Establishment of the occupation regime Although the German army was instrumental in the conquest of Greece, this was an accident born of Italy's ill-fated invasion and the subsequent presence of British troops on Greek soil. Greece had not figured in
Adolf Hitler's pre-war plans as a target for German annexation: the country was poor, not adjacent to Germany, and did not host any German minorities. The Greeks themselves were seen by Nazi racial theory as neither valuable enough to be Germanized and assimilated, nor as sub-humans to be exterminated. Indeed, Hitler opposed the diversion of efforts towards western and southern Europe, and focused on the conquest and assimilation of Eastern Europe as the future German "
Lebensraum". Coupled with admiration for the Greek resistance to the Italian invasion, the result was that Hitler favoured postponing a final territorial settlement of Italy's claims on Greece to after the war. In the meantime, a local puppet government headed by Lt. General
Georgios Tsolakoglou would be installed as the most efficient way to run the country. Eager to pull German troops out of the country in view of the imminent
invasion of the Soviet Union, and to shore up his relations with his most important Axis partner, Hitler agreed to leave most of the country to be occupied by the Italians. This was undertaken by the
Eleventh Army under
Carlo Geloso, with three army corps:
XXVI Army Corps in
Epirus and western Greece,
III Army Corps in
Thessaly, and
VIII Army Corps in the
Peloponnese. The northeastern parts of the country, eastern
Macedonia and most of
Western Thrace, were handed over to Bulgaria, and were de facto annexed into the Bulgarian state. However, a band of territory along the
Evros River, on Greece's border with Turkey, remained under control of the collaborationist Greek government to give the Turkish government a pretext for disregarding her obligations to assist Greece in case of a Bulgarian attack according to the 1934
Balkan Pact. Entry to this zone was forbidden to the Bulgarians, and the Germans maintained only a police and administrative staff there. The Germans also retained control of a patchwork of strategically important areas across the country. The region of
Central Macedonia around Greece's second largest city,
Thessaloniki, was kept under German control both as a strategic outlet into the Aegean as well as a trump card between the competing claims of both Bulgarians and Italians on it. Along with the eastern Aegean islands of
Lemnos,
Lesbos,
Agios Efstratios, and
Chios, became 'Salonica-Aegean Military Command' () under
Curt von Krenzki. Further south, the 'South Greece Military Command' () under
Hellmuth Felmy comprised isolated locations of
Athens and the
Attica region, such as the
Kalamaki Airfield, parts of the port of
Piraeus, and the offshore islands of
Salamis,
Aegina, and
Fleves; the island of
Milos as a mid-way stronghold to Crete; and most of Crete, except for the eastern
Lasithi Prefecture, which was handed over to the Italians. Crete, quickly named "
Fortress Crete", came to be regarded as a de facto separate command; upon the insistence of the
Kriegsmarine, it was regarded as a target for eventual annexation after the war. The islands of
Euboea and
Skyros, originally allotted to the German zone, were handed over to Italian control in October 1941; southern Attica was likewise transferred to the Italians in September 1942. From the outset, the so-called , ('preponderance') granted to Italy by Hitler proved an illusion. The Italian plenipotentiary in Greece, Count
Pellegrino Ghigi, shared control over the Greek puppet government with his German counterpart, Ambassador
Günther Altenburg, while the fragmented occupation regimes meant that different military commanders were responsible for different parts of the country. As the historian
Mark Mazower comments, "The stage was set for bureaucratic infighting of Byzantine complexity: Italians pitted against Germans, diplomats against generals, the Greeks trying to play one master off against the other". Relations between the Germans and Italians were not good and there were brawls between German and Italian soldiers; the Germans regarded the Italians as incompetent and frivolous, while the Italians considered the behaviour of their ostensible allies as barbarous. By contrast, the Italians had no such inhibitions, which created problems among
Wehrmacht and
SS officers. German officers often complained that the Italians were more interested in making love than in making war, and that the Italians lacked the "hardness" to wage a campaign against the Greek guerrillas because many Italian soldiers had Greek girlfriends. After the
Italian capitulation in September 1943, the Italian zone was taken over by the Germans, often by attacking the Italian garrisons. There was a failed attempt by the British to take advantage of the Italian surrender to reenter the Aegean Sea with the
Dodecanese Campaign.
