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Nazi Sunset Golden Dawn

Feature - 54 min

Greece's forgotten Nazi history that lies behind Golden Dawn

Nazi Sunset Golden Dawn Why would you vote for the political descendants of murderers? Across Greece, villages that were once destroyed by the Nazis and their Greek collaborators are now voting to give Neo-Nazis power. Tracing the direct line between Nazism and Golden Dawn, this film provides a unique insight into the party. It is a terrifying look at Greek Nazi history in all its horror and why political memory is so important. How can the Greeks have forgotten their past so quickly?
"We were walking in shoals", a female survivor says of the journey up to the school house where all the Greeks in the town were being assembled. The men and boys were split off from the women and children. "Many hundreds of women and children were in two small classrooms. Agony. Seeing the houses on fire from the windows", recalls a witness from amongst the children who were spared. 700 men and teenage boys were executed at the massacre of Kalavrita. There were only 13 male survivors.

"Things were so cloudy, so unstable that anything could have happened", is how Alexandros Giosmos from Golden Dawn tries to explain away his father's collaboration with the Nazis and alleged involvement in war crimes. Alexandros admits killings, but defends all of his father's actions behind the veil of being at the forefront of fighting the Communists. He says any Nazi collaboration was only incidental. "My father led death squads that maybe acted parallel to the Security Battalions. He was a National Socialist as am I."

Despite his protestations, Greek collaborators like Giosmos's father were in fact deeply involved in the Nazi desecration of Greece and Giosmos was a senior member of the collaboration government. "But there were also Greeks in this whole thing. The German-Tsoliades as we called them." In another massacre in Kalavrita there was the same tale of shootings and everyone being burnt alive, but this time it was different. "The assassins were Greeks. I didn't see any Germans kill." Despite members of Golden Dawn having such a strong connection to this brutal legacy, in the locality of Kalavrita their support base is rising from election to election. How is this possible? It is because Golden Dawn have become supremely adept at hiding this brutal legacy.

The pain that generation of Greeks endured was life shattering. "You can't forget the pain. They killed 14 people from our family." But for some reason the magnitude of what happened hasn't passed onto the next generation in the same way and as one survivor comments, "if people have a history that is not written correctly, then the people are not right either."

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TRANSCRIPT

The Producers


Stelios Kouloglou is a Greek journalist and writer. He is the creator of the news web channel "TVXS" and a board member of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. He is, also, a columnist for the LIFO magazine. He has worked as a political correspondent in Greece and as a foreign correspondent in Paris and Moscow, from where he covered developments in the Soviet Union and the other ex-communist countries. In the 1992-95 period he covered the war in Yugoslavia as a special war correspondent. In 1996 Kouloglou created and introduced for the Greek national television Reportage Without Frontiers. In 2009, his documentary film Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, based on the book of the same name by John Perkins, was shown at film festivals in the U.S.

Making The Film


In a series of Greek cities that were destroyed by the Nazis and their Greek collaborators during the German occupation and whose population was annihilated, the Neo-Nazi party won a significant percentage in the recent elections. The director screens a film about Nazi crimes at the school in such a town. Do the students know the history of their home town? How can it be that some of their parents voted for the political descendants of murderers? Or did the Neo-Nazis not actually do so well in the elections? A documentary within a documentary about memory and oblivion.

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