German crew in Greece: The horror in Block 15

The Greek parliament has decided to demand claims for further reparations payments from Germany for war crimes during the Second World War. It's about many billions of euros. This historical report, first published in August 2018, recalls the crimes of the Wehrmacht, which are the subject of the current debate.

"Block 15" - the taxi driver in the center of Athens seems to have heard of it. How exactly you get there, he does not know. From where too. He can not drive there by taxi anyway. To block 15 you go on foot. And only after written notification, days in advance.

Block 15 stands on a military army barracks area in the Athens suburb of Chaidari. The two-story box once belonged to the largest and most notorious German concentration camp on Greek soil. Freshly plastered and framed by flowering shrubs, it now looks disturbingly friendly.

For many Greeks, Block 15 symbolizes the resistance during the occupation during the Second World War. Above all, however, he stands for a silent treatment of this epoch. For in Greece, historians criticize, the time of the German occupation is invisible. Not because she was a blessing. On the contrary, despite the Nazi war atrocities.

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Eleni Georganta was 14 and lived with her family in the noble suburb of Kifissia, when the Wehrmacht invaded Athens in April 1941:

"I went down to the square to look at the Germans, and the tanks came in. I remember: they wore those helmets with the ribbons, helmets they could tie in. Many tanks drove past us."

At home, it put a beating. The father had forbidden to run to the Germans. Eleni soon understood why. She saw the bombing of the airport, the dead. Then the school closed, with winter came the famine.

"There was nothing left, neither turtles nor hedgehogs, nothing, we ate everything imaginable: grass, stinging nettles, thistles."

The hotels of Kifissia became hospitals for wounded from the Albania front. Eleni volunteered to be in touch with the youth organization of the Communist-controlled National Liberation Front. She went on demonstrations and wrote slogans on house walls.

"Freedom or death, that was my watchword, which I also wrote when the gendarme grabbed me."

In March 1943, she was arrested. Eleni thought the Greek security police would let her go because she was only 17.

"They put me on a stool, then somebody kicked me from the back of my back and I crashed into the desk so I spit blood and asked for some water, they brought me water, I poured everything over, they started Then I asked if I could go to the bathroom, they took me to a toilet with a window high up, I do not deny that I climbed up - then the door opened. "

The escape attempt was unsuccessful. Eleni got blows on the soles of her feet and her hair was cut off. A military court sentenced her to death. The bishop achieved that the sentence was changed to life sentence - to sit down in the KA Chaidari administered by the SS.

"The women were tortured in Block 15"

More than 70 years later, Eleni told Georganta about it - in one of 90 eyewitness interviews. Historians of the Free University of Berlin and the National and Kapodistrias University of Athens have collected memories of the occupation - almost at the last moment, because all witnesses are very old.

"History piles up everywhere," says project collaborator Iasonas Chandrinos, "but at the level of recovery, we're in prehistoric times." It was silent on the sensitive topic in the fifties and sixties during the conservative Adenauerzeit, so as not to burden the economic relations with Germany. Even after that, the rulers in Greece had for decades no interest in enhancing the - mostly communist - resistance.

Athens under the swastika

1264 days took the occupation of Greece by the Germans. They destroyed hundreds of villages, massacred residents and exploited the land. Tens of thousands of Greeks died during the great famine of the first winter.

Signature in the Federal Archives: Photo 101I-164-0368-14A
To the digital image archive of the Federal Archives

Invasion of Athens: On April 27, 1941, German tanks rolled into the city. The occupation of Greece was originally not planned. Only after Hitler's ally, Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, had invaded the country in October 1940, but his troops had been pushed back, sent the German Reich Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.

Signature in the Federal Archives: Photo 101I-164-0357-29A
To the digital image archive of the Federal Archives

On the day of the invasion of Athens, German soldiers raised the swastika flag on the Acropolis . A few days later, two young Greeks brought them down again at night - as a sign of resistance.

Signature in the Federal Archives: Photo 101I-165-0419-19A
To the digital image archive of the Federal Archives

German bombers over Athens: With airplanes of the type Dornier Do 215 attacked the air force in April 1941 strategically important goals like the airport near the capital and the port of Piraeus.

On October 12, 1944, the German occupiers withdrew from Athens and left a free city. Three days later, this photo was taken. It shows British paratroopers and Greek policemen in front of a former German barracks. On the wall is still the propaganda slogan "Germany is the victory", this paint someone two British "V" for "Victory" .

For a moment, it seemed as if the war for the Greeks was over. But the attempt to unite left and right forces in the country with a joint government failed. A civil war followed. In the "Battle of Athens" in December 1944 faced both sides: here the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) with its armed arm, the National People's Liberation Army ELAS, there supported by British troops regular police and army forces. The shot shows a British soldier during the December fights.

