cover image Inside Hitlers Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44

Inside Hitlers Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44

Mark Mazower. Yale University Press, $37.5 (462pp) ISBN 978-0-300-05804-8

Drawing on eyewitness accounts and previously untapped archives, Mazower's notable study offers a detailed chronicle of the German occupation of Greece and the rise of the resistance movement. He traces the rapid growth of the National Liberation Front/People's Liberation Army after communist activists created an organization that harnessed the anti-Axis sentiment of the populace at large, and describes the bloody reprisal campaigns launched by the Wehrmacht against the guerrillas in the mountains. Mazower also presents a documented account of the fate of Greek Jewry between 1941 and 1944, the first of its kind in English. He covers the bitter fighting between British and Greek forces after the October 12, 1944, liberation of Athens and the internecine clashes that led to civil war. Finally, he reveals new details of the systematic oppression of the Greek Left after the liberation. As late as the 1960s, Greece's prisons were crowded with men and women whose only crime was to have fought against the Germans. Mazower teaches international relations and modern history at the University of Sussex in England. Photos. (Nov.)