were integrated in State security services and the apparatuses of the dominant political parties. B | WORLD WAR II, OCCUPATION, CIVIL WAR Among the irst who attempted to assist the country’s later conquerors were pro-German and pro-Italian ideological and political followers of fascism.10 As with all other political parties, NUH had been banned by the “4 August 1936” regime, but was revived as a pure nationalist-socialist organization during the irst months of the country’s occupation by the Axis powers. The initiative came from some of NUH’s veteran members in Thessaloniki, but the organization’s oicial reestablishment occurred in Athens, where it was supported by the German occupation authorities and by oicials of the irst collaborationist government. NUH formed the hard core of collaborationism during the occupation, along with organizations such as the Hellenic Socialist Patriotic Organization, the Organization of National Forces of Greece, and the National-Socialist Party of Greece. The second period of the occupation (1943-1944) was characterized by the development of the third and most massive fascist current in Greek history, formed largely by the occupation-organized Security Battalions (about 30,000 to 40,000 armed men in southern Greece and 10,000 to 20,000 in northern Greece) and the various local anti-communist organizations that ater the war became an indispensable part of the dominant power bloc – the bloc of “national-mindedness”. During that crucial turn, diferent royalist and anti-royalist milieus started to converge in the defence of the country’s so-called “social regime”. The social and political coalition formed by members of the prewar elites, economic collaborators and armed battalions under German command describes a minority yet quite broad social bloc. From October to December 1944, during the short “interregnum” period of the National Unity Government under George Papandreou, in which the National Liberation Front (EAM) participated, the anticommunist camp organized its internal alliances and secured the external supports that would allow it to engage in a head-on collision with EAM. December 1944 then saw the “Battle of Athens”, in which troops of the British Empire and armed battalions of Greek nationalists/anti-communists fought the forces of EAM-ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army). Thus the irst open clash between the forces of the anti-fascist coalition took place before even the oicial end of World War II. EAM was defeated and banned from the government, setting the terms for the reconstitution of the Greek State. The years of 1945 and 1946, a period of at irst latent and then open civil war, represent the crucial link in the formation of the post-war Greek Republic and the mechanisms of what is variably termed the “parastate”, “deep state” or “parallel state”. These, in the context of an international civil war, tried and succeeded in keeping Greece within the Western camp during the Cold War. 10. Cf. Vlachopoulos 2012. MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 15