Millions of women played combat roles during World War II. Some were killed in battle or taken as prisoners of war, and those who were captured faced interrogation and torture aimed at extracting information. The German Nazis executed many of the women they captured, among them Eleni Lela Karagianni, a leader of the Greek resistance.
Karagianni was born on June 24, 1898, in Limni on the island of Euboea, Greece. She was the wife of an Athens pharmacist, a simple housewife, and the mother of seven children in Athens.
During World War II, the Axis powers invaded and occupied Greece. The Greek army tried to defend the country against Italian and German forces. Greece received limited reinforcements from British, Australian, and New Zealand troops, but it did not receive enough and was forced to surrender.
When the Axis powers invaded and occupied Greece in 1941, the Karagianni family provided medicines to withdrawing British soldiers and later helped some trapped soldiers escape the country. The family's involvement grew steadily in the expanding resistance movement against the Italian occupiers of Athens at the time. This eventually led Lela, her husband, and her older children to join the Greek Republican National League.
Lela was an intelligent and brave woman. She even formed her own cell within the movement under the name "Bouboulina," after her great-grandmother Laskarina Bouboulina, a Greek leader who fought against the Ottoman Empire during the Greek War of Independence.
Karagianni worked to coordinate Greek resistance cells and their activities against the occupying Axis forces. She and her fellow resistance members operated from her husband's pharmacy in Athens and from a monastery in Megara. Her cell distributed information to other cells, smuggled wanted individuals to areas controlled by Greek resistance forces, forged documents, and coordinated with British military intelligence to disrupt the occupation.
In July 1944, German occupation forces arrested the Karagianni family in Athens. She was taken to the SS headquarters on Merlin Street, which some Greek prisoners knew as the "House of Hell." There she was tortured for several days, but she refused to reveal the names of her fellow resistance members. She was then sent to the Haidari detention camp outside Athens.
While in detention, Lela continued to coordinate resistance efforts against the Germans. Nevertheless, Eleni Karagianni and other resistance members were executed by firing squad on the morning of September 8, 1944, at the age of 46, only 34 days before the liberation of Athens by Allied forces.
Before her execution, she cried out: "Let the Nazis see that the Greeks know how to die for their homeland." She was posthumously awarded the Prize of Virtue and Self-Sacrifice, and she also received Israel's highest honor as a member of the "Righteous Among the Nations," those who risked their lives to help save Jews.
Lela's husband and children survived the war, and her story has been told in many books and even in films. A street in central Athens has been named after her.