The Battle of Meligalas (Greek: Μάχη του Μελιγαλά, romanized: Machi tou Meligala) took place during the Axis occupation of Greece in Meligalas in southwestern Greece on 13–15 September 1944. Greek Resistance forces of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) defeated a Security Battalion garrison loyal to the collaborationist government.
Partisan ELAS forces, the military wing of the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM), had begun operating in the Peloponnese from 1942 and in 1943 began to establish their control over the area. In response, the German occupation authorities formed the Security Battalions, which took part not only in anti-guerrilla operations but also in mass reprisals against local civilian populations. The Security Battalions were increasingly targeted by ELAS in 1944. Following the withdrawal of German forces from the Peloponnese in September, a force of about 1,000 Battalionists gathered in Meligalas, where they were quickly surrounded by around 1,200 ELAS partisans. After three days of fighting, the ELAS forces broke the town's defences; victorious, they executed between 700 and 1,100 prisoners and civilians. After news of the massacre spread, the leadership of EAM took steps to ensure a peaceful transition of power in most of the country, limiting reprisal occurrences.
During the post-war period and following the Greek Civil War, the ruling right-wing establishment immortalized the Meligalas massacre as evidence of communist brutality and memorialized the victims as patriotic heroes. Following the end of right-wing rule in 1981, official support of the commemoration ceased. The massacre continues to be commemorated by the descendants of the Battalionists and their ideological sympathizers in the far-right and remains an antifascist point of reference for the far-left in Greece.
Political and military background
Emergence of the Resistance in occupied Messenia
Following the German invasion of Greece in April 1941, German forces were quickly transferred out of Greece for the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. Most of Greece, including the Peloponnese, came under Italian military control as a result.
In the Kalamata Province, the communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) emerged in 1942, forming initial partisan resistance against the unpopular confiscation of crops by the Italian military authorities. The engagements of these first left-wing groups were limited to skirmishes with the Greek Gendarmerie and the Italian Army, and by late 1942 they were almost all either destroyed or forced to evacuate to Central Greece. In April 1943, when the Peloponnese was considered "partisan-free" by the occupation authorities, Dimitris Michas, who had previously been imprisoned by the Italians, formed a new partisan group on orders from EAM. Following his first successes, and with the arrival of reinforcements from the mainland, the group began openly attacking Italian soldiers and their Greek informants. By June 1943, the number of Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) partisans in the Peloponnese had reached about 500 men in total. Due to the lack of a central command and communication difficulties, they were dispersed and operated as quasi-autonomous groups. In August 1943, according to a German intelligence report, partisan activity spiked in the mountainous areas of Messenia in southwestern Peloponnese, where 800 men under Kostas Kanellopoulos operated.
In early 1943, the "Hellenic Army" (ES), formed by mostly royalist former officers, was established as a resistance group and formed its own small armed groups, which clashed with the Italians. Initially it declared itself a politically independent and neutral force, but after forging ties with royalist networks chiefly in the Peloponnese and in Athens, it shifted to an anti-EAM stance by July. The British made efforts to unify the local resistance groups in the Peloponnese, but these efforts failed, and in August 1943 ES clashed with ELAS, while some of its most prominent leaders, such as Dionysios Papadongonas and possibly also Tilemachos Vrettakos, respectively sought collaboration with the Italian and German occupation authorities against ELAS. However, the apparent delay of German assistance, the losses suffered by Vrettakos' men in a clash with a German force at Pyrgaki, Arcadia, and the end of Allied air drops to both ES and ELAS, resulted in ES's defeat in October, leaving EAM/ELAS as the sole organized Resistance force in the Peloponnese.
German takeover and the establishment of the Security Battalions
In the meantime, after the Italian capitulation in September 1943, the overall command of anti-partisan operations in the southern Peloponnese fell to the German Major General Karl von Le Suire, commander of the 117th Jäger Division, which had been moved to the area in July. In October, Le Suire was named the sole military commander in the Peloponnese. The town of Meligalas in northern Messenia, which under Italian occupation had housed a Carabinieri station, now became the seat of two German infantry companies. The Italian capitulation led to the immediate and considerable reinforcement of ELAS in morale, personnel, and materiel, and with British support ELAS forces began attacking German targets. In the mountainous districts of the Peloponnese, representatives of EAM/ELAS translated their monopoly of armed resistance into the exercise of authority, but faced difficulties with the mostly conservative and royalist local population. Peasant disaffection was further fuelled by the requirement to feed the partisans amidst conditions of malnourishment and a general disruption of the agricultural production caused by the mounting hyperinflation and by the large-scale German anti-partisan sweeps (Säuberungen). These operations involved reprisals against the civilian population, following a July order of the commander of the LXVIII Corps, Hellmuth Felmy. In the Peloponnese, Le Suire carried these orders out with particular ruthlessness, particularly as the partisan threat mounted, resulting in the Kalavryta massacre in December.
