Greek Civil War Research Articles

Student responses to differing accounts of a controversial historical issue: 15-year-old Greek students consider the removal of children in the Greek Civil War

In recent decades, controversial issues have come to the forefront of history teaching. So far, they have been utilized in three ways: (1) to manage tensions in divided societies; (2) to instil humanitarian values into students; and (3) to enhance the teaching of second-order historical concepts. This study is based on the findings of other relevant research, and underpins the use of controversial accounts in order to foster procedural concepts of history. It was conducted in three middle schools of the Xanthi Prefecture, northern Greece, in 2017 and 2018. The subjects were 94 15-year-old students, and the design was experimental. After being taught two versions of the Greek Civil War, a traditional and an experimental one, students expressed their opinions about three pairs of different historical accounts of a controversial issue: the removal of children during the war. A pilot study consisted of role-playing activities involving historical competences. After qualitative and quantitative analysis, a variety of ideas emerged about the differences in the accounts, the reasons for their differentiation, and the epistemological status of history. The findings show that: (1) students' comprehension depended on the level of difficulty of the accounts; and (2) the experimental groups modified their ideas about the different accounts and history to some degree. In conclusion, a structured, disciplinary approach to controversial historical issues, focused on role-playing activities, could contribute to a refinement of students' epistemological notions.

Insurgents’ intelligence network and practices during the Greek Civil War

ABSTRACTJohn N. Gentry argues that Violent Non-State Actors, such as insurgencies or terrorist groups, use intelligence in three ways. First and foremost, they employ intelligence to plan physical military attacks and to protect themselves from penetration and attack by government forces. Secondly, they use counterintelligence in order to ensure the survival of the insurgency and preserve the faith of their members by enforcing ideological discipline. Finally, they use information operations to shape their operational environments. This article seeks to determine what type of intelligence the Greek insurgents employed during the civil war and whether this insurgency fits Gentry’s model.

Paramilitarism, politics and organized crime during the Greek civil war (1945–1949)

The historiography of the Greek civil war has made significant progress during the past decade, but the origins, role and activities of paramilitaries remain under-researched. Most studies have focused on the period of the ‘white terror’ and explored the collusion between the state and the paramilitary groups. Although such studies have advanced our understanding of this turbulent period, they have not discussed important issues such as the motivation of the rank and file members, the sociopolitical networks used to recruit and mobilize support and the diverse conditions under which militias emerge. The article will address this lacuna and provide new insights into the origins, development and legacies of paramilitarism.

Meeting the Communist Threat in Greece: American diplomats, ideology and stereotypes 1944-1950

This paper focuses on four US officials serving in Greece at a critical period in both Greek and American political history. The Greek Civil War (1946-9) was decisive in the development of the Cold War confrontation. The Truman Doctrine (1947) represents an ideological milestone in this respect. In particular, the paper explores the views of Lincoln MacVeagh (ambassador 1944-7), Paul A. Porter (chief of the American Economic Mission to Greece, 1947), Dwight Griswold (chief of the American Mission for Aid to Greece 1947-8) and Henry Grady (ambassador 1948-50), namely their perceptions of the Greek post-war crisis in relation to the strategic goal of anticommunism. The emphasis of the analysis is on their understanding of the Greek social and political conditions - and especially of the nature of the communist threat – and of the goals involved in the American aid to the country. These four case studies highlight the interaction between the prevailing ideology in foreign policy objectives and the personal belief systems. Cultural preconditions and stereotypes constitute the framework in the context of which US officials sought to contain the communist challenge in Greece both though military as well as through economic and ideological means.

Rebuilding Jewish Communities after the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Relief Programme in Postwar Greece

In the postwar chaos of the Greek Civil War, the Greek state was practically absent in the effort to rebuild the country’s Jewish communities and provide for their particular, post-Holocaust needs. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee came to fill this gap. The JDC organised and handled the assistance from American Jews to their coreligionists in Greece, both at the level of distributing humanitarian aid and of reconstituting community life. The JDC played a significant role in reshaping the communal life of postwar Greek Jewry along American lines. This article is mostly focused on the immediate postwar years, when JDC officials sought to establish a network to help Greek Jews cover their most immediate and elementary needs.

