Georgios Papadopoulos (, ; 5 May 1919 – 27 June 1999) was a Greek military officer and dictator who ruled Greece from 1967 to 1973. He led the military junta that overthrew Prime Minister Panagiotis Kanellopoulos in 1967 and established his dictatorship. He was proclaimed Prime Minister of Greece from 1967 and served until 1973. He was elected President of Greece under the junta in June 1973, following a referendum. However, after causing a massacre by deploying military riflemen and a tank brigade to attack non-violent protestors to suppress the Athens Polytechnic uprising, he was overthrown by hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis, in a string of events that would culminate in the fall of regime in 1974. His and dictatorship's legacy, as well as its methods he constructed and effects on Greek economy and society as a whole, are still fiercely debated.

He joined the Hellenic Army during the Second World War and initially helped resist the Italian invasion of Greece in the Greco-Italian War. He is widely believed to have later collaborated as a member of the Axis-aligned Security Battalions. After the war, he rose to the rank of colonel.

In April 1967, Papadopoulos and a group of other mid-level Army officers overthrew the democratic government and established a military junta that lasted until 1974. Assuming dictatorial powers, he led an authoritarian, anti-communist and ultranationalist regime which eventually ended the Greek monarchy and established a republic, with himself as President. In 1973, he was overthrown and arrested by his co-conspirator Brigadier General Dimitrios Ioannidis. After the Metapolitefsi which restored democracy in 1974, Papadopoulos was tried for his part in the crimes of the junta and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Refusing several offers of clemency in exchange for admitting guilt, he spent the remainder of his life in prison.

Early life and military career Papadopoulos was born in Elaiohori, a small village in the Prefecture of Achaea in the Peloponnese, to local schoolteacher Christos Papadopoulos and his wife Chrysoula. He was the eldest son and had two brothers, Konstantinos and Haralambos. After finishing high school in 1937, he enrolled in the Hellenic Military Academy, completing its three-year programme in 1940.

His biographical notes, published as a booklet by his supporters in 1980, mention that he took a civil engineering course at the Polytechneion but did not graduate.Georgios Papadopoulos: Report to the Court and Declaration to the Greek People. (Αναφορά προς το Δικαστήριον και Δήλωσις προς τον Ελληνικόν λαόν). Greek Canadian Patriotic League. Horizons Press, Toronto, Ontario 1980, (Ελληνικός Πατριωτικός Σύνδεσμος. Τυπογραφείον Ορίζοντες Τορόντο, Οντάριο).

Resistance and acquiescence During the Second World War, Papadopoulos saw field action as an artillery second lieutenant against both Italian and Nazi German forces that attacked Greece on 6 April 1941.

Papadopoulos is believed by most historians to have later become a member of the collaborationist Security Battalions in Patras under the command of Colonel Kourkoulakos, which "hunted down" Greek resistance fighters.Foley, C., "Greek Dictator in CIA’s Pocket", The Observer, 1 July 1973. This is contested by Greek historians Evanthis Hatzivassiliou and Leonidas F. Kallivretakis.Χατζηβασιλείου Ευάνθης, Απαρχές και χαρακτήρας της δικτατορίας των Συνταγματαρχών, από τον τόμο των πρακτικών του συνεδρίου "Η δικτατορία των Συνταγματαρχών & η αποκατάσταση της δημοκρατίας", Ίδρυμα της Βουλής των Ελλήνων, Αθήνα 2014, σελ. 23 According to Kallivretakis, during the Axis occupation of Greece, Papadopoulos worked in the Greek administration’s Patras office. It has also been argued that Papadopoulos, at the end of the Axis occupation of Greece, entered Organisation X, but Kallivretakis considers that this information has not been proven.

Along with other right-wing military officers, he participated in the creation of the nationalist right-wing secret IDEA organisation in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the country's liberation. Those 1940 officers who took refuge in the Kingdom of Egypt along with King Geórgios II immediately after the German invasion, had become generals when their still-colonel former classmates undertook the coup of 1967.

Post-Second World War career During the Greek Civil War, Papadopoulos was promoted to captain in 1946, and promoted to major in 1949. He served in the KYP Intelligence Service from 1959 to 1964 as the main contact between the KYP and the top CIA operative in Greece, John Fatseas, after training at the CIA in 1953.TV documentary by Stelios Kouloglu via Internet Archive

The Beloyannis trials

Papadopoulos was also a member of the court-martial in the first trial of Greek communist leader Nikos Beloyannis, in 1951. At that trial, Beloyannis was sentenced to death for the crime of being a member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which was banned following the Greek Civil War. The death sentence was not carried out, but Beloyannis was put on trial again in early 1952, this time for alleged espionage, following the discovery of radio transmitters used by undercover Greek communists to communicate with the exiled leadership of the Party in the Soviet Union. At the end of this trial, he was sentenced to death and immediately taken out and shot. Papadopoulos was not involved in this second trial.

