Greek volunteer fighters

Greek volunteers who fought in the International Brigades were a diverse group consisting of three components. The first were Greek citizens, opponents of the Metaxas dictatorship. They were mainly seamen and members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), who initially joined the Dimitrov Battalion and later the Nikos Zachariadis Battalion (named after the imprisoned Secretary General of the KKE Central Committee).  Most of them abandoned their ships when they docked in Marseille or Oran, and with the help of the Union of Greek Seamen, crossed to Alicante, sometimes disguised as Senegalese sailors. 

The second group were economic immigrants, almost exclusively from the United States. Many were second-generation immigrants who did not even speak Greek. The majority joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Pavlos Fortis, shown here with his Spanish Communist Party membership card, had served in the Greek navy but emigrated to the United States and arrived in Spain from San Francisco on 1 September 1937. Finally, there were Cypriot immigrants, mainly from the United Kingdom and the USA, who joined the British Battalion and the Henri Barbusse Battalion. 

It is estimated that approximately 2,000 Greeks attempted to reach Spain, but the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship on August 4, 1936 and the ban on the KKE disrupted the effort. Many leftists were arrested and imprisoned, and those few that escaped arrest could not obtain passports, while the regime imposed strict controls on overseas travel. Τhe compulsory law 511/1937 ‘On the prohibition of conscription or departure of volunteers to Spain’ punished offenders with prison sentences of three to six months. 

The precise number of Greek volunteers in the International Brigades is not known, but the generally agreed estimate is around 400. The number of dead, wounded and survivors is also unclear. Currently there are some 260 certified names of volunteers and some 60 names of volunteers who were killed, while there is no figure for those missing. A still unspecified number of several dozen Greeks were captured, imprisoned or executed by the Francoist authorities.

Greek volunteers participated in all the major battles of the Civil War (Jarama, Brunete, Belchite-Quinto, Teruel and the Ebro), suffering heavy losses. Most served in combat units at the front, some took up higher administrative and command posts, while others -including a few women- worked in the rear in hospital care. There are three known cases of young Greek women (Marika Nikolaou, Eleni Nikiforou and Toula Ioannou) who left Canada to serve as nurses in the Republican army.

After the agreement for the withdrawal of the International Brigades from Spain, repatriation to the ‘New State’ of Ioannis Metaxas was not an attractive prospect for most of them. Greeks from Britain, Cyprus and the US returned there. The rest remained in Spain and continued to fight until the end of the war and the flight to France. There the French authorities imprisoned them along with all Spanish antifascists.

In the following decades most of the veterans avoided talking about their presence in Spain, either because of their dramatic experiences in the following years (war, occupation, exile) or because of the internal conflicts and purges in the communist movement both during the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. 

TDS/DF/LH