Being Leftist and Jewish in Greece during the Civil War and its Aftermath: Constraints and Choices

After the end of the Second World War, and as a result of the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–1949), former resistance members went through a period of generalised, severe persecution. In this context, Jews who had survived the Shoah by taking part in the resistance in some way or by going into hiding under the protection of the resistance forces had to denounce their former comrades or communist rescuers. How did Greek Jews who had been influenced by leftist ideology respond to the politics of the civil war and its aftermath? How were their responses affected by the attitudes of the Greek state, Jewish community and State of Israel towards them? Following the traces left mainly in a) the archives of the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Jewish communities of Athens and Salonica, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; b) the Greek Jewish press of the period; c) personal accounts, essays and literature, I will attempt to explore the multiplicity of responses of leftist Greek Jews to the political and personal dilemmas of the post-Shoah period. I argue that despite different postwar (and prewar) political attitudes and experiences, leftist Greek Jews expressed two main tendencies: a tight relationship with the country’s Jewish communities and, at the same time, a strong tendency to leave for other countries, mainly Israel.

In the shadow of the Civil War: Greek students at VGIK, 1950s–1970s

ABSTRACTPart of a special issue devoted to the centenary of the Film Institute VGIK, this article considers a forgotten page of the history of the film school as the alma mater of the celebrated writer Alki Zei, the award-winning filmmakers Fotos Lambrinos and Christos Siopahas and other important Greek cultural figures. Along with the studio Mosfilm, VGIK was both a unique school and a safe haven for Greek refugees and leftist students, who found themselves in the Soviet Union in the period between the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) and the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. This article revisits the history of the Greek friends of Andrei Tarkovsky, and of the students of Mikhail Romm and Iurii Egorov. These Greek students at VGIK had experienced repression, authoritarianism and exile; they were marked by the division of Cyprus and haunted by the defeat in the Civil War. To these painful experiences and dramatic events, they responded with their art.

History as trauma and the possibility of the future: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera

Theo Angelopoulos has described Taxidi sta Kythira (Voyage to Cythera) (1984) as an attempt to ‘exorcise the past’ and offer the Greek audience a possibility to face the future without the traumas of the past. This article explores the question of the extent to which we can exorcise the past and asks if a future is possible without acknowledging the traumas of the past. Drawing upon cultural trauma theory, the article analyses the Greek Civil War (1946–49) as a cultural trauma for the Greek Left, especially concerning the recognition of political prisoners and exiles. Psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, suggests that a fundamental characteristic of trauma is the un-representability of the event itself, as a traumatic event is only known through its persistent reiterations. Through its multi-layered narrative structure and aesthetic strategies of deferral and displacement Voyage to Cythera stages the trauma of the Greek Civil War for both the returning exiles and the generation that followed. As a representation of presence through absence, the article considers Voyage to Cythera in terms of Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of the parapractic text and Max Silverman’s notion of palimpsestic memory whereby the film does not exorcise the past as such but reveals a past haunting the present. The article concludes with the reflection that a traumatic past has a tendency to return however much we may wish to lay it rest.

Birth of the Cold War: irregular warfare first blood in Greece

ABSTRACT While often held up as a model of successful American counterinsurgency, the Greek Civil War presents a unique case. Peculiar local conditions and geopolitics contributed to the defeat of communist forces in Greece. A firm British and later American commitment to combating communism stood in contrast to ambiguous support from the Soviet Union in an area they considered outside of their sphere of influence. Strong nationalist feeling among the Greek population buttressed support for the government and undermined the ‘internationalist’ concessions of communist forces. These characteristics make the extrapolation of broader lessons focused on victory through the application of overwhelming American resources and the financing of local forces problematic. If lessons are to be gleaned from this case, they should focus on the critical roles played by internal political dynamics and geopolitics in undermining the strength of the insurgent forces and how these provided a stable platform from which the counterinsurgents could operate.

