The Improbable Heroine

Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece

Stylianos Perrakis

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110778540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

This is the first biography in English of a World War II heroine of the Greek resistance, who joined the British secret intelligence services (SIS) shortly after the German occupation of Athens and was betrayed, arrested and executed one month before the Germans' departure. She was a prosperous housewife with seven children, who had no experience in politics or military affairs, and yet she managed to build a formidable escape, espionage and sabotage organization that interacted with the highest levels of SIS agents in Occupied Greece.

Book Presentation with Prof. Stylianos Perrakis (Concordia University), Prof. Stathis Kalyvas (University of Oxford), and Prof. Gonda van Steen (King's College London)

1 Prologue

Merlin Street, in downtown Athens, is only 100 meters or so long and can be walked in a couple of minutes in all its length, bridging the heavy traffic of Kifissias boulevard and the almost as busy Kanari Street in the fashionable Kolonaki district. It owes its name not to the wizard of British lore but to one of his compatriots, who served as a diplomat and then as a businessman in late nineteenth-century Greece. One of his sons decided to stay in Greece, and the street originally formed the border of his inherited land.

This is Athens’ most expensive real estate, and the street is today dominated by high rises, either apartment blocks or office buildings. Number 6 houses an insurance company, whose entrance is fronted by a glass door. Behind the door there is a stylized statue of a young man against the wall, and next to it what looks from the outside like a metal gate encased by metal scaffolding. It is, indeed, a metal gate, of a building that is no longer there but whose infamous reputation still resonates in Greek narratives more than 75 years after the end of its sinister role. For the Merlin 6 address was in 1941 to 1944 the site of a neoclassical building that housed the headquarters of the German occupation regime’s repressive apparatus, the Security Police or Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the Gestapo. This is stated clearly in an inscription on the wall next to the stature: “Here was the Hellhole of the Gestapo, 1941 – 1944”. That’s where interrogations took place, and it is from there that condemned prisoners were taken to the various execution spots around the city.

Nikos Bardis, a young man in his early twenties who had been in the Resistance with his entire family, was one such prisoner scheduled for execution on September 7, 1944. He had been arrested on June 24, 1944, and was initially locked up at the Averof prison in the Ambelokipi district, in what were then the northern limits of Athens. From there he was transferred on July 17 to the Haidari prison camp, on the road to Eleusis and the Peloponnese, near the Byzantine cathedral of Daphni. He stayed there till September 7, when shortly after 8 PM he was transferred to Cell #8 in Merlin Street. together with other companions from the Resistance. The Germans were getting ready to leave Greece – they left Athens about a month later – and they wanted to get rid of their prisoners, either by letting them go or shooting them. Although Dimitriades, the Greek interpreter for the Germans in Merlin, had assured Bardis and his companions that they were going to be set free, there were competing rumors that those who had been sent there were scheduled for execution the next day. These latter rumors gained traction when Chrysostomos Vasileiou, a Roman Catholic priest who was also in the Resistance, had been implicated in helping Jews escape the German dragnet and had been betrayed and arrested in May and was now a fellow prisoner,¹ was allowed to come to their cell to hear confessions and administer the Holy Communion. Several of the prisoners then started writing farewell notes for their families.

Cell #9, next to the men, held several women from the Resistance who had also been transferred from Haidari. Outside the cells the interpreter Dimitriades was patrolling the corridors together with the jailers. At this point we’ll let Bardis tell the story in his own words:

At that point, when I was finally reaching the end of my life, I felt the need to see again the woman whom for the last three years I had learned to work for as an assistant, and love her as if she were my own mother… I managed after begging Dimitriades at length to have him escort me to her cell. It was half an hour after midnight, half an hour into that fateful day. The air was foggy in Cell #9, but I saw her immediately with her tall size, leaning against a corner of the cell. She turned around as soon as the door opened and as soon as she saw me she shouted my name and opened her arms to me. I’ll never forget the kiss that she gave me as long as I live… Her face was smiling and her eyes were shiny, as they had always been. First she asked me if I had news about my parents and if they were still alive, and then she talked about how we were betrayed and how now we were going to die. We must, nonetheless, be proud, she went on, because we were dying for our country, and we must die like Greeks. “Tell the others in your cell Niko,’ she went on, ‘that we must show the Germans that Greeks are not afraid of death when in the service of their country.” Then she showed me her hands that were paralyzed when she had been hanged by them during torture, with the fingers still blue. Her right side also had deep scars from torture. She was, however, very proud that they [the Germans] had not managed to make her talk… Unfortunately the interpreter did not let me stay any longer in her cell. I left, after a last look at her face. She waved goodbye with the smile still on her lips.²

This brief encounter with Nikos Bardis is the last human interaction of Lela Karayanni, the central character of this book, that has come down to us, although we know that she also spoke with her fellow prisoners who were executed with her. At 5 AM that same morning of September 8, 1944, a German officer came to the cells, lined up the prisoners and read a list of names who were asked to follow him. When he came to Bardis’ name he pushed him back into the cell, telling him “You will stay here.” Then Nikos heard Lela, who was lined up with the women prisoners, shouting to him full of joy: “Nikaki [little Niko], you are saved my boy!”

