Georgios Tsolakoglou

Georgios Tsolakoglou

Georgios Tsolakoglou ( Greek Γεώργιος Τσολάκογλου , * April 1886 in Agrafa ; † May 1948 in Athens ) was a Greek general , politician and Prime Minister from 1941 to 1942 during the occupation of Greece by the German Wehrmacht .

Military career

Officer and war participation 1912 to 1922

Tsolakoglou completed training as an army officer after attending school. In this role he took part in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) , the First World War , the Allied expedition to Ukraine (1919) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) .

Second World War

During the Greco-Italian War he was Lieutenant General from October 1940 to April 1941, Commanding General of the III. Army Corps. After the German Wehrmacht attacked Greece as a result of the Balkan campaign and the conquest of Thessaloniki on April 9, 1941, the troops subordinate to it were requested late from northern Greece, so that the German troops successfully separated the units of the Greek army from each other by conquering Ioannina could cut off.

When the hopelessness of further resistance became evident, he negotiated on April 20, 1941 in consultation with the commanding generals of the 1st Army Corps, Lieutenant General Panagiotis Demestichas , and of the 2nd Army Corps, Lieutenant General Georgios Bakos , as well as the Metropolitan of Ioannina, Spyrdion, the Surrender in place of the commander of the Epirus Army , General Ioannis Pitsikas , whom he had previously replaced, in the presence of the commander of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich .

In doing so, he disregarded the express order of the commander-in-chief of the Greek army , General Alexandros Papagos , to resist until the end. One day later he finally signed the unconditional surrender of the Greek army in Larissa . Although no special agreements were made with regard to the German war partner Italy , the surrender ceremony was repeated for the third time on April 23, 1941 at the express request of "Duce" Benito Mussolini . In addition to Tsolakoglou and an Italian plenipotentiary, Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff , signed the surrender protocol on the German side .

Tsolakoglou described negotiating and signing the surrender in his posthumous memoir, published in 1959, as follows: “I found myself in a historical dilemma: to continue the fight and have a Holocaust or to follow the appeals of the army commanders and accept the surrender [...] I do not refuse any Responsibility for the decision I made from [...] To this day, I have not regretted my actions. On the contrary: I feel proud. "

Prime Minister under German occupation

After the regular Greek government under Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos and King George II. On April 23, 1941 after Crete later and during the Battle of Crete into exile to Egypt went Tsolakoglou was on 29/30. April appointed Prime Minister by the German occupying power. The Great Famine in Greece also falls during this period . His office he held until 2 December 1942. successor as prime minister under the occupying power of the Axis powers was Konstantinos Logothetopoulos .

Condemnation as a collaborator

After the liberation of Greece by the Allied forces on October 13, 1944, he was arrested and later sentenced to death by a special court as a collaborator with the Axis Powers . Tsolakoglou was charged with defying orders, favoring the surrender of Greece and later joining an illegitimate government. The death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment . In May 1948 he finally died of leukemia while in custody .

Biographical sources and background information

• biography
• Evi Koukouraki: From the Greek Wars of Liberation to the Present: History of Young Greece. 2003.
• Greek Army 1940–1941 on afrika-korps.de
• The Second World War 1940-1945. War, Occupation, Resistance, Liberation .
• Greece History: The Second World War and the Civil War. ( Memento of February 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) - Greek- message.de

literature

• Hagen Fleischer : In the cross shadow of the powers. Greece 1941-1944. (Occupation - Resistance - Collaboration) (=  Studies on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 2 ). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1985, ISBN 3-8204-8581-3 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 1978).

predecessor	Office	successor
Emmanouil Tsouderos	Greek Prime Minister 1941–1942 (under occupation)	Konstantinos Logothetopoulos (under occupation)