by Mark Mazower
In this respect, Salonica was very different from Athens. There Archbishop Damaskinos condemned the deportations in no uncertain terms in formal letters sent to the prime minister and Gunther von Altenburg, the Reich plenipotentiary for Greece. His many fellow-signatories in this remarkable protest included the representatives of all the chief professional and public institutions of the capital. Athens business associations proposed that Salonican Jews should, if necessary, be concentrated internally rather than sent out of the country. By contrast, the Metropolitan of Salonica, Gennadios, appears to have confined himself to a private protest. When a handful of city notables visited Simonides to try to forestall the deportations the governor-general simply referred them to the Germans, who expressed their astonishment that the Greeks did not understand the favour that was being done them. Thereafter, the silence from Salonica’s professional classes was deafening. From the university professors and students, the businessmen and lawyers’ associations, there was barely a whisper. The municipality enquired of the governor-general when it should advertise vacancies for the jobs previously filled by Jews, and renamed the few streets in the city which commemorated Jewish figures. Simonides himself, far from protesting the deportations, raised no objections, failed to report what was happening to his own government in Athens and provided gendarmes and other civil servants to assist Eichmann’s men. “The rumour circulated insistently in Salonica,” writes Michael Molho, “especially among the Jews, that the Government was not entirely opposed to the idea of deporting the Jewish element, and this because the Government thought thus to attain a double end, that of assuring the racial homogeneity of the population, and of facilitating the settlement of the refugees from Thrace and Macedonia who had flooded into the city.”43
This lack of reaction could not be put down to the impossibility of protest itself. In 1942 there had been strikes and demonstrations against civil mobilization, and these were renewed in April 1943—in the middle of the deportations. There were further labour protests in August and September 1943 mounted by students, union workers, and war veterans against food shortages and profiteers. But the biggest public protest of all came in July 1943 when the Germans decided to expand the Bulgarian occupation zone in northern Greece, allowing a Bulgarian division into the vicinity of the city. In fact, the prime concern of Simonides, Archbishop Gennadios and a range of political figures from across the spectrum in 1943 was to prevent the gains of 1912–13 being rolled back and seeing the Bulgarian army enter Salonica. To stop this happening, they formed a semi-official National Macedonian Council to persuade the Germans to keep faith with the Greek administration. They believed Max Merten, the chief Wehrmacht administrator in the city, was sympathetic, and an advocate for the Greek side in discussions with his pro-Bulgarian military superiors. No senior Greek political figure in the city was thus prepared to forfeit his support and waste valuable political capital by speaking out on behalf of the Jews, not least since Merten had already made it clear to everyone that this was a matter decided at higher levels in Berlin and out of his hands.44
Something less than 5 per cent of Salonica’s Jewish population escaped deportation compared with perhaps 50 per cent in the Greek capital a year later. This was partly because the Jews of the Macedonian capital were far more numerous, more obtrusive and less assimilated than in Athens; helping a few thousand mostly Greek-speaking Jews in a city of nearly half a million was considerably easier than helping 50,000 Sefardim in a city half the size. Timing explains a lot too: much more was known by 1944, not least because of what had happened earlier. Perhaps more could have escaped from Salonica had families been willing to split up, or if Chief Rabbi Koretz had been a different personality, and obstructed German wishes—as the Chief Rabbi of Athens did: by 1944 the resistance was fully operational and better able to help than it had been the previous year. But a crucial part was also played by the different priorities and sentiments of the elites in Greece’s two main cities. According to the German records, approximately 45,000 people reached Auschwitz from Salonica. Within a few hours of arriving, most of them had been killed in gas chambers.45
23
Aftermath
