Kokinha raid

The Piraeus quarter of Nicaea was founded by refugees after the Asia Minor catastrophe . The sites for the construction of the Nea Kokinha quarter were purchased by the Greek government in March 1923 ^[1] . Like other urban neighborhoods and villages founded by refugees throughout the country and given the names of “Unforgettable Fatherland”, the quarter ultimately received the name of Bithynia Nicaea . The quarter (municipality) was renamed Nicaea in September 1940 ^[2] . There was another additional reason for this. The destitute Asian refugees who became victims of the antagonism of the Entente powers, in large numbers, became supporters of the Communist Party of Greece . In this light, the previous name of Kokinya ( Greek κόκκινος “purple-red, crimson”) acquired a political connotation. But it is under this name, in the words of the British historian Mark Mazower ( M. Mazower ) during the triple German-Italian-Bulgarian occupation of Greece (1941-1944) “Kokinya became famous as one of the most“ red “quarters of the Greek capital” ^{[3] [ 4]} .

By the beginning of 1944, ELAS city ​​squads practically controlled the suburbs of Athens, which at that time distinguished the Greek capital from other occupied European capitals. Occupation troops raided the suburbs, usually in the daytime ^[5] . Fascinated by the Athenians' struggle, the French Hellenist Roger Millieks wrote that Athens was "the capital of European Resistance" ^[6] . The raids carried out during the raids on the neighborhoods controlled by the city ELAS units were one of the forms of countermeasures of the occupation authorities and punitive actions. During the years of occupation, the so-called. 6th Separate ELAS Regiment and one of the OPLA organization units. Between March 4 and March 8, 1944, Kokkina was attacked by the occupying forces and collaborators. During the so-called. The “battle for Kokinha” attack was repelled by the forces of urban units and the population, the occupying forces were forced to retreat ^[7] . In retaliation for their defeat, the Germans shot 37 residents of Kokinyi, who were at that time in the Haidari concentration camp . Five of those shot were from among the Armenian refugees ^[8] .

For five months after the battle for Kokinha, it was under the complete control of the city ELAS squads. The raid of August 1944 was a carefully prepared military operation. ELAS city squads were taken by surprise. The resistance of the few night patrols was quickly suppressed; most of the members of the urban detachments did not even have time to get to the hiding places with ammunition and weapons. Before dawn on August 17, 1944 , mechanized and infantry units of the 11th Wehrmacht airfield division , together with Greek collaborators from the Security Battalions, surrounded the quarter and invaded it from two directions. The operation also involved the mechanized part of the Greek police colonel Burandas, who collaborated with the SS and the Gestapo ^[9] , whose name became a household word and odious ^[10] In the first morning hours and using horns, collaborators demanded that men aged 14 to 60 years gathered in the central square ( Πλατεία Οσίας Ξένης ), warning that those who did not follow the order would be shot on the spot. German soldiers broke into houses and shot on the spot all found there.

A few hours later, up to 25,000 residents of Kokinyi were driven into the square, where local collaborators, covering their faces with masks and bags with slits for the eyes, began to point the Germans to the participants of the Resistance. 90 people were shot directly on the square. 72 people were shot by the so-called. Kokinyi walls, 42 at the wall of the Armenian settlement, 40 in the Skisto gorge. Among those who were extradited and killed were the secretary of the local Communist Party organization Apostolis Hadzivasiliu, who was chopped with swords while dragging him, Panagiotis Asmanis from the OPLA detachment, whom Plidzanopoulos killed himself, Stelios Kazakidis, who was gouged out to give his comrades-in-arms, is a nineteen-year-old local girl Epon , whose group fell in battle, and she herself was wounded was taken prisoner.

The executed were burned using gasoline, although many were still alive. Simultaneously with the mass shootings and killings in houses and on the streets, the Germans robbed and burned, using flamethrowers and mortars, hundreds of houses. Out of 90 houses, 80 were burnt in an Armenian settlement.

By the end of the day, up to 350 ^[11] corpses were transported and buried in the 3rd Piraeus cemetery. At the same time, about 8,000 Kokinyi residents were sent to the Haidari concentration camp . Of these, about 3 thousand were sent to Germany, most remained among the missing.

