Great Famine (Greece)

Requisitions, together with a blockade by the Allies, the ruined state of the country's infrastructure after the German invasion of Greece, and the emergence of a powerful and well-connected black market, resulted in the Great Famine, with the mortality rate reaching a peak during the winter of 1941–42.

Immediately following their victory, the occupying powers divided the country into 3 zones between which any movement of goods and people was strictly prohibited:[7] the Germans occupied parts of Athens, the region around Thessaloniki, a few strategic outposts in the Aegean and the island of Crete; the Bulgarians held the northern regions of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia; and the Italians controlled most of the mainland and the Ionian Islands.

From the outset of the occupation, German and Italian troops initiated wide-scale plunder of everything of value, with pillage, torture, execution, and civilian massacre also occurring.

Let them perish so long as no German starves.Within the occupation zones, the confiscation of fuel and all means of transportation (including fishing boats and pack animals) prevented any transfer of food and other supplies and reduced mobility to a minimum.

The Germans have emptied all public [fuel] tanks].… A Marathon farmer, who made his way in today to report that our nurses were safe in the hills, said that his flocks of poultry, even the pigeons, had been machine-gunned and the swastika planted at the four corners of the field.

They took their "purchases" to the parcel post office or to the reailway express and promptly shipped them home to the Reich… I saw a squad of soldiers, who had cleaned out a small leathergoods shop, carry their new suitcases to a clothing store to be filled.

[7][10] Occupied Greece was not only burdened with the occupation costs of the German and Italian armies but also with the expenses of Axis military projects in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Unlike the rest of the occupied countries, whose costs were limited to their actual defense appropriations prior to the Axis invasion, the size of Greece's levy in 1941–1942 reached 113.7% of the local national income.

[7] Farmers in Greece had to pay a 10% in kind tax on their produce, and sell to the collaborationist government at fixed prices for all production above the subsistence level.

Due to low government prices and newly imposed taxes, farmers went to great lengths to hide their produce from the officials and traders pulled their merchandise from the shelves, a factor that added to the severing of the foreign trade routes on which Greece traditionally depended for food imports.

[1] During that winter the mortality rate peaked,[15] and according to British historian, Mark Mazower, this was the worst famine the Greeks had experienced since ancient times.

[1][19] The situation in the port of Piraeus and the wider Athens area was out of control; hyperinflation was in full swing and the price of bread multiplied by nearly 90 times from April 1941 to June 1942.

Foodstuffs were collected by a nationwide campaign of the Kızılay (Turkish Red Crescent) and the operation was mainly funded by the Greek-American Greek War Relief Association and the Hellenic Union of Constantinopolitans.

[25][26] This assistance was mostly symbolic; one assigned ship was unable to alleviate such an extreme situation alone, and the state of the Turkish economy was generally limited at the time.

One ship, the SS Dumlupınar, brought about 1,000 sick Greek children aged 13–16 to Istanbul, to recuperate in a safe place during the war, and later returned them to Greece.

[28][29] Because of the efforts of the Greek diaspora in the United States and Great Britain, the situation of the starving civilian population in Greece soon became a public issue in Allied countries.

The following March, the occupiers and Allied forces agreed to the establishment of the Swedish-run Joint Relief Commission to reorganize the public food supply system.

The occupiers also committed to replacing all appropriated agricultural products with food imports of equal calorific value and relaxed the harshest mobility restrictions and price regulations.

[32] German military operations against rising guerrilla activity in rural areas sent large numbers of people into towns or mountains, emptying part of the countryside of its labour force.

However, the largest Greek resistance organization, the National Liberation Front (EAM), took the initiative and distributed food and clothing to the regions it controlled at the time.

Stockpiling unnecessary amounts of food and an irrational fear upon seeing an empty pantry, is still colloquially called occupation syndrome by many Greeks, since these behaviours were especially common during the postwar years.