One of the great successes of ΕΑΜ was the mobilization against the plans of the Germans and the collaborationist government to send Greeks into
forced labour in Germany. Public knowledge of the plans created "a kind of pre-insurrectional atmosphere", which in February 1943 led to a mounting series of strikes in Athens, culminating in an ΕΑΜ-organized demonstration on 5 March, which forced the collaborationist government to back down. In the event, only 16,000 Greeks went to Germany, representing 0.3% of the foreign labour force total. ELAS fought against German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation forces as well as, by late 1943, anticommunist rival organizations, the
National Republican Greek League (EDES) and the
National and Social Liberation (EKKA). It succeeded in destroying the latter entirely in April 1944. ΕΑΜ-ELAS activity resulted in the complete liberation of a large area of the mountainous Greek mainland from
Axis control, where in March 1944, ΕΑΜ established a separate government, the "
Political Committee of National Liberation" (PEEA). ΕΑΜ even carried out elections to the PEEA's parliament, the "
National Council", in April; for the first time in Greek electoral history, women were allowed to vote. In the elections, it is estimated that 1,000,000 people voted. In the territories that it controlled, ΕΑΜ implemented its own political concept, known as
laokratia (λαοκρατία, "people's rule"), based upon "self-administration, involvement of new categories (mainly women and youths) and popular courts". At the same time, the mechanisms of the "revolutionary order" created by ΕΑΜ were often employed to eliminate political opponents. Within "Free Greece" as the area under EAM control was known, EAM's rule was broadly popular as the elected councils that EAM set up to rule the villages were made up of local people and were responsible to local people. Before the occupation, Greece was ruled in a very centralised way with prefects appointed by the government in Athens ruling the villages and decisions about even matters of purely local concern being made in Athens. A recurring complaint before the war was the decision-making process in Athens was slow and indifferent to local opinion while EAM's system of "people's councils" was considered an improvement. Likewise, the legal system before the war was widely considered to be cumbersome and unfair in the sense that poor and illiterate farmers could not afford a lawyer nor understand the law, causing them to be victimized by those who did. Even for those who could afford lawyers, trials were held only in the district capitals, requiring those concerned to make time-consuming trips to testify. EAM's system of "people's courts" which met in the villages every weekend to hear cases was very popular as the "people's courts" did not require lawyers and the rules of the "people's courts" were very easy to understand. The "people's courts" usually made their decisions quite quickly and tended to respect the informal rules of the village instead of being concerned with the legalities. The "people's courts" were very draconian in their punishments with people who stole or killed livestock being executed for instance, but the simplicity and speed of the "people's courts" together with the convenience of trials being held locally were all felt to compensate. In both the "people's courts" and "people's councils", EAM did not use
Katharevousa, the formal Greek that was the language of the elites, instead using
demotic, the informal Greek of the masses. In Free Greece, there was much differences of opinion about the sort of society that EAM should establish. The Greek Communist Party following Moscow's orders to establish a "Popular Front" against fascism allowed other parties a say in ruling "Free Greece", which considerably diluted its Marxist programme. Furthermore, the majority of the Greek Communists were intellectuals from urban areas who before the war had paid little thought to the problems of rural Greece, and thus most Communists found that the Party's theories were not relevant in the predominately rural "Free Greece". Several of the ELAS
kapetans such as
Aris Velouchiotis and
Markos Vafeiadis were frustrated with the way that the Party's leadership remained focused on the urban working class as the "vanguard of the revolution", charging that Party needed to broaden its appeal in rural areas. It was pressure from Velouchiotis who has emerged as the most successful of the
andarte leaders which forced the Party to start making an appeal to rural people in 1942. The British historian
Mark Mazower wrote that EAM "was far from being a Communist monolith", and there was much lively debate within EAM about how a "People's Democracy" was to function. The
kapetans who commanded the
andarte bands were often independent-minded men who did not always follow the Party line. The EAM established "People's Committees" to govern villages in "Free Greece" who were supposed to be elected by all people over the age of 17, through in practice EAM sometimes set up "People's Committees" without elections. Much of the work of the "People's Committees" was to mitigate the devastating effects of the Great Famine of 1941-42 and to carry out social reforms intended to ensure that everyone would receive food. There was constant tension between the demands of the national EAM leadership vs. the local "People's Committees" who often resisted orders to supply food to other villages in "Free Greece". As part of its "Popular Front" message, EAM appealed to Greek nationalism, saying all Greeks should unite under its banner to fight against the occupation. As EAM was the resistance group most committed to fighting the occupation, many Greek Army officers joined EAM. By 1944, about 800 Army officers together with about 1,000 officers from the prewar reserves were commanding ELAS