IN THE SUMMER OF 1943, an undercover British agent called Nicholas Hammond, disguised as a Vlach shepherd, made the hazardous journey into Salonica from the mountains to establish contact with the resistance. He was taken to a hideout in what he was told was the safest part of the town, a quarter recently vacated by the Jews. “My man explained the merit of the Ghetto to me. The Germans had recently deported the … Jews of Salonica, and they had no check on who was now living in the Ghetto, which swarmed with squatters and refugees.” Hammond’s testimony is a reminder that although the Jews were gone, their presence lived on in the tangible shape of empty homes, communal buildings, shops, factories and entire quarters. In a matter of weeks nearly one-fifth of the population of a large city had been deported, leaving their property and possessions behind them.1
THE SERVICE FOR THE DISPOSAL OF JEWISH PROPERTY
AS SOON AS THEY WERE MARCHED AWAY, people rushed into their houses, tore up floorboards and battered down walls and ceilings, hoping to find hidden valuables. “The poor folk of Ayios Fanourios and Toumba who wanted their share of the Jewish inheritance were fired upon by the bravos and guards of the thieving pair Nikos Stergiades and Peri Nikolaides … who had been assigned the dwellings and the huts of the deserted Jewish quarters,” wrote a Greek newspaper shortly after Liberation. “Youthful, daring raiders managed to grab small bits and pieces.” But the same thing happened in smarter quarters. Giorgos Ioannou’s short story “The Bed” describes the instant looting of tables, chests of drawers, mirrors and sheets from his neighbour’s apartment. Within hours it was stripped bare: the floor was covered in paper, mattress stuffing and feathers, the bath was filled with discarded books, and the tiles in the kitchen had been broken away in the search for hidden treasure. There was a “complete breakdown of order” wrote an official at the time, and the second-hand shops of the city began to fill up with stolen goods. The Germans themselves looted the villas of the elite and Jewish-owned warehouses; vans took away “pianos, wardrobes, furniture, carpets, electric lights and clothing of all kinds” to Germany. It was, in the words of one journalist, a “general and shameless pillaging.”2
Experience in Germany and Austria had taught the SS the importance of organizing the takeover of Jewish property properly. “Wild” looting was inefficient and dangerous—inefficient because it did not allow the authorities to distribute the gains from Jewish property as they wished, and dangerous because it contributed to a breakdown of public order and easily led to a free-for-all. Thus even before the deportations began, Wisliceny and Brunner ordered Governor-General Simonides to set up a new department to administer Jewish property on behalf of the Greek state. The Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property (YDIP) was headed by a dutiful civil servant called Ilias Douros, head of the city’s mortgage office. Above him there was a raft of worthies including a university law professor as legal adviser, the branch directors of the main local banks, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, and representatives of professional and craft guilds. German policy implicated much of the city’s business elite in the disposal of Jewish property and created a powerful incentive for them to work with Berlin.
Residential property in the western suburbs was invaded by squatters after YDIP removed furniture to its warehouses: twenty-seven were needed to store all the chairs, tables and other goods. Because there was so much Jewish-owned residential housing elsewhere in the city, the welfare service was told to settle refugees there, as it had done in Muslim property after 1923. But German intervention made this plan impossible to fulfil, and many homes were stripped by occupation troops and then squatted by refugees themselves, much as had happened after the population exchange. Meanwhile, YDIP was, in the words of its director, “continually bombarded” with requests for its stored furniture from government and municipal departmen
ts and individuals.3
Using lists supplied by the Jewish community itself, Douros decided to narrow down a Herculean task by concentrating on the commercial properties. Where the nearly two thousand abandoned offices, stockrooms, shops and factories were concerned, he planned to bring their owners out from the ghettoes, and to send them together with stocktakers and representatives of YDIP to inventory and seal their own premises. The keys safely returned to him, he could then allocate caretakers to manage and look after each property. These caretakers would pay rent to YDIP—benefiting the Greek state—and account for their use of the premises and their contents.
It was a neat scheme but ambitious in the circumstances. After all between the setting-up of YDIP and the first transports to Auschwitz, no more than a few weeks elapsed, not nearly enough time to allow some two thousand Jewish businessmen and shopkeepers to be brought out of confinement to inspect their shops. Even working round the clock, only some six hundred—less than one third of the total—were ever inventoried in the presence of their owners.