Changing history: British soldiers arrested by Greeks during the December 1944 uprising. The photo was taken in front of a house (on the left) on Korai Street, which despite its small age already had a turbulent history: Built in the thirties as the headquarters of the National Insurance Institute , the office building was confiscated by the Greek authorities at the beginning of the war and in 1941 by the Military Command. And a third time after the withdrawal of the Germans in autumn 1944 - this time from the National Liberation Front (EAM). The left lost the December Uprising, in early January British troops quartered themselves in the building, and then the Greek government took over again - and finally the insurance it belonged to. In the background is the University of Athens.

The notorious "Block 15" of the former German concentration camp in Chaidari in the fifties

Little is known about German concentration camps; There were 36 in the country, it is believed. "There is no scientific study, even statistical data hardly exists," says historian Anna Maria Droumpouki. The research was almost only contemporary witness statements available.

In the summer of 2018, a communications officer at the Greek Telecommunication School will take him over the barracks area to Block 15. He has a one-and-a-half page paper in moderate English: "Short Story on Block 15," he reads.

Why the monument is called Block 15? The officer shrugs, he is no expert, guiding visitors is simply his job.

Eleni Georganta came to Chaidari in September 1943:

"We women came to the sixth block." It was terrible. "When you went out to the morning roll call, you were taken off your clothes, you had nothing, just change clothes, then the captain came in and did the inspection, with a dog, a whip If he slapped someone on the back, there was no piece of meat to hang, that was all there was to it, then there was no torture, above all others, the women were taken to Block 15 led and tortured there. "

The entrance of block 15 is still barred. Inside a corridor with doors to the narrow, high cells, the window holes so high up that you can not see out. In addition, a shed that was once the toilet, open, without doors.

Shooting ground as practice area for shooters

Unlike the façade, the interiors were kept in their original state, but probably only from the eighties, because only then was Block 15 officially a monument. According to historian Droumpouki, most of the prisoners came from left-wing resistance as "a reason for the conservative governments to continue to use the camp militarily and deny access to the public" - until 1982, even to the few surviving inmates. Eleni Georganta remembers:

"If there were executions, we knew it, since we had tea and jam and a slice of bread, so we knew they would take somebody."

May 1, 1944 was such a day. Four days earlier, fighters of the Greek People's Liberation Army had killed the German Lieutenant General Franz Krech and three companions. In retaliation, the military commander announced the shooting of 200 Communists: prisoners from the Chaidari concentration camp.

"Three days later, they came back and also took six women from our group, strangely, they always took two from the list, one left them there, and I was there too, I thought it was my turn. then the commander grabbed me and pulled me back. "

The executions took place at the firing range of Kaisariani in the east of Athens. After the war, the Greek Schützenbund used the place of execution - as a training ground. It was not until 1984 that the government declared the shooting gallery a monument and prohibited its use. The Schützenbund argues today in court for the training field.

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visited the monument in 2015 just hours after his swearing-in for a symbolic appearance: At the site of the Wehrmacht crime, he resigned Rosen - and announced that he would take action against Germany and the austerity measures in the Eurozone.

On an ordinary day, the memorial, surrounded by high walls, is quiet. And closed. In the park around it Athens go for a walk.

From the horrors of the occupation, Athens is a more accessible place right in the city center - six meters underground. Anyone who strolls along Koraistraße or sits in one of the always well-stocked sidewalk cafés barely notices the entrance to the cellar. Number 4, headquarters of the National Insurance Institute, was considered to be one of the most modern office buildings when it was completed in 1938: with elevators, central heating and a two-storey air-raid shelter. The massive gas protection doors were supplied by Mannesmann Stahlblechbau AG from Germany.

Then in 1941 the German troops arrived. Greek authorities seized the house and left it to the occupiers. When they left in October 1944, they took everything with them - except for a huge swastika flag, which blew on the house.

"Others gave their lives, I mean legs"

The bomb shelter was a prison, according to witnesses. At an inspection in 1990, experts found that the Germans at least twice re-plastered and painted - and covered countless sketches and characters. Hidden in doorways, at water tanks and at the sewerage were scraps of paper with notes.

The footsteps gave historians an idea of ​​what must have happened in the cellar. People of unknown numbers, including children, were locked up here in total darkness. Some were released, others to the concentration camp.

As Eleni Georgantas life went on, the historians also recorded. Their personal history also shows why people in Greece were interested in this epoch only so late - and for so many decades at least.

Eleni was released in September 1944 and re-arrested three years later. In Greece, the civil war was raging. In 1944, the young woman took part in the December uprising of the left and then lived underground, until she was betrayed and sent into exile. "It was worse than the Chaidari camp," she says bitterly in retrospect. They were taken to various prisons, including Makronissos.

"They put 40 of us in a tent, then a Special Forces soldier came in with his whip and hit us, causing us to sweat blood and water, my legs, which got all of them, is unimaginable, so they carry me Well, others have given their lives, my legs, what the hell. "

1952 ended the captivity of Eleni Georganta. An officer of the State Security Service in 1966 took care of the destruction of their file - thereby protecting them from further persecution during the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974.