andarte bands. About 50% of the men who served as ELAS
andartes were veterans of the Albanian campaign of 1940–41, the "epic of 1940" when Greece defied the world's expectations by defeating Italy, and gave as one of their reasons for joining EAM a desire to uphold Greek national honor by continuing the fight. A notable aspect of EAM was the emphasis upon sexual equality, which attracted much support from Greek women. Before the war, Greek women were expected to be highly subservient to men, being treated as almost slaves by their fathers, and after their marriages, by their husbands. In rural areas, three quarters of Greek women were illiterate in the 1930s, and were generally not allowed to go outside alone. One agent from the American
Office of Strategic Services serving in rural Greece during the war reported that women were "regarded as little better than animals and treated about the same". Since women did not have the right to vote or hold office in Greece, the clientist system had led Greek politicians to almost totally ignore the concerns and interests of Greek women, and EAM as the first organization that took female concerns seriously won significant female support. To justify involving women in public life, EAM argued that in a time of national emergency it was necessary for all Greeks to serve in the resistance. American historian Janet Hart noted that nearly all of the female EAM veterans whom she interviewed in 1990 said their main reason for joining EAM was "intense love of country", noting that in Greece the concept of patriotism is closely linked to the more individualistic concept of
timi (self-worth and honor). In terms of gender relations, EAM effected a revolution in the areas under its control, and many Greek women recalled serving in EAM as an empowering experience. EAM differed from the other resistance groups by involving women in its activities and sometimes granting them positions of authority such as appointing women as judges and deputies. A popular story was that Velouchiotis had an
andarte who was against women serving in EAM taken out and shot; regardless if this story was true or not, it was widely believed, and the slogan for EAM members was "respect women or die!" A typical EAM pamphlet "The Modern Girl and Her Demands" criticized the traditional patriarchal nature of Greek society and stated: "In today's struggle for liberty, the mass participation of the modern girl is especially impressive. In city demonstrations, we see her as a pioneer, a fighter, courageous and defying death: first in the line of battle the country girl defends her bread, her crops; but we see her even as an
andartissa, wearing the crossed belt of the
andartes, and fighting like a tigress". In the EAM propaganda play
O Prodotis (
The Traitor) by Yorgos Kotzioulos, the story line concerns an old man living in a village named Barba Zikos who argues with his son Stavos about EAM's reforms; the elder Zikos contends that equality for women will destroy the traditional Greek family while his son maintains that sexual equality will make the Greek family stronger. One female EAM member later recalled in an interview as an old women in the 1990s: "we women were, socially, in a better position, at a higher level than now...Our organization and our own government...gave so many rights to women that only much later, decades later we were given." Another woman EAM member recalled:"I couldn’t go anywhere without my parents knowing where I was going, with whom I was going with, when I would be back. I never went anywhere alone. That is, until the occupation came and I joined the resistance. In the meantime, because we were right in the midst of the enemy, we had an underground press, there at the house...It was very dangerous [but my parents] had to support us...The minute you confront the same danger as a boy, the minute
you also wrote slogans on the walls, the moment
you also distributed leaflets, the moment
you also attended protest demonstrations along with the boys and some of you were
also killed by the tanks, they could no longer say to you, ‘You, you’re a woman, so sit inside while I go to the cinema.’ You gained your equality when you showed what you could endure in terms of the difficulties, the dangers, the sacrifices, and all as bravely and with the same degree of cunning as a man. Those old ideas fell aside. That is, the resistance always tried to put the woman next to the man, instead of behind him. She fought a double liberation struggle." EAM allowed women to vote in the elections it organized and for the first time in Greek history declared that men and women would receive equal pay. EAM tried to establish a universal education system in rural areas, using the slogan "A school in every village", and made education for girls compulsory. Women were enlisted in EAM were engaged in social work such as running the food kitchens in towns and villages in "Free Greece" while also working as nurses and washerwomen. At least a quarter of the
