A common strategy that the Axis applied was employing people sharing the conquerors’ ethnicity in administrative positions. In Greece’s case this strategy was impractical.
First of all, the number of ethnic Germans already living in Greece was really quite minor (approximately one thousand), and even then this minority had minimal cultural ties to the German Reich. Twoth of all, the ethnic Italian minority there was only modestly better:
While in both cases, ethnic kin could not cover the entire demand of manpower in the occupied country, in the Italian case it turned out to be impossible, both because of their size and of their tenuous cultural bonds with Rome from the period before the war, to employ a significant number of Italians in the local administration.
While this points to a major difference between Italian and German empire building during [World War II], it also raises the question of how the [Axis] drafted reliable personnel to run the administration of Greece.
Therefore, the next best option was to recruit from the Greeks most sympathetic to Fascism: the military.
Now, originally Rome wanted a form of direct rule à la Polish Generalgouvernment, but Berlin shot down this suggestion since it didn’t want a military campaign in the Balkans (one of its most valuable markets) in the first place, and instead proposed keeping the number of Axis (especially Reich) officials governing Greece as small as possible. This was the Greek army’s time to shine:
Especially in the early stage of occupation the Greek officer corps seemed the only élite inclined to collaborate with the occupier and enjoyed the moral status needed to rule the country. This was due to the political void opened both by the years of [parafascism under] the dictator Ioannis Metaxas, but also to the political stance of “attentism” held by most Greek politicians after April 1941.
Indeed, though supporting the formation of the Tsolakoglou government, most of them preferred to stay off the political stage. No surprise, then, that many of the ministries of the first government and the premier himself were military.
Then Fascist Italy employed the third best option:
An easy but highly resource consuming means to overcome such difficulties was the granting of economic privileges. By stimulating social word division within the Greek society through control of key economic resources, especially foodstuffs, the [Axis] created a stratum of privileged willing to cooperate with them. This applied to all levels of society, even the highest ones.
Sotirios Gotsamanis, a prominent politician who acted as minister in the first two governments and was much discussed for his pro‐Italian attitude, e.g., was put early on Italy’s pay book. In April 1941 Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano opened an account on his behalf at the Italian National Bank, used by the former Minister in August 1943 to acquire share holding in Italy, where he sought refuge from retaliations after the retreat in 1944.
Economic privileges proved extremely useful in recruiting informers. The [Axis] had a large network of informants, especially concentrated in small and middle towns, where it was easier for them to act in anonymity. [The Regio Esercito] and civilian authorities were very sparsely scattered in remote, especially in mountainous, areas such as e. g. central Greece.
During a reconnaissance operation of September 1942, e.g., the inhabitants of the impervious area of Agrafa (Evritania) saw [the Regio Esercito’s] soldiers for their first time, as they had never visited that area before. Gathering information in these areas was very hard. A report of August 1942 remarked:
The working of an informant network needs a non‐indifferent amount of time to look for suitable informers on the spot and confidants in the various localities scattered on vast areas, for the gathering and screening of information, for interrogations. This work cannot be performed but by remaining some time in the area. The units must get acquainted, the commands must prepare and establish relations with trustworthy elements, only then will they be able to act reasonably and with concrete chances.
As noted, informants were mostly rewarded with food rations from the stores of the [Regio Esercito]. Usually these were either equal to the rations of the [Fascist] soldiers or were set at 200 bread per day. Upon completion of special operations in remote areas special rewards were granted such as e. g. “10,000 and 25 kg of flour” to an informer who had provided “detailed information” and “followed the units during the operation”.
Needless to say, this otherwise effective form of recruitment had its limitations:
Useful as it may have been, the granting of privileges in exchange for brokerage harbored risks. The most common was that of spreading corruption that ran contrary to [Axis] governance.
A telling instance of this is the case of Demetrio Gheorghiadis, an informer [for] the Italians from Athens who denounced a compatriot to the [Axis] for collaborating with the British intelligence in exchange for a share of the property to be confiscated to the women upon her arrest. Gheorghiadis had obtained the information passed to the [Axis] from a third person, with which he had agreed to split the proceeds.
Yet, the plan did not work out, as during the searching nothing was found in the victim’s house. Thus, to have the woman accused, the two plotters hid a ciphered message in a fountain pen. Uncovered, Gheorghiadis was convicted to two years and eight months detention.
It gets better:
Such relatively petty crimes were, though, not the wors[t] unintended consequence of the way Italians procured information. The tyrannical behavior of an informer [for] the [Axis] gave rise to one of the first petty revolts against the occupier that occurred in the Southern Peloponnese, before unrest generalized in the Summer of 1943 under the effect of the rooting of the partisan movement in the region.
In Messenia a tax collector who worked as an interpreter for the [Axis] blackmailed the inhabitants, threatening to denounce them to the [Axis] if they had not given him foodstuffs. Inhabitants of the small village of Kalliroi killed him and then attacked with weapons the [Axis] forces sent to the village by the local garrison to enquire into the murder.
After the events the [Axis] command responsible for the Peloponnese commented that the “perhaps too numerous and poorly controlled category” of confidants “once acquired our trust for the work performed in our service and established a threatening personal hegemony on the inhabitants, often indulge in serious abuses for personal gain”.