Apart from Bardis and four or five other people, the remaining prisoners were loaded on two black trucks whose backs had been transformed into cages for transporting people. The trucks then drove from downtown Athens along the way to Eleusis, turning left after the Haidari prison camp and just before the Byzantine monument at Daphni. They stopped at the entrance of a shallow ravine that would serve as the execution spot.

Since none of her fellow prisoners survived after they left Merlin Street there are no first-hand accounts of Lela Karayanni’s last moments. An indirect testimony is to be found in one of her husband Nikos’ postwar reports.³ According to it, at some unspecified time after Liberation, Nikos received the visit in his Athens shop of an official from the Haidari gendarmerie station, who told him that he had been ordered to attend, as a witness representing local authorities, the September 8 mass executions. The official followed the trucks at the Daphni ravine, where he saw the Germans separating the men from the women. The rest of the narration is worth quoting verbatim from Nikos Karayannis’ second hand account:

When everything was ready for the women’s execution one of the women, the tallest of the lot, shouted, ‘everybody raise your heads, so that we won’t disgrace ourselves in front of the Germans,’ and then she started singing the National Anthem. The machine guns started firing, the women fell down, and half of them fell in the ravine.” As the witness told us, “…I was an emotional wreck at that moment, I cannot describe to you how I felt. I was so impressed by the emotional strength of that woman that I asked the interpreter who she was, and he told me that her name was Lela Karayanni.

The account is believable, and Lela’s reported last words coincide almost perfectly with what she had said to Nikos Bardis the night before. They are also fully consistent with what we know of her remarkable story, which is told here for the first time for a non-Greek speaking readership. She deserves to become better known, especially to a British reading public, not only because she was strongly anglophile – two of her sons were named Byron and Nelson – but also because many of her early resistance activities were connected with helping British escapees and prisoners in Occupied Athens.

To my knowledge, the last time Lela’s name was mentioned very briefly in an English-language book was in 2002, in Marcus Binney’s biographical sketches of women who took part in World War II resistance. There were no details given about Lela’s resistance activities and no biographical details about her, apart from the fact that she had seven children and was executed in 1944. There were many more mentions of her in the immediate postwar years, all of them brief. W. Byford-Jones mentions her in his Greek Trilogy[a], published in 1945. More substantive references to her resistance work were provided in two books by Roy Farran, an escapee from a prisoner camp who was helped by Lela. He gives a detailed account of his escape and of the assistance that she gave him and his companions in his nonfiction book Winged Dagger, published in 1948, and mentions in the preface of his fiction book The Day After Tomorrow[a], published in the early fifties, that the main character in it is modelled on Lela. Chapter 7 of this book reviews the evidence that he gives us and contrasts it with parallel accounts of the same events from Greek sources.

These references to Lela in English language sources are all in private memoirs. No mention of her exists in archival material, although both she and some members of her organization received British postwar recognition and awards. This lack of information was also noted (p. 314) in Binney’s 2004 paperback edition of his 2002 book. As he states, “of the 10,000 personal files of [Special Operations Executive] SOE staff and agents that survive, none apparently bears her name.” This omission is discussed and explained in Chapter 6 of this book. Very simply, Lela had joined the resistance in Greece and had formed her own resistance subgroup before the SOE had been formally constituted. That subgroup was linked either to the escape organization MI9 or to the espionage service MI6, both branches of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from which the SOE was created. Unlike SOE, neither one of these two British secret services has released its archival material.

Although Lela’s name does not appear anywhere in British archival material, her formal links to SIS cannot be doubted. In several parts of this book we shall see her receiving items such as wireless equipment and sabotage materials, which she then directed to specific operatives whose links to the SOE or MI6 and MI9 are indisputable. Further, there are two undeniable pieces of evidence that show an appreciation of her wartime career from high-level British sources. The first one is a photograph of Lela, framed in black and prominently displayed in the Special Forces Club in London’s Knightsbridge district, as befits an SIS member killed in action. The photo is reproduced in Binney’s book. The second is a photocopy of a document in page 112 of Lela’s 1947 biography by Dimitris Kotrotsis. It is dated June 9, 1947, and signed by then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, commending Lela for brave conduct and expressing “His Majesty’s high appreciation of the service rendered.” There are, therefore, official British archival documents that mention “the service rendered” by Lela, and since these are not part of the SOE archives they must be MI6 and/or MI9 documents.

