Georgios Papadopoulos

Georgios Papadopoulos was a Greek military officer and dictator who led a coup d'etat in Greece in 1967 and became the country's Prime Minister from 1967 to 1973. He also was the President of Greece under the junta in 1973, following a referendum. However, after the effective suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising, he was, in turn, overthrown by hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis, in a string of events that would culminate to the fall of the regime in 1974. Papadopoulos was born in Elaiohori, Achaia, the son of a village schoolmaster. He graduated from the War Academy in 1940 as a second lieutenant and served on the Albanian front during the Greek-Italian war. He joined the national resistance units when Greece was occupied by the Germans during World War II. After an early career as an artillery officer, he was promoted to the central intelligence service, where he worked as a liaison officer between Greek and American intelligence agencies from 1959 to 1964. He was promoted to colonel in 1960. In April 1967, Papadopoulos and a group of other mid-level army officers overthrew the democratic government and established a military junta that lasted until 1974. Assuming dictatorial powers, he led an authoritarian, anti-communist and ultranationalist regime which eventually ended the Greek monarchy and established a republic, with himself as president. He banned political parties, imposed restrictions on the press, and imprisoned thousands of political opponents. He also pursued a foreign policy that aligned Greece with NATO and the United States, while antagonizing Turkey and Cyprus. In 1973, Papadopoulos established a republic with himself as president and lifted martial law. However, loss of support from other senior military officers led to his arrest by Ioannidis and to his replacement as president by General Phaedon Ghizikis in November 1973. Ioannidis then provoked a crisis in Cyprus that led to the Turkish invasion and the collapse of the dictatorship. Papadopoulos was tried for his part in the crimes of the junta and sentenced to death in August 1975, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Papadopoulos died of cancer at the age of 80 in 1999. He never regretted his role in the coup and insisted to the end that he saved Greece from communism. His and the dictatorship's legacy, as well as its methods and effects on Greek economy and society as a whole, are still fiercely debated.