Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos declared “we are Nazis” and expressed contempt for elections and democracy, a Greek prosecutor told an Athens appeals court on Friday as she urged judges to uphold landmark convictions for running a criminal organisation.
Kyriaki Stefanatou, delivering her final recommendation to the Five-Member Appeals Court for Felonies after nearly 200 hearings since June 2022, called Golden Dawn “genuine child of Nazi ideology” and systematically dismantled the far-right group’s claim to be a legitimate political party.
The appeal concerns 42 Golden Dawn members, including the entire former parliamentary leadership, convicted in October 2020 for operating a criminal organisation behind the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and a series of violent attacks on immigrants and political opponents.
“Golden Dawn is genuine child of Nazi ideology and this is the motive of their acts,” Stefanatou told the court. “Members owed complete submission to hierarchy. Everything was organised and known to Central Administration.”
Historic 2020 conviction now under appeal
The original trial, which ran from 2015 to 2020, marked the biggest prosecution of a fascist political party in Europe since Nuremberg. Golden Dawn’s leadership was found guilty of directing a criminal gang that murdered Fyssas in September 2013, attempted to kill Egyptian fisherman Abuzeid Embarak in June 2012, and carried out numerous other attacks.
The convictions stunned Greece. Golden Dawn had risen from obscurity during the country’s financial crisis to become the third-largest party in parliament in 2012, winning 21 seats with nearly 7% of the vote. By 2020, after the trial exposed its violence, the party had lost all parliamentary representation.
Michaloliakos and other leaders received sentences of 13 years or more. Some now appeal for lighter sentences, whilst prosecutors have separately appealed seeking harsher punishment for 12 defendants including Michaloliakos and prominent members Ilias Kasidiaris, Christos Pappas and Ioannis Lagos.
Prosecutor’s recommendation carries legal weight
Stefanatou’s speech doesn’t bind the appeals court’s final judgement but carries significant criminal and legal weight under Greek law. Her key task: recommend whether to uphold the unanimous first-instance ruling that Golden Dawn operated as a criminal organisation under the guise of a political party.
She left no doubt about her position, describing Golden Dawn as a Nazi party modelled on the Thule Society – the mother organisation of Germany’s National Socialist party. The Thule Society’s Golden Dawn order operated on the principle that “there is not enough space on Earth for everyone”, she said. Hitler himself served in that order.
“Michaloliakos says ‘we are Nazis’ and notes how much they detest elections and Democracy,” the prosecutor told the court, citing a heap of statements and texts by the convicted leader that clearly refer to Nazi ideology.
Even co-founder called it “pavement thuggery”
Even a Golden Dawn co-founder damned the organisation in testimony meant to help Michaloliakos, Stefanatou pointed out. The witness described members as “waste, professional failures” and said Michaloliakos “was interested in setting up thuggery. Was man of the pavement. Golden Dawn was pavement.”
The same witness told the court: “It’s not a criminal organisation, it’s a gang.”
Stefanatou mocked the leadership’s courtroom denials of Nazi beliefs.
“I always wonder why truly intelligent people consider everyone else idiots,” she said. “Before the cock crows three times they denied their Nazi ideology” – invoking Peter’s biblical betrayal of Jesus.
The prosecutor dismissed defence claims that Golden Dawn sought German war reparations, calling the accused “devotees of Hitler’s Germany” instead.
From “cockroaches” to Auschwitz
Stefanatou drew a direct line from Golden Dawn’s dehumanising rhetoric to genocide, citing the Auschwitz-Birkenau Historical Museum’s warning that the Holocaust followed a deliberate process of dehumanisation and degradation.
Golden Dawn members called targeted groups “cockroaches”, she told the court.
“When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process,” Stefanatou said, warning that whilst people can hold any ideology privately, this doesn’t erase “the catastrophic social consequences of National Socialism – the targeting of minorities, the social degradation that becomes stigma and their extermination is sought”.
Golden Dawn’s ideology never changed over 30 years, she emphasised.
Military-style hierarchy ran operations
The prosecutor read internal circulars and regulations proving “everything was organised and known to Central Administration”, showing Golden Dawn operated with military-style discipline and top-down control for three decades before adopting party status as a façade.
Members owed complete submission to the hierarchy, with the central leadership directing and monitoring all activities, she told the court.
Stefanatou outlined the legal framework applying to the 42 accused after successive Criminal Code changes, noting the court must apply the most favourable provisions for sentencing and for the substance of joining a criminal organisation.
The appeals court will now weigh her recommendation alongside defence arguments before issuing final verdicts that could uphold, reduce or overturn the historic 2020 convictions. The trial represents a crucial test of Greece’s reckoning with far-right extremism.
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