Fortunately for historians of wartime Greece, MI6 and MI9 operated mostly through Greek agents permanently located within their German-occupied country. These agents were generally grouped into small resistance organizations with links to an SIS service that often included financing and a wireless connection. Unlike their parent groups, these downstream MI6 and MI9 outlets did release postwar reports that almost always contain the names of their operatives and a list of their wartime activities, and occasionally some information on their upstream British connections. Further, several of the Greek agents have left us memoirs about their resistance careers. Lela’s group, which she named Bouboulina for reasons that we shall see in Chapter 3, is particularly well-documented

These Greek language documents have not, to my knowledge, been used by non-Greek historians of wartime Greece, which explains why Lela is seldom mentioned by them. They are scattered in various public and private archives in Athens and constitute the main sources for this book. They must, however, be used with caution, since as I found out the narratives often give exaggerated and occasionally self-serving or misleading accounts of their authors’ activities. We shall see some glaring examples of such accounts in Chapter 7.

In spite of their flaws, these Greek language sources are indispensable for any serious research on Greek wartime resistance. Without them several resistance organizations in Greece, whose existence is indisputable since they lost members who were arrested and executed by the Italians or the Germans, would have remained unknown, since they are not mentioned anywhere in the accessible British archives. Several such groups played a significant role in Lela’s resistance career, since she interacted with them and used their agents in order to process information that she had collected. These connections in the case of Lela are presented here for the first time, since neither her biographers nor any other people who wrote about the Greek resistance organizations showed any interest in them.

Within Greece Lela is better known than other figures of the secret wartime organizations. She has been honored repeatedly on public occasions, both in Athens where she lived and fought in the resistance, and in the town of Limni, in the island of Euboea, where she was born. Limnos Street, where she lived during the war, has been renamed Lela Karayanni Street. There are marble monuments dedicated to her in Tositsa Street. in Athens, between the National Museum and the Athens Polytechnic, in Limni and in Halkida, the district capital of Euboea. The monument in Athens, a bust of Lela that does not look very much like the pictures that we have of her, was unveiled in 1963 in the presence of Princess Irene, of the Greek Royal family that lost its throne in 1974. There are also frequent references to her resistance career and her heroic death in popular media on various occasions.

Lela’s fame is unusual for a member of the secret services. To appreciate it, one should compare Lela and her group to the “Apollo” resistance organization, a creature of the SOE and the main group through which Lela was transmitting the military intelligence that she collected in the second half of the German occupation of Greece. Several of the people that were executed with Lela at Haidari in that fateful day of September 8, 1944, were also members of the Apollo network, arrested as a result of a similar set of circumstances as the one that sent Lela to the firing squad.

Today Apollo and its leader Yannis Peltekis are almost completely unknown in Greece even among professional historians, as I found out during a 2007 conference on the Greek Civil War. This is in spite of the fact that a comprehensive book on SOE activities in occupied Europe, written right after the war but published only in 2000, characterized the Apollo organization as a “success story” and Yannis Peltekis personally as “…a man of the highest ability, a Greek patriot….”⁴ These judgments were also reflected in Peltekis’ obituary in the London Times in December 1969, which notes that Peltekis “…played an exceptionally important part in the Greek resistance during the last war.” Unfortunately these flattering comments were not included in a more recently published collection of testimonies on important SOE personalities in the form of their Times obituaries, edited and republished for every country where the SOE was active by Tillotson (2011). The chapter on Greece does not include the Peltekis obituary nor, for that matter, that of any other Greek.

I first became aware of Lela as a young boy more than 70 years ago, when I read about her in one of the first postwar memoirs published during the late 1940s by Christos Zalokostas. It was one of the rare glimpses that I had of the hardships that beset the country where I was born and raised during the first years of my life, even though I had lived through them. For all the proximity of the wartime events in those early postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s, there was much less information and less interest about them then than there is now. The onset of the Cold War had shifted the wartime enemies and allies, a shift that was particularly pronounced in Greece, the country where the Cold War rivalries first became a violent reality. This shift had also affected the historical and political narratives reflected in newspapers and other mass media, de-emphasizing the wartime conflict and focusing on the more recent civil war that consumed Greece during 1946 to 1949 which, as I have written elsewhere⁵ and as will also become apparent here, had its origins in wartime events.

