Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou (), born Dimitrios Papandreou (; 3 March 1891 – 20 May 1949) was the archbishop of Athens and All Greece from 1941 until his death. He was also the regent of Greece between the pull-out of the German occupation force in 1944 and the return of King George II to Greece in 1946. His rule was between the liberation of Greece from the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II and the Greek Civil War. Early life He was born Dimitrios Papandreou (no relation to the Papandreou political family from Achaea) in Dorvitsa, Greece. He enlisted in the Hellenic Army during the Balkan Wars. He was ordained a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1917. In 1922, he was made Bishop of Corinth. He spent the early 1930s as an ambassador of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the United States, where he labored to help organize the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. In 1938 he was elected Archbishop of Athens, taking the name Damaskinos. Ioannis Metaxas, dictator of Greece at the time, objected to Damaskinos and forced the cancellation of his election, and the appointment of Metropolitan Chrysanthus to the post. After the 1941 German invasion of Greece and the fall of the Greek government, the Metropolitans who had elected Damaskinos seized the opportunity to eject Chrysanthus from the throne (with German agreement, as the latter had refused to be present at the oath-taking ceremony of the quisling Prime Minister Georgios Tsolakoglu), and Damaskinos was reinstalled. Nazi occupation The Archbishop of Athens was the spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox people of Athens and All Greece, and Damaskinos worked very hard to live up to his position during those hard times. He frequently clashed with the German authorities and the quisling government. The Germans took Greeks hostage and threatened to execute their hostages in the event of resistance. Damaskinos often visited hostages in prison the night before their executions to offer spiritual comfort to the doomed. The archbishop frequently sent his lawyer, Iannis Yeorgakis, to argue for freedom on behalf of Greeks tried in German military courts. In December 1942, Yeorgakis was banned from representing Greeks before the military courts after he had supposedly insulted a military judge. Initially, Yeorgakis accompanied those convicted by the military courts to their executions to offer moral support, but he found this duty to be so hollowing and heart-breaking that