by Mark Mazower
Others did, of course. The German consul had been sending detailed information about the community back to Berlin since 1938, and local German agents and collaborationist Greek anti-Semites were constantly suggesting anti-Jewish measures. Heinrich Himmler himself warned Hitler in October 1941 that the city’s large Jewish population posed a threat to German security. Yet no plans for further persecution were drawn up. The military authorities understood the economic importance of the Jews for the city, and felt the famine was not a good time to disrupt trade further. They were also aware of the Jews’ irrelevance to anti-German resistance. Suggestions from Berlin to introduce the yellow star were dismissed.8
LOCAL ANTI-JEWISH MEASURES
IT WAS THUS A SHOCK when out of the blue—on 8 July 1942—the local Wehrmacht commander in Salonica instructed all male Jews aged between eighteen and forty-five to present themselves for registration. “Whoever belongs to the Jewish race is considered a Jew, regardless of what religion he professes today”: with these words, meaningless in the absence of prior legal definition, racial categories entered Greek administrative life. The announcement gave no reasons for the registration, but it soon became known that the men were to be used as civilian labour building roads and airstrips. From eight in the morning the following Saturday, nine thousand Jewish men stood in lines in Plateia Eleftherias while their names were taken down. Huge crowds gathered to watch, and from the balconies overlooking the square some Germans took photographs. The men were forbidden from taking refreshment; some were humiliated and made to do gymnastic exercises. In the daily Apoyevmatini—the one local pre-war paper still published—the Jews were accused of being “parasites” and black-marketeers, who would now be put to productive use.9
The German army urgently needed civilian workers. Volunteers had already been recruited locally, and there had been tentative efforts to conscript the able-bodied population of the city by year-group. In the first week of July, Greek men were being put to work at the docks, building air defences. With public resentment growing, a senior gendarmerie officer in Salonica had suggested to the local military commander, General von Krensky, that the Jews be singled out. In this sense, the round-up of 11 July helps us to realize how the Final Solution unfolded: not only through instructions from Berlin, but also via the accretion of local initiatives taken by authorities such as the German army, their civilian labour contractors and politically astute local officials.
What most struck the onlookers were the scenes of deliberate humiliation that accompanied the registration. In Salonica, German soldiers and officers had sometimes targeted Jews for ridicule, just as they had done more frequently in Poland. One rabbi had half his beard shaved; another was forced to discuss the Talmud whilst being beaten. But the events of 11 July—discussed at gleeful length the next day in the quisling press—were of a very different order. The cruelty which the Germans had displayed preyed on people’s minds. The Italian consul Zamboni noted that “unlike what has happened in other occupied countries, there were no clear anti-Jewish orders issued until now here. Now, suddenly, after a few previous indications which passed almost unnoticed by most people, the question has been raised in full.”10
This was confirmed when the quisling daily Nea Evropi published a series of articles on the history of the local Jewish community. The story they described was of Greek suffering at Jewish hands: since 1890, according to the author, Nikolaos Kammonas (from an old, respected Salonica family, he later became a founding member of Salonica’s branch of the Friends of Adolf Hitler), “the Jews managed with infernal perversity and venomous perfidy to secure their financial and racial empire on the corpse of Macedonian Hellenism.” Others joined in denouncing this “danger to our health.” One journalist described the Jews as “a sort of epidemic” and called on the authorities to remove traders near the Hirsch hospital, and “to force them to wash themselves, and their houses, and stop their bazaars.” Nor could anyone doubt the ultimate backing for such sentiments. On 9 November 1942, the Greek papers carried a speech by Hitler under the headline: “International Jewry will disappear from Europe.”11 All of this was being orchestrated locally by a new military propaganda office run by the Germans. Its Greek underlings included well-established journalists such as Alexandros Orologas, the owner of Apoyevmatini, and Nikolaos Fardis, whose inflammatory writings in Makedonia had played such an important part in the Campbell riot. In the 1920s, the same Fardis had been vociferous in calling for the destruction of remaining Ottoman buildings. What drew men like him to collaboration was not racialism so much as an extreme nationalism that allowed them to accept any measures necessary to weaken the role played by other ethnic groups in the life of the city.12
One of the buildings Fardis had wanted destroyed in 1925 was the Hamza Bey mosque on Odos Egnatia which had been turned into a telephone exchange and then into a cinema. In 1942, as the “Attikon” cinema, it was one of three properties owned by a Jewish businessman. That September he was arrested and thrown into the Pavlos Melas camp on the northern outskirts of the city. This camp was run by the SS and it chiefly housed political prisoners to be shot in reprisal executions. The cinema owner was told that he would be released only if he appointed new managers nominated by the press and propaganda office. Eventually the contracts were drawn up by Greek lawyers in the presence of Max Merten, the Wehrmacht official in charge of the administration of the city, and the cinemas were rented out to a refugee from Serres. The transfer of Jewish properties to beneficiaries of the Germans had thus begun. Within weeks, people understood: Jewish businesses faced expropriation by the Germans and their agents, and their owners could be arrested or otherwise coerced into releasing them.13
