During World War II, millions of women took on combat and resistance roles. Some were killed in battle, and others were captured as prisoners of war. Captured women were interrogated and tortured for information, and many were executed by the Nazi Germans.
After the Axis powers invaded and occupied Greece, they faced strong resistance from the Greek people. The Greek resistance became one of the strongest resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. Greek women also took an active part in that movement.
Two Greek female resistance members, Eleni "Lela" Karagianni and Iro Konstantopoulou, were captured by the Nazis, tortured, and executed by firing squad.
Eleni "Lela" Karagianni was a Greek resistance leader. She was born on June 24, 1898, in Limni, Evia, Greece. She was the wife of a pharmacist, a simple housewife, and a mother of seven children in Athens.
When the Axis powers invaded and occupied Greece in 1941, the Karagianni family provided medicine to retreating British soldiers. They later helped some trapped soldiers escape the country.
The family grew increasingly involved in the resistance movement against the Italian occupiers of Athens. Eventually, Lela, her husband, and her older sons joined the National Republican Greek League.
Lela was an intelligent and brave woman. She formed her own cell within the movement, named "Bouboulina" after her great-grandmother, Karina Bouboulina, a female Greek captain who had 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 partisans operated from her husband's pharmacy in Athens and from a monastery in Megara.
Her cell distributed information to other cells, smuggled wanted persons into areas controlled by Greek partisan forces, forged documents, and coordinated with British military intelligence to disrupt the Axis occupation.
In July 1944, the Karagianni family was arrested in Athens by the German occupation forces. She was taken to the SS headquarters on Merlin Street, known to some Greek prisoners as the "Hell House."
There she was tortured for several days but refused to name her fellow resistance members. She was then sent to the Haidari concentration camp outside Athens. While interned, Lela continued to coordinate resistance efforts against the Germans.
Eleni Karagianni and other captured resistance members were executed by firing squad on the morning of September 8, 1944. She was 46 years old, and her execution came just 34 days before Athens was liberated by Allied forces.
Before her execution, she shouted, "Let the Nazis see that the Greeks know how to die for their homeland."
She was posthumously awarded the Virtue and Self-Sacrifice Award. She also received Israel's highest honor as a member of the Righteous Among the Nations, for those who risk their own lives to help save Jews.
Lela's husband and children survived the war. Her story has been told in several books and even in films, and her name has been given to a street in central Athens.
Iro Konstantopoulou was a Greek resistance member. She was born on July 16, 1927, in Athens, Greece, into a wealthy Greek family. She was 13 when the Axis powers invaded and occupied Greece during the Second World War.
Despite her young age and her status as a high school student, she became a member of the resistance movement. She joined the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, a Greek resistance movement in which she worked to steal messages and monitor troop movements.
In early 1944, she was caught carrying out resistance activities and was arrested at her home by the security battalions, the Greek police who collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. Her wealthy parents used their connections and bribed the local authorities to have her released.
She continued her activities in the resistance movement. In July 1944, she was involved in a successful resistance operation to blow up a train carrying ammunition. Soon after, a double agent working within the Greek resistance revealed her identity to the German occupation forces.
On July 31, 1944, Iro was arrested while walking home from high school. According to a source, she had finished her final high school exams that morning.
She was tortured for several days but refused to reveal the names of her fellow resistance members. As a German speaker, she was noted as having been able to insult her captors in their own language.
After her interrogation, she was transferred to the Haidari concentration camp just outside Athens, with a highly dangerous note and a red cross next to her name. There she was held along with several other members of the resistance, including resistance leader Lela Karagianni.
On September 5, 1944, Iro and 49 other members of the resistance were executed by firing squad in the camp, just 37 days before Athens was liberated by Allied forces.
It is said that on the morning of her execution, as she was being taken by camp guards, Lela Karagianni, who would be executed three days later, told her proudly, "Well done, my hero. This is how Greek women die."
Many sources also report that Iro's body was shot 17 times, one bullet for each year of her life, as a warning to other members of the resistance.