Ioannis Rallis

Ioannis Rallis

Ioannis Rallis ( Greek Ιωάννης Δ. Ράλλης , * 1878 in Athens ; † October 26, 1946 ) was a Greek politician and Prime Minister during the occupation of Greece by the German Wehrmacht (1943-1944).

Origin and studies

Rallis came from a family with roots as far back as the Byzantine period , whose members had held various public offices since the 15th century. He grew up as the son of Prime Minister Dimitrios Rallis and, after graduating from high school, studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and later postgraduate in France and Germany . After returning to Greece, he established himself as a lawyer. His son Georgios Rallis was also Prime Minister for a short time.

Political career

MP

Rallis began his political career in 1905 with the election to the National Assembly (Voulí ton Ellínon) . He was a member of parliament until 1935. He initially represented the interests of the People's Party ( Greek Λαϊκό κόμμα ) of the future Prime Ministers Dimitrios Gounaris and Panagis Tsaldaris .

In 1933 there were differences of opinion with Tsaldaris, so that he ran in the elections of June 1935 as a candidate for the free-thinker party of Ioannis Metaxas for parliament. However, he did not succeed in re-election. In the election to the National Assembly on January 26, 1936, he successfully ran for the electoral alliance of Georgios Kondylis and Ioannis Theotokis . In the period that followed, political life was marked by great instability. The Liberal Party ( Greek Κόμμα Φιλελευθέρων ) of Themistoklis Sofoulis had most of the parliamentary seats, but could not form a government. A few months later, on August 4, 1936, the National Assembly was dissolved by the dictator Metaxas. Despite his personal friendship with Metaxas, Rallis was a major critic of this dissolution.

minister

On November 18, 1920, his father appointed him Minister of the Navy in his cabinet, which was in office until February 6, 1921. From August 26, 1921 to March 2, 1922, he was then a member of Gounaris' second cabinet as Minister of Economics. He was later from November 4, 1932 to January 16, 1933 Foreign Minister in the first cabinet of Tsaldaris.

After the People's Party won the parliamentary elections on March 5, 1933, Tsaldaris appointed him Minister of the Interior on March 10, 1933. He was a member of the cabinet until August 13, 1933. However, after disagreements with the Prime Minister, he resigned and soon afterwards left the People's Party.

Prime Minister under German occupation and conviction

On April 7, 1943, Rallis was appointed as the successor to Konstantinos Logothetopoulos as the third (and last) Prime Minister during the occupation of Greece by the German Wehrmacht. This was preceded by conflicts with his son Georgios Rallis . Unlike his predecessor, he developed a strategy against resistance from the population by setting up so-called security battalions on behalf of the occupiers . Nevertheless, in the course of his reign , which lasted until October 12, 1944, the Greek resistance movement grew stronger , which from March 10, 1944 formed its own governments with Evripidis Bakirtzis and later Alexandros Svolos in the areas they controlled.

After the liberation of Greece in October 1944, he was arrested and then sentenced by a special court to life imprisonment for collaboration , in which he also died. One year after his death in 1947, his son Georgios Rallis published posthumously written texts from his imprisonment under the title Ioannis Rallis speaks from the grave .

predecessor	Office	successor
Konstantinos Logothetopoulos (under occupation)	Greek Prime Minister 1943–1944 (under occupation)	Georgios Papandreou (return to government in exile)