In 2014 The Observer published an article headlined “Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret”. The authors alleged that in December 1944 British troops shot and killed unarmed civilian demonstrators on the streets of Athens, Greece. The subtitle of the article states:
When 28 civilians were killed in Athens, it wasn’t the Nazis who were to blame, it was the British. Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith reveal how Churchill’s shameful decision to turn on the partisans who had fought on our side in the war sowed the seeds for the rise of the far right in Greece today
And the caption under one of the photographs says:
A day that changed history: the bodies of unarmed protestors shot by the police and the British army in Athens
A few paragraphs into their article the authors write:
This was the day [3rd of December 1944], those 70 years ago this week, when the British army, still at war with Germany, opened fire upon – and gave locals who had collaborated with the Nazis the guns to fire upon – a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with whom Britain had been allied for three years.
Thus, was born another element of the Churchillian Black Legend – Winston Churchill's massacre of innocent Greek civilians.
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| Contrary to what The Observer says, these people were not killed by British soldiers. |
The article appeared, on the surface, to be credible. It was written by two distinguished journalists: Ed Vulliamy, a notable war reporter, and Helena Smith, the Guardian’s correspondent for Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. They cite several experts on Greek history and also interviewed eyewitnesses of the event. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that their article has been very influential. Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor wrote in the Washington Post that:
This week’s Oscar rewards yet another hagiography of this odious man [Churchill]. To the Iraqis whom Churchill advocated gassing, the Greek protesters on the streets of Athens who were mowed down on Churchill’s orders in 1944, sundry Pashtuns and Irish, as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands (emphasis added).
The reference to “Greek protestors” links to the article by Vulliamy and Smith.
The Indian news channel WION (World is One News) summarised the events thus:
In the year 1949 [sic], Churchill ordered the British army to fire on the anti-Nazi protestors in Greece...
If you google “Churchill Athens”, Vulliamy and Smith’s essay is the top suggestion out of 4,280,000 results.
There is one problem with the allegation – it is completely untrue.
Fake News
Almost four months after that Vulliamy and Smith’s article was published, Stephen Pritchard was compelled to write a follow-up. This later article proves that the lurid account of British troops gunning down protestors was false. According to Pritchard, after Vulliamy and Smith’s article was published:
Seven Greek historians protested. They said the British had not fired on the crowd, but that Greek police certainly had, and that to present the December confrontation as one fought between the British alongside supporters of the Nazis against the partisans was “a gross misrepresentation” (emphasis added).
This isn’t a controversial point. No one before Vulliamy and Smith had ever claimed that the British Army shot at a civilian crowd on the 3rd of December 1944. Greek police certainly did, but there was no British involvement in that massacre. It frankly boggles the mind that this accusation passed even the most basic fact-check review.
What followed after this protest by historians is quite revealing as to Weltanschauung of The Observer:
The following week, I ran a clarification, noting the protest by the seven and pointing out that Greek police were also likely to be among those who shot the 28 protesters. I recognise now that it was plainly inadequate in addressing concerns about the article (emphasis added).
So, after being told that they were flat out wrong about British troops killing Greek protestors, The Observer doubled down, merely suggesting that it was “likely” that Greek police were also involved in the shootings. This crosses the line from being reckless with the facts to being deliberately dishonest. The Observer was so keen to portray British troops in a negative light that they just assumed their involvement in the shooting. The slander was allowed to remain in the article despite numerous experts correcting the paper.
The blame for this misinformation shouldn’t fall on the elderly eyewitnesses quoted by Vulliamy and Smith. There were understandable reasons why they misremembered who was responsible for the shooting.
He [historian André Gerolymatos] wrote: “Did the British open fire on the demonstrators on 3 December 1944? The answer is no, but that reality is filtered through perceptions clouded by a day filled with violence and considerable confusion.
“The British did make an effort to peacefully disperse part of the crowd. One explanation is that some protesters easily mistook the use of tracer shells by British armoured units, fired over the heads of the demonstrators, as being directed at them. Another issue that further complicated matters was that the Greek soldiers wore British battledress, as did the Greek gendarmerie. Furthermore, there were American and British soldiers on the roof of the Grand Bretagne Hotel, observing the spectacle. For those on the ground it could have appeared that the gunfire from the police could have been mistaken as originating from the soldiers on the roof of the hotel. Although the police wore grey, they were in concealed positions on the balcony, roof, windows, and behind a wall in front of the police headquarters, making it difficult for the demonstrators to identify whether they were police or soldiers.”
