The archive of the Athens Court of First Instance, ‘Κατοχικαί αποφάσεις’ (‘Court Judgments Regarding Cases of the Occupation period’), 1950-1960

This includes approximately 10,000 cases, which were heard after a claim was filed by persons who had sold property during the Occupation and were now, under Law 1323/1949, requesting that said property be returned.

The archives of the Athens Court of First Instance comprise the judgments of the cases heard by the court but not the lawsuits themselves, meaning that we are not in possession of complete case histories with all the relevant information on the parties and properties involved in each case[1].

Data for the study on the economy during the occupation was collected through meticulous and exhaustive indexing of court judgments issued during 1950–1955 and of witness depositions where these exist. Thus, whilst we indexed 600 judgments, we only have employment information for about half of the claimants.

Witnesses for the buyers (the parties that purchased properties during the occupation) aimed to convince judges that

• The pre-war value of a given property (when this was not of negligible worth) was more than 750,000 drachmas, which was the legal limit for a claim, meaning that the claim would therefore be dismissed automatically.
• The seller had a considerable estate and/or savings and was employed in a profession that guaranteed a good standard of living, meaning that the return of the property was not a real necessity.
• The buyer had invested a significant sum of money in making improvements to the property, an amount equal to or greater than half the real value of the property, meaning that the property would not be returned but the seller would be reimbursed with an amount equal to real value of the property at the time of the sale.
• The buyer was the victim of a bombing, fire or organised leftist activity, meaning that the property would not be returned but the seller would be reimbursed with an amount equal to real value of the property at the time of the sale.
• The claimant “voluntarily participated in leftist organisations” or was known to have “anarchist ideas” and therefore was denied the right to claim that the property be returned. This archive, very much a product of its time, clearly conveys the prevalent sentiment in post–civil-war Athens where anyone suspected of being of leftist ideology was automatically denied even their basic rights.

It appears thus that the majority of transactions (82%) took place between October 1941 and October 1942—the worst period of the occupation in terms of food shortages, hunger and inflated prices—and only 5% of transactions occurred in 1943.