In December 1942 came the strongest indication to date that even the municipal authorities themselves might find the plight of the Jews impossible to resist. The Jewish cemetery, which occupied a very large area outside the eastern walls, had been the object of controversy between the community and the municipality for decades. It had obstructed the implementation of the interwar town plan from its inception, for it lay squarely where Hébrard had envisaged green recreational spaces at the heart of the new modern city, and where others, more practically, wanted to build a new university campus. The university, which had started out in the old Villa Allatini, had been penned for most of the interwar period into the old Ottoman Idadié building on the cemetery’s edge. Negotiations between the Greek authorities and the Jewish community had progressed slowly. But in 1937 they had agreed that in return for ceding the western part, the rest would be planted with trees, while new Jewish graveyards would be constructed elsewhere. In 1940 further burials were forbidden in the old cemetery, though in fact they continued to take place because no action was taken to build new ones.14
Now, however, the municipal authorities saw the chance to resolve the cemetery issue for good, and they raised it with the Germans. Negotiating the release of Jewish forced labourers that October—they were eventually ransomed by the community, which paid the Germans a large sum—Merten mentioned to his Jewish interlocutor, the lawyer Yomtov Yacoel, that he had received many suggestions from Greeks that the expropriation of the cemetery should form part of their negotiations. Although this idea was instantly rejected by the Jewish side, it resurfaced a few days later. On 17 October, Vasilis Simonides, the governor-general of Macedonia, informed the Jewish community that it should transfer the existing cemetery and construct two new ones on the city’s outskirts: any delay would lead to the cemetery’s immediate demolition. When the chief rabbi asked for the work to be postponed until after the winter, the municipality ordered the demolition to begin.
Thus in the first week of December, instructed by the chief municipal engineer, five hundred workers destroyed thousands of tombs, some dating back to the fifteenth century, and piled up the marble slabs and bricks. Relatives of those buried there hurried to collect the remains of their dead before it was too late. “My parents and I rushed to the cemetery,” recalled a s
urvivor:
The sight of it was devastating. People were running between the tombs begging the destroyers to spare those of their relatives; with tears they collected the remains. In my family vault there were the remains of my brother, aged twenty, who died during a journey to Rome. His body was brought back from abroad and put in two coffins, one in metal and the other in wood. When the second coffin was opened my poor brother appeared in his smocking and his pointed shoes as though he had been put there yesterday. My mother fainted.15
The cemetery covered a vast area of nearly thirty-five hectares (in comparison, the Jewish cemetery in Prague is about one hectare) and contained hundreds of thousands of graves. German military authorities requisitioned some of the marble for road-building and to construct a swimming-pool. Greek organizations and individuals carted off more: indeed even a few years ago, tombstones could still be seen stacked in the city’s churchyards or set in the walls and roads of the Upper Town. “A few weeks sufficed for this army of workers to achieve the task of destruction for which it had been engaged,” wrote an eyewitness. “The vast necropole … now presented the spectacle of a violently bombed city, or one destroyed in a volcanic eruption.” One of the oldest and largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe had been uprooted; the Germans had given the green light, but the initiative had not come from them. After the war, the Greek authorities took the view that the land had been definitively expropriated, and today the university campus stands on the spot.16
WISLICENY AND BRUNNER
DURING LATE 1941 highly secret discussions on the Final Solution took place in Berlin as the innermost circles of those concerned with “the Jewish question” came to terms with the vast dimensions of the task they had set themselves. Neither emigration out of Europe, nor resettlement inside it, now seemed to provide the answer, and near the end of 1941 Hitler decided upon “biological annihilation.” After that came the building of extermination camps, and the coordination of the complex diplomatic, financial and transportation arrangements for bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to them. The spring of 1942 saw mass deportations from Vienna, Prague and many towns in Germany itself. Jews from Croatia, Slovakia and occupied France, including many hundreds who had emigrated from Salonica before the war, were killed in Auschwitz, which was rapidly being expanded into the largest combined concentration- and death-camp in the SS system.17
Extending the Final Solution to Greece ran up against the problem that the Italians, who controlled much of the country, did not share the German desire for action. Salonican Jews with Italian citizenship were reassured that they would be protected from German racial policies if these were introduced and in May 1942, the Italians told the Germans that they saw no need to make Jews wear a star. That July, the SS complained about the Italians’ attitude, and the foreign office was told that if agreement with Rome were not possible, the Germans would press ahead and “show the way.”18
Months went by, the SS grew impatient and in January 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent his trusted deputy, Rolf Günther, to Salonica. It was the first time an official from the infamous department IV B 4 for Jewish affairs of the Main Reich Security Office had come to Greece, and Jewish officials he met there were struck by his “harsh and disdainful” attitude. He demanded information on the community and left for Berlin almost immediately. Some days after, Eichmann ordered one of his closest aides, Dieter Wisliceny, to go to Salonica “to make arrangements with the military administration to find a Final Solution for the Jewish problem there.” Wisliceny had already sent women and children from Slovakia to the gas chambers, and was fully briefed on the newly comprehensive Final Solution now under way. In Vienna he was joined by Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner who had been entrusted with the technical aspects of the deportations. Their instructions were to have the whole matter wrapped up in six to eight weeks.19
SATURDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 1943: Wisliceny and Brunner, accompanied by about one hundred German police, arrived in Salonica and installed themselves in a suburban villa outside which they draped a large black SS flag. That Monday they told Chief Rabbi Koretz that Salonica’s Jews would have to wear the yellow star, mark their shops and dwell in a ghetto. Instructions issued a few days later were more specific: the star must be ten centimetres in diameter and have six points. It was to be worn by all Jews over the age of five on the left breast. New identity cards were to be issued. For the first time, a racial definition of being Jewish was provided, based on the Nuremberg laws. Then came further prohibitions—on changing residence without permission, on using the trams or telephones and on walking in public places after dark. By 25 February, all Jewish homes had to be marked as well.20
Trying to carry out all these instructions led to a frenzy of activity for Koretz insisted that the German orders must be obeyed in full. “At the head of this multifarious and multifaceted organization,” wrote Yacoel, the community’s legal adviser, “stood the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Koretz, occupying himself personally, from morning to late at night, with the smallest and least important details, neglecting the examination of the greater problem: the fate that awaited the Jewry of Salonika.” Koretz was persuaded, against his will, to ask Wisliceny whether it would be possible to create two Jewish quarters instead of one. This was accepted, and so one area was marked out for Jewish settlement on the west of the city above Egnatia Street, and another in the eastern suburbs. The almost entirely Jewish working-class districts on the outskirts were not affected, and the SS agreed that for the time being their inhabitants could remain in their homes. Everyone else had to move into one of the two designated zones by 25 February. Since Christian inhabitants in these areas were not evicted, they quickly became extremely crowded. Although they were not enclosed, large black six-pointed stars were drawn on walls to mark their boundaries. “Finally!” exclaimed Apoyevmatini on 25 February. “Did you see Thessaloniki this morning? The streets were filled with bright stars worn by filthy Jews.”21
In January and early February, those who could transferred assets to Christian friends and associates in order to save them from the Germans. In front of the Hirsch hospital, crowds gathered as Jews sold off their possessions for food, clothing, rucksacks and handcarts. Eventually they were prohibited from selling their belongings at all. Meanwhile, a Jewish police force was made up of young men, mostly from well-off families, under the control of the SS’s Greek collaborator Laskaris Papanaoum. Led by their Jewish heads, Hasson and Albala, they went around with German guards closing up shops, expropriating them and terrorizing people. At their trial after the war, the president of the court intervened to say to Hasson: “I heard many things about you … The whole neighbourhood of Ayia Triada had to deal with you. You went about on horseback, whip in hand, and threatened them.” Another witness, a leather merchant, watched helplessly as Hasson’s men “took out anything they liked from his house for the Germans and loaded it up onto carts.”22
Next the Germans ordered all clubs, unions and professional organizations to dismiss their Jewish members, effectively cutting them off from municipal and state allocations of goods, allowances and pensions. On 1 March, all Jews were instructed to make a declaration of their assets. Meanwhile, Jewish workmen were ordered to turn the Baron Hirsch quarter, down by the station, into an enclosed camp with barbed-wire fences and lighting for the guards. It was a sad irony that this neighbourhood had originally been built in the late nineteenth century to house Ashkenazi refugees from Tsarist pogroms. Wooden fences went up around its perimeter and left it with only three tightly guarded exits—two onto adjacent roads and the third leading directly to the station. Without warning, its impoverished inhabitants were cut off from the world, and went two days without food before the community managed to organize a soup ration for them. Brunner’s idea was that once its original inhabitants had been deported, it would become the transit camp from which the rest of the city’s Jews could be easily put onto the trains nearby. Yet even at this stage, few people realized what the Germans planned. When one of the Jewish
engineers involved in the lighting of the Hirsch encampment learned that the Jews were not merely to be subjected to the Nuremberg laws and confined, but also deported, the news struck him “like a bombshell.” On 5 March, Koretz—who denied there was any truth in the rumours of deportation—felt obliged to call for calm and to remind people “not to give credence to alarming rumours, entirely unfounded.”23
Friday, 6 March: All the areas designated for Jewish settlement in the city were suddenly blocked off with checkpoints. Greek and Jewish policemen checked papers and did not permit Jews to exit, though Christians could come and go. The next day, Brunner called a meeting of Jewish notables. His message was a harsh one. Through Koretz, who translated, he warned his audience that had not the chief rabbi guaranteed their obedience with his life, they would all be in a concentration camp as hostages. He demanded their full cooperation and told them that the community was now responsible for organizing soup kitchens and distributing clothing. After Brunner left, Koretz announced that no Jews were allowed to work any longer outside the specified Jewish zones. Their shops would only be opened to allow them to retrieve possessions. Otherwise they would be kept shut and the keys handed over to the occupation authorities who were creating an organization to find caretakers to run them.24