The responsibility for the error lies with Vulliamy and Smith, who apparently did not bother to check this claim to see if it was correct. The Observer is at fault as well. They did not fact-check the article before publication, and they kept it online without removing the allegations. Unless a reader spots the link to Pritchard's article (which they euphemistically call a “column by the readers’ editor”) they will have a completely wrongheaded view of the events of the 3rd of December 1944. As this “readers’ editor” column has been shared a mere 59 times while the original essay has been shared 31,073 times, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of readers have been misled by the article.
The Observer added a correction at the bottom of Vulliamy and Smith's article, but even that is misleading. It implies that it was possible that Greek police also fired on the protestors along with British troops, instead of saying that no British troops were involved:
A group of Greek historians writes concerning this article. It was reported that British troops opened fire on the Greek demonstrators from the Grande Bretagne hotel in Athens on December 3 1944. The hotel was British military headquarters, but the fire from it could also have come from Greek police.
What Actually Happened in Athens
On the morning of the 3rd of December 1944, a large demonstration took place in Athens. This demonstration was mainly left-wing, consisting of ‘communists, socialists, republicans, and antimonarchists’. According to the late André Gerolymatos, a Professor of Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, some people were coerced into attending. The National Liberation Front (EAM) had previously announced that anyone who stayed away would be regarded as an “enemy of the people and dealt with accordingly (Gerolymatos, International Civil War, pp.100-101).
Greek police had cordoned the entrances to the city centre but a number of protestors broke through and advanced to the police station located near the Grande Bretagne Hotel. This was the headquarters of the Allies, i.e., the British. Gerolymatos actually is fairly understanding of the police and makes it clear that this incident wasn’t just an example of far-right Nazi collaborators butchering innocent left-wing protestors:
The policemen had every reason to fear for their lives: as they had served under the jurisdiction of the occupation authorities, the majority of Athenians had, rightly or wrongly, labeled them collaborators. Although many Greek police officials had covertly assisted the resistance and the allies, not enough time had passed since liberation to permit a clear distinction between absolute traitor and patriot. Indeed, some had had to wear the mask of the former in order to assist the latter.
Making matters worse, the Greek government failed to purge the security establishments and civil service of collaborators, whose continued presence now tainted every state official. The government had argued that time was required to conduct a meticulous and judicious purge, but such reasoning was lost on the crowds advancing toward the center of the city in the morning of 3 December 1944. To the half-starved population of Greece, symbols truly mattered, and the gray uniforms of the police invoked the fear and agony of the occupation
The handful of policemen positioned a few yards beyond their station were aware of this reality, and for the previous several hours they had witnessed dozens of wounded fellow officers being carried off on stretchers into the station following clashes with groups of demonstrators. As the crowd got closer and closer, the policemen’s fears turned to panic, and some began to replace their blank rounds with live ammunition.
When the crowd advanced to less than one hundred yards from the police cordon, suddenly a man in military uniform ran out of the station and shouted, “Shoot the bastards!” He then dropped to one knee and began firing his gun. A few seconds later the panic-stricken policemen followed suit.
They did not fire in unison like a disciplined unit, but discharged their weapons sporadically. Some of the officers hesitated for a few seconds; others had remained transfixed by the spectacle before them, but one after another they began to return fire. The first ranks of the crowd fell forward; the fortunate ones found protection behind trees or nearby walls, but most simply lay flat on the ground.
The shooting continued for approximately half an hour, and when it was over twenty-two of the demonstrators remained still, twelve of them dead (Gerolymatos, International Civil War, pp.104-105).
Gerolymatos is one of the experts cited by Vulliamy and Smith, and he is unequivocal that it was Greek policemen who shot demonstrators on the 3rd of December, not British soldiers.