An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas

Reviewed by: An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas Spyros Tsoutsoumpis (bio) Andre Gerolymatos, An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxii, 399. Paper $25.00. Spyridon Plakoudas, The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xi + 256. Cloth $99.00. In the midst of the Greek Civil War, Iraklis (Heraclis) Petimezas wrote to a fellow-veteran of the resistance struggle that it is "nearly not enough to present the current predicament as the fault of the British or the Russians" or as a by-product of political circumstances "outside our control." Petimezas reminded [End Page 431] his correspondent that that several western European nations had powerful left-wing movements, yet these countries "were spared the ravages of civil war" and concluded the letter by noting that "If we truly want to understand the root of these events we should carefully look at our recent history and try to understand what led us to where we are now" (Genika Arheia tou Kratous/Petimezas Archive/163/19/1/1947). Seven decades after the parting shorts of the civil war were fired, Petimezas's appeal has not lost its resonance. Andre Gerolymatos's An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 and Spiros Plakoudas's The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy attempt to address this question by locating the civil war in a broader comparative and theoretical framework. The authors are not unique in this respect. The study of the resistance and the civil war has witnessed an unprecedented renaissance in the preceding decade. These two books exemplify the progress made but also demonstrate the numerous problems and challenges faced by civil war scholars. This review of the two books is divided into three parts. The first part provides a brief overview of past scholarship and locates the two studies in relation to ongoing debates in the history of the 1940s. The second part provides a critical analysis of the two accounts while the third and final part delineates paths for future research. In the aftermath of the war, the study of this turbulent period was relegated to the margins of historical enquiry. The bulk of the studies was produced by conservative pundits, politicos, right-wing veterans, and amateur scholars. While these actors had widely different agendas, backgrounds, and political lineages, most of them agreed on one single point: the civil war was the act of a baleful, un-Greek minority with no roots or genuine support within the country. The real culprit behind the civil war was the nation's eternal enemies, the Slavs, who used the Greek left to realize their age-old ambition of partitioning northern Greece and gaining a foothold in the Aegean. The civil war years were therefore presented as a struggle between a unified nation and communism (Mazower 2000, 216–224). The advent and fall of the Junta dictatorship (1967–74) and the consequent discrediting of right-wing conservatism paved the way for a new generation of scholars who challenged the representation of EAM as a Soviet pawn. They re-examined the role of the British and American factor in Greek foreign policy and have provided new insights on foreign relations. The bulk of these studies was based on foreign archives and adopted a top-down perspective that stressed the actions and activities of political elites and top-level activists. At the same time, alongside the revisionist historiography, there emerged a popular historiography fueled mostly by memoirists—the majority of them ELAS veterans—who offered their own vision of resistance events. The book [End Page 432] that set the tone for this historiographical trend was Dominique Eudes's The Kapetanios. Influenced by the radical leftism of the 1960s, Eudes refashioned the resistance as an earlier version of Latin American liberation movements. The guerrillas were recast as peasant rebels fighting for grass-roots democracy and the enfranchisement of the people. In common with other contemporary radical leftists, Eudes criticized the conservative stance of the Communist Party, and accused it of stalling the revolutionary potential of the...

National Awareness Of Greek And Macedonian Children-Refugees From The State Educational Center In Police

The paper contains excerpts of a MA thesis that was defended in 1962 in Poland. Its author was an educator and a teacher in the State Educational Center for children-refugees in a town of Police. The thesis, which includes the problem of national awareness of Greek and Macedonian children and their mutual relations, constitutes an important source for research on children-refugees from the Greek Civil War in Europe.

Identity And Knowledge Of Macedonian Children-Refugees In Socialist Poland: Geopolitics Of Education

From 1948 till early 1950s, the Polish People’s Republic accepted around 15 thousand refugees of the Greek Civil War. The refugees connected with the defeated side of the Greek Communist Army constituted a heterogeneous group of Greeks, Macedonians, and Aromanians, including both adults and children. Poland, like many other Eastern European countries, sheltered them as part of the solidarity within communist parties. However, till 1956 the anti-Yugoslavian discourse affected the fate of refugees in Poland making the refugees of Greek origin a favored group and treating those of Macedonian origin as Tito collaborators. The paper aims to present the Macedonian schooling system organized in Poland for the refugees together with an unknown case of the Macedonian textbooks for school children prepared and printed in Poland. The analysis of the textbooks is situated in the broader framework of the international policy of the Eastern Block and Yugoslavia, Polish-Macedonian relations in the 20th century as well as the sociology and history of knowledge.

Macedonian And Greek Refugee Children In Eastern Europe: Language, Politics And Identities

The paper uses life stories and archival evidence to explore the relations between Macedonian and Greek refugee children who escaped the violence of the Greek Civil War and grew up in children’s homes in Eastern Europe. More in particular it examines the dominant role of the Greek Communist Party on the refugees’ lives, the organization of Macedonian-language education and the tensions created by the anti-Tito campaign launched by the Cominform countries. It discusses the short-lived establishment of an autonomous Macedonian organization in Poland during the early 1960s. And finally it analyzes the oral memories of both Greek and Macedonian refugee children about their mutual – largely harmonious - relations. The paper argues that the recovery of such memories in light of contemporary conflicts between the two countries might be an important resource for the future.

