Nikos Belogiannis

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Memorial to Belogiannis in Berlin

Nikos Belogiannis ( Greek Νίκος Μπελογιάννης , also transcribed Belojannis or Beloyannis ; * December 22, 1915 in Amaliada , Peloponnese ; † March 30, 1952 in Goudi ) was a Greek communist and resistance fighter.

Life

Act

Belogiannis joined the Communist Youth Association of Greece (OKNE) in 1932. He was unable to continue his law degree, which he began in the same year, due to the persecution of the communists. In 1934 he became a member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which elected him the following year as secretary of its local organization. In March 1936, Belojannis was imprisoned for the first time for organizing strikes, exiled for one year and sentenced in absentia to two years imprisonment. After his successful appeal against the sentence, he had to be released.

After the coup on August 4, 1936, the communist party was banned. Belogiannis continued the fight against fascism and war under illegal conditions. In December 1936, however, he was imprisoned by the Metaxas regime. In June 1937 he returned to Patras and took over the leadership of the illegal KKE. In 1938 he was arrested and sentenced again, this time to five years in prison and two years in exile. He spent his imprisonment in Akronauplia prison ( Nauplion ) and stayed there when Greece was occupied by German troops in 1941 . He escaped in 1943 and joined the ELAS partisan movement under Aris Velouchiotis . He was a functionary of the Communist Democratic Army of Greece (Dimokratikos Stratos Elladas, DSE) and left the country after its defeat in the Greek Civil War in 1949.

In June 1950 Belogiannis returned illegally to Greece to rebuild the Athens branch of the - illegal - Communist Party of Greece . He was arrested on December 20, 1950 and tried on a court martial accusing him of working for a banned party and of espionage for the Soviet Union . The trial, in which a total of 94 people were charged, began on October 19, 1951. The judges also included Georgios Papadopoulos , who later became the leader of the Greek military dictatorship .

Since Belogiannis, who denied all accusations, always appeared in court with a carnation in hand, he was known as the "Man with the Carnation" and was also shown in a sketch by Pablo Picasso .

Despite international appeals for clemency Belogiannis and three of his co-defendants were to death by firing squad condemned and in a nighttime secret operation on March 30, 1952 executed . The interveners included a. Charles de Gaulle , many famous figures in France and 159 MPs from the two major parties in England. Well-known people such as Pablo Picasso , Charlie Chaplin , Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre joined the protests .

Monument to Belogiannis in Poland ( Krościenko )

reception

Belogiannis was honored as one of the great heroes of the Greek communists and their sympathizers in the Eastern Bloc through multiple name sponsorships, through the erection of a monument on the grounds of the University of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst and also immortalized as a literary figure. The Hungarian village of Beloiannisz was named after him, where Greek communists who fled lived from 1949 until the end of the Greek military dictatorship in 1974.

The end of his work in the party, his arrest, his trial including his ardent plea for socialism as well as the resistance against the German occupation and his execution were documented in the feature film "Ο άνθρωπος με το γαρύφαλλο" ( The Man with the Carnation ).

Personal

Belogiannis was married to the resistance fighter Elli Pappa , with whom he had a son. Elli Pappa was the sister of the writer Dido Sotiriou , who wrote the book The Commandment about the trial and execution of Belogiannis' .

literature

Non-fiction

  • Peter Kaiser, Norbert Moc, Heinz-Peter Zierholz: Shots in Dallas. Political murders 1948 to 1984. Dietz Verlag, Berlin (GDR) 1988, ISBN 3-320-01051-4 .
  • A. Thomas Lane (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Conn. 1995, ISBN 0-313-26456-2 , pp. 74-75.

novel

  • Dido Sotiriu : The commandment. From the modern Greek by Eleni Florias. Romiosini Verlag, Cologne; Moll and Eckhardt, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-923728-61-1 .

Poetry

Web links

Commons : Nikos Beloyannis  - collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ^ Sophia Georgalidis: Dido Sotiriou: Life and Work . »Kahrolsun sebep olanlar« or: Always look for the causes and the culprits! In: Verein Die Brücke e. V. (Ed.): The bridge . Forum for anti-racist politics and culture. Vol. 24, issue 135, 2005, ISSN  0931-9514 , category Medien-Kultur-Schau ( bruecke-saarbruecken.de [accessed on September 16, 2019] Jan – Feb – Mar 2005/1).
  2. ↑ Nâzim Hikmet: The air is heavy as lead . 4th, revised. Edition. Dağyeli, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-935597-19-7 , pp. 166–167 (Turkish: Hava kurşun gibi ağır . Translated by Helga Dağyeli-Bohne, Yıldırım Dağyeli, poems Turkish, German).
personal data
SURNAME Belogiannis, Nikos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Belojannis, Nikos; Beloyannis, Nikos; Μπελογιάννης, Νίκος (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek communist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Amaliada
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1952
Place of death Goudi