
Dimitrios Ioannidis (13 March 1923-16 August 2010) was a Greek military officers and one of the leading members of the dictatorial Regime of the Colonels from 1967 to 1974.
Biography[]
Dimitrios Ioannidis was born in Athens, Greece in 1923, and he came from a wealthy business family originally from Epirus. He joined the EDES resistance group during World War II, and he went on to serve in the Hellenic Army during the Greek Civil War. As Director of the Hellenic Military Academy, Ioannidis took a leading role in the 1967 Greek coup d'etat, and he became a leader of the Regime of the Colonels and increased the Greek Military Police's size to 20,000 personnel. After the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, Ioannidis and several military hardliners ousted Georgios Papadopoulos from power and installed Phaedon Gizikis as the new President of Greece. Ioannidis, now the power behind the throne, pushed to annex Cyprus through enosis (union), and he organized a nationalist coup in Cyprus led by Nikos Sampson, installing a friendly regime in Nicosia. This led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which ruined Cyprus' chances of enosis and led to a new Greek coup which deposed Ioannidis and brought an end to the military regime. On 14 January 1975, Ioannidis was sentenced to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 2010 at the age of 87.