Freud under the Acropolis: The challenging journey of psychoanalysis in 20th-century Greece (1915–1995)

Psychoanalysis was introduced to Greece in 1915 by the progressive educator Manolis Triantafyllidis and was further elaborated by Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s friend and member of the Greek royal family, and her psychoanalytic group in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, the accumulated traumas of the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the post-Civil-War tension between the Left and the Right, the military junta (1967–1974) and the social and political conditions of post-war Greece led this project and all attempts to establish psychoanalysis in Greece, to failure and dissolution. The restoration of democracy in 1974 and the rapid social changes it brought was a turning point in the history of Greek psychoanalysis: numerous psychoanalysts, who had trained abroad and returned after the fall of the dictatorship, were hired in the newly established Greek National Health Service (NHS), and contributed to the reform of Greek psychiatry by offering the option of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the non-privileged. This article draws on a range of unexplored primary sources and oral history interview material, in order to provide the first systematic historical account in the English language of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and Greek society, and the contribution of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the creation of the Greek welfare state. In so doing, it not only attempts to fill a lacuna in the history of contemporary Greece, but also contributes to the broader historiography of psychotherapy and of Europe.

Shadow on the Soul dir. by Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, and: Kisses to the Children dir. by Vassilis Loules, and: Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories dir. by Kostas Kalantzis, and: Beneath the Lemon Tree dir. by Stavroula Toska

Reviewed by: Shadow on the Soul dir. by Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, and: Kisses to the Children dir. by Vassilis Loules, and: Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories dir. by Kostas Kalantzis, and: Beneath the Lemon Tree dir. by Stavroula Toska Violetta Hionidou (bio) Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, directors, Shadow on the Soul. 2016. 94 mins. Vassilis Loules, director, Kisses to the Children. 2012. 112 mins. Kostas Kalantzis, director, Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories. 2014. 47 mins. Stavroula Toska, director, Beneath the Lemon Tree. 2015. 76 mins. The importance of film as a medium for imparting knowledge and affect, thus contributing to or even creating a social memory of historical events, is widely acknowledged (Berger 2007). As films, museums, and the press shape the popular understanding of the past, the engagement of academia with such modes of transmission of historical knowledge becomes imperative. The four historical films reviewed here all make references to major events of twentiethcentury Greece, the memory and current understanding of those events, and their connections to today's Greece. For those who know little about Greek history, these films provide an introduction to three traumatic episodes with long-term repercussions: the 1922 Asia Minor Disaster that led to the mandated Greco-Turkish population exchange which created at least 1.5 million refugees; the Holocaust; and the Greek Civil War. As I cannot claim any expertise as a film critic, I feel I have to make it clear from the start that my perspective is that of the historian. Nevertheless, I also review these films as someone who has an increasing interest in how histories are taught, internalized, and ultimately remembered. [End Page 226] For the most part, documentaries bring to the screen the words, voices, emotions, and personalities of individuals who lived through the studied events. This manner of presentation is an engaging and much more immediate way of learning, one that can particularly reach children. However, the immediacy of film and testimonies can also create prosthetic memories. All four films reviewed here bring together in distinct ways issues of collective and individual memory, addressing very painful aspects of Greek history. While the Holocaust has rarely been addressed in the Greek context (the only case I am aware of is the 2013 film, The Longest Journey: The Last Days of the Jews of Rhodes, directed by Ruggero Gabbai), the other subjects have been dealt with in both Greek and non-Greek cinema, as well as in historical documentaries. Shadow on the Soul deals with the 1922 refugees and their legacy, both in Greece and in Turkey. Experts interviewed in the film, including the eminent scholars Renée Hirschon and Dimitris Kamouzis, focus on the social issues concerning the arrival and settlement of the refugees in Greece and Turkey. They identify and elaborate on the friction between the host population and the newcomers, as well as the names that the latter were called by the former: "Turkish-seed" in Greece; "Greek-seed" in Turkey. It is bewildering to hear the Turkish descendants of the exchanged population mix Greek and Turkish words while speaking today—nearly 100 years after the event—a stark reminder of a past when the two languages and peoples inhabited the same spaces. The refugees and their descendants interviewed in the film talk about the hunger, the disease, and the high mortality rate among the refugees following their arrival in Greece. But they also speak about the conviviality of the refugees, their passion for life, singing, and makeshift celebratory gatherings. We are told about the shanty towns that were initially erected in the greater Athens area and how they lacked running water in the early days and did not have a central sewage system until the 1970s. It should be pointed out that these deficiencies applied to most impoverished areas within Greece at the time and were not exclusive to refugee areas. The extensive use of credit when purchasing food from local grocers is mentioned; this too was not specific to refugees, but more of an attribute of the Greek urban poor. It is interesting and rare to see in a documentary the differentiation that is made...

