Greek Forced Labourers in the Third Reich: An Untold Story

Recent research on forced labour in Nazi-occupied Europe has largely ignored the presence of Greek non-Jewish prisoners in labour camps. We will try to rescue from oblivion part of these forgotten stories, drawing on the recorded life stories of thirteen Greek men and women sent to labour camps in 1944. Our analysis will focus on their memories of the ‘life after’: the chaotic situation at liberation, the odyssey of the journey home and the hostile reception in their home country marked by a burgeoning civil war. We will explore how narrators negotiate in their memories the difficult choices they had to face after liberation: to go home and look after their families or to design a new future somewhere else. And—if they chose to return to Greece—to join the Greek National Army and fight against the partisans in a cruel Civil War (1946–1949), to join the partisans or to risk being sent to the notorious ‘reformation’ camp on Makronisos island. On these and other aspects of the homecoming process, oral testimonies bring to light intimate details of social relations which remain invisible in the historical record. We argue that such individual memories are part of a broader picture shaped by the politics of memory in different European countries. Our aim is to explain why in Greece, as in many other countries, the experiences of those who were deported to Nazi forced labour camps have never become part of a national master narrative.