German occupation zone . Operating from September 1943 until September 1944, it was the largest concentration camp and notorious for torture and executions. From 1942 onwards, the German occupation zone was ruled by the
duumvirate of the plenipotentiary for South-Eastern Europe,
Hermann Neubacher, and Field Marshal
Alexander Löhr. In September–October 1943,
Jürgen Stroop, the newly appointed Higher SS Police Leader, tried to challenge the Neubacher-Löhr duumvirate and was swiftly fired after less than a month on the job.
Walter Schimana replaced Stroop as the Higher SS Police Leader in Greece and established a better working relationship with the Neubacher-Löhr duumvirate.
Economic exploitation and the Great Famine about distribution of food to the Greek people in 1944 Residents of Greece suffered greatly during the occupation. With the country's economy having been reduced from six months of war, and economic exploitation by the occupying forces, raw materials and food were requisitioned, and the collaborationist government paid the costs of the occupation, which resulted in greater inflation. Because the outflows of raw materials and products from Greece towards Germany weren't offset by German payments, substantial imbalances accrued in the settlement accounts at the
National Bank of Greece. In October 1942 the trading company
DEGRIGES was founded; two months later, the Greek collaborationist government agreed to treat the balance as a loan without interest that was to be repaid once the war was over. By the end of the war, this
compulsory loan amounted to 476 million Reichsmarks (equivalent to billion euros). Hitler's policy toward the economy of occupied Greece was termed
Vergeltungsmassnahme, or, roughly, "retaliation measures", the "retaliation" being for Greece having chosen the wrong side. Germany was additionally motivated by a desire to "pluck out the best fruit" to plunder before the Italians could get it. Groups of economic advisers, businessmen, engineers and factory managers came from Germany with the task of seizing anything they deemed of economic value, with involvement from both Germany's Economic Ministry and its Foreign Office involved in the operation. These groups saw themselves as in competition with the Italians to plunder the country, and also with each other. The primary purpose of the German requisitions, however, was finding as much food as possible to sustain the German army. The occupying powers' requisitions, disruption in agricultural production, hoarding by farmers and breakdown of the country's distribution networks from both infrastructure damage and change in government structure led to a severe shortage of food in the major urban centres in the winter of 1941–42. Some of this shortage is attributable to the
Allied blockade of Europe since Greece depended on wheat imports to cover about a third of its annual needs. These factors created the conditions for the "Great Famine" (Μεγάλος Λιμός) where in the greater
Athens–
Piraeus area alone, some 40,000 people died of starvation, and by the end of the occupation "it was estimated that the total population of Greece [...] was 300,000 less than it should have been because of famine or malnutrition". Greece received some foreign aid to make up some of the shortfall, coming at first from neutral countries like
Sweden and
Turkey (see
SS Kurtuluş), but most of the food ended up in the hands of government officials and black market traders, who used their connection to the authorities to "buy" the aid from them and then sell it on at inflated prices. The perception of suffering and pressure from the Kingdom of Greece's government in exile eventually led to the British partially lifting the blockade, and from the summer of 1942 Canadian wheat began to be distributed by the
International Red Cross. Of the country's 7.3 million inhabitants in 1941, it is estimated that 2.5 million received this aid, of whom half lived in Athens, meaning that almost all people in the capital city received this aid. Although the food aid reduced the risk of starvation in the cities, little of it reached the countryside, which experienced its own period of famine in 1943–44. The rise of the armed Resistance resulted in major anti-partisan campaigns across the countryside by the Axis, which led to wholesale burning of villages, destruction of fields, and mass executions in retaliation for guerrilla attacks. As P. Voglis writes, the German sweeps "[turned] producing areas into burned fields and pillaged villages, and the wealthy provincial towns into refugee settlements".