On September 24, the residents of Kokigny were called upon by the resistance organizations to take part in a memorial service in memory of the victims of the raid. Thousands of residents of the quarter responded to the appeal and filled the central square with wreaths and flowers in their hands. The church procession was fired upon by machine guns of the occupiers from a nearby hill, and 9 more dead and 32 wounded were added to the victims of the raid ^[12] .

The wall of Kokigny was located on the territory of the pre-war carpet factory, which belonged to the British company Oriental Carpet and functioned from 1929 until the start of the occupation. During the occupation, the Germans shot 75 people here ^[13] .

After these events, the factory remained abandoned for decades. Today the place is called the Kokigny Roundup Wall ( Μάντρα Μπλόκου της Κοκκινιάς ) or just the Kokigny Wall ( Μάντρα της Κοκκινιάς ) and has become a memorial.

After their release, the leadership of the Security Battalions, including Colonel I. Plidzanopoulos, appeared in court for participating in 30 raids ^[14] . At the same time, democratic newspapers noted that the presence of “supporters of the right-wing forces” in the hall aroused fear among prosecution witnesses, in particular among soldiers who testified to the presence of the military police ^[14] . However, with regard to the Kokigny raid, the process focused on if Plindzanopoulos shot one of the arrested persons with his own hands and did not deal with the charge of "acts of violence in collaboration with the occupying authorities against the Greeks for their activities against the enemy." ^{[15] The} prosecutor found only one defendant guilty, who extradited the Germans to the participants of the Resistance without a mask on his face. Ultimately, in March 1947, at the height of the Civil War , all the accused were found not guilty ^[16] .

In the 1950s, a memorial plate was erected on the Wall of Kokigny with the inscription "here, the German invaders executed the Greek patriots." ^[17] In 1956, a bronze monument to the victims of the Kokinje raid by the sculptor Yorgos Zongolopoulos was erected on the Square on August 17. Members of the left parties organized unofficial memorial services until this was officially done by the community on the twentieth anniversary of the raid in 1964 ^[18] .

After the establishment of the military dictatorship in the country, the memorials took on an anti-communist character and their organization was assigned to the military commandant of Piraeus. The participation in the security battalion raid was hushed up and it was alleged that the main purpose of the raid was the members of the OPLA and that the scammers were members of the Communist Party. On August 17, 1968, the military authorities changed the memorial plaque to a new one that read: “Masked traitors gave the barbarians to the invaders on August 17, 1944, the patriots of the fighters of the National Resistance, the heroic sons of Nicaea who were shot at this place” ^[19] . In his speech, retired major N. Plindzanopoulos, the nephew of the commander of the Security Battalion Plidzanopoulos, who by that time had been appointed mayor of Nicaea, called those responsible in the massacre “masked traitors-communists” and justified the need for action in the summer of 1944 against “red terror” ^{[20 ]} . With the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, the Memorial Plate on the Wall of Kokigny assumed its original form ^[21] and the Kokigny Oblast Museum was created in one of the buildings of the former carpet factory. In 2005, one of the areas of the quarter received the name of the executed Diamanto Kumbaki ^[22] . Also, a monument to the victims of the Kokigny raid is installed at the 3rd cemetery of Athens.

“Resistance Poetess”, Sofia Mavroidi - Papadaki, dedicated one of the poems of her collection published in 1946 to this event ^[23]

At the forefront of labor and fire

And the sacrificial altar

Quarters of Kalogreza, Drapetsona

And the bloodied Kokinha

The events that occurred during the Kokinha raid were reproduced in the movie "The Raid " filmed in 1965 by film director Adonis Kira ^[24] .

• Κωστόπουλος, Τάσος. Η αυτολογοκριμένη μνήμη: Τα Τάγματα Ασφαλείας και η μεταπολεμική εθνικοφροσύνη. - Αθήνα: φιλίστωρ, 2005.
• Δημήτρης Π. Λιάτσος " Το μπλόκο της Κοκκινιάς " (1983)

• Το Μπλόκο της Κοκκινιάς (neopr.) . Ντοκυμαντέρ του Διονύση Γρηγοράτου (ΕΡΤ, 1983).
• Δίκτυο μαρτυρικών χωριών και πόλεων της Ελλάδας, το μπλόκο της Κοκκινιάς