Second World War. The organization was concentrated in the areas of Athens and Piraeus
, and although it never expanded to become a wider movement, it was one of the most active of the multitude of urban resistance groups that sprung up during the Occupation, and one of the first to carry out active resistance, in the form of bombings.
History
Foundation and political aims
Kostas Perrikos in Air Force uniform, before the Occupation.
The organization was founded in October 1941 by a
overrun by the Germans in April 1941. However, Perrikos was dissatisfied by the SSN's neutrality on the crucial issue of the post-war regime (monarchy or republic), and together with a number of others, split off to form the PEAN. The founding members of PEAN were, aside from Perrikos, lawyer Athanasios Dimitrios Skouras, who was chosen as president of the Governing Commission, the lawyers Ioannis Katevatis and Georgios Alexiadis, the merchant Dionysios Papavasilopoulos, the doctor Nikolaos Ailianos and Konstantinos Eleftheriadis.[1] Some of them were members of Panagiotis Kanellopoulos' National Unionist Party [el], and Kanellopoulos himself would become the group's political mentor.[2] Through Kanellopoulos, PEAN would develop close cooperation with another organization, the "Sacred Brigade" (Ιερά Ταξιαρχία, ΙΤ).[1]
Politically, PEAN, like most other similar groups formed in that period, was leftist-socialist, advocating "social justice" and state takeover of crucial sectors of the industry, while being vehemently opposed to any return of the monarchy in the person of King George II. What set it apart from the majority of them, however, was its insistence on active struggle against the occupying forces. Nevertheless, from the outset, PEAN was engaged in a war of words with both the royalist right and the Communist Party-controlled National Liberation Front (EAM), which at the time rejected PEAN's calls for sabotage acts and condemned them as "urban terrorism", a bitter feud that would continue throughout the Occupation.[3]
The ESPO bombing and aftermath
The PEAN Museum building in Kallithea, formerly used a hideout for the organisation
PEAN published a number of newspapers, most important of which was Doxa (Δόξα, "Glory"), first published in April 1942,
National-Socialist Patriotic Organisation (ESPO), the largest Greek National-Socialist organization, in central Athens. ESPO was trying to recruit volunteers for a "Greek Legion" to fight in the Eastern Front alongside the Germans. A team of four (K. Perrikos, A. Mytilinaios, Sp. Galatis and I. Bimba), carried out the bombing, in which ca. 40 ESPO members and 6 Germans were wounded, most of them severely, including ESPO's founder, Dr. Spyros Sterodimas, who died shortly after of his wounds.[4] The attack was widely publicized and praised by Allied radio stations, and marked the end of the ESPO and of German attempts to recruit Greeks into the Wehrmacht
.
The Germans initially blamed EAM for the act, but after the betrayal of the group by
court martial condemned the arrested to death. Perrikos was executed at Kaisariani on February 4, Ioulia Bimba was executed by beheading on 26 February 1943 in Vienna,[5] Galatis' sentence was commuted to a life sentence, while Mytilinaios managed to escape and flee to the Middle East. Four others, Th. Skouras, Ioannis Katevatis, D. Lois and D. Papadopoulos, although found not guilty, had been executed as a reprisal act on 7 January.[6] Dalianis would soon be executed by fighters of the right-wing "Omiros" organisation, which members included later Junta officer Stylianos Pattakos
