World War II Photographs

Browse through photos from World War II from photographic archives held at institutional and private collections.

The story begins with snapshots of Greek troops leaving for the front, the victory against Italy, which was the Allied Forces’ first victory against the Axis, followed by the German occupation of Greece commencing in the spring of 1941.

King George II and the Greek government, led by Tsouderos, fled to Egypt. Greek officers and soldiers, military school students and many civilians flee the occupied country and form the Greek Middle East Army. They take part in the two major allied operations, in El Alamein in 1942 and in Rimini, Italy in 1944.

The exhibition takes us to occupied Greece, cities and countryside a backdrop for the Greek Resistance, one of the most militant resistance movements in Europe. Demonstrations and strikes, espionage networks, sabotage groups, guerrilla warfare, illegal press, flyers and grafitti, such as the EPON slogan "we fight and we sing", are the arsenal of the resistance fighters, whom we see posing fierce, young men and women, on the mountains and in the villages and the cities.

In contrast, photographs from the lives of the civilian population in the occupied cities highlight the tension between the individual and the collective, the heroic and the anonymous, the small and the large. We notice that there are relatively few occupation photos from the cities. On one hand, the ban on photography in public places makes it extremely risky for photographers, who anonymously and secretly take out and keep a file with photographic evidence, on the other hand there are shortages of film and technical material. Documenting wartime photos is extremely difficult due to lack of information, especially of photographers. 

Much of the war time photography is done by anonymous creators, alongside professional photographers such as Nikos Stournaras from Bolioti, who, enjoying the favor of the occupying forces, covertly sends films and cameras to the Resistance. Then there are the guerrilla-photographers, foreign photographers who do photojournalism and also amateurs, who capture their own experience, either in the mountains or in the cities.

The German occupation of the Greek capital officially ended on October 12, 1944. Collective memory, through photography as an indisputable testimony, celebrates the Liberation as reflected in the images of people celebrating on the streets of Athens .