In 1936, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas became a pro-Nazi dictator with the support of King Geórgios II. Metaxas’ death in 1941 bolstered the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) anti-Nazi resistance. The KKE had established ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army, to fight the occupying Nazis. Until 1943, ELAS was initially trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret unit designed to train European paramilitaries. Indicative of the power of Greek leftism, ELAS’s political wing, the National Liberation Front (EAM), boasted 2 million members.
The British Foreign Office fought to restore Geórgios II, explicitly citing his anti-left credentials. Working with Cyprus’s fascist battalion X, the Brits set up a new army unit, the Hellenic Raiding Force, to hunt and kill ELAS members. The Syntagma Square demonstrations in 1944 against the British and fascists ended in a massacre of 25 protestors, including a young child. A year later at the Yalta/Crimea Conference, Stalin agreed to allow Britain and the US to occupy Greece in exchange for Bulgaria and Romania. In 1947, Britain asked the US for support to purge leftist ideologies from the Greek public’s mind.
— source thegrayzone.com | T.J. Coles | Apr 20, 2022