin-off faction with a European communist orientation evolved into a big part of what is today’s Syriza. While Syriza is not awaiting the resurrection of the Soviet Union like its orthodox relative, traces of the Cold War ideological split nevertheless remain. For instance, following the Maidan uprising in Kiev, Syriza leaders expressed concern that Europe and the United States were destabilizing Ukraine for their imperialist purposes. After Russia annexed Crimea and began fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine, Alexis Tsipras visited Moscow and decried Western sanctions against Russia while warning of neo-Nazi elements in Kiev. In an atmosphere of renewed tension reminiscent of the Cold War, Syriza was taking the side of an old comrade.

  Syriza saw itself as pitted in an epic ideological struggle against the German government’s neoliberal rule of and for the bankers and big capitalists. In that fight, Greece would provide the spark that would ignite a revolution of socialism and solidarity not just in Greece, but across Europe. (“Greece is showing the way” was a Syriza slogan at the time.) Capitalism, the party’s supporters argued, was in its death throes, and Greece was leading the march toward a brighter future. In Glezos’s eyes, Greece was once again leading the resistance. “What’s happening in Greece right now isn’t by chance,” he told me in his living room. In World War II, he reminded me, the Greeks handed the Axis a major early defeat by repelling Mussolini’s forces, which had invaded Greece from the north. “We destroyed the myth of invincibility of the Axis,” he said. “And now, we’re again going to make an example. We’re asking for another Europe.”

  This message proved attractive to a lot of humiliated Greeks, who for years had been scorned as the central cause of Europe’s problems. Syriza assured Greeks that the crisis was not the fault of the people, but of unchecked capitalism, and the message proved attractive. By the time I met Glezos, the party, which had come very close to taking power in Greece in 2012, was consistently leading in Greek polls, making Greece the only European Union country in which a far-left party was dominant. The debt crisis, it appeared, was providing the Greek left with an opportunity to take power, a goal it had been seeking since the Axis occupation, when Greek communists by far comprised the strongest resistance force. Glezos at one point told me he objected to a Syriza slogan urging voters to usher in a leftist government “for the first time.” It would not be the first time, he told me. During the occupation, communist resistance fighters wrested much of the Greek mainland from Axis control—“Free Greece,” as the fighters called it. “We had it once before,” Glezos told me. “Unfortunately, we gave it up.” Now, he believed, they were on the verge of taking it again.

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  To understand the intensity of Greeks’ feelings about reparations and lingering resentments over World War II, once must know something about what happened to Greece during the occupation and its long, bloody aftermath. Greece suffered a particularly brutal occupation. Only Slavic countries had it worse, according to the historian Hagen Fleischer, a German-Greek academic who has written extensively on the occupation.

  The war began for Greece in late 1940, when its army defeated Mussolini, giving the Allies the important, morale-boosting victory Glezos brought up during our conversation. The Italians’ defeat compelled the Germans to arrive six months later to do the job of taking Greece themselves. Within two months of the Germans’ arrival, Greece was fully under a tripartite occupation of German, Bulgarian, and Italian forces. In contrast to the Third Reich’s �
�rational exploitation” of Western European nations under occupation, in Greece the Germans quickly instituted policies of “plundering and indifference,” as the historian John Louis Hondros put it. German authorities purchased Greek businesses, factories, and the merchant marine for fractions of their worth. Ores such as bauxite, chrome, and nickel, used to manufacture munitions, were mined and sent to Germany. Motor transport was commandeered. Food stocks were shipped to Germany. In the first year and a half of the occupation, the Reich “absorbed nearly every useful economic item and gave little or nothing in return,” Hondros has written.

  The consequences of this treatment, combined with a British sea blockade, quickly became evident. By the summer of 1941, just a few months after the occupation began, the first signs of starvation appeared, the beginning of what is known as the Great Famine. Almost all surviving Greeks can tell stories about the hunger they experienced or witnessed during this time, including my father, who grew up in a village near Corinth occupied by German soldiers. He could not describe the feeling of hunger itself, but rather told me stories about the euphoric feeling in his body after his mother gave him a piece of bread—grain was a rare commodity at the time—dipped in olive oil to eat. He was comparatively lucky. People on the islands and in Athens, far from arable land, had it much worse. Athens was home to “the worst scenes of starvation seen in occupied Europe outside the concentration camps,” the historian Mark Mazower has written. Though the number of dead is hard to quantify, and estimates vary, some 300,000 Greeks out of a population of around 7 million are said to have starved to death.

