Daughter of Greece’s collaborationist prime minister fought with the resistance
Niky Mcintyre, who has died aged 97, played an important role in the Greek resistance during World War II, helping British SOE commandos to sabotage vital transport links during the German occupation, including the period between April 1943 and October 1944 when her father, Ioannis Rallis, held office as prime minister in the Nazi-controlled puppet government in Athens.
Niky Rallis was studying archaeology at Athens University when the Germans invaded in April 1941. The Greek army was decimated by the German blitzkrieg and she volunteered to work as a nursing auxiliary in a temporary hospital in
Athens. There, she cared for badly wounded young men from the army’s
Cretan division, dressing their extensive wounds with bandages soaked in garlic in lieu of antibiotics.
She went on to work for the Greek resistance and, due to her fluency in German and English, was assigned to work with British agents who had been dropped into Greece by parachute to undertake acts of sabotage. One of them, Lieutenant Harry Mcintyre, a Royal Engineer, would become her husband.
Appropriately, given their future relationship, one of their early missions together involved them driving across Athens disguised as bride and bridegroom, smuggling arms and explosives underneath their car – with Harry passing himself off as a Cretan as he spoke limited Greek.
In his impressionist travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, the American writer Henry Miller, who had met Niky before the war in Corfu, described her as having ‘‘Nile green eyes’’ and red hair that ‘‘seemed to be entwined with serpents’’. Her good looks and word-perfect German helped ease their path through German checkpoints.
In May 1943 Harry Mcintyre and a fellow officer fixed the explosive charges that destroyed the Asopos Viaduct, the highest railway bridge in Greece, disrupting German munitions supplies to Rommel in North Africa. The demolition of the viaduct was regarded as one of the most skilful feats of sabotage in the war and Mcintyre was rewarded with a Military Cross for his work.
Niky, however, was always loath to talk about her wartime exploits, regretting the terrible waste of young lives on all sides of the conflict, and sought no acknowledgement for risking her life.
After his exploits in Greece, Harry Mcintyre was evacuated by boat to Cairo, and Niky managed to smuggle herself out of occupied Greece to join him there, arriving in just the clothes she was standing in, with no passport or money. Shortly before she left, the Gestapo complained to her father that she was aiding and abetting the British.
She and Harry married in Cairo in 1945 and afterwards she settled down to the peripatetic life of a British Army wife.
She was born on the island of Corfu, where, in her youth, she would hang out with Miller and Lawrence Durrell.
Her parents hailed from two notable Greek political dynasties. Both her grandfathers had been prime ministers; as well as her father, her brother, George, would become a long-serving MP for Corfu and Greek prime minister from 1980-81, helping to normalise political life in Greece after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974.
She was christened Niky, meaning ‘‘victory’’ (the Greek is often translated as ‘‘nike’’), as her birth coincided with a famous election victory by her grandfather Dimitrios
When living in Malaysia in the 1950s, her neighbours would routinely call on her to kill cobras in their gardens with her husband’s hockey stick.
Rallis, who served five terms as prime minister between 1897 and 1921.
After her exploits in the resistance, she was relieved to leave Greece as the communists, gearing up for the ferocious civil war that would erupt after the German withdrawal, had started to use her as a poster girl because of her connection to the prime minister. After the liberation of Greece, her father was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration and treason. He died in prison in 1946, and the following year his son George published Ioannis Rallis Speaks from the Grave, an apologetic letter written during Ioannis’ imprisonment.
Niky and Harry Mcintyre returned to Britain by troop ship in 1946 and the first of their three children was born shortly afterwards. Niky’s courage never deserted her. When she was living in Malaysia in the 1950s, her neighbours would routinely call on her to kill cobras in their gardens with her husband’s hockey stick. She never refused.
In the early 1970s she attended Glasgow University, where she got a degree in French and German, winning a language prize and a paid secondment to Heidelberg University. She declined, refusing to leave her family.
After her husband’s death in 1981 she settled in the Cotswolds, in a converted nunnery, close to her two sons. She had a small house in Corfu and knew many people on the island.
She led a very active life, happiest whether swimming, picnicking, walking, chatting, cooking or helping to pick olives (in her 60s she fell out of an olive tree and ‘‘bounced’’).
There was, though, a significant difference between the young men in the British Army for whom wartime service in Greece was the defining ‘‘adventure’’ of their lives and the Greeks who suffered occupation, starvation and a civil war, for whom the war was a defining tragedy. It made Niky determined her family would be safe and would never go hungry.
As her son Peter recalled of family visits to her home, ‘‘it was only in the final few months of her life that she stopped being able to provide more food than you could possibly eat whenever you arrived’’.
She is survived by her children and grandchildren. –