Mark Mazower, Professor of History at Columbia University and another expert cited by Vulliamy and Smith, also wrote that it was Greek police, not the British Army, who fired on protestors:
Shortly before 11 a.m., as thousands of EAM demonstrators entered Constitution Square, several policemen panicked and fired directly into the crowd from the police station which stood at one corner of the square. People fled, but it was discovered later that at least ten had been killed and over fifty injured. The initial reaction of the British 23rd Armoured Brigade, whose men moved in and cleared the square, was that the Greek police had lost their nerve: they had 'dealt rather wildly with the demonstration' and had 'fired unnecessarily' (Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, p.352).
The shooting outraged left-wingers in Athens. Gerolymatos notes:
By noon, a second wave of demonstrators broke through the police cordons and was soon joined by thousands more, until the square was jammed with almost 60,000 people.11 The police retreated to their station and locked themselves inside. Over the next thirty minutes, the remaining police barricades disintegrated as most of the officers discreetly left the scene and sought refuge in nearby private homes or managed to reach the safety of the police headquarters. A few police stragglers near the square, however, were not as fortunate. They were seized by dozens of hands, punched, kicked. and spat upon. Their protestations of innocence were drowned out by a torrent of verbal abuse. The lucky ones were dragged off to the nearest lamppost and lynched; some, however, could not be pried away from the clutches of the mob, which, intoxicated by raw animal savagery, tore the men literally from limb to limb (Gerolymatos, International Civil War, p.105)
You know things are bad when being lynched makes you one of the lucky ones!
The next day shooting took place throughout the city between ELAS – EAM’s Paramilitary wing - and the police, and between ELAS and their political opponents. By mid-afternoon ELAS had captured most of the police stations in Athens. Usually, police officers who surrendered were summarily executed by ELAS insurgents, either by being shot or hanged. Gerolymatos mentions one particularly gruesome incident:
In Piraeus, a British unit attempted to interpose itself between a police station and ELAS, but faced overwhelming opposition. After a tense verbal exchange, the guerrillas dragged out several of their prisoners and in front of the British soldiers proceeded to gouge out the eyes of these hapless prisoners. The British soldiers gawked, transfixed by the horror unfolding before them and disgusted by their impotency to interfere. The screams of the policemen reverberated along the empty streets, and were quickly reduced to low guttural moans, but the ordeal was far from over. For a few minutes, the ELAS executioners just grinned while savoring the spectacle of torment and the vulnerability of the British. Then, they took out butcher’s cleavers and began to hack off the forearms of the blind policemen and continued slashing until the bodies resembled heaps of human pulp. The agony, for victims and spectators, ended when the policemen were put out of their misery by bullets to their brains. The tormentors exploited such sadistic brutality on several levels—by exercising of their total superiority over their victims, and by forcing the British to observe the atrocity they made them de facto participants (Gerolymatos, International Civil War, p.108).
Churchill received updates on the situation in Athens throughout the 4th of December. That night he telegraphed the commander of British forces in Greece, Lt Gen Ronald Scobie:
Do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority with which we are working….Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress….It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary (quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, p.807; emphasis added).
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| A paratrooper takes cover during fighting in Athens, Dec 1944 |
Fighting with communist insurgents was, at that time, controversial given the role communist partisans played in the fight against the Germans. It even led to a vote of no confidence in Churchill on the 8th of December, although Churchill won it comfortably at 279-30.
Churchill's statements show that his motivation was the defence of democracy in Greece, not thwarting democracy.
Democracy, I say, is not based on violence or terrorism, but on reason, on fair play, on freedom, on respecting other people's rights as well as their ambitions. Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States. That is my general description of the foundation upon which we should approach the various special instances on which I am going to dwell. During the war, of course, we have had to arm anyone who could shoot a Hun. Apart from their character, political convictions, past records and so if they were out to shoot a Hun we accepted them as friends and tried to enable them to fulfil their healthy instincts
The Road to Civil War
Churchill and the Greek Monarchy
The King is the servant of his people. He makes no claim to rule them. He submits himself freely to the judgement of the people as soon as normal conditions are restored. He places himself and his Royal House entirely at the disposition of the Greek nation. Once the German invader has been driven out, Greece can be a republic or a monarchy, entirely as the people wish (quoted in Gerolymatos, International Civil War, pp.51-52).
Communist Shenanigans
Were the Greek Communist forces, who were strongly armed, to seize power, a massacre might follow. This would be very injurious to our prestige, and might even add Greece to the post-war Balklan Slav block which now showed signs of forming under Russian influence, and from which we were anxious to keep Greece detached” (quoted in Gerolymatos, International Civil War, p.98).
