The story of the Holocaust in the Second World War is one of the most terrible and heart-rending events in the 20th century. The murder of six million civilians purely because they were considered Jewish in the Nazi world view is a stain on western civilisation.
Impressive histories of the Holocaust have been available for many years, with more recent volumes addressing the involvement of non-Germans. The authors of this collection focus on the implementation of the Holocaust in Greece during the German occupation of 1941-44 and the experience of survivors. They offer new insights based on ground-breaking new historical research undertaken over the past 20 years. It also represents the first academic collective volume on the subject in English. The editor’s note that the topic has until recently attracted little public or academic interest and they hope that their volume will be seen as a major contribution to overcoming this gap. The book makes for sobering reading.
Greece’s prewar Jewish community is estimated to have totalled approximately 77,000, with some 50,000 resident in Thessaloniki. They had lived in the Hellenic world for hundreds if not thousands of years and were an integral part of the nation’s economic, social and cultural life. The German occupation of Greece posed a mortal threat to this. In the end around 90 per cent of Greece’s prewar Jewish population was murdered in the horrors of the Nazi factories of death.
The book recognises the role of those who took great risks to save their fellow citizens from the Holocaust. In this regard they note the role of the Greek resistance, individual communities (such as on Zante and at Veroia) as well as a number of prominent individuals who raised their voices in opposition to the deportations, such as Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens. It is because of these actions that Greece is significantly recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem amongst its “righteous amongst the nations”, with more than 330 non-Jewish Greeks honoured for their bravery, a higher percentage than those of other comparable European occupied nations.
And yet the question remains, why did so few Greek Jews survive the war? The book reveals that their survival rate was the worst in the Balkans and amongst the worst across all occupied Europe.
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This is the main question posed by this collection of essays. In doing so they discuss how the Holocaust was implemented in Greece to such a destructive extent through the consideration of some of its key aspects, including the level of anti-Semitism and the question of collaboration, the organisation of the deportations themselves, as well as the fate of Jewish property before, during and after their deportations. They also discuss how the few surviving Greek Jews were treated on their return after the war, especially in terms of justice and restitution, as well as how the Greek Jewish community re-built itself both in Greece and abroad.
The authors’ conclusion is consistent with the sad story of that of other Nazi-occupied nations. The implementation of the Holocaust in Greece required the active cooperation and participation of local authorities and collaborators, supported by the lack of opposition from many others.
The book takes us through the role of these collaborators – from the leaders of the three successive collaborationist governments in Athens, through the regional and local administrations (especially those in Macedonia and Thessaloniki), to those who profited by the persecution of their fellow Greeks.
Greek authorities and individuals assisted in the registration and deportation process, with armed collaborationist groups assisting the Nazi’s in lootings, interrogations and executions. In Thessaloniki they assisted with the registration of their Jewish neighbours for forced labour and in their horrifying assembly in Thessaloniki’s Eleftherias Square in July 1942. Former Greek army officers supervised the work details, often with cruelty. General Tsolakoglou, who had mutinied against the Greek government during the war and led the first collaborationist government in Athens, openly referred to Greece having a “Jewish question” which would be solved in the context of the New Order in Europe, mimicking Nazi ideology.
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The book discusses the role of the Union of Jewish Properties Managers, established to represent those who had obtained the property of the persecuted Greek Jews. This organisation so effectively undermined the implementation of Greece’s post-war law on the restitution of seized Jewish property that in one study of 13,300 confiscated residences and businesses only 600 were returned to their rightful owners after the war. No more than 5 per cent of the 850 Greek Jews who returned after the war being able to retake their homes. As if to add insult to injury, post-war Greek governments also acted to strip overseas Greek Jews of their Greek nationality.
Another area discussed is the destruction of Thessaloniki’s historic Jewish cemetery in December 1942, three months before the first transports left the city taking its Jewish population to Auschwitz. The cemetery contained more than four hundred years of burials, with an estimated 500,000 individual burials and covering some 500,000 square metres. Its burial markers were considered by some who visited the cemetery to be of great historical value. The authors point out that this destruction was the work of the local municipal authorities, the Nazi’s taking little interest in such matters. They recount the pre-war attempts by the municipality to remove the Jewish cemetery for the planned expansion of the city, leading to the transfer of over 12,000 metres of the cemetery to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1937. In this case, the headstones and remains were carefully removed and reinterred in a new cemetery.
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This was not the scene that occurred in 1942 when 500 municipal workers demolished the remaining cemetery wholesale, its treasured memorials reduced to construction materials, distributed throughout the city for re-use. It may come as some surprise that not only were these materials used to pave the sidewalk of Stratou Avenue but over 500 marble slabs and 20,000 bricks from the cemetery were allotted to the Church of Agios Dimitrios for repairs.
Photographs reveal their use in the construction of German defences. The site of the cemetery – with its thousands of human remains underneath – would form the expanded site of the University. The authors point out that the Germans did not oversee this destruction. The obliteration of this ancient and historic necropolis was the work of the local municipality. It would not be until 2015 on the initiative of Thessaloniki’s then independent Mayor Yiannis Boutaris, the University and the city’s surviving Jewish community that a commemorative marker was installed at the University, recognising the site as the location of this historic cemetery and of its destruction. Sadly the memorial has been subsequently vandalised on a number of occasions.
The contributors to the book are drawn from some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions. One of the editors is Assistant Professor Giorgos Antoniou of the Artistotle University of Thessaloniki. Assistant Professor Stratos Dordanas is from the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki). Doctor Andrew Apostolou earned his doctorate from Oxford University. Iason Chandrinos is a special researcher at the Jewish Museum of Greece and research assistant at the Freie University of Berlin. Paris Papamichos Chronakis is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Doctor Anna Maria Droumpouki is from the University of Athens. Doctor Maria Kavala is adjunct lecturer at the Artistotle University of Thessaloniki. Kostis Kornetis is a fellow at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III. Doctor Maria Vassilikou received her doctorate from University College London.
The book will be a welcome addition to all interested in the history of modern Greece and its experience of WW2. It complements and deepens our understanding based on such other publications as Mark Mazower’s excellent Inside Hitler’s Greece and his Salonica: City of Ghosts. As Associate Professor Nick Doumanis of NSW University writes, this book “is one of the best books to have been published on modern Greece in many years.”
This important book is a reminder of the need to continue to re-assess our historical knowledge and awareness in the light of new evidence and insights. For some, history is a fixed and unarguable stone, comprising an all too comfortable rendition of national stereotypes. New historical research, based on an assessment of primary sources, can upset these views, with some feeling that agreed identities are under challenge.
As such some may find this exposure of these more unpalatable aspects of Greece’s modern history difficult to come to terms with. I would only say that Greece shared with many other European nations the experience of collaboration as well as resistance, of those who sought to benefit from the suffering of others, of those who looked the other way – as well as those who placed themselves in danger by helping those who were facing the full-force of the Holocaust. It is said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. For all who say, “never again”, this book will be a welcome addition to their library.
Jim Claven is a trained historian, freelance writer and Secretary of the Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee. He has researched the Hellenic link to Anzac across both world wars for many years and is the author of the recently published Lemnos & Gallipoli Revealed: A Pictorial History of the Anzacs in the Aegean 1915-16. He can be contacted at jimclaven@yahoo.com.au