Italian occupation zone Annexationist and separatist projects After the German invasion, the Italian government put forward vague demands for annexations in northwestern Greece, as well as the
Ionian Islands, but these were turned down by the Germans, as they would have been a hindrance to concluding an armistice and establishing a collaborationist government: any such concession would have terminated the puppet government's legitimacy. Likewise, Italian suggestions for an outright military occupation without a Greek administration were rejected. Hitler and the German Foreign Minister,
Joachim von Ribbentrop, even cautioned the Italians of the dangers of annexing territories inhabited by large Greek populations, which might become hotbeds of resistance. Nevertheless, in the Ionian Islands the Greek civil authorities were replaced by Italians, presumptively in preparation for annexation after the war. Claiming the inheritance of the
Republic of Venice, which had
ruled the islands for centuries, the senior Fascist Party official
Pietro Parini took steps to uncouple the islands from the rest of Greece: his decrees had the force of law, a new currency, the "
Ionian Drachma", was introduced in early 1942, and a policy of Italianization initiated in public education and the press. Similar steps were undertaken in the eastern Aegean island of
Samos. However, due to German insistence, no official annexation took place during the occupation. Italian policy promised that the region of
Chameria (
Thesprotia) in northwestern Greece would be
awarded to Albania after the end of the war. Similarly to the Ionian Islands, a local administration (
Këshilla) was installed, and armed groups were formed by the local
Cham Albanian community. For at least the beginning of the occupation, Muslim communities chose different political alignments according to the circumstances, alternating between collaboration, neutrality and, less frequently, resistance. Albanian and Greek communities allied with the strongest available patron and shifted their allegiances when a better one appeared. Many events were part of a cycle of revenge between local communities over land ownership, state policies, sectarian hostilities and personal vendettas. This cycle of revenge became nationalized during the war with different communities choosing different sides. Although the majority of Cham Albanian elites
collaborated with the Axis, some Chams joined a mixed EAM battalion at the end of the war, but never ended up making a significant contribution to the resistance against Germany. (For local developments in 1944–1945: see
Expulsion of Cham Albanians). After the war, a Special Court on Collaborators in
Ioannina condemned 2,109
Cham collaborators to death
in absentia. However, by the time of conviction, they had already relocated abroad. Some of the
Vlach (
Aromanian) population in the
Pindus mountains and Western Macedonia also collaborated with the Axis powers. Italian occupation forces were welcomed in some Aromanian villages as liberators, and Aromanians offered their services as guides or interpreters in exchange for favors. Under
Alcibiades Diamandi, the pro-Italian
Principality of the Pindus was declared, and 2000 locals joined his
Roman Legion, while another band of Aromanian followers under
Nicolaos Matussis carried out raids in service of Italy. While most local Aromanians remained loyal to the Greek nation, some collaborated with the Axis powers because of latent pro-Romanian feelings or anger toward the Greek government and its military. Diamandi's Legion collapsed in 1942 when Italian positions were taken over by Germany, and most of its leaders fled to Romania or Greek cities. Most active members were convicted as war criminals in absentia, but many convictions were forgotten over the course of the
Greek Civil War, in which many convicted Legion members actively fought for the government.
Oppression and reprisals Compared to the other two occupation zones, the Italian regime was relatively safe for its Greek residents, with a relatively low number of executions and atrocities compared to the German and Bulgarian zones. Unlike the Germans, the Italian military mostly protected Jews in their zone, and rejected the introduction of measures such as those established in the German occupation zone in Thessaloniki. The Germans were purportedly perturbed as the Italians not only protected Jews on their territory, but in parts of occupied France, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere. On 13 December 1942,
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, wrote in his diary, "The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of the Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in
Tunis and in occupied France and will not permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals but is very superficial regarding problems of vital importance." Mass reprisals did sometimes occur, such as the
Domenikon massacre in which 150 Greek civilians were killed. As they controlled most of the countryside, Italy was the first to face the rising resistance movement in 1942–43. By mid-1943, the resistance had managed to expel a few Italian garrisons from some mountainous areas, including several towns, creating liberated zones ("Free Greece"). After the
Italian armistice in September 1943, the Italian zone was taken over by the Germans. As a result, German anti-partisan and anti-Semitic policies were extended to it.