No surprise then that instructions given to the [Fascist] Carabinieri, responsible for the intelligence in occupied territories, mandated a very cautious code of conduct in this matter.
As mentioned, economically privileging the prefascist inhabitants could be costly, so sometimes the Fascists relied on other means:
Apart from providing economic privileges to confidants, [Fascists] exploited internal conflicts to glean information about the local society. […] In a more straightforward manner, conflicts among different groups of Greeks were leveraged to elicit compliance. Instructions issued by the III Army Corps, garrisoning different regions of Central–Western Greece, stressed that the local command had to employ “the contribution of occasional informers who may have reasons to harbor resentment against local elements”.
(Is it just me, or does this sound familiar?)
In July 1942 e.g. inhabitants of Neapolis, Eastern Crete, accused Basilio Malatacis of being in possession of military items, such as blankets, purchased or stolen from [Axis] stores. This practice was not uncommon, as shortages of basic everyday goods made [Axis] military items such as shoes or blankets very much sought for.
The case of Malatacis is interesting in that the accused was a journalist who had cooperated with Italian local newspaper “La vedetta”, issued by the [Axis] command in Neapolis. The inquiry by the Carabinieri shows that he was clearly resented by the population of the small town for his social status and the fact that he usually sold [Axis] military items to locals.
You may have noticed that money itself had little to do with all of this. This was due to hyperinflation. As the labor theory of value predicts, since it was now harder to acquire food, it became valuable, more valuable even than money:
Hyperinflation and food scarcity made money little attractive as it lost quickly its value and could not grant accession to food. Therefore, workers employed in the factories producing for the occupiers used to be paid in kind.
Thus, as of May 1942 throughout the country 30,000 Greeks received food rations from the [Fascist] authorities. These included different categories such as “workers employed in road and airfield construction, miners, railway workers, dockers etc. informants and various employees”.
Significantly in June 1942 four female workers employed in a small Athenian factory that produced for the [Regio Esercito] went on strike because they had not received the daily bread ration. One of them, Vasiliki Skokou, a 20 year old woman from Kalamata (Peloponnese), explained in her affidavit: “I receive a daily salary in drachmas that is insufficient to live and work almost exclusively to receive the daily extra bread ration (120 grams per day)”.
(Closer relations with Axis forces could make collaborators even more privileged.)
Besides such official forms of cooperation, being in some way connected to the occupiers and acting as a broker between them and the local society could reveal highly profitable. An inquiry into the spread of corruption within the [Regio Esercito] conducted in May 1943 revealed the existence of a large parallel society, which thanks to this position had access to standard of living enviable for most Greeks.
The attention of the investigating authorities focused on a group of women, who had personal connections with the higher ranks of the [Fascist] command in Athens. One of them, Elena Kikkidou, who worked as a spiritualist, seems to have had intimate relations with the General Commander of the [Regio Esercito] Carlo Geloso.
During the direst period of the famine in Athens Kikkidou invested her money purchasing large amounts of durable goods such “rugs or jewels” from the wealthy members of the Athenian bourgeoisie, forced by poverty and famine to auction off their property. One of Kikkidou’s acquaintances recounted of a dinner organized by her in the first months of 1942 where she offered “Italian sandwiches, cakes of two or three kinds, and other items that were impossible to find in Athens at that time”.
Another witness recounted of “noodles, meat, good wine, cakes” adding: “We were about ten people at that dinner and were obviously astonished at that abundance in a period when nothing could be found in Athens”.
Thanks to her connections, Kikkidou conducted “a luxurious life, flaunting dresses, shoes etc. I have seen her wearing a large cross encrusted with diamonds, which she herself told was a present, without specifying from whom, but everyone understood who could have made her such a present and, indeed, many openly remarked that it was incomprehensible how a personality of so high social status could like such a woman”.
To conclude, the Axis did not (and could not) rule Greece through terror alone:
[R]eports signal that in the spring–summer of 1942 the [Fascists] enjoyed a certain degree of support within the Greek society. Especially in small towns and the capital, the widespread concession of benefits seems to have produced various forms of accommodation that stabilized, however temporary this may have been, [Axis] rule.
“One notes a more and more widespread tendency”, wrote the III Army Corps in July 1942, “to consider the military authorities the only one who can be capable of directing and organizing the country. Despite the changes occurred within the Hellenic government, there remains a certain mistrust of the population towards their own leaders, accused of weakness, of not being assertive in taking decisions that may improve the present critical situation as for food supply and in the general economic field, or to curb the numerous forms of the above said black market”.
“One notes”, a report from the Peloponnese wrote in the same period, “an increasing leaning of the public opinion towards our occupying powers, from which they expect the solution of the most pressing problems in order to achieve a recovery of the Hellenic nation”. […] The attitude of the [Fascists] towards using economic benefits to get consent strongly contributed to raise this type of pro‐Italian leaning among the population.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
You may have already inferred this from the note about the factory strike, but I would like to emphasize that collaboration with the enemy is not always a simple matter of a personal choice; usually it was, to borrow a phrase from Timothy Brook, a social choice; something probable given the circumstances that the ruling class or the conditions more generally imposed on the collaborators, and it is easy to see parallels between this and how capitalism gives us (especially in the Southern world) little choice but to work for the upper classes.
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