Greek Perceptions of the 'Good Italian' and 'Bad German' from Invasion

Greek perceptions of the ‘good Italian’ and ‘bad German’ from invasion (1940) to the London Agreement (1953) Jason Leech I have started now, every time I go to Athens, to pester my fellow commuters on the proverbial Athens omnibus with a questionnaire which asks about their memory of the Second World War and their attitude towards the various participant nations. It is too early for any statistics but the voice of Greek collective memory recalls a narrative which goes something like this: „When the Fascists came upon us in 1940 with the armed forces of a nation six times our size, we defeated them roundly...Then the Nazis came to the aid of their partners. We had not the material strength to withstand their overwhelming mechanized might. They overran our land, and four terrible years of occupation caused the death by starvation of nearly 11% of our population, spread misery and disease, destroyed our industries, agriculture and communications, and left the country in ruins‟.1 This carefully-worded extract is not, of course, from an elderly gentleman I accosted but from a speech King Paul of Greece made in a tour of the United States in December 1953. This was the official narrative as Greece concluded the transition from „hot‟ war to Cold War. It was worded to forget the national identities of Greece‟s enemies and thus it formed the bridge between the narratives of preceding administrations and those of today‟s parliamentarians. One gets the impression from the extract that the „Fascists‟ were left defeated in Albania and never made it into Greece. That is a far cry from the official statements made by either Emmanuel Tsouderos, Greece‟s wartime Prime Minister in Exile, or his first elected successor in 1946, Konstandinos Tsaldaris. They were both explicitly critical of Italy‟s occupation record. Only a few months ago, however, I heard Philippos Petsalnikos, the Speaker of the Parliament, unashamedly remind Germany‟s ambassadors (and his Greek voters) that „Greeks have forgiven but not forgotten‟.2 The great irony, of course, was that he had forgotten something: the actions of Germany‟s Italian (and Bulgarian) co-occupiers. By failing to qualify his remarks with any reference to those two countries, he proved that, in his mind, the responsibility for the „four terrible years of occupation‟ were entirely German. The way in which the identities of „Italians‟ and „Germans‟ evolved in Greek minds is extremely complex and I, personally, still have many, many unanswered questions, so, in my ticking 20 minutes, I would like to share with you my findings and take you through my working hypothesis of how I believe the trauma of occupation healed in a surprisingly selective way: how the wounds inflicted by the Germans scarred visibly enough to be readily recalled whereas Italian atrocities receded into the murky depths of Greece‟s collective 1 „Address of H.M. The King of the Hellenes to the Calvin Bullock Forum. New York, 2nd December 1953‟ in Speeches Delivered by H.M. The King of the Hellenes during the State Visit to U.S.A. 28 Oct.-3 Dec. 1953 (Athens: The Greek National Institute, 1954), p.65-6. (My italics.) 2 Philippos Petsalnikos, the Speaker of the Parliament (Ππόεδπορ ηηρ Βοςλήρ) would speak words to this effect, if not verbatim, when he made his „opening remarks‟ to a two-day symposium entitled Landmarks of Greco-German Relations [Οξόζεκα ησλ Διιελν-Γεξκαληθώλ Σρέζεσλ] organised by the Goethe Institut, Athens during 16-17 April 2010. 1 memory and never made it into Petsalnikos‟ own. If I end up asking more questions than I answer I hope that you will treat that as a springboard for discussion. * * * Where did the concept of the „good Italian‟ originate? That, for sure, was Italy. After the Italian capitulation in September 1943 and the switch to co-belligerence the following month, whilst the Wehrmacht was still fighting the Allies, the Italian establishment was preparing for the time: „when it will be necessary to respond concretely to the recurring accusations of violence committed by our soldiers or [to] eventual designations of war criminals‟.3 Within a year, the conspiracy, aimed originally at saving the fully complicit Crown and the establishment from the impending wrath of international justice, would become the self- acquitting myth of the entire nation. The fervently nationalistic political climate of 1945, exacerbated by calls from Yugoslavia for the extradition of the Italian war criminals who had ravaged that country, encouraged an almost unanimous condemnation of Mussolini and the senior political cadres of the Fascist Party across the political spectrum and would urge the defence of national honour against foreign countries which, so it was argued, could not tell fascism and the Italian people apart.4 Condemnation of the few, therefore, for the lustration and unity of the rest. In this, Italy was no different from other countries which wholeheartedly supported the Axis, such as Austria, or simply collaborated like France. But many Italian generals, like Mario Roatta, would go much further in blatantly denying war crimes under the Italian occupation: „Italians as war criminals? At most one can admit to soldiers stealing a few chickens (or pigs) during battle without the knowledge of their superiors‟.5 Even critics of fascism within the political Left contrasted the „innate sense of humanity‟ of the Italian soldiers who was ready to „alleviate the misery of the [occupied] population‟ to the „cold, mechanical brutality‟ of the „barbaric and uncivilised Teutonic robot‟.6 This fabricated dichotomy, wittingly or unwittingly propounded, was the basis of a national consensus, leading to newspapers like Il Commento to portray the Italian occupation of Greece as an idyllic picture of perfect human understanding.7 The mere existence of this myth though was no reason for it to be believed by the population of an occupied country. * * * 3 As quoted by Filippo Focardi and Lutz Klinkhammer, „The question of Fascist Italy‟s war crimes: the construction of a self-acquitting myth (1943-1948)‟ in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol.9, no.3 (2004), p.341. 4 Effie G. H. Pedaliu, „Britain and the “Hand-over” of Italian War Criminals to Yugoslavia, 1945-48‟ in Journal of Contemporary History, vol.39, no.4, p.511ff; Zacharias N. Tsirpanlis, „The Italian View of the 1940-41 War: Comparisons and Problems‟ in Balkan Studies, vol. 23, no.1 (Salonica: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1982), p.29ff; Italia Nuova (18 November 1944) as quoted by Focardi and Klinkhammer, „Construction of a self-acquitting myth‟, p.332. 5 As quoted by Focardi and Klinkhammer, „Construction of a self-acquitting myth‟, p.339. 6 Gaetano Salvemini, as quoted by ibid., p.336. 7 Il Commento (16 April 1945) as quoted by ibid., p.336. 2 Indeed, until at least February 1947, when it signed the peace treaty with Italy (and Bulgaria), the Greek Government was diametrically opposed to this Italian version of Italy‟s wartime conduct. At the Allied Atrocities Conference in London in January 1942, Prime Minister Emmanuel Tsouderos did not separate Greece‟s occupiers into „good‟ and „bad‟: „Germans, Italians and Bulgars seem to have vied with one another in savagery in their several campaigns and spheres of influence‟.8 No special dispensation was made for Italy. If anything, when the Government-in-Exile republished the Ministry for Foreign Affairs‟ White Book later on in 1942, it highlighted the relationship between Greece and Italy as „thirty years‟ of national antagonism and hostility „interspersed at rare and short-lived intervals with deceptive manifestations of friendship‟.9 The Italian capitulation affected nothing. In its 1946 publication on the „atrocities of the invaders‟ the National Hellenic Office for War Criminals gave over unmistakeably large sections to all three major invaders.10 The infamous German massacres at Kalavryta, Kommeno and Distomo are all mentioned; but so are the swathes of executions by Italian troops in the early months of 1943 across Kastoria and the plains of Thessaly.11 The Office for War Criminals writes, in fact, that the: „destructive mania of the Italians...did not differ at all from the German hordes that succeeded them in September 1943. [The massacre at] Domenico, in effect, was nothing but the curtain rise of a tragedy that would continue at an ever faster pace‟.12 Working alongside the Office for War Criminals in this campaign for the international enlightenment of Greece‟s plight and the securing of substantial reparations from the Paris Peace Conference was the Ministry for Reconstruction. Between 1946 and 1947, the Ministry published thirty-five books outlining in great detail the destruction caused by the occupying powers and the magnitude of the reconstruction effort.13 The Italians were heavily implicated. The Ministry calculated that they destroyed 110,000 buildings with a pre-war value of $147,321,429.14 Added to that was the destruction of port facilities, shipping, rail infrastructure, rolling stock, waterworks, agriculture, etc. The total list of demands made of Italy, including pillaging, destruction, unpaid services and other (inflated) balancing charges (such as reduction of GDP) brought the total to just over $6 billion (in 1938 values).15 The 8 M. Emmanuel Tsouderos, Greek White Paper: Axis Crimes in Greece. Memorandum submitted by M. Emmanuel Tsouderos, Prime Minister of Greece, at the Inter-Allied Conference at St. James’s palace, on January 13th, 1942, and addressed to all Allied and Friendly Governments (London: Keliher, Hudson & Kearns, [1942]), p.1. 9 Royal Greek Ministry for Foreign Affairs, The Greek White Book: Diplomatic Documents relating to Italy’s Aggression against Greece (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1942), p.8, 5. 10 National Hellenic Office for War Criminals [Office National Hellénique des Criminels de Guerre], The Atrocities of the Four Invaders of Greece: Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, Albanians [Les Atrocités des Quatre Envahisseurs de la Grèce: Allemands, Italiens, Bulgares, Albanais] (Athens: [n.p.], 1946): devoted 70 pages to Germans, 46 to Italians, 45 to Bulgarians (and 27 to Albanians who were added to support the Government‟s territorial claims to Northern Epirus).

Load more