The German occupation began in a Greece of contradictions and political confrontations, with a witch hunt underway for those deemed communists. The "demonization" of citizens was carried out legally, and arrests, convictions, and exiles were a daily application of this.

The same society that easily stigmatized and categorized these people had also stigmatized the waves of refugees who came uprooted from Asia Minor and Thrace, referring to them with derogatory “epithets” that insulted their Hellenicity.

The stigmatized as non-Greek “demons” and refugees would choose their own paths that would lead to civil conflict. Andreas Venianakis’s new study on the three leaders of the traitorous EDES completes a research period on some of the unknown aspects of the German Occupation in the region of Macedonia.

Who were the three Papadopoulos? Why and how did they act against ELAS and collaborate with the German occupying authorities? How did the local civil disputes evolve? What was the role of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the officers? These are the fundamental questions to which the author seeks –and provides– answers.

Through the convergence of numerous primary and conflicting sources, as well as interviews, the study unravels step by step the thread of the occupation's Ariadne in Macedonia and extensively describes unknown events of the occupation civil war.