Nikos Beloyannis

Nikos Beloyannis was a Greek resistance leader and leading cadre of the Greek Communist Party. He was born in Amalias (Peloponnese, Greece) in 1915. He came from a relatively prosperous family and went on to study Law in Athens, but before being able to graduate he was arrested and jailed in the Akronauplia prison (Nauplion) by the Ioannis Metaxas fascist regime in the 1930s and transferred to the Germans after the Axis occupation of Greece (1941). He escaped in 1943 and joined the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) in Peloponnese in the side of Aris Velouchiotis. After becoming Political Commissioner of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) during the Greek Civil War he was one of the last to leave the country (1949) after its defeat.