Whitewashing Red Terror
Although some of the victims, particularly in the towns, had been working for the German occupation authorities, the great majority had not. Indeed, they were described by EAM cadres as “reactionaries” rather than “traitors”. They were typically notables: mayors, doctors, merchants, petty officers, that is, individuals who were seen as both potentially disloyal to the EAM cause and able to influence many villagers. Their potential disloyalty was connected to what were rather trivial issues: traveling to a (German-occupied) town too often, hiding or refusing to hand in a gun, refusing to pay a tax or perform some duty requested by EAM, criticizing EAM or even poking fun at a local EAM member in the coffee shop, and so on (Kalyvas, 'Red Terror', p.148).
The role of the kin of EAM’s victims is central in understanding the wave of terror launched by the Security Battalions. As soon as they realized that the Security Battalions were willing to help them overthrow EAM in their villages, the victims’ kin lobbied the SB to organize raids and supplied the Battalions with crucial information about the EAM organization of their villages. More than sixty years later, many among these people have no qualms about their actions, which they view as either just retribution for the distress suffered under EAM rule or as the inevitable result of the only defense that was available to them. For instance, a man whose parents had both been killed by EAM before he joined the Security Battalions, told me: “I went to the Germans. What should I have done since there was no one else to turn to?” (Kalyvas, 'Red Terror', p.151).
ELAS was also beginning to lose popularity because of the hardships endured by the mountain villages. Veloukhiotis, in particular, exacted terrible vengeance upon any villager suspected of aiding the enemies of ELAS—not just the Germans. Often, he even forced members of the AMM to watch helplessly as he tortured a simple peasant for some minor offense. In the village of Mavrolithary, ELAS arrested fourteen men simply because they belonged to a rival band. The punishments, designed to set an example for all the local inhabitants, usually took place in the village square and set the pattern of death and degradation that continued until 1949. On this occasion, Veloukhiotis’ henchmen grabbed the first prisoner and stripped him of his clothes. Then in front of the villagers, they tied the man to a table, spread eagle. The victim quickly realized what was in store and vainly pleaded for mercy. In a few minutes, his shrill cries reverberated in the village square as the executioner, splattered with blood, slowly proceeded to hack away at the man’s body, pausing enough for each blow to take effect and prolong the process for as long as possible. The savagery went on until a British officer present pulled out his revolver and terminated the man’s agony. Veloukhiotis, shaking with anger, had to be restrained from killing the officer (Gerolymatos, International Civil War, pp.88-90)
Conclusion
The claim that Churchill ordered British troops to fire on an unarmed protest in Athens on the 3rd of December 1944 is baseless. Greek police, not British soldiers, shot at a demonstration that day. They did so for their own reasons, and not because they were following Churchill's orders. After the massacre, there was widespread fighting throughout Athens and Churchill ordered the British Army to put down the insurgents. Churchill was not attempting to crush democracy, but to save it from what appeared to him to be a communist coup d'état.
While the massacre of the demonstrators was appalling, it is misleading to describe it as marking the beginning of the Greek Civil War. The first phase of the civil war began over a year earlier when the communist resistance group ELAS attempted to destroy other resistance organisations. ELAS acted with such savagery that it drove many people into the arms of the German occupiers. Between that, and EAM's shenanigans throughout 1944 to oust the Greek government-in-exile, it is hard to take seriously the claim that Churchill stabbed an ally in the back in December 1944.
Churchill deserves credit though for travelling to Athens - at great personal risk - to facilitate a conference that would bring the warring parties together. It might have ended the fighting, and so Churchill was willing to risk his own life to secure peace. Unfortunately, while the conference took place, the Greek factions could not come to an agreement and so the war continued.
Bibliography
Gerolymatos, André, An International Civil War: Greece, 1943 – 1949 (Yale University Press, 2016)
Gilbert, Martin, Churchill: A Life (Pimlico, 2000)
Kalyvas, Stathis N., 'Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation' in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943 - 1960 (Princeton University Press, 2016), pp.142-183
Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941 – 44 (Yale University Press, 1993)
Roberts, Andrew, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Penguin, 2019)