A big problem was the lack of qualified and trustworthy personnel to check inventories. There was, to be sure, no shortage of candidates. Indeed queues of prospective stock-takers formed outside the YDIP offices: Douros was inundated by their requests and called the police to keep them out. However, most people only wanted to be nominated for “substantial concerns, preferably jewellers, textile merchants and fancy goods,” making excuses if they were assigned to something more modest. Another problem was the never-resolved issue of what constituted “Jewish property” in a city where Jews and Christians owned businesses in common, and rented properties from one other. And finally there was the biggest headache of all—the Germans. If the Greek civil servants had really thought the occupation authorities would resist the temptation to interfere in the work of YDIP, they were quickly disabused. What unfolded—at least to judge from the fragmentary minutes of YDIP’s meetings through the spring and summer of 1943—was an extraordinary story of greed, coercion and fraud.
People were pulling strings, competing to get the plums. On 9 April, for instance, a certain Dimitris V. complained to YDIP that he had submitted a request to the Chamber of Commerce, which was handling many of the staffing issues, to be assigned a position as stock-taker, and had been allocated the shop of Solomon Florentin in Ermou Street. He had run around the city looking for the keys to it, being sent from one office to another. Yet in the end he was turned away from the shop itself by another man and told “to get lost, because my brother-in-law has been nominated and is preferred to you.” Signing himself “an unemployed head of family,” he was upset at having wasted so much time on this, especially as “the shop in question is full of goods and will need many days’ work to count them.”4
For some, there were quicker and more effective routes than YDIP. A beautician called Evi P. was one of dozens who went straight to the Germans. She called into the offices of the Wehrmacht administrator and informed a certain Inspector Kuhn—in German—that “I studied at the Vienna cosmetics school for three years on a Humboldt scholarship and passed with distinction. I would like to let you know of my request for one of the shops left by the Jews. I suggest either 107 Tsimiski Street (formerly owned by Haim Mano), or 33 Ermou Street (owned by Greta Almaleh).” Three days later, Kuhn assigned her the Tsimiski Street premises, and two men accompanied her there to evaluate the property and its contents.5
Questions about the legality of all this initially took a back seat. The pressing problems of public order, trade and hygiene created by the suddenness of the deportations were the priority as debts went unpaid and vegetables, fruits and fish-roes mouldered in the late spring heat. Item 3 of the meeting of the YDIP supervisory council on 5 May noted that “worried about the possible decay of stocks of foodstuffs in Jewish properties [it is agreed] to proceed to the formation of a sub-committee to examine the problem and to see how to bring these goods to auction.”6 The question of YDIP’s own legal standing was not addressed until June when the Greek government finally got around to passing the necessary decree. For the first three months of its operation, therefore, the sole basis for YDIP’s actions was administrative fiat. Wehrmacht administrator Max Merten, who was an expert on property law in the Reich, advised Simonides to use existing Greek legislation on the expropriation of enemy assets which had been invoked to seize Italian-owned property in the city in 1940, and English the following year. But of course the Greek Jews were not enemy subjects. When legislation was eventually published, it talked of “caretakers” and “trustees,” as if to imply that the arrangement was provisional and that the caretakers themselves had no claims to ownership. The real owners were referred to as “having settled abroad.”
What opened up was a difference of opinion between the legally minded Douros, who wished to follow the law to the letter, and the occupation authorities who could not have cared less for the legal niceties but were impatient at the slow pace of hand-overs. Other things were making Douros unhappy too. Stock-takers and caretakers were doing deals to carve up the contents of shops, submitting inventories to his office that fell far short of the truth. The nightwatchmen guarding the store-rooms, warehouses and factories were helping themselves. Above all, there was the way the Germans kept going around him to hand properties out. By 23 June, the organization had placed only 300 caretakers, and of those 256 were German nominees.
