Peter Limbourg, DW Director General, has presented Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos with a special gift during a trip to Athens: a new CD featuring DW broadcasts from the time of the military dictatorship in Greece.
Image: DW/S. Moskovou
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Deutsche Welle (DW) and Greece enjoy a special relationship. During the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974, DW's Greek service took a clear stance on behalf of those fighting for freedom and democracy within Greece and in exile.
From 1969 onwards, DW reported extensively on the resistance. And Greeks heard about mass arrests and torture for the first time.
Since then, many Greeks have remained loyal followers of Germany's international broadcaster and value it as a reliable source of information.
The junta of Athens and the Greek DW program
During the military dictatorship in Greece, DW made journalism history.
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The military coup of 1967
A small group of conspirators led by colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, lieutenant-general Stylianos Pattakos and general Georgios Zoitakis executed a coup d'etat late on April 21, 1967. That night, the first wave of arrests swept Greece. An estimated 8,000 people were detained, among them sitting ministers, countless journalists, lawyers, writers and artists.
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Seven years of junta rule
The parliament was disempowered, tens of thousands of people - in particular those leaning to the political left - were jailed and banished to island prisons. The seven years of the military regime were marked by despotism, extensive censorship, torture and murder. Thousands were killed.
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Broadcasting from Cologne to Greece
DW started broadcasting its Greek-language program from its then-headquarters in Cologne in 1964. After the military seized control in Greece, the program gave a voice to critics of the new regime. DW was one of the few outlets available to Greek citizens that provided unrestricted information, making it a thorn in the junta's side.
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Dissident news and banned music
Every day from 9:40 to 10:40 p.m., DW broadcasted news, opinion pieces, press reviews, features on the events in Greece and interviews with anti-regime activists. Greek music was also part of the program. This included tunes that had been banned by the military dictators, such as the songs of composer and famous opposition supporter Mikis Theodorakis.
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United against the junta
People from all walks of life with widely different political views were part of DW's Greek department. The one thing they could all agree upon: A military dictatorship was not acceptable. Pictured here: G. Heyer, A. Maropoulos, G. Kladakis, D. Koulmas, K. Nikolaou (from left to right).
Image: DW
A protest tour against the regime
When she arrived in Berlin, Melina Mercouri was greeted by German novelist Günter Grass. Merkouri was a successful Greek actress, singer and politician who had left her home country for exile in France in 1967. "The military junta is a disgrace for a democratic Europe," Merkouri said when she visited Germany's biggest city on an international protest tour against the regime.
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Counterattacks from the regime
The regime systemically disrupted DW's shortwave signal. Newspaper "Nea Politeia" - a mouthpiece for the Athens regime - tried but failed to damage the reputation of the DW editorial team. "The rodents of the Cologne radio broadcaster;" read the title page of their June 8, 1969 issue. But 3 million Greeks still followed the broadcast every night.
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A concert turned demonstration
"When Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis conducted the performance of his own songs in the sold-out concert hall yesterday, the concert was spontaneously turned into a demonstration after the intermission by the many Greeks attending the event," newspaper "Hamburger Abendblatt" wrote after Theodorakis' performance in Hamburg on Februar 2, 1972.
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The voice of the Athens Polytechnic
On November 14, 1973, students of the Polytechnic in Athens went on strike to protest against the regime. They barricaded the campus and opened a radio station. Their voices were broadcast across Greece by DW. The student boycott marked the beginning of the end for the dictatorship, which ultimately collapsed in Mid-1974. The myth of DW as the "voice of freedom" lasts to this day.
"The Greek service of the DW was the voice of freedom during the military dictatorship," said Limbourg. "Even more than 50 years later it is still an example of how important foreign broadcasting is when democracy is in danger."
President Pavlopoulos thanked DW on behalf of all Greeks "for being the voice of freedom and democracy from the heart of Europe during the dictatorship. But also for the constructive role it played during the financial crisis."
The history of modern Greece has been marked by political instability. Here are some of the most important events since the founding of the state in the 19th century to this day.
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Hitler's army invades Greece
A turning point in the history of Greece: The German Wehrmacht invaded the country in April 1941. German field marshal Walther von Brauchitsch (center left), commander in chief of the army, is seen here visiting the Acropolis. Liberation of the mainland came in October 1944. Not all Greeks were opposed to the Nazis. But first, a look further back...
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A Bavarian prince as the first 'Greek' king
In 1453, Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottomans. Greece thereby came under a centurieslong Ottoman rule. The liberation struggle of the Greeks began in 1821 in the Peloponnese, and the Greek state was established in 1830. Otto von Wittelsbach, second son of the Bavarian King Ludwig I, became its king (1832-1862).
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A bitter defeat
Greece joined the Allies during the First World War. In 1919, with the approval of the victorious powers, they tried to use the Turkish defeat to bring Eastern Thrace and the area of Izmir and its Greek inhabitants under Greek control. In 1922, the Greco-Turkish War ended with the defeat of Greece.
A large-scale exchange of minority populations was agreed upon in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Some 1.5 million Greeks left Turkey for Greece, while around 500,000 Turks left Greece for Turkey. Social unrest also began in Greece after WWI. From 1924 to 1936 the country was politically very unstable.
On August 4, 1936 General Ioannis Metaxas suspended the Greek parliament and constitution to install an authoritarian regime that ruled until April 1941. On October 28, 1940, Metaxas rejected Italian dictator Mussolini's ultimatum to grant Italy access to Greek territory, leading to the Greco-Italian war. After Italy was defeated and pushed back, the German Wehrmacht invaded Greece in April 1941.
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German regime of terror
From June 1943 to June 1944, the German occupiers reportedly killed more than 20,000 suspected partisans, imprisoned nearly 26,000 more, and shot nearly 5,000 hostages. Altogether 81 percent of Greece's Jews were murdered in the extermination camps Auschwitz and Treblinka. In October 1944 the Nazi-German Wehrmacht was forced to withdraw from Greece.
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Civil war in Greece
The Greek Civil War started shortly after World War II, lasting from March 1946 to October 1949. It was the continuation of a conflict that had started in 1943 between the leftist Democratic Army of Greece and the right-wing Greek conservatives and monarchists. The consequences were catastrophic. There were nearly 57,000 dead among the civilian population alone.
Image: Getty Images/F. Patellani
Military putsch
After the civil war, it was mainly the Americans who helped the Greeks rebuild the country. Political instability continued into the following years. On April 21, 1967, right-wing army officers (above) seized power in a coup and set up a military dictatorship that lasted until 1974. Politicians, trade unionists and intellectuals were arrested by the thousands, imprisoned and tortured.
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Return to democracy
After seven years of dictatorship, the junta resigned in July 1974. Former Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis, who lived in exile during the dictatorship, was sworn in as a transitional premier. Free elections were held within the following year, a new constitution was enacted and junta officers were arrested. Greece has been an EU member since 1981 and a member of the Eurozone since 2001.
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The recordings come from the archive of the late writer and journalist Alexander Skinas, one of the main commentators of the Greek editorial team in the early 1970s. Two contributions by Giorgos Nikolaou, the then editor-in-chief, who later served as Vice President of the European Parliament, are also on the audio document, among them an interview with a penitent spy in the service of the junta, created shortly after the dictatorship was overcome.
For the head of DW's Greek service, Spiros Moskovou, the CD is a testament to the power of radio in Greece at that time. "It is very revealing to see how the colleagues then kept the balance between open condemnation of the regime and the standards of professional, independent journalism," Moskovou said.
