Dimitrios Ioannidis

Dimitrios Ioannidis ( Greek Δημήτριος Ιωαννίδης , also: Ioannides; born March 13, 1923 in Athens ; † August 16, 2010 in Nikea (Attica) ) was a Greek officer and member of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.

Career

After training at the military academy , which he graduated as a lieutenant in 1943, he began his officer career at EDES , with which he took part in the Greek civil war on the right-wing side. From 1945 to 1949 he was a member of the National Guard, the Rimini Brigade and special forces serving in the internment camp on the island of Makronisos , where communists were interned. Between 1950 and 1959 he served in various units and supplemented his military training with studies at the infantry school (1952), in ABC warfare (1954) and at the war school (1956). In 1961 he took part in training programs for infantry units in Germany. In 1963 he served in Cyprus.

Ioannidis took part in the putsch of the colonels on April 21, 1967, but stayed in the background in the following years of the military dictatorship and left Georgios Papadopoulos to head the colonel's regime . He was the head of the ESA military police , which under his leadership became a force feared even by civilians. In 1970 he was promoted to colonel and in 1973 to brigadier general.

After the student uprising at the Polytechnion in Athens in November 1973, Ioannidis led a coup , deposed Papadopoulos and made his friend Phaidon Gizikis president.

On July 15, 1974, Ioannidis organized the National Guard coup on Cyprus to overthrow the government of Archbishop Makarios III. In doing so, he rekindled the Cyprus conflict and provoked the invasion of the Turkish armed forces a few days later, which in turn led to the collapse of the Greek military junta and the transition to democracy.

Ioannidis was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for high treason and other crimes . He served this until his death in the prison in Korydallos near Athens.

literature

• Dimitrios Ioannidis , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 09/1975 of February 17, 1975, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The standard of August 16, 2010: "Security chief of the military dictatorship has died"
2. ↑ To Vima from "What the CIA Said About Ioannidis" (Greek) ( Memento of the original from November 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.