page_title: 1 May 1944 Kaisariani executions
section_title: Commemoration
hierarchical_section_title: 1 May 1944 Kaisariani executions / Commemoration
caption_attribution_description: English: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras lays down red roses at the National Resistance Memorial, Kaisariani on 26 January 2015.
context_page_description: On 1 May 1944, 200 Greek communists were executed at the firing range of the Athens suburb of Kaisariani by the Nazi occupation authorities as reprisal for the killing of a German general by Greek Resistance forces.
context_section_description: The executions were a seminal event of the Greek Resistance against the Axis forces, and resonate among the Greek Left to this day.
  When on 1 May 1950 the celebration of the International Workers' Day was permitted for the first time since 1936 (the Metaxas Regime abolished it soon after), it was held at the Kaisariani shooting range. The crowd demanded amnesty for political offenses and the release of the over 20,000 political prisoners still held on the island Makronisos and elsewhere following the Greek Civil War.
  On his June 1987 visit to Greece, German President Richard von Weizsäcker chose the Kaisariani Memorial to commemorate the victims of World War II occupation in a move regarded with scepticism by conservative circles of both the Greek and German administrations. While there, Weizsäcker also mentioned the names of some other places in Greece where the German Wehrmacht had perpetrated massacres: Kalavryta, Distomo, Kleisoura, Kommeno, Lyngiades, and Kandanos.
  On 26 January 2015, the newly elected Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, the country's first leftist head of government, visited the shooting range and laid roses on the memorial to the executions, as his first act after being sworn in. The move was widely interpreted as a symbolic gesture of defiance towards Germany and its role in the Greek government-debt crisis.
  In October 2017, the movie To Teleftaio Simeioma ("The Last Note") by the acclaimed Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris, was released. It focuses on the story of the 200, with the German camp commandant, SS captain Karl Fischer (André Hennicke) and the Greek political prisoner and interpreter Napoleon Soukatzidis (Andreas Konstantinou) as the main characters.
caption: Alexis Tsipras laying down red roses at the Kaisariani Memorial.
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