  Like other occupied nations, Greece was forced to pay “occupation costs,” though in Greece these were particularly astronomical, for a time surpassing the national income. Greece paid by printing money, leading to rapid inflation, to which the occupation costs were adjusted. Price levels in Greece at the beginning of 1946 were more than five trillion times those of May 1941, according to the historian Richard Clogg—a hyperinflation five thousand times worse than the Weimar inflation of the early 1920s, which is so often cited as the scarring experience at the root of Germans’ contemporary inflation aversion. In addition to the occupation costs, Greece’s puppet government was forced in 1942 to make a 476-million-reichsmark loan to Germany. (In today’s money, that equals a very high 54 billion euros, according to Glezos, though the more common estimate is 11 billion.) Near the end of the war, the Third Reich started paying the forced loan back, though repayment stopped with its defeat. “In all its history, until the occupation, Greece had borrowed,” Glezos told me in his living room. “And after the occupation, it borrowed again. And now, it’s borrowing still more. One time in its life, it was a creditor. When? In the worst period of its life. That was the forced loan.”

  The privations during the occupation and breakdown of the preexisting social order fueled support for resistance movements, in particular the communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM), and its military wing, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), which became the dominant partisan force in the Greek countryside, partly by taking out competing resistance groups. As partisan activity increased, the German supreme command mandated that fifty to a hundred Greek hostages be executed for every German soldier killed. Wehrmacht antiguerrilla operations constituted a terror campaign of executions, burned villages, and massacres that led to more than 20,000 civilian casualties. Some one million Greeks saw their homes and farms destroyed or looted. The vast majority of Greek Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Of the up to 80,000 Jews who lived in Greece before the war began, fewer than 10,000 survived. Many Greeks also died from disease. By one estimate, one-third of the population suffered from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and typhus. Making matters still worse, as German and Bulgarian forces withdrew from Greece near the war’s end, they systematically destroyed the country’s infrastructure—bridges, roads, railways, and tunnels were demolished, and the Corinth Canal was blocked.

  Greece’s misery was far from over after the Axis withdrawal. A new acrimony—the kindling that would lead to a second eruption of prolonged violence—had already taken hold. During the occupation, internecine conflict between resistance groups had intensified as the outlook turned to the postwar order. The British government, which had sought to organize resistance activity in Greece, became increasingly concerned with the communists’ growing dominance, as did the British-backed Greek government in exile, based during the war in Cairo. In an effort to diminish the communists’ sway, the British supported a smaller, noncommunist force, the National Republican Greek League (EDES), though its leader appeared to be more of an opportunist than an eager resistance fighter. Fighting eventually broke out between ELAS and EDES. Further internal fighting broke out after the Greek collaborationist government created anticommunist “security battalions” to hunt the leftist partisans. The social fissures generated during this time soon led to a civil war that left tens of thousands more people dead.

  For the occupation-era plunder and bloodletting that commenced this decade of misery, top German leaders never apologized, because they feared this would embolden those Greeks demanding reparations, according to the historian Hagen Fleischer. Greece’s hardship was also largely overlooked, lost in the greater panorama of unfathomable human suffering unleashed by the war. Gauck took it upon himself to rectify this when, during his 2014 visit, he traveled with the Greek president to the town of Ligkiades in the country’s northwest, the site of a 1943 massacre by Wehrmacht soldiers of scores of people, mostly women and young children. Gauck laid a wreath at a memorial for the victims and tearfully told the assembled crowd and television cameras that he was ashamed. “I am ashamed that people who once grew up in German culture were murderers,” he said. “And I am ashamed that democratic Germany, even as it processed the past step by step, knew and learned so little about German debt to the Greeks.” He wished, he added, that someone responsible for these atrocities had apologized long ago. “It’s the unsaid phrases and the lack of knowledge that constitute a second debt, as they even banish the victims from memory,” Gauck said. “And so I would like to express today what perpetrators and many political leaders of the postwar period could not or did not want to express: what happened was a brutal injustice. With shame and pain, in the name of Germany, I ask the families of the murdered for forgiveness. I bow before the victims of these monstrous crimes, those who lament here and in many other places.” The Greek president, standing beside Gauck, began to weep.

