Nelly | Greece

How do you memorialize someone like Nelly? On one hand, she was a pioneering woman photographer and her photos of Greek temples and columns set against sea and sky shaped – and it can be argued, still shape – our imagination of Greek culture and its visual image. On the other hand, she was a propagandist and she closely associated with Nazis and fascists.

Born Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari near Smyrna in Asia Minor, she studied photography in Germany. The expulsions of ethnic Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turks following the Greco-Turkish war was to shape her views for decades to come – she would adopt nationalist approach to her work, working for the Greek royal family and the Greek state, which was then trying to reproduce an idealized view of their country for both internal propaganda as well as external tourism.  Her photos of the Parthenon, Athens, and Santorini, as well as the locals in ethnic dresses, are to shape the Western imaginations of Greek culture.

Under the pre-war dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, she worked for the regime’s youth organization EON, producing photos and photomontages of fascistic grandeur. Through Metaxas’ regime, she became acquainted with the Nazi establishment, photographing Hitcher and Mussolini at close quarters, and becoming close to the Goebbels. She requests that Goebbels recommend her to UFA, the German film academy, to be trained in shooting documentaries – due to her admiration of Leni Riefenstahl, that other female propagandist, with whom she was later compared.

When the war broke out, she was in the United States; with the Italian invasion of Greece looming, her nationalism turned anti-Axis and she spent the war years fundraising for the Allied cause by selling the photos of her idealized Greece. A photo of hers – of a soldier sounding his trumpet to call the Greeks to fight off Italy – was on the cover of Life magazine in December 1940.  After Greece finally returned to democracy in 1974, her associations with the Metaxas regime was downplayed by a new Greek government which recast her as the ‘photographer of the nation’: a cultural ambassador of “the ‘Greece’ we all carry inwardly, the ‘Greece’ to which we all return to, the ‘Greece’ we cannot easily overcome’, as one pundit put it.

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The Photo of an Unknown War

The blog likes to note there is often no truth in photography. What better photo to illustrate this point that this one used in propaganda by both Communists and Fascists, and in two wars a decade apart. 

In the late 1970s, as the gerontocractic fascism of Francisco Franco drew to a close, historians revisited his arrival onto the world stage during the Spanish Civil War, now viewed in retrospect as the Dress Rehearsal for the Second World War. They pointed out the above photo as an evidence of atrocities committed by Franco’s troops on their prisoners of war during the Civil War, an eerie precursor of Fascist crimes to come.

Throughout the Civil War, both sides exploited the power of news media and newly-popular photography, at times using the same photographs. Back in 1938, the above photo was used by the Falange – the Spanish Fascists – to denounce the barbarous nature of the Spanish Republicans. In Corriere della Sera (which toed Mussolini’s line after the removal of its editor Luigi Albertini), it was labelled as the communist International Brigaders holding the heads of Spainish patriots.

The photo, which does look like a poor Photoshop attempt, is often attributed to David Seymour, the future co-founder of Magnum who made his name during the Spanish Civil War. It was not clear who actually took it and it was not even clear when it was taken. In 1938, when L’Humanité, an organ of the French Communist Party, saw the photo, it used it to denounce the French colonial empire in North Africa.

In that aspect, L’Humanité was closer to the truth (but perhaps accidentally). The photo was perhaps taken during the Rif War (1921-1927), when Spanish and French Foreign Legions brutally put down a Berber rebellion in Morroco led by Emir Abd-El-Krim.

The photo first appeared fittingly in Memoires d’Abd-el-Krim, a book whose pedigree was also in doubt. Jacques Roger-Mathieu claimed that the book was dictated to him by Abd-el-Krim onboard the vessel Abda which was to transport the defeated emir to his exile on the island of Réunion. Although, it appeared with a grand subtitle of “la confession ou les confidences”, many now doubt the book’s authenticity, noting it was filled with “absurdities of all sorts, lies, and anachronisms”. As per Roger-Mathieu, the photo depicted Spanish Legionaires with the heads of Rif fighters.

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Mussolini’s Demise

During the last days of the Second World War in Italy, Benito Mussolini attempted to escape the advancing Allied Army by hiding in a German convoy headed toward the Alps. Partisans stopped and searched the convoy at a small village on Lake Como; in the back of a truck, they found a private suspiciously wearing a general’s pants under his overcoat. It was, of course, Mussolini.

The partisans took him prisoner and he was later joined by his mistress, Clara Petacci. The council of partisan leaders, lead by the Communists, secretly decided to execute Mussolini and 15 leading Fascists. They were executed on April 29, 1945, and their bodies were brought back to Milan, where the fascist dictator’s meteoric rise to power began two decades ago; the bodies were hung from an Esso gas station in the Piazzale Loreto, the scene where Mussolini’s own fascists executed fifteen partisans (the so-called Martyrs of Piazzale Loreto) the previous year.

The photos of Mussolini’s gruesome demise was widely reproduced and sold to many Allied soldiers. Meanwhile in Berlin, Hitler heard how Mussolini was executed and vowed he would not let this happen to him. The end was near and Gotterdammerung was about to begin. (See an extremely gruesome picture of Mussolini’s defaced (literally) body here).

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Mussolini’s body was buried in a secret grave, but fascists found the body and removed it a year later. A small trunk containing the remains moved from a local convent to a monastery to a police constabulary until it was finally returned to Mussolini’s widow in 1957, and was buried at Predappio, Il Duce’s birthplace.