Interview , | 05/01/2026 : “They died with their fists raised”

After more than 80 years, previously unknown photographs documenting the execution of 200 Greek anti-fascists during the German occupation of Greece have surfaced. They were listed on eBay by a Belgian military memorabilia dealer and were discovered by chance. The Greek government acquired them shortly after. In a conversation with Boris Kanzleiter and Vangelis Koltsidas of RLS’s Greece office, renowned historian Menelaos Charalambidis explains why the photos have shaken the collective memory, what historical contexts they reveal, and why they continue to spark political debates even today.

Pictures of the mass shooting of 200 antifascist Greek resistance fighters by the Nazi occupation forces on 1st of May 1944 in a suburb of Athens have emerged. The pictures provoked an outcry in the Greek public. Can you describe the events of 1944?

On April 27, 1944, in an ambush by fighters of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) outside Molai, in the Peloponnese, Major General Franz Krech and three members of his escort were killed. In retaliation, the German occupation authorities killed every man they encountered along the 70 kilometer route from small town of Molai to Sparta and ordered the execution of 200 communists in Athens, despite the fact that the ambush site was 300 kilometers from the capital. At the same time, on their own initiative, Greek armed units collaborating with the German authorities executed another 100 people in southern Peloponnese.

On the symbolic day of May 1st 1944, 200 detainees from the Haidari concentration camp, which operated under SS administration in the western suburbs of Athens, were taken to the Kaisariani Shooting Range, requisitioned by the German occupation authorities and turned into a site of mass executions. There they were executed by men of the Wehrmacht. This execution is depicted in the photographs that were recently discovered.

At least 157 of the 200 were pre-war communist political prisoners who had been arrested by the Greek security authorities of the dictatorial regime imposed by General Ioannis Metaxas and King George II (1936–1941). These prisoners were among the approximately 2,000 communists handed over by the Greek authorities to the German army when it invaded and occupied Greece in April 1941. Among them was the entire leadership of the Communist Party, including its General Secretary, Nikos Zachariadis, who was later transferred to the Dachau concentration camp.

The pre-war communist political prisoners were led before the firing squad on May Day 1944 not because they had taken part in any act of resistance, they had remained continuously imprisoned from the 1930s until the day of their execution, but solely because of their political identity.

This execution was the largest carried out in Athens during the Occupation period and, more than almost any other event, has become deeply engraved in collective memory.

What is the symbolic significance of the Kaisariani Shooting Range? What meaning does it have for the Greek left?

The Kaisariani Shooting Range is perhaps the most important site of memory and martyrdom in Greece for the period of the Occupation. The German occupation authorities executed at least 620 Greek resistance fighters there, as well as 20 Italian and 5 German anti-fascists.

The vast majority of those executed at the Kaisariani Shooting Range were communists and members of the National Liberation Front (EAM), the largest Greek resistance organization, founded on September 27, 1941, at the initiative of the Communist Party of Greece and with the participation of three smaller socialist parties. EAM was not only the largest resistance organization, but also the most mass-based political organization in the history of the modern Greek state. It remains one of the most emblematic periods in the history of the Greek Left.

From the years of the Occupation and particularly after the end of the war, the Shooting Range acquired legendary status and emerged as one of the principal symbols of resistance and struggle for the Greek people. Poems and songs were written both about the site in general and specifically about the execution of the 200, visual artists depicted the executions in paintings and engravings, and numerous documentaries were produced.

For all these reasons, the Kaisariani Shooting Range holds a distinct place in the history and collective memory of the Greek Left.

The pictures were taken by a German army officer named Hermann Hoyer. What do we know about him?

Hermann Heuer was born in 1903 in Berlin and served as a sergeant in the 1012th Fortress Infantry Battalion of the Wehrmacht. He arrived in Greece in late 1943 and departed in September 1944, during the withdrawal of the German occupation troops from mainland Greece, which was completed by the end of October.

Like many other Wehrmacht soldiers, he photographed various locations in Greece that he passed through or where his unit was stationed. In his photo album, in addition to the images of the execution of the 200, there are also photographs from the funeral of the German General Krech, who commanded the division to which Heuer’s battalion belonged.

Is the fact that the someone took pictures of the executions surprising? Do we have similar evidence from comparable historical circumstances, was it common practice for the Nazi occupation forces to systematically document such events, or is this an exception?

The photographs we know from the German occupation troops in Greece are, in their overwhelming majority, touristic in nature: men of the Wehrmacht posing at various monuments, such as the Acropolis in Athens and the White Tower in Thessaloniki, as well as in moments of leisure, swimming at beaches or dining in taverns.

More rarely, among these photographs, we find others depicting operations suppressing resistance activities, such as the brutal killing of unarmed demonstrators in the center of Athens on July 22, 1943. In 1980, the Greek public was shaken when photographs came to light of the mass execution of civilians, residents of the village of Kondomari in Crete.

To understand the ways and motives behind these photographs, we need to focus our research on the German photographic archives of the Second World War. Most originated from soldiers and officers creating personal mementos of their military service. These were photographs placed in albums and kept in thousands of German homes.

Those with a propagandistic character were taken by professional photographers serving in or attached to German units and were channeled to the appropriate authorities, aiming to visually reinforce Nazi Germany’s propaganda narrative about the war.

We do not have a clear answer to the question of whether Nazi forces systematically documented their crimes in order to certify them, in a kind of accounting logic within the framework of the mass extermination of civilians and resistance fighters.

How significant are these pictures as evidence, and what do they bring to light?

These photographs constitute extremely important evidence for the study and documentation of the crimes committed by German occupation troops in Greece. They reveal the standardized method through which the Germans sought to punish the Greek people for resisting.

