Figure 1.--After the 1941-42 famine, emergency food supplies reached Greek cities. The escalating guerilla war impaired harvests and caused food shortages in the countryside. Obly the German withdrawl and arrival of the British averted another famine. The caption here was, "Food for liberated Greece: Athens, Greece--Two little barefooted Greek boys, perch atop a bag of meal and look hunggrilly at the food being unloaded on the dock - food for the pople of liberated Greece, who never had enough of it under Nazi occupation." The photograph was dated October 31, 1944.

While the terrible famine ended in 1942, it was not the end of the food crisis in Greece. As the gurill war intensified (1943), Greece again began expeiencing food shortages. This time it was the countryside rather than the cities that suffered most. The countryside became a war zone. The resistance struck at the Axis occupation forces. The Axis forces launched deadly reprisal actions. The Axis forces burned villages and shot people in areas auspected of harboring the guerrilas. The Germans and Bulgarians were especually brutal. Terrible actions occurred in Epirus and Thessaly. [Hionidou, pp, 17 and 30.] The rural population in these areas began streaming into the cities or up into the mountains to escape the reprisals. This meant that large areas of the countryside lost a substantial part of the agricultural labor force. As a result, famine reappeared during the winter of 1943-44. Conditions were especially severe in Aetolia and some of the islands. [Laiou-Thomadakis, p. 2.] The problem was made worse by the fact that Red Cross food aid did not reach the country side. Tey helpe keep the cities supplie, but relief workers were unable to get food to the countryside. Here it is not entireky known why. It may havce been the countryside was a war zone. Som believe that the Germans were retaliating against people in areof high guerrilla activity or tokeeo food away from the guerillas themselves. The National Liberation Front (EAM) was able to distribute some food and clothing to the regions it controlled. [Laiou-Thomadakis, p. 3.] The Germans begin withdrawing from Greece indanger of being cut off as the Red Army drives into the Balkans (August 1944). Because of Crete and the smaller islands, the German evacuation of Greece was complicated. The last German soldiers loweered their swastika down from the Acropolis and begin to driving through the city towards the road north. They passed through crowds of Athenians joyously waving their blue and white Greek flags. adding to the hunger was inflation btought about by financial mismanagement. Inflation was so bad that reports describe a loaf of bread cost 2 million drachma. People were trading their belonings for basics like flour and olive oil. The countryside was in a trrible state and food productuin had declined substantiually. Greek and British troops entered thge capital (October 12, 1944). This opened the way for the delivery of food supplies to the hungary Greek.

Sources

Hionidou

Laiou-Thomadakis, Angeliki. "The Politics of Hunger: Economic Aid to Greece, 1943–1945, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora Vol. 7 (2006).

Mazower, Mark. Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (Yale University Press, 1993), 437p.

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Created: 9:46 AM 3/1/2011
Last updated: 9:46 AM 3/1/2011