[.ca] Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, ... (ISBN 0300089236)

A valuable contribution to modern historical understanding:
Meticulously researched and thoughtfully written, Mazower's Book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of European history in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the decade of the 1940s. As the title suggests, this is a work about the German occupation of Greece. The unique character of Greece's political, social and economic structures make the story especially complicated. The suffering of the Greeks during the occupation was particularly intense. The famine that caused many thousands of deaths is a part of the suffering. So were the occupiers' reprisals at resistance activity. The author offers insightful analyses of the work and organization of the resistance, including various Communist groups, to show how and why the communists were able to carry on a civil war against the Athens government once the war was over. In an excellent chapter on the suffering of Jewish Greeks, he details how about fifty thousand Jews -- mostly from Salonika -- were deported to death camps in Poland and elsewhere. Personally, I take some comfort in Mazower's statement on page 159 that, in general, most Orthodox Christian Greeks made a determined effort to save their Jewish compatriots from the invaders by hiding them and providing them with food. Mazower has recently edited a book of fourteen essays titiled After the War Was Over, exploring the question of how collaborators were dealt with in the years following the occupation. ...

Idiosyncratic narrative:
It has long been traditional amongst certain kinds of disconnected intellectual to maintain that the Greek communists were romantic heroes. Much as it is pleasant to create illusions and myths that accord with one's own political prejudices, the slenderest acquaintance with the primary sources makes it completely impossible to believe in this one. We have been unable to conclude otherwise than that, when they were not totally useless, perfidious, and parasitic they were unspeakably barbaric. Now that the cold war is over, there is no longer any vested interest in pretending otherwise. Mr. Mazower's narrative is idiosyncratic and biased. EAM/ELAS was nothing but a carnivorous plant. EAM/ELAS was planted on Greek soil by the Communist party of Greece (KKE) and the Oxbridge types of SOE. EAM/ELAS was fertilized with British gold sovereigns, and was fed with the corpses of the Greek people who systematically, and very often in a barbarous way, its thugs murdered.

Hitler's Greece:
Overall this is a good book. It is not the most organized book nor the most enthralling in terms of colorful language and storytelling, but informs the reader in a way that makes it hard to quit reading. This book isn't a collection of eyewitness stories, though it has many clips here and there from eyewitnesses. Instead, it tells the story of what the average Greek went through (famine, massacres, deportation, plundering, torture, etc). It deals mainly with the guerilla warfare that took over the whole country. Mazower explains how the different groups (communist, Nazi, Greek royalist, British, etc) dealt with each other. What is surprising is that their was no "good" or "bad" group; all of them made mistakes and did unspeakable things. Mazower seems to write completely unbiasedly and informatively. The only reason this book didn't get five stars is because it is somewhat disorganzed and can be confusing. Those who want to read about Germans and Nazism in Greece may be disappointed. But those who want to learn how the war changed Greece and her people forever will not be let down.

Hitler and Greece:
If you like reading about Hitler, and if you're interested in Greece, then have I got the book for you.

History rewritting at its best:
The title of the book is misleading and misinforming to say the least, unless he (the author) wants by resuscitating the past to justify the present and capitalize for the future within the European Union. In fact the Axis powers divided Greece into three zones of occupation. The Germans controlled Athens-Piraeus, Thessaloniki and the area between Aliakmon and Strymon rivers as well the Aegean Islands and Crete; the area from the Strymon river to the Greek Turkish frontier was annexed by the Bulgarians; the rest of the country went to the Italians until the Italian armistice of 8th September 1943. All the occupiers were as brutal as their Germans allies were. The Germans were not either more or less brutal than the Anglo-Americans, Russians and French in Germany after the war (Perry Biddiscombe, 'Werewolf!), British in Cyprus (The Black Book of the British crimes in Cyprus, unpublished in the archives of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.), French in Algeria (General Paul Aussaresses, "the Battle of the Casbah) as it is the case of the occupiers around the world and the entire history of mankind. The real beast during this tragic period was the communist barbaric ELAS who fell upon the unarmed Greek people and murdered, murdered, murdered. It should have been interesting "professor" Mazower to have included in his book a couple of numbers: i.e. how many Germans were killed by ELAS activities, how many Greeks were executed by the German and how many Greeks were murdered by the ELAS and its cohorts of thugs. The real heroes of this tragic period, the Greek Governments in occupied Greece are vilified and called "collaborationists". The real collaborationists were the politicians who escaped in Middle East and on the payroll of the British spent the days conspiring against each others and the night in the cabarets of Alexandria (Egypt) a behavior that forced the Nobel prize George Seferis to write: "the ineptitude and stupidity of the Greek ruling class makes you vomit" (G. Seferis. "War Diaries") The famine of 1941-42, the most tragic event of the period which had reached genocidal proportion, an estimated 7% of the prewar 7.5 millions of the Greek population died because of the famine, is dealt in such a way to put the entire blame on the Germans, and whitewash the British. In reality the British blockade of the Mediterranean was the major cause of starving the Greek people to death. (Pau Maun, "Per Arma Caritas" In Greek). Blockade that was enforced selectively to target the Greek people, while the Vichy France had all the Mediterranean supply routes open. It has been commented that the "only direct blockade advantage that the Allies could have hoped to draw from the starvation of Greece was the embarrassment of German transport arrangements, rather than any appreciable diminution of Axis supplies". This was obviously hardly worth the tens of thousand of deaths by famine in Greece. As far as the annihilation of the Greek Jewry "professor" Mazower offers the paradigmatic truth. The fate of the Jews in Greece was sealed by the impious alliance between Nazism and Zionism. The Germans would not be able to round up the Jews in Thessaloniki, or Salonika, if he wishes, without help from the Zionist groups. Along the Germans the so-called Albala Command operated in an efficient and effective way to deliver the Jews to their exterminators. (Matarasso, "Not all of them died", in Greek and very rare book,) Concluding the book is the best example of "when the myth becomes fact, write the myth".