  It’s safe to assume that many contemporary Germans first found out that their Nazi-era forebearers invaded Greece after hearing about Greek demands for reparations in the news. The occupation of Greece is not a subject featured very prominently in high school curricula in Germany—nor, for that matter, in a lot of other places. Gauck’s visit and apology were moving steps toward a greater understanding in his home country of what happened in Greece. But, it seemed, the gesture did not mollify many Greeks. “Those are just words,” Panagiotis Bampouskas, the only remaining survivor of the Ligkiades massacre, told a reporter for a German news agency around the time of Gauck’s visit. Bampouskas, an infant at the time of the attack, survived a bayonet stabbing in the back; his mother and brother were murdered. His father died shortly afterward—from grief, according to Bampouskas, who did not attend the memorial ceremony. “I want justice, and that means reparations.”

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  One evening shortly after I met Glezos at his house, I saw him campaigning in the working-class neighborhood of Galatsi, a densely populated suburb of Athens, beside some tall, rocky hills that created a vertical pause in the concrete expanse of the city. Galatsi provided a sort of hometown crowd for Glezos. A lot of people from Naxos, the Cycladic island where Glezos was born, moved to Galatsi decades ago. That included a lot of people from his birthplace, a village of stone homes on the island’s eastern side called Apeiranthos—Aperathu, in the local dialect. Glezos is particularly beloved in the village, where people sing
songs about him with lyrics like: “You had a heart of steel and a breast of granite, and you climbed the Acropolis, gallant one from Aperathu.”

  When Glezos arrived on the small square in Galatsi where he was to speak, a crowd of people from the island assaulted him with kisses as an organizer of the event, a woman with a stern, almost martial voice, bellowed through a microphone: “So not a single citizen of Galatsi will go hungry. So not a single student will faint in school” (from hunger, she meant). “So not a single citizen will go without electricity.” A black-clad widow in her late eighties sat down in a folding chair next to Glezos and caressed his face. “We were best of friends,” she told me when I asked her how she knew him. The old woman’s daughter, a retired teacher named Katerina Bougiouka, who wore a large silver-heart necklace, then approached me. “He is my spirit, my soul,” she said of Glezos. Bougiouka had been a teenager living in Aperathu when she first saw the famous Glezos on one of his visits to the island. “There, I felt God,” she said. “I thought he was a mythical person. That he’s Proteus,” the sea god; “that he’s Diogenes,” the ancient philosopher; “that he’s Karaiskakis,” the Greek revolutionary war hero. “This person has never stopped fighting for one moment. He never stopped. He wasn’t afraid of disease. He wasn’t afraid of senescence. He wasn’t afraid of the Germans. He wasn’t afraid of the fascists. He wasn’t afraid of dictatorships. He wasn’t afraid of anything. When you see a person in his ninety-second year standing up in this manner, toiling and getting out front, whether you want to or not, you fight too. You toil. He becomes your hero.”

  By this point, I’d seen Glezos make a few speeches. He was an eloquent, poetic speaker, and could captivate an audience. He could also speak on a wide range of subjects. I’d heard him expatiate upon gold and mineral extraction (he had read a lot of geology books while in exile, a subject authorities deemed harmless enough for study), irrigation (he has worked on a method to channel rainwater into underground aquifers), and Marxist theories about the nature of money. I found Glezos’s energy and passion admirable, and I wanted to admire him—to believe, like so many others, in his heroic virtue. But this desire ran up against the reality that I often found Glezos to be wrong, if not actively misleading, and populist. Greece, he said one night on the campaign trail, had unimaginable mineral wealth, but it had gone unexploited because government officials “execute the orders of the foreigners, who don’t want us to create heavy industry in Greece.” The foreign powers preferred Greece to be a “resort of Europe,” unproductive and dependent. “They want us only to be waiters!” he said. “Do you want every Greek to be a waiter? Or do we want to stand up by our own strength?” This drew applause from his crowd; it was part of an oft-repeated Syriza assertion, expressed in various ways, that Greece was being victimized by foreign powers interested in subjugating it rather than seeing it thrive.