In 1943, the German commanders in Greece concluded that their own forces were insufficient to suppress ELAS. As a result, and in order to "spare German blood", they decided to use the anti-communist elements of Greek society to fight EAM. In addition to the "Evzone Battalions" (Ευζωνικά Τάγματα) established by the collaborationist government of Ioannis Rallis, in late 1943 independent "Security Battalions" (Τάγματα Ασφαλείας, ΤΑ) began being raised, particularly in the Peloponnese, where the political affiliations of a large part of the population and the violent dissolution of ES provided a broad recruitment pool of anti-communists—five battalions in total, which were placed under the overall command of Papadongonas. After a request from the collaborator prefect of Messenia, Dimitrios Perrotis, the Rallis government ordered in February 1944 a municipality-supported Security Battalion to be formed in Kalamata. This Battalion merged in March with the Security Battalion under the command of Major Panagiotis Stoupas that arrived from Athens in Meligalas, a location that controlled the road from Kalamata to Tripolis and the entire area of the south. After all officers of the Military District of Messenia were drafted following Papadongonas's intervention, the Security Battalion of Messenia, having major Panagiotis Georganas as commandant, included five companies, one stationed at Kopanaki, another at Kalamata, which transformed into a battalion with major Antonios Smyrlis as its commander, and three stationed at Meligalas. The Security Battalions were subordinated to the Higher SS and Police Leader in Greece, Walter Schimana, but the development of relations of trust between the individual battalion commands and the local German authorities led to them enjoying a relative freedom of movement. The Security Battalions served as garrisons in towns across the Peloponnese, but also increasingly participated in German anti-partisan operations; they chose those that would be executed among prisoners and themselves executed hostages as reprisals for partisan attacks on German targets (as happened after the execution of Major General Franz Krech by ELAS in April 1944), gaining a reputation for lack of discipline and brutality. Officers and supporters of the Security Battalion of Meligalas-Kalamata publicly vindicated its actions in anticommunist declarations against EAM, similar in content with the era's Nazi discourse, with antisemitic and anti-Slavic references and defending conservative values.
After suffering some early blows, ELAS managed to recover its influence, and from 1944 conducted constant sabotage on the supply routes used by the German army. In April 1944, Meligalas became the first town held by a German garrison to be attacked by ELAS, but the assault was beaten back. In the same month, EAM leader Georgios Siantos, following reports of indiscipline among the partisan forces in the Peloponnese, sent Aris Velouchiotis there as representative of the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA), EAM's newly established parallel government. Velouchiotis' task was to reorganize the 3rd ELAS Division, with a total strength of some 6,000 men. They were facing 18,000 German soldiers and 5,000 Battalionists. Velouchiotis quickly imposed strict discipline, managing to reverse the decline in partisan numbers and increase the number of their attacks on enemy targets. The deterioration of the military situation led Felmy to declare the Peloponnese as a combat zone in May, which allowed Le Suire to in turn declare martial law, limiting the civilian population's freedom of movement and assembly. Nevertheless, the sweeps and reprisals by the Germans and their collaborators were not enough to reverse ELAS penetration of the countryside in Messenia and neighbouring Laconia. In the area of Kalamata, where during the occupation thousands of homes were torched and about 1,500 people had been executed, the reprisals of the Security Battalions continued until late summer. Following the assassination of Georganas by the OPLA of Kalamata, a para-military organization of the EAM movement with police duties aiming to punish collaborators, in June, Smyrlis executed 27 communists in retribution. In late August, while clashes between the ELAS and the Germans had decreased, those between ELAS and the Security Battalions increased steadily.
Position of the Greek collaborators
... never before was there such a fine line between the demand for vengeance and the call for justice, between anarchy and law ...
— Jan Kott, Polish politician and theatre critic, on the end of World War II
In November 1943, the Moscow Conference issued a joint "Statement on Atrocities" by the Big Three (Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin) concerning the prosecution and trial of those Germans responsible for war crimes against occupied nations. This also served as the basis for the condemnation of Axis collaborators in the occupied countries. In the spirit of this declaration, the Greek government in exile announced the revocation of Greek nationality from the members of the collaborationist governments, while PEEA issued a legal act proscribing the death penalty for high treason for those who collaborated with the occupation authorities, including the members of the Security Battalions. However, the burgeoning confrontation between EAM and the government in exile and its British backers, who at least since 1943 began to view EAM as an obstacle to their own plans for Britain's post-war role in Greece, led the British to consider the possibility of using the Security Battalions as part of the planned post-war national Greek army, or at least as a means of applying pressure and getting EAM to agree to support a national unity government. Thus, during negotiations on forming a new government, Georgios Papandreou, head of the government in exile, resisted the pressure of the PEEA delegates to publicly condemn the Security Battalions, arguing that this had already been done in the Lebanon Conference in May 1944, and in June he caused the Allied propaganda against the Security Battalions, both through the dropping of leaflets and through radio emissions, to be suspended.