MOTHERS IN WAR: “RESPONSIBLE MOTHERING,” CHILDREN, AND THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE IN TWENTIETH‐CENTURY WAR

ABSTRACTThe key concern of this article is to explore how the history of twentieth‐century violence forces us to reflect on how we interpret the acts of those who find themselves attempting to prevent violence, as mothers have done in relation to their children, in the context of violence and atrocity. A focus on mothers and maternity redirects our analysis to gendered aspects of a history of violence and war that do not concentrate solely on bodily violent acts or physical inflictions upon women—crucial as these remain to histories of violence—but shifts the attention to examining women and violence within another aspect: that of women as active agents negotiating violent contexts. It builds on the considerable scholarship that argues that mothers in war have invariably been represented only as victims or spectators in war, and yet they have also demonstrated agency both individually and collectively. This is significant because to ignore this dimension of scholarly endeavor misses an opportunity to write women into histories of violence in ways that complicate their role in war and make them central to the story. To marginalize mothers in the broader canvas of war and violence, as scholarship often does, is also to narrow our focus of understandings of agency and the negotiation of violence itself. I explore these wider questions by focusing on the cataclysmic events of war, in the first instance in the context of a total war in the early twentieth century, the First World War, and in the second—the Greek Civil War—a civil war that took place in mid‐century. Although these are vastly different conflicts, they both illuminate the decisions of mothers to attempt to prevent further violence in war, especially in relation to their children, and to highlight the contested notion of “responsible motherhood” in war.

Revisiting the Nationalism/Populism Nexus: Lessons from the Greek Case

This article explores the relationship between people and nation by focusing on the Greek case, which has attracted considerable political and media attention throughout the last few years. The article traces the ways in which populism and nationalism have been related within Greek political culture diachronically, inclusive of the current crisis conjuncture. We follow this trajectory from the 1940s and the Greek Civil War up until today in order to capture the unexpectedly dynamic and ambivalent relationship between the two and account for its multiple mutations. The conclusions drawn from this country-specific exploration are expected to have wider implications for populism research internationally.

‘Being traitors’: post-war Greece in the experience of Jewish partisans

As a result of political developments, silence about Jewish resistance in post-war Greece persisted for decades. In my article, I focus on the post-war fate of Jewish partisans in the context of the Greek Civil War and the emerging East–West conflict. After liberation, many partisans in Greece were stigmatized and even tried as communists. In the 1980s, when Athens shifted towards socialism, Jewish survivors began to speak up regarding their involvement in the left-leaning resistance (EAM/ELAS). Based on archival research and oral testimonies, I explore how former Jewish partisans reflected on their EAM/ELAS participation, in which way they came to terms with the imminence of post-war persecution and which attitudes were applied in the case of arrests. In this way, this study may contribute not only to a better understanding of post-the First World War Greece but also towards identity politics and memory studies in general.

Building ‘healthy happy family units’: Aileen Fitzpatrick and reuniting children separated by the Greek Civil War with their families in Australia, 1949–1954

This article explores the efforts by Aileen Fitzpatrick, the Australian social worker, who repatriated child refugees from Greece at the height of the Greek Civil War, to reconstruct ‘healthy, happy family units’. I explore several themes. First, Fitzpatrick’s argument for the unification of families echoed the view that the family unit represented democracy and freedom in the post-war period. Second, an appeal to reuniting family became a successful strategy for crossing cold war lines when dealing with several governments. Third, for Fitzpatrick child saving from war and reuniting families was perceived to be essential to democracy, humanitarianism and internationalism. Finally, by taking a biographical approach, the details of the experience of family emerge in new ways. A focus on Fitzpatrick’s strategies suggests family rhetoric could be used to both promote and yet also cross cold war lines. More broadly, this article seeks to embed the history of the family within the general history of the post-war period as a way of highlighting how the ideal of the family was mobilised in rhetoric on freedom, democracy and the future and which in practice revealed the severe challenges facing families after the war.

Majority rule, minority issues: The Macedonian question in the Dekemvriana

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of the Macedonian Question in the 1944 December Uprising (Dekemvriana) in Greece. While the Dekemvriana is commonly portrayed in right–left terminology in the historiography, this article argues that part of the reason for the left’s failure was their inability to manage the Macedonian ethnic component of the struggle, either within their armed forces or in their relationship with Yugoslavia. As such, this article integrates the early phases of the Greek Civil War into the broader literature on minorities in civil conflict, while simultaneously exposing some of the myths about Macedonian involvement that result from its contemporary political ramifications.