Nazi foe Manolis Glezos dies at 97

Manolis Glezos, a Greek resistance fighter who became a national hero after he and a friend tore down the Nazi flag that waved over the Acropolis when the Germans occupied Athens in 1941, died Monday in Athens. He was 97.

Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis of Greece announced the death, which occurred at the Henry Dunant Hospital Center. The cause was heart failure, Greek news media reported.

Glezos was an 18-yearold student in 1941 when he joined a resistance group during the German occupation. At first, the fighters felt powerless.

“There was the hard reality that we had nothing in our hands,” Glezos said in a television interview in 1982.

But then he and another member of the group, Apostolos Santas, had an idea. In the early hours of May 31, armed with just a knife and a lantern, the two crept into a cave beneath the Acropolis, silently ascended that ancient citadel high above the outskirts of Athens, climbed the flagpole on the grounds and pulled down the Nazi flag while unsuspecting German officers drank toasts near the Parthenon to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Crete. The two young men cut the flag into pieces and buried it.

“We had absolute consciousness that it was a historic moment,” Glezos told The New York Times for a profile of him in 2014. “No struggle for what you believe in is ever futile.”

When Glezos went home, his mother asked him where he had been.

“I opened up my shirt and pulled out a piece of the swastika,” he said. “I showed it to her and said, ‘That’s where I was.’ Without saying a word, she hugged me and left.”

The next day, his stepfather asked her what young Manolis had done. “Look at the Acropolis, and you will know,” the mother said.

The news of their daring feat shot around the globe, giving inspiration to resistance groups throughout Europe. The next day, the Germans called for the death penalty for the offenders, but it wasn’t until 1942 that they captured Glezos and sent him to prison.

“That was my first act of resistance, and I knew there would be others,” he said.

His death sentence was commuted, but his younger brother, Nikos, who was also part of the resistance movement, was executed by the Germans in 1944.

Glezos was imprisoned in 1943 by Italian occupation forces and again in 1944 by Greek collaborators with the Germans, enduring a beating when he tried to escape.

After World War II, during the four-year Greek civil war between the government and communist revolutionary forces, Glezos, a communist partisan, received two more death sentences. But an international outcry pushed authorities to grant him life imprisonment instead. He was released in 1954.

Manolis Glezos was born Sept. 9, 1922, in Apeiranthos, a village on the island of Naxos in the South Aegean Sea. His father, Nikolaos Glezos, died two years after Manolis was born; his mother was Andromachi Nafpliotou.

His family moved to Athens a few years later, where he attended the School of Economics.

Between his times in jail, he worked as a journalist and ran for office.

While still in prison, he was elected to Parliament in 1951 and again in 1961. In 1959, he was sentenced to five years in prison for “helping to get communist spies into Greece,” The Times reported at the time.