Greece had around 77,000 Jews at the start of the German occupation in April 1941. Around 60,000 of them were murdered, a mortality rate of 78 per cent. The largest Greek Jewish community, at Salonika, was effectively wiped out: around 48,000 of its 50,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz between March and August 1943 and almost all murdered on arrival. Smaller Sephardic communities at Corfu, Rhodes (during the Italian occupation that lasted until 1943, after which it became German-controlled), Ioannina, Athens and the smaller mainland towns suffered similar fates. The Italian zone of occupation in north-western Greece sheltered some Jews until Italy switched sides in 1943; the German zone in northern and central Greece, including Salonika, was lethal from the beginning.
The community
Greek Jewry was overwhelmingly Sephardic and overwhelmingly old. The Salonika community traced itself directly to the 1492 expulsion from Spain. The community at Ioannina was Romaniote, the older Greek-speaking Jewish community that predated the Sephardic arrival and that may have been there since classical times. The Romaniote community had its own Greek-language Jewish liturgy and rituals, distinct from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic practice. Greek Jewish culture had produced poetry, scholarship and music for centuries; the modern Greek nation, in formation since the 1820s, had not been particularly hospitable to its Jewish minority but had not been actively hostile either. The Salonika community had been massively reduced by emigration in the 1920s after the city’s transfer from Ottoman to Greek rule in 1912 and the 1917 fire that destroyed most of the Jewish quarter, but it remained the largest Jewish city in the eastern Mediterranean.
The German occupation
Greece was invaded by Italy in October 1940. The Italian invasion failed and Germany intervened to rescue the Italian forces in April 1941. Greece was then divided into German, Italian and Bulgarian zones of occupation. Salonika was in the German zone. Athens and most of central Greece were in the Italian zone. Eastern Macedonia and Thrace were in the Bulgarian zone.
The German treatment of the Salonika Jewish community began with humiliation. In July 1942, the entire male Jewish population of the city, around 9,000 men, was assembled in Liberty Square and made to perform calisthenics in the summer heat for several hours, watched and photographed by laughing German soldiers and civilians. Many were beaten. The men were then sent to forced labour. The community was made to pay a large ransom for their release. The ransom was paid. The men were nominally released, though many had died in the labour and several were never returned.
The deportations from Salonika
The deportations of the Salonika community began on 15 March 1943. Trains ran every few days for the next five months, taking Salonika Jews to Auschwitz. Around 48,000 people were deported in 19 transports. Almost all were murdered on arrival. A small number were selected for labour and survived; some of the surviving Salonika men became members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, and a few were among those who took part in the Sonderkommando revolt of October 1944.
The Italian zone and Athens
The Italian military authorities in their Greek zone refused to allow deportations of Jews. Around 8,000 Jews lived in Athens and the surrounding area. Some came under Italian protection. When Italy switched sides in September 1943 and the Germans took over the Italian zone, the Jewish community of Athens went into hiding. Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, instructed Greek Orthodox priests to issue baptismal certificates and forged identity papers to Jews. The Athens police, under Chief Angelos Evert, issued false Greek identity cards to Jews who applied. Around 4,000 Athens Jews survived in hiding, partly because of these official protections.
Corfu and Rhodes
Both Corfu and Rhodes had been under Italian rule before and during much of the war and their Jewish communities had been protected by the Italians. After September 1943, both islands came under German control. The Corfu community of around 2,000 was deported in June 1944. The Rhodes community of around 1,800, the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who had settled on the island in 1492, was deported in July 1944. Both were among the last large deportations of the Holocaust. Almost everyone deported was murdered. The Rhodes case is particularly painful because the deportation took place in the final months of the war, after Italy had switched sides and after most of the rest of the European deportations had ended.
Ioannina and the Romaniote community
The Ioannina Jewish community, the principal Romaniote community in modern Greece, was around 2,000 strong before the war. The deportation took place on 25 March 1944, the day of the Greek national holiday. The Germans rounded up the entire community in trucks and drove them to Larissa, then by train to Auschwitz. Around 1,850 were deported. About 100 survived. The Ioannina synagogue, the Kahal Kadosh Yashan, still stands today; the community it served has effectively ceased to exist.
The post-war record
The Greek Jewish community has not recovered from the war. Around 5,000 Greek Jews live in Greece today, mostly in Athens. The communities at Salonika, Ioannina, Corfu, Rhodes and the smaller towns are tiny remnants of what they were. Greek Holocaust memorialisation has been slow and patchy. The Salonika Jewish cemetery, destroyed by the Germans in 1942 and built over by the post-war Greek authorities, is now the campus of Aristotle University; a memorial was finally placed there in 2014, seventy years after the deportation.
See also
Sources
- Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-1944, Yale University Press, 1993
- Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, Knopf, 2004
- Steven Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews 1940-1945, Stanford University Press, 2009
- USHMM: Greece