andartes (guerrillas) serving in the ELAS were women. The
Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent
C.M Woodhouse complained in a radio message to SOE headquarters in Cairo that "many weapons are wasted in the hands of women", charging that it was absurd on the part of ELAS to have women fighting as
andartes. To address traditional concerns about "family honor", EAM had a strict rule forbidding sexual relationships outside of marriage between male and female members. One female EAM member in a 1990 interview recalled: "We girls and boys weren't really allowed to have romances" Despite the emphasis upon the equality of sexes, in its propaganda recruiting for the
andartes, EAM emphasized traditional masculine values such as
leventia and
pallikaria, untranslatable Greek words for which there are no precise English equivalents, but which roughly mean "bravery" and "courage". Women who joined EAM when captured by the
Security Battalions were always raped to punish them for having in the opinion of the Battalions betrayed their sex by abandoning the traditional subservient role expected of them. It was also common for the Security Battalions to rape women who merely had relatives serving as
andartes. Another play by Kotzioulos,
Ta Pathi to Evraion (
The Suffering of the Jews) was one of the first to engage the subject of the Holocaust. The plot concerned two Greek Jews who have both fled to "Free Greece" to escape being deported to the death camps named Haim, the son of a wealthy businessman and Moses, a former employee of Haim's father who has joined EAM. Haim who has become a Zionist plans to move to Palestine after the war and is uncomfortable with living with Christians, but Moses urges him to stay in Greece, arguing that in the "New Greece" that EAM is creating that there will be no more ethnic, racial or religious bigotry. The play ends with Moses persuading Haim to give up his "prewar mentality" and both men become
andartes. The play's message was that all Greeks, regardless of their religion will a place in the "New Greece", where Moses insists "Here everything is shared. We live like brothers". The position of EAM/ELAS in occupied Greece was unique in several aspects: whereas the other two main resistance groups, the
National Republican Greek League (EDES) and
National and Social Liberation (EKKA), as well as the various minor groupings, were regionally active and mostly military organizations centred on the persons of their leaders, EAM was a true nation-wide mass political movement that tried to "enlist the support of all sections of the population". Although precise numbers do not exist, out of a total Greek population of 7.5 million, at its height in late 1944 EAM numbered, from a low estimate of 500,000–750,000 (according to
Anthony Eden) up to some 2,000,000 (according to EAM itself) members in its various affiliated organizations, including 50,000–85,000 men in ELAS. The American political scientist Michael Shafer in his 1988 book
Deadly Paradigms estimated the total EAM membership in 1944 as about 1.5 million while ELAS fielded about 50, 000
andartes; by the contrast EDES, EAM's main rival, fielded about 5, 000
andartes in 1944. Although the poorer sections of society were naturally well represented, the movement included many of the pre-war elites as well: no fewer than 16 generals and over 1,500 officers of the army, thirty professors of the
University of Athens and other institutions of higher education, as well as six bishops of the
Church of Greece and many ordinary priests. At any given time in 1943 and 1944, about 10% of German forces in Greece were engaged in anti-
andarte operations while during the course of occupation ELAS killed about 19, 000 Germans. The elections organized by EAM in 1944 to its National Council undeniably included a far broader and representative sampling of Greek society than ever before with women sitting on the National Council and in addition on the National Council there were farmers, journalists, workmen, village priests, and journalists; in contrast before the war, almost the only men elected to represent rural areas were doctors and lawyers. Electoral fraud had been common in rural Greece even before the 4th of August regime was imposed in 1936, and Mazower wrote "...in this respect at least, things were not much different during the war in "Free Greece", and we should avoid idealising the National Council as an expression of free will". Mazower cautioned that these elections organized by EAM bore a close similarity to the elections organized in wartime Yugoslavia by the Partisans, and that in the same way that the wartime "People's Democracy" in Yugoslavia became a Communist dictatorship after the war, the same thing might have happened in Greece had EAM came to power after the war. Through very sympathetic towards EAM, Mazower wrote that historians should avoid "excessive naivety" about what EAM meant by "revolutionary elections". However, Mazower also wrote that EAM was generally "not regarded as an instrument of Soviet oppression, but on the contrary, as an organisation fighting for national liberation". == Liberation, Dekemvriana and road to Civil War ==