Napoleon Soukatzidis was born in Bursa, Ottoman Empire in 1909 to an ethnic Greek family. After the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and the forced population exchange that followed, he and his family settled in Crete, in the area of Arkalochori, near Heraklion. He studied business and became an accountant. Soukatzidis was multilingual and spoke Russian, English, German, French as well as Turkish. He was a member of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), and president of the Heraklion shop clerks trade union. Due to his union activism, in 1936 he was arrested by the dictatorial regime of Ioannis Metaxas and exiled to the island of Agios Efstratios (Ai Stratis).