EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis). Michalis Lymperatos, a historian and author of works on modern Greek history and a postdoctoral researcher at Panteion University, speaks on Kostas Vergos’s excellent program Perigrammata (“Outlines”) about German reprisals during the Occupation.
What justifications did the German occupation forces invoke when carrying out their notorious reprisals and executing hundreds of innocent Greeks? Who were the “Two Hundred of Kaisariani”? The myth of the “good Wehrmacht” and the “bad SS,” and how that myth collapsed after the first executions.
All German soldiers were expected to stain their hands with the blood of Greek men and women. The idea was simple: they were all to become accomplices in a collective crime, so that the necessary bonds of blood would be forged among them. At the same time, this erased each individual’s personal responsibility. Something akin to Dostoevsky’s Demons. Once someone has participated in the crime for the first time, there is no turning back.
After the defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans increasingly portrayed themselves as the force fighting international communism. Those selected for execution therefore had to be communists, so that a message would be sent to the occupied population about who would be punished—and who would not.
The prehistory of genocide is also discussed: the genocide in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, between 1904 and 1908, whose victims were the indigenous Herero and Nama peoples. It is regarded as the first recorded genocide of the twentieth century.
In the face of all this suffering, what reparations did Germany pay? Not even the compulsory occupation loan was repaid. The notorious Merten affair of 1957–1959 reflects the sense of impunity enjoyed by the former occupiers of our country.
The agreement concerning Greek Gastarbeiter—Greek migrant workers who would help rebuild Germany—was signed in 1960, shortly after Merten’s release from prison on Karamanlis’s orders.
Helleniscope is part of the International Committee for German Debt to Greece and has pledged to do everything possible to honor the memory of the victims.
