Alexios Ntetorakis Exarchou
Charles University
For millions of deportees to Nazi Germany, liberation was not a single moment but the beginning of a new and often chaotic struggle. This paper examines that experience through the case of 282 Greek prisoners deported to Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary in 1944, following their paths beyond the prison gates into the weeks and months after April 1945. Drawing on research conducted for my MA thesis research, I analyze a diverse body of testimonies—including an unpublished diary, published memoirs, contemporary newspaper accounts, and original oral interviews with survivors—to reconstruct the aftermath of “freedom.”
The paper argues that liberation was a longer process shaped by three intersecting experiences. First, ambivalence toward German prisoners who assumed control of the prison in the final hours, exposing the limits of trust forged underincarceration. Second, encounters with Soviet liberators were marked both by genuine deliverance and by arbitrary treatment. Third, a difficult repatriation through the ruins of defeated Germany led the former prisoners back to a Greece already on the brink of civil war. Notably, in this case it was only after liberation that political tensions among the Greek prisoners themselves emerged, conflicts submerged during imprisonment.
By following these men from the prison gates to a homeland that had little room for their stories, this paper addresses the conference’s call to examine “narratives of liberation and its contradictions,” suggesting that liberation functioned as anopen process, whose implications continued to shape the prisoners’ relationships to one another, to Greece, and to their own later testimonies.
Alexios Ntetorakis Exarchou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern History at Charles University, Prague.