Bold claim: Courage that outlives generations finally comes into view, and people won’t stop talking about it. Here’s the story newly told with fresh words, while keeping every key fact intact and, where helpful, adding a touch of clarity for readers new to the topic.
In a book-lined office, Vangelis Sakkatos studies the photographs of men queued before a firing squad. The May Day executions of 1944—the brutal Reich retaliation against a communist guerrilla attack—have haunted him since childhood. The veteran leftist surveys the images now dominating Greece’s headlines with a mix of fury and awe. “Their heroism was the stuff of myth,” he says, eyes resting on the newfound pictures. “The years may have passed, but I haven’t forgotten.”
At 96, Sakkatos never imagined he would finally be able to “put a face” to the protagonists of a tragedy that stands as one of the Nazi occupation’s worst atrocities. Two hundred communists were killed by machine gun fire at the Kaisariani shooting range, just a short distance from his first-floor home. They had been executed in retaliation for a deadly ambush that killed a German general when communist fighters struck a few days earlier. The photographs show the men walking into the firing range, heads high, eyes steady, facing the camera as if unfazed. They went to their deaths singing partisan songs, an act of fierce defiance that has become emblematic in Greece.
“That’s the part we’ve always heard about,” notes Sakkatos, who long campaigned with other leftists for a memorial to honor the victims. “And now we can see that courage with our own eyes.”
Until recently, the existence of these images was unknown. They surfaced when a Belgian collector, Tim de Craene, posted them on eBay. Before that moment, the public memory of the last moments of these prisoners relied on handwritten notes tossed from trucks as the men were driven from Block 15 at the Chaidari prison complex to their deaths—a stark substitute for photographs.
Following days of public outcry after the photos appeared, Greece’s culture ministry announced a preliminary agreement to purchase them from De Craene, who briefly withdrew them from sale. The prints, believed to have been taken by Hermann Heuer, a Wehrmacht lieutenant, are described by officials as a “monument of exceptional historical importance.”
Few events in Greece’s wartime memory have wielded as much influence. The May Day executions—widely seen as the apex of the country’s communist-led resistance to Nazi occupation—have inspired generations of artists: poets, songwriters, painters, and filmmakers have drawn on this episode that still captures the national imagination.
“Its one thing to hear about their bravery; it’s another to see it,” says Yiannis Eris, a communist party volunteer who guides visitors at Kaisariani’s firing range and the national resistance museum. “They faced the firing squad with immense pride, raising their fists. The night before, they washed and shaved. They weren’t afraid of what lay ahead; they saw it as an honor.”
The shootings occurred months before Hitler’s forces were retreating from Greece in October 1944, ending four years after Mussolini had ordered a full-scale invasion from Italian-occupied Albania and three years after the Wehrmacht entered Athens.
Heuer’s assignment in Greece, beginning in 1943, was likely part of a unit connected to Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, tasked with documenting daily life under occupation. “The images let us view the drama of occupied Greece through the occupier’s lens,” said Lina Mendoni, Greece’s culture minister.
The collection is estimated to comprise 262 photographs, with some bearing a handwritten note reading “Aten 1.5.44”—the massacre date.
Greek historians, who have long lamented scarce archival material from the period, regard the images as exceptional. Their discovery not only advances research into Nazi-era atrocities but also opens space for open discussion about Greece’s bloody civil conflict that followed liberation in 1944–49.
For decades, Greece’s communist KKE party was banned, and public commemorations of events like the Kaisariani killings were restricted, partly because access to sites such as Kaisariani’s firing range was restricted. The dictatorship that ended in 1974 left a legacy in which the left’s role in the resistance could be downplayed.
Recently, relatives who recognize ancestors in the photographs have stepped forward, demanding a formal acknowledgment of a deeply traumatic era.
“At last, we have pictorial confirmation of what has haunted the Greek left for decades,” says Kostis Karpozilos, history professor at Panteion University. “These images will open necessary debates about memory politics in modern Greece, debates long overshadowed by civil-war-era divisions.”
Tensions flare in the meantime: a marble plaque commemorating the 200 was vandalized by far-right actors shortly after the photographs’ appearance. Yet on Friday, the memorial near the wall where the men were shot was adorned with red carnations, signaling a surge of visitors seeking to pay respects.
“The response to these images has been overwhelming emotionally,” notes Anastasis Gkikas of the Communist Party’s history department. “We’ve received many requests from descendants asking for the photographs to be returned to Greece. These belong here, and they should be displayed publicly for everyone to see.”