Rise to colonel in the 1960s In 1956, Papadopoulos took part in a failed coup attempt against King Pávlos. In 1958, he helped create the Office of Military Studies, a surveillance authority, under General Gogousis. It was from this same office that the subsequently successful coup of 21 April 1967 emanated.

In 1964, Papadopoulos was transferred to an artillery division in Western Thrace by a decree of Defense Minister Garoufalias, a member of the Centre Union (EK). In June 1965, days before the onset of the major political turmoil known as Iouliana, he made national headlines after arresting two soldiers under his command and eight leftist civilians from settlements near his military camp, on charges that they had conspired to sabotage army vehicles by pouring sugar into the vehicles' petrol tanks. The ten were imprisoned and tortured, but it was eventually proven that Papadopoulos himself had sabotaged the vehicles. Andreas Papandreou wrote in his memoirs that Papadopoulos wanted to prove that under the Centre Union government, the Communists had been left free to undermine national security. Even after this scandal, Papadopoulos was not discharged from the army since the Prime Minister, Geórgios Papandreou, forgave him as a compatriot of his father. In 1967, Papadopoulos was promoted to colonel.

21 April 1967: Coup d'état That same year, on 21 April, a month before the general elections, Colonel Papadopoulos, along with fellow middle-ranking Army officers, led a successful coup, taking advantage of the volatile political situation that had arisen from a conflict between the young King Constantine II and the popular former prime minister, Geórgios Papandreou. Papadopoulos used his power gained from the coup to try to place Papandreou under house arrest and re-engineer the Greek political landscape rightward. Papadopoulos, along with the other junta members, are known in Greece by the term Aprilianoi ('Aprilians'), denoting the month of the coup. The term Aprilianoi has become synonymous with the term "dictators of 1967–1974".

Regime of the Colonels

King Constantine appointed a new government nominally headed by Konstantinos Kollias. However, from the early stages, Papadopoulos was the strongman of the new regime. He was appointed Minister of National Defense and Minister of the Presidency in the Kollias government, and his position was further enhanced after the King's abortive counter-coup on 13 December, when Papadopoulos replaced Kollias as Prime Minister. Not content with that, on 21 March 1972, he nominated himself Regent of Greece, succeeding General Geórgios Zoitakis. Torture of political prisoners in general, and communists in particular, was not out of the question. Examples included severe beatings, isolation and, according to some sources, pulling out fingernails.

"Patient in a cast" and other metaphors Throughout his tenure as the junta strongman, Papadopoulos often employed what have been described by the BBC as gory surgical metaphors, where he or the junta assumed the role of the "medical doctor". The "patient" was Greece. Typically, Papadopoulos or the junta portrayed themselves as the "doctor" who operated on the "patient" by putting the patient's "foot" in an orthopedic cast and applying restraints on the "patient", tying him on a surgical bed and putting him under anesthesia to perform the "operation" so that the life of the "patient" would not be "endangered" during the operation. In one of his famous speeches, Papadopoulos mentioned: Translated as:

In the same speech Papadopoulos continued: which translates as follows:

Other metaphors contained religious imagery related to the resurrection of Christ at Easter: "Χριστός Ανέστη – Ελλάς Ανέστη" translating as "Christ has risen – Greece has risen", alluding that the junta would "save" Greece and resurrect her into a greater, new Land. The theme of rebirth was used many times as a standard reply to avoid answering any questions as to how long the dictatorship would last: Translated as:

The religious themes and rebirth metaphors are also seen in the following:

Translated as:

Assassination attempt

A failed assassination attempt against Papadopoulos was perpetrated by Alexandros Panagoulis in the morning of 13 August 1968, when Papadopoulos was driven from his summer residence in Lagonisi to Athens, escorted by his personal security motorcycles and cars. Panagoulis ignited a bomb at a point of the coastal road where the limousine carrying Papadopoulos would have to slow down, but the bomb failed to harm Papadopoulos. Panagoulis was captured a few hours later in a nearby sea cave, since the boat sent to help him escape was instructed to leave at a specific time and he could not swim there on time due to strong sea currents. After his arrest, he was taken to the Greek Military Police (EAT-ESA) offices where he was questioned, beaten and tortured. On 17 November 1968, Panagoulis was sentenced to death but was personally pardoned by Papadopoulos, served only five years in prison, and after democracy was restored was elected a member of Parliament. He was regarded as an emblematic figure of the struggle to restore democracy, and as such has often been paralleled to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, two ancient Athenians known for their assassination of Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias.

Normalisation and attempts at liberalisation

Despite his heavy-handed rule, Papadopoulos was one of the more moderate members of the junta. He had indicated as early as 1968 that he was eager for reform. He had declared at the time that he did not want the Revolution of 21 April (as the coup was called by the junta's supporters) to become a 'regime'. Around the same time, he had reached out to some old-line politicians, such as Spyros Markezinis. Several attempts to liberalise the regime during 1969 and 1970 were thwarted by the hardliners on the junta, including Ioannides. In fact, subsequent to his 1970 failed attempt at reform, he threatened to resign and was dissuaded only after the hardliners renewed their personal allegiance to him.