This situation took a 180-degree turn after the fall of the military dictatorship that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. That dictatorship was also a delayed reaction to civil war events, stimulated by Cold War tensions and political failures in the Greek ruling class. Its original purpose was to support the monarchy, crush the Greek Left and reinforce the conservative values of 1950s Greece that were supposedly threatened by modernist currents. It ended up with a republican regime, a legalized Greek communist party, a socialist movement that ran Greece for most of the next 45 years, and with liberalized social mores to a degree that was inconceivable 60 years ago.

It also brought out a major explosion of interest on the hitherto neglected subject of World War II Occupation and Resistance, as well as on the civil war that followed. This time the narrative was dominated by voices on the Left, presenting themselves as the victims of both conflicts and emphasizing their wartime resistance activities through the National Liberation Front or EAM by its Greek acronym which, to be fair, are indeed impressive and were till then ignored in the prevailing anti-communist political climate. The narrative was one-sided and distorted, both with respect to the topics studied and to the type of evidence that was thought important and was presented selectively. It focused almost exclusively on the armed resistance and tended to whitewash the misdeeds of the Left.

The armed resistance, in the form of organized bands that controlled most of the rural areas in mainland Greece, was, indeed, dominated by the Left. It also led directly, however, to the 1946 to 1949 civil war, whose origins were traced in Stathis Kalyvas’ classic study published in 2000, to the later years of the German Occupation between mid-1943 and Liberation Day in mid-October 1944. That’s when the KKE, the Greek Communist Party, through its control over EAM and its armed wing ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army), started attacking rival resistance organizations and, eventually, civilian opponents of communism. Since, as pointed out, some of the groups that had been attacked turned to the Germans for protection and support, the civil war in its initial phases has been presented by some authors as a fight between resisters and collaborators and has generated heated debates among Greek historians.

This debate lies beyond the scope of this book and affects only a little more than half the time that Greece was under German Occupation. In contrast, Lela’s resistance activities started two weeks after the German army entered Athens and lasted till her arrest in July 1944. The armed resistance does, nonetheless, need to be examined briefly but rigorously, since the clashes between Greek armed resistance groups became the defining political event during the last year of the Occupation and affected the British secret services and their Greek extensions. More to the point, they affected the fate of the central character in our narrative, Lela Karayanni herself. Chapter 16 describes her betrayal and arrest as a result of her involvement in attempts to penetrate and influence collaborationist organizations to abandon the Germans and join the Allies, probably following orders that have never been traced.

A few, very few, works on the British secret services in wartime Greece and their Greek associates have been published during the last 20 years, on the margins of mainstream historical research. The situation was not helped by the fact that Britain’s archival material on its secret services is notoriously scarce and was only partially released at the beginning of this century. I became aware of some of this newly released material in the course of historical research on a different wartime topic. I realized then that there was a parallel set of wartime experiences by Greeks that had been the subject of the memoir I had read during my childhood more than 60 years earlier that was now being ignored by historians and deserved systematic study. Among them was also the story of Lela Karayanni, which had until then been presented only in Greek, and even there only in an idealized format and devoid of any historical context.

For all her fame and the posthumous honors that she has received, Lela Karayanni remains even today a largely unknown quantity even in Greece, this time because of the way she has been described by her supporters and admirers, rather than by her possible political opponents. There are two biographies of her in Greek, but the information that they give about her wartime activities is f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of acronyms
• 1 Prologue
• 2 The troubled country: Greece in the early twentieth century
• 3 The making of a heroine: Lela Karayanni, 1898 – 1941
• 4 The British secret services in Greece at the beginning of the war
• 5 Greece at war: October 1940–May 1941
• 6 Lela Karayanni, resister and secret agent I: Mana Karayanni
• 7 The Kokkinia escapes
• 8 Disaster in the Aegean
• 9 The smuggler the famine, and the rise of EAM
• Illustrations
• 10 Lela Karayanni, resister and secret agent II: Spies and saboteurs, 1941 – 1942
• 11 Thurgoland and Harling
• 12 From Prometheus to Apollo and the Lela connection
• 13 Armed resistance, collaboration, and the politics of Dr. Frankenstein
• 14 Lela Karayanni, Righteous Among Nations
• 15 Apollo wounded
• 16 The Grand Scheme and Lela’s arrest
• 17 The heroic deaths
• 18 Liberation and aftermath
• 19 Epilogue: Lela Karayanni, the armed resistance and the politicization of memory
• Chronology of the main WW II events in Greece
• List of photography sources
• Index