Vasilis Lambrou
Vasilis Lambrou ( Greek Βασίλης Λάμπρου even Basil L. ) was inspector general of the Greek Military Police (Ελληνική Στρατιωτική Αστυνομία, ΕΣΑ), de facto Security Service of the Greek Junta (1967-1974), and one of the most well-known torturer of the system.
If a nocturnal arrest was planned, he set off, usually accompanied by his assistants Evangelos Mallios (Ευάγγελος Μάλλιος) and Karapanagiotis (Καραπαναγιώτης).
A quote from a speech he gave to several hundred political prisoners, to whom he wanted to convey the futility of their resistance, became known:
“If you think there is anything you can do, the best you can do is make a fool of yourself. The world is divided in half. There are communists and the free world. The Russians and the Americans, nothing else. What are we? American. Behind me is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the USA. You cannot fight us, we are Americans. "
In the course of their investigation , the European Commission's Human Rights Commissioners wanted to hear the police and the military who were mentioned most frequently by the tortured detainees . Most of them made statements that devastatingly exposed the Colonel's cause : they lost self-control , berated the political prisoners, claimed that this or that prisoner was nothing but a filthy simulant acting on the orders of the Communist Party and mutilated himself to create the appearance that the "honorable Greek police officers" were savages. But in Captain Basil Lambrou, the members of that commission had another man before them. Elegant, polite, smiling, mastering nerves and emotions, eloquent , without using technical terms, he was the perfect actor. He had tried to make a "plausible" explanation credible: namely, that inevitable errors occur in the police in every country and he also pointed out the "special circumstances" in Greece.
literature
- James Becket: Barbarism In Greece: A Young American Lawyer's Inquiry Into the Use of Torture In Contemporary Greece , New York (Walker) 1970.
Web links
- About Theodorakis' captivity and his encounter with Lambrou , from: Guy Wagner : Mikis Theodorakis . A biography , Echternach 1983, ISBN 3888650208
- Report of the victim Nikos Kafandaris about the treatment by Lambrou (Greek)
Individual evidence
- ^ William Blum: Killing Hope , 2nd edition 2003, ISBN 1842773690 ( excerpt , English); German 2007 as Killing Hope: The US military and secret service interventions (CIA) since World War II , ISBN 3889751415 , there cited from Becket (see lit.)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lambrou, Vasilis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lambrou, Basil |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Chief Inspector of the Greek Security Police |
| DATE OF BIRTH | before 1967 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 20th century or 21st century |