Originally published by the International Federation of Resistance Fighters – https://fir.at/en/
With this newsletter, FIR commemorates the liberation of Athens by the armed forces of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) on October 12, 1944. Since the attack of the German and Italian units in April 1941, Greece and its capital Athens lived under Nazi terror. Every day, the occupying forces and their local organs, the notorious security battalions, spread terror and death. They try to break any resistance of the National Liberation Front (EAM) and the morale of the people.
In fact, it was the Communist Party of Greece that called for resistance; that took the initiative to found the EAM; that became the leader of the Greek people’s resistance struggle and the organization of a new life in the liberated areas. At great sacrifice, in the last months of the war, EAM and ELAS organized the struggle for the survival of the people and to save the infrastructure, the port, the facilities, the industrial infrastructure and the factories that the occupying forces threatened to demolish when they left. The Greek people thus made a major contribution to the struggle to smash fascism, in which the USSR played the leading role in the liberation of the occupied countries of Europe.
ELAS dominated in most parts of the country. The people organized in the EAM-ELAS had liberated 90% of the country and had taken their destiny into their own hands by organizing local government, popular justice, popular education, etc. The bourgeois forces were not in control. The bourgeois forces were completely discredited in the consciousness of the population, as they left the people to their fate, went to Cairo and London and called on them to submit to the Nazi occupiers, while some of them openly collaborated with the fascists.
As early as August 1944, when the Communist Party of Greece called on the people to take up armed struggle, the ELAS and the EAM in Athens succeeded in dealing decisive blows to the German fascist troops. By mid-August, the eastern districts were free and the ELAS of Athens controlled all the districts of Attica. Together with the advance of the Allies, the occupying troops were forced to withdraw from Athens. At 9 a.m. on October 12, 1944, the hated swastika flag was taken down from the mast of the Acropolis. In a matter of seconds, Athens was draped in the blue and white flag. For three days, people celebrated an indescribable festival of joy without interruption. On 12 October, people flocked to the streets and took part in the rallies organized by the EAM. The people who had fought with arms and endured the hunger and bullets of the occupiers proclaimed victory.
The Panhellenic Union of Fighters of the Greek Resistance and the Democratic Army of Greece (PEAEA-DSE) is proud of the great struggle of 1941-1944 and the three years of fighting of the DSE that followed, and demands that the Greek government claim the German war reparations, because they are reparations due to our people. The PEAEA-DSE honors the monumental, heroic struggle of the Greek people in the period 1941-1949 and organizes its activities for the defense of historical truth and the preservation of historical memory. The lessons of the history of the Second World War should be kept alive so that people no longer pay for capitalist barbarism; so that they can take their lives into their own hands and organize their societies in a radically different way of development, focused on the fulfillment of human needs, without exploitation, refugee flows and wars.