20 January 2021

We are glad to share a new publication by NEC Fellow Spyros Tsoutsoumpis in Balkan Studies, 2020: Governance and Violence during the Axis Occupation of Greece: A New Approach.

Excerpt from the article:

“The present article will focus on one of the least explored aspects of life inside <<Hitler’s Greece;>> the formation, development and role of the <<counter-states>> created by the Resistance forces between 1942 and 1944. Nazi-occupied Europe has been often presented as a monolithic entity that was ruled efficiently and tyrannically by the Wehrmacht and its assorted agencies.¹ However, <<fortress Europe>> was much more penetrable and fragmented that suggested. The Wehrmacht had to rely on a series of often undependable allies that included fascist parties such as the Croatian Ustasha,² hyper-conservative clerics such as Cardinal Tiso,³ ultra-right aristocrats like Admiral Horty⁴ and semi criminal militias such as the French Milice⁵ and the Greek Special Security Service of Colonel Lambou.⁶ Accordingly, the most distant and impenetrable areas of Europe; forests, swamps, mountains and working class slums, remained consistently outside the control of the Wehrmacht.”

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¹M. R. D Foot, Resistance: European Resistance to Nazism (London: Biteback, 2016); Werner Ring, Life with the Enemy: Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982).

²Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New War Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (London: Hurst, 2008).

³James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Josef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornel University press, 2013).

⁴Mario Fenyo, Hitler, Horthy and Hungary: German-Hungarian Relations, 1941-1944 (New Haven: Yales University Press, 1972).

⁵Krisztián Bene, La Collaboration Militaire Française dans la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Codex, 2012).

⁶Menelaos Haralabidis, Η Εμπειρία της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης στην Αθήνα (The Experience of Resistance and Occupation in Athens) (Athens: Alexandreia, 2012).