[2] Both the Italians and the Germans distrusted the Security Battalions and provided them with only small arms, fearing that Pangalos, a tough, able soldier and a megalomaniac who was widely considered to be "half mad", was not a reliable partner.

[3] They were supported by extreme right and Nazi sympathisers, but also by some centrist politicians who were concerned about the dominance of ELAS (the military arm of the communist-dominated National Liberation Front EAM) as the main body of the Greek resistance.

[2] Members of the Security Battalions included ex-army officers, forcefully conscripted soldiers, conservatives, landowners, extreme-right radicals and social outcasts, as well as opportunists who believed that the Axis would win the war.

[2] The growth in ELAS, which was now far better armed than it was before the armistice, alarmed many conservative Greek officers, including the royalists, who joined the Security Battalions as a way of defending the "bourgeois world".

[3] One provincial governor, that of the Patras district, told an audience of Wehrmacht officers in February 1944: "Hellenism is by heritage and tradition opposed to the communist world-view.

The German military governor of the Balkans, General Alexander Löhr, in a message to Berlin stated that his policy was to ensure "that the anti-communist part of the Greek population be fully utilised, revealing itself openly and obliged to display an undisguised hostility towards the communist side".

[10] The mountainous terrain of Greece favored the andartes, together with the fact that the Wehrmacht was by 1944 fully committed elsewhere in Europe, led to the policy of "total terror" being employed.

[14] During the war, the Allied-oriented government in exile and the main resistance organizations in Greece decried the Security Battalions for treason multiple times.

In November 1943, a British officer, Major Donald Stott, arrived in Athens and contacted the local branch of the Geheime Feldpolizei (German military police).

[15] Stott's visit was considered so important by the Germans that he met with Hermann Neubacher of the Auswärtiges Amt, who played a key role in governing the Balkans.

Some of the Nazi leaders were like Himmler, who, influenced by his intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, tried to engage in various stratagems to break up the "Grand Alliance," such as his offer in 1944 to stop deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz if the United States were to give Germany 50,000 trucks that would only be used to supply the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

[17] The Geheime Feldpolizei in the Balkans were led by Roman Loos, a career policeman from Austria who was described by the British historian Mark Mazower as a "wily" and "shadowy" figure who closely worked with the SS, and who was never tried for war crimes.

[17] In a speech to mark Hitler's birthday, on 20 April 1944 before the officers of the Security Battalions, Schimana announced that the most dividing line in the world was between communism vs. anticommunism, and predicted that the "Grand Alliance" against Germany would soon fall apart.

[17] In May 1944, a secret emissary representing Dertilis arrived in Cairo with a message for the government-in-exile that the Security Battalions were a "patriotic organisation" committed to the "national struggle" against communism, and that when Greece was liberated, they would reveal their true loyalty was to the king.

[17] Dertilis was sent to Vienna to be interrogated by the Gestapo while Blume had the Athens headquarters of the Security Battalions searched for evidence of contacts with Britain and the Cairo government.

"[20] One agent of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) reported after interviewing captured members of the Security Battalions that 35-40% of them believed that the governments of Britain and the United States secretly approved of them fighting for Germany.

[23] From Blume's viewpoint, having Athens reduced to chaos would show the need to sack Rallis, who was close to a nervous breakdown in the summer of 1944, and replace him with the stronger Pangalos.

[23] Appointing Pangalos as prime minister and letting the Security Battalions run amok were part of Blume's preparations for executing the "Chaos Thesis".

[25] The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a very favorable view of the Security Battalions, saying, "It seems to me that the collaborators in Greece in many cases did the best they could to shelter the Greek population from German oppression".

For instance, their creator and quisling Prime Minister of Greece, Rallis, was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason and died in prison in 1946, but he was acquitted for his involvement with the Security Battalions.

After the defeat of the EAM in Dekemvriana, the Security Battalion members continued to hunt down left, communist, and anti-royalist civilians during the white terror period that ensued after the Varkiza Agreement that dismantled ELAS.

[27] After the Civil War, and during the persecution of the communists during the 1950s and '60s in Greece, many of the brutal military personnel of the exile islands accused of tortures were ex-members of the Security Battalions.

[29] Some members of the Security Battalions were recognized during the Greek military junta of 1967-74 by law as "resistance fighters against the Axis", but this decision was cancelled after the fall of the regime.