In an interview with The National Herald, historian Spiros Tsoutsoumpis of the University of Manchester said that after the German invasion and Greece’s capitulation the country was divided into an Italian zone, a Bulgarian zone and a German zone.
Tsoutsoumpis said Bulgarian policy was clearly one of ethnic cleansing. He said the aim was to detach Eastern Macedonia and Thrace and make those territories part of a greater Bulgaria. Together with German plundering of national wealth, he said, that division led to the great famine and tens of thousands of deaths in the winter of 1941–1942.
He argued that hunger and destitution alone did not produce the Resistance. On the national side he pointed to a power vacuum and to activist parties, especially the Communist Party of Greece and some radical Venizelists. Internationally he cited Allied victories at El Alamein, America’s entry into the war and the Soviet Union’s first victories, and said the British also armed and financed resistance organisations.
Tsoutsoumpis, author of A History of the Greek Resistance in the Second World War – The People’s Armies, also placed the Greco-Italian War of 1940 in the wider struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, and said Greek memory often treats it only as a nationalist Greco-Italian conflict.