Bulgarian occupation zone The
Bulgarian Army entered Greece on 20 April 1941 on the heels of the
Wehrmacht without having fired a shot. The Bulgarian occupation zone included the northeastern corner of the Greek mainland and the islands of
Thasos and
Samothrace, which corresponds to the present-day region of
East Macedonia and Thrace, except for the
Evros prefecture at the Greek-Turkish border, which was retained by the Germans over Bulgarian protests because of its strategic value. Unlike Germany and Italy, Bulgaria officially annexed the occupied territories on 14 May 1941, which had long been a target of Bulgarian foreign policy. East Macedonia and Thrace had been part of the
Ottoman Empire until 1913, when it became part of Bulgaria following the
First Balkan War until being annexed by Greece in two stages. Later in 1913, Greece annexed parts of Western Thrace after the
Second Balkan War, and then in 1920 at the
San Remo conference, Greece formally received the remainder of present-day
Western Thrace province after its victory in
WWI. aiming to forcibly
Bulgarize, expel or kill ethnic Greeks. This Bulgarisation campaign deported all Greek mayors, landowners, industrialists, school teachers, judges, lawyers, priests and
Hellenic Gendarmerie officers. The Bulgarian government tried to alter the ethnic composition of the region by aggressively expropriating land and houses from Greek people in favor of settlers from Bulgaria, and enacted
forced labor and economic restrictions on Greek businesses, in an effort to influence them to migrate to the German- and Italian-occupied parts of Greece. However, the ethnic composition of the region meant that the most of its inhabitants actively resisted the occupying forces. East Macedonia and Thrace had an ethnically mixed population until the early 20th century, including Greeks, Turks, Slavic-speaking Christians (some of whom self-identified as Greeks, others as Bulgarians), Jews, and
Pomaks (a Muslim Slavic group). However, during the
interwar years, the ethnic composition of the region's population had dramatically shifted, as Greek refugees from Turkey and Bulgaria settled in Macedonia and Thrace following the
population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This left only a minority of local Slavic language speakers as the target of the Bulgarian government's recruitment and collaboration efforts. Because of these occupation policies, there was armed resistance in the Bulgarian zone was that enjoyed widespread support from the civilians in the region; Greek guerrillas engaged the Bulgarian military in many battles, even entering pre-war Bulgarian territory, raided villages and captured booty.
Bulgarian activities in German-occupied Macedonia against the Bulgarian expansion The Bulgarian government also attempted to extend its influence to central and west Macedonia. The German High Command approved the foundation of a Bulgarian military club in
Thessaloniki, and Bulgarian officers organized supplying of food and provisions for the Slavic-speaking population in these regions, aiming to recruit collaborators and gather intelligence on what was happening in the German- and Italian-occupied zones. In 1942, the Bulgarian club asked assistance from the High Command in organizing armed units among those populations, but the Germans were initially very suspicious. Taking advantages of Italian incompetence and the German need for releasing troops on other fronts, since 1943 Sofia had been seeking to extend its control over the rest of Macedonia. After the Italian collapse in 1943, the Germans allowed the Bulgarians to intervene in Greek Central Macedonia, over the area between the Strymon and Axios rivers. The situation also forced the Germans to take control of Western Macedonia with the occasional interventions of Bulgarian troops. At that time the Greek guerrilla forces, especially the left-wing
Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) were gaining more and more strength in the area. As a result, armed collaborationist militias composed of
pro-Bulgarian Slavic-speakers, known as
Ohrana, were formed in 1943 in the districts of
Pella,
Florina and
Kastoria. The ELAS units joined EAM in 1944 before the end of the occupation.
Bulgarian withdrawal The Soviet Union declared war on the Kingdom of Bulgaria in early September 1944. Bulgaria withdrew from the central parts of Greek Macedonia after the pro-Soviet coup in the country
on 9 September 1944. At that time it declared war on Germany, but the Bulgarian army remained in
Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, where there were several limited attacks from withdrawing German troops in the middle of September. Bulgaria hoped to keep these territories after the war. The Soviet Union initially also believed it was possible to include at least Western Thrace in the post-war borders of Bulgaria and thereby to secure a strategic outlet to the Aegean Sea. But the United Kingdom, whose troops advanced towards Greece at the same time, stated that the withdrawal of Bulgarian troops from all occupied territories was a precondition for a ceasefire agreement with Bulgaria. As result on 10 October, the Bulgarian army and administration began evacuating and after two weeks withdrew from the area. Meanwhile, around 90,000 Bulgarians left the area, nearly half of them settlers and the rest locals. The administrative power was handed over by the already ruling
Bulgarian communist partisans to local subdivisions of ELAS. In 1945 the former Bulgarian authorities, including those in Greece, were put on trial before "
People's Courts" in post-war Bulgaria for their actions during the war. In general thousands of people were sentenced to prison, while ca. 2,000 received death sentences.
Regional level policies Many
Slavophones of Macedonia, in particular of Kastoria and Florina provinces, collaborated with Axis forces and came out openly for Bulgaria. These Slavophones considered themselves Bulgarian. In the first two years of occupation, a group of this community believed that the Axis would win the war, spelling the demise of Greek rule in the region and its annexation by Bulgaria. The first non-communist resistance organization that emerged in the area had as main opponents members of the Aromanian- and Slav-speaking minorities, as well as the communists, rather than the Germans themselves. Because of the strong presence of German troops and the general distrust of Slavophones by the Greeks, the communist organisations EAM and ELAS had difficulties in Florina and Kastoria. == Nazi atrocities ==