We see images of the procedures repeated each time executions were carried out at the Kaisariani Shooting Range: German military trucks entered the Haidari concentration camp and the prisoners were loaded onto them. In the back of the trucks stood four armed German soldiers—clearly visible in the photographs—with their weapons pointed inward at the detainees. The convoy then made its way to the Shooting Range.

As the route of the trucks was publicly known, residents of Athens would wait along the sidewalks to collect the notes that prisoners threw onto the road and deliver them to their families. These were their final messages—brief words of love and farewell to their loved ones, along with their names and home addresses.

The photographs then show the site of the Shooting Range: the narrow passage between the stone walls through which the prisoners were led to the place of execution. We see the wall in front of which they were positioned to be shot. We also see the entrance of the Shooting Range, with the discarded clothes of the previous group of twenty who had already been executed.

In the prefecture of Attica alone, the German occupation authorities executed at least 1,600 people in dozens of mass executions. The number of victims rises to more than 4,500 if other losses inflicted in the same geographical area are included such as the persecution of the Jews of Athens, battles, individual murders, deaths in labor camps.

These retaliatory executions were not carried out following any trial or judicial sentence. No charges had been brought against those executed, and most had no involvement whatsoever in the resistance actions in reprisal for which they were led before the firing squad. They were not detainees in the legal sense, but hostages of the German occupation authorities.

The German occupiers used the Haidari concentration camp as a “human reservoir,” from which they drew individuals for execution, aiming to break the Greek people’s spirit of resistance.

Despite the enormous blood toll paid by the people of Attica, as well as by Greece as a whole, the Nazi occupation forces failed to reduce the intensity of the Greek resistance movement, which was one of the strongest in occupied Europe.

What is the mood in Greece following the emergence of the photographs – is there emotional impact but also potentially a mobilization of far-right reflexes?

The discovery of the photographs caused an enormous shock in Greek society. The images spread instantly across social media, and the story was covered by all major mass media outlets.

I believe they made such a powerful impact because they depict people with an attitude toward life very different—if not entirely alien—to the dominant values of today’s European societies. In an era in which ideas have been fiercely attacked on a global scale, and where a culture that glorifies the individual prevails, photographs suddenly appeared showing people walking proudly toward the firing squad not as isolated individuals, but as a collective—as comrades; people going to their deaths for an idea, for the idea of communism.

They were people who looked their executioners in the eye, who died with raised fists, singing the national anthem, the anthem of EAM, and “The Internationale”; people who did not break, even though they lived under conditions incomparably harsher than those we experience today.

At a time marked by authoritarianism, the dominance of far-right agendas, and the weakening of institutional legitimacy,  when many are sinking into inertia, feeling powerless in the face of their political opponents’ overwhelming strength, these photographs send a clear message: no struggle is in vain, and organized collective political action has been, remains, and will continue to be the main path toward a genuinely democratic society.

Equally striking was the reaction of the Right to the photographs. The responses were revealing: from vulgar comments on social media to unacceptable statements by Greek far-right ministers in the Mitsotakis government and the awkward stance of certain centrists who often display their aversion to anything associated with the Left.

The Greek Right was unsettled not only because it does not see itself in the resistance movement of the Occupation, but also because many collaborators with the German occupiers later filled its ranks in the postwar period. The emotions and questions sparked by the photographs significantly challenged right-wing and far-right propaganda, which for decades has systematically slandered the actions of the Left, and especially the resistance movement of EAM. Within just a few hours, these images created a major rupture in the regime of oblivion and silence that right-wing governments had imposed for decades.

An unexpected event—the emergence of these photographs—led large parts of Greek society to feel proud of the communists who walked defiantly toward death. The way they look at us from the past compels us to rethink the present.

Have these photographs reopened the discussion about reparations for German war crimes?

For most of Greek society, the issue of claiming German reparations was never truly settled. Although a full 80 years have passed since the end of the war, it remains unresolved. What has been lacking is the political will on the part of Greek governments to pursue a substantive and systematic claim against the German state. I understand that this issue involves significant difficulties, given Germany’s political and economic stature, yet it is it is first and foremost a moral matter. A country that inflicted such suffering on another cannot expect the issue to be resolved simply by offering occasional apologies.

These photographs render an important service in this dregard. They have brought back to the forefront the brutality of the Nazis and the immense human cost paid by Greece, especially for young people, who are not really taught about the period of the Occupation in school

Historians and researchers have sought to to highlight the importance of the Greek resistance movement and the crimes of the German occupiers for years. These photographs accomplished that within a couple of days.

Wounds of such magnitude as those inflicted by the German occupation army on Greek society do not heal merely with the passage of time, nor do they fade into oblivion. The atrocities of the Occupation are not forgotten. 

What are the demands of left-wing and anti-fascist organizations regarding the use of the pictures, and is there also any organization or institution that has undertaken specific action in response to the incident?

The policy of forgetting that has prevailed at the institutional level regarding the events of the Occupation has resulted in Greece being the only European country that has not established a central reference institution for the events of World War II.

In the past, I took the initiative to promote the idea of creating a central Museum of the National Resistance in Athens. The issue of the photographs has rekindled that debate. An  institution like that could identify and acquire historical material, such as these photographs that have deeply moved us, in order to ensure access for research  and to prevent it from ending up in private collections.

Through the research programs it would design and implement it could also contribute to the scholarly documentation of  human losses and material destruction caused by the war and the Occupation. This is an element directly linked to the claim for war reparations from Germany.

Finally,  it could address the significant deficit in public memory through its activities and the creation of a network of memorials. This institution could also cooperate with regional Museums of the National Resistance already operating in various municipalities and cities across the country to highlight their work. It could also organize public history initiatives such as public lectures on World War II, historical walking tours, exhibitions, documentaries, and so on, contributing to contemporary struggles against fascism.