In July 1943, when Bulgarian troops marched further into Greek territory, the German army decided to place the civil administration of the Salonica region under their direct control, and YDIP came under the oversight of Merten’s deputy Kuhn. Kuhn and Douros rowed about whether caretakers were entitled to sell off the goods they found in the shops. Douros insisted that they were not; the Germans, keen to spread the benefits of the expropriations further around the city, disagreed. Pro-German armed gangs burst into shops and made their new proprietors, who had been sticking to the terms of the original contract, sell off whatever was there. On 3 August, to Douros’s dismay, the Germans ordered all the locked properties in the west half of the city—from Ayia Sofia to the Hirsch district—to be opened up, with predictable consequences. Two weeks later, Douros tried to resign on health grounds but was ordered by Simonides to stay in his job. Next month, the supervisory council was dissolved.
By the autumn of 1943 the whole question of what one YDIP official called “the dirty business that went on around Jewish property” was an open secret in the city. Only 160 properties had been handed over to YDIP-nominated caretakers. Some refugees from towns in the Bulgarian zone had been taken care of: 296 from eastern Macedonia and Thrace, 242 from Simonides’s home-town of Serres, and 169 from Drama, according to the YDIP files. But the bulk of the refugees had certainly not felt the benefits. German officers and firms had confiscated buildings—sometimes for personal gain, sometimes not. Others had gone to their Greek agents, or to Greeks whose own properties had been requisitioned. Proceeds from the sales of Jewish shops were financing stool-pigeons, interpreters and the collaborationist militias which were terrorizing the city. The Association of Friends of Hitler—whose members included local journalists, businessmen and gendarmerie officers—acquired new offices; the Bulgarian Club was allocated sixty properties. The collaborator Pericles Nikolaides was handed over four formerly Jewish-owned cafés in order to set up gambling dens and casinos and bought up the Baron Hirsch quarter, now “silent and deserted,” on the cheap, before demolishing it and selling off the rubble at a handsome profit. Laskaris Papanaoum, who later lived quietly in retirement in West Germany, was rewarded for his help in rounding up Jews in hiding by being given the largest tannery in the Balkans, as well as Jack Juda’s shop on Egnatia, the Nar fish-shop, and the premises of Amir and Mevorah at no. 57, 26th October Street. The Germans also auctioned off the concessions to demolish the other outlying Jewish quarters—151 and Kalamaria to the east, Regi Vardar and Ayia Paraskevi to the west—and acres of the city’s outskirts were reduced to rubble an
d ruins. Against six Jewish-owned groceries on the YDIP lists, an official has pencilled in: “All the premises found in the 151 Settlement have been demolished.” The same note accompanied the sixteen properties—greengrocers, cobblers, dairy products, tavernas, a barber and a chemist—listed along one street in the Hirsch quarter. The buildings left behind by the deported Jews had thus rewarded local collaborators. “In Thessaloniki it was widely known,” stated a collaborationist civil servant after the war, “that many people were saved by Merten and praised him because he gave them Jewish properties.”7
Little of this reached the ears of the authorities in far-off Athens for some time, but when it did they were horrified. In October 1943 a Greek civil servant reported to the ministry of the interior that the treatment of Jewish property was “alarming and scandalous.” The housing shortage in the city was as serious as before, and many refugees continued to live in awful conditions. Most Jewish apartments and dwellings had become uninhabitable following the plundering of their walls, roofs and floor materials. Others had been blown up—like many of the city’s synagogues—depriving the needy of further shelter. “My personal impressions of the general treatment of this stupendous problem are sorrowful,” he concluded. Shortly after liberation, a Jewish survivor visited the two remaining YDIP warehouses and described what he found there: “Their total contents were some old closets, some old tables, some typewriters mostly destroyed, empty jars for perfume manufacturing, everything of insignificant value.”8