The invasion of the German army in 1941 brought to Greece Hitler's New Order, a world of ruined settlements, starving populations, and absolute catastrophic visions. Gathering rich firsthand testimonies and drawing from untouched archival sources, Mark Mazower describes the governance and economic exploitation of Greece by the Axis powers, the collapse of an entire society amid terror and famine, and its rebirth in the institutions and practices of mass resistance.

Daily life under foreign rule, as well as that of the resistance fighters in the mountains of Free Greece, is presented within the unprecedented material and psychological conditions of total war: civilian citizens and villagers targeted in purges, Jews on the way to concentration camps, resistance fighters, collaborationists, black marketeers, and traitors are the figures through which the vivid narrative reconstructs the troubled and contradictory experience of the Occupation.

However, the war is also examined from the perspective of the conqueror: the words and deeds of ordinary soldiers or officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS (such as the young Kurt Waldheim, whose activities in occupied Greece sparked this study) reveal the beliefs and values that supported the Nazi policy of violence, terror, and the Final Solution.

Richly illustrated with photographs from German, British, and Greek sources, the book offers a revelatory and often poignant account of the greatest Greek tragedy of the century: one that ended one day with the celebrations of Liberation only to reopen the next amidst the fire of the Civil War.