The invasion of the German army in 1941 brought Hitler's New Order to Greece, a world of ruined settlements, starving populations, and absolute cataclysmic visions. Drawing on rich firsthand testimonies and previously untouched archival sources, Mark Mazower describes the governance and economic exploitation of Greece by the Axis powers, the collapse of an entire society amidst terror and hunger, and its rebirth through the institutions and practices of mass resistance.
Daily life under foreign rule as well as that of the guerrillas in the mountains of Free Greece are presented within the unprecedented material and psychological conditions of total war: civilian citizens and villagers targeted in clearance operations, Jews on their way to concentration camps, Resistance fighters, collaborators, black marketeers, and traitors are the characters through whom the vivid narrative reconstructs the turbulent and contradictory experience of the Occupation. However, the war is also examined from the perspective of the occupier: the words and deeds of ordinary soldiers or officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS (such as the young Kurt Waldheim, whose activities in occupied Greece inspired this study) reveal the beliefs and values that supported the Nazi policy of violence, terror, and the Final Solution.
Richly illustrated with photographs from German, British, and Greek sources, the book offers a revealing and often moving view of the greatest Greek tragedy of the century: one that closed one day with the celebrations of Liberation only to reopen the next amidst the fires of the Civil War.