The Holocaust saw the mass murder of Greek Jews, as part of their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp, by the Nazis during World War II. By 1945, between 82 and 92 percent of Greek Jews had been murdered, one of the highest proportions in Europe.
Before the war, approximately 72,000 to 77,000 Jews lived in 27 communities in Greece. The majority, about 50,000, lived in Salonica (Thessaloniki), a former Ottoman city captured and annexed by Greece in 1912. Most Greek Jews were Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim (Jews originating on the Iberian Peninsula) with some being Greek-speaking Romaniotes (an ancient Jewish community native to Greece). Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria invaded and occupied Greece in April 1941. During the first year of the occupation, Greek Jews as well as Christians suffered from famine, property confiscation, and hostage killings.
In March 1943, just over 4,000 Jews were deported from the Bulgarian occupation zone to Treblinka extermination camp. From 15 March through August, almost all of Salonica's Jews, along with those of neighboring communities in the German occupation zone, were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, Germany took over the Italian occupation zone, whose rulers had until then opposed the deportation of Jews. In March 1944, Athens, Ioannina, and other places in the former Italian occupation zone witnessed the roundup and deportation of their Jewish communities, although more Jews were able to escape than in the earlier deportations. In mid-1944, Jews living in the Greek islands were targeted. Around 10,000 Jews survived the Holocaust either by going into hiding, fighting with the Greek resistance, or surviving Nazi concentration camps.
Following World War II, surviving Jews faced obstacles regaining their property from non-Jews who had taken it over during the war. About half emigrated to Israel and other countries in the first decade after the war. The Holocaust was long overshadowed by other events during the wartime occupation, but gained additional prominence in the 21st century.
Background
The Greek-speaking Romaniotes are the oldest Jewish community in Europe, dating back possibly as far as the sixth century BCE. Many Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim settled in the Ottoman Empire, including areas that are now Greece, after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. Numerically and culturally, they came to dominate the earlier Romaniote community. The prewar Jewish communities of southern, western, and northern Greece each had a different history: Because of suspicion that they opposed the Greek insurgents, many Jews of the Peloponnese and Central Greece were massacred during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, while others fled to the Ottoman Empire. The newly independent Greek state established the Eastern Orthodox Church of Greece as the state religion shared by almost all inhabitants. Very few Jews remained in independent Greece, the largest community comprising fifty Romaniote families at Chalcis. After the establishment of the monarchy following independence, small numbers of Ashkenazim (Jews from Central Europe) as well as Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire settled in Athens, many in the service of the new king, Otto of Bavaria. They became well integrated into social and political life, considering themselves Greeks of the Jewish faith. Western Greece, especially Epirus, was home to a community of Romaniotes who settled along the area's trading routes, especially the Via Egnatia, during the early centuries CE. Emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century of the Jewish community of Ioannina left it with a few thousand Jews. Western Greece remained under Ottoman rule until the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913, when it was captured by Greece. Forced resettlement in Constantinople in 1455 by Sultan Mehmet II almost erased the Romaniote communities of Thrace, Macedonia, and Central Greece. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire allowed Sephardim to resettle on the Aegean coast from Larissa west; Ashkenazi migrants joined them later, but the Sephardim remained dominant. Prior to World War II, about 50,000 Jews lived in Salonica (Thessaloniki), a center of Sephardic learning that historically held a Jewish majority and was termed the "Jerusalem of the Balkans". The city was heavily Hellenized as a result of the Great Fire of 1917, but the Jewish demographic plurality persisted until many Greek refugees from Eastern Thrace and Anatolia arrived in 1922. The Greek islands, especially Corfu, Rhodes, and Crete, were home to both Sephardic and Romaniote communities that had spent many years under Venetian rule or influence such that many Jews from these islands spoke Italian. Before the Balkan Wars, no more than 10,000 Jews lived in Greece; this number would increase eightfold as a result of territorial acquisitions. Jews occasionally faced antisemitic violence such as the 1891 riots in Corfu and the 1931 Campbell pogrom, carried out by the National Union of Greece (EEE) in a suburb of Salonica. As a result of economic decline, many Jews left Greece after World War I. At first, wealthy merchants left for Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the 1930s, many poorer Jews emigrated from Salonica to Mandatory Palestine. Under heavy pressure to Hellenize, Jews in Salonica gradually assimilated into the Greek majority and some young Jews spoke Greek as their first language. Historian Steven Bowman states that while the physical destruction of Greek Jews took place from 1943 to 1945, "an economic, social, and political assault predated the vicissitudes of World War II". The political fragmentation of Salonican Jews into opposing factions of conservative assimilationists, Zionists, and Communists hampered its ability to cope. In 1936, the Metaxas dictatorship overthrew unstable parliamentary politics. Upon the outbreak of World War II, some 72,000 to 77,000 Jews lived in 27 communities in Greece—the majority of them in Salonica.
Axis occupation
Early in the morning of 28 October 1940, Italy gave an ultimatum to dictator Ioannis Metaxas: if he did not allow Italian troops to occupy Greece, Italy would declare war. Metaxas refused and Italy immediately invaded Greece. The Jewish community reported that 12,898 Jews fought for Greece in the war; 613 died and 3,743 were wounded, most famously Colonel Mordechai Frizis. During the winter of 1940–1941, Italians and Greeks fought in Albania, but in April 1941, Germany joined the war and occupied all of mainland Greece by the end of the month and Crete in May. A group of generals announced a new government with German backing on 26 April, while the royal family was evacuated to Crete and then to Cairo, where the Greek government-in-exile was established. After a month, all Greek prisoners of war were released, including all Jewish soldiers.
In mid-1941, Greece was partitioned into three occupation zones. The Germans occupied strategically important areas: Macedonia including Salonica, the harbor of Piraeus, most of Crete and some of the Aegean islands, and allowed the Italians to take almost all the Greek mainland and many islands. Bulgaria occupied Western Thrace and eastern Macedonia, where it immediately undertook a harsh Bulgarianization program, sending more than 100,000 Greek refugees westward. The collaborationist Greek government began to see Bulgaria as the main threat and did all it could to secure German support for limiting the size of the Bulgarian occupation zone. However, in June 1943, parts of eastern Macedonia switched from German to Bulgarian control.
Anti-Jewish persecution Immediately after the occupation, German police units made arrests based on lists of individuals deemed subversive, including Greek Jewish intellectuals and the entire Salonica Jewish community council. The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce surveyed Jewish assets a week after the occupation. To curry favor with the Germans, collaborationist prime minister Georgios Tsolakoglou announced that there was a "Jewish problem" in Greece—the term was not a part of prewar discourse—adding, "this question will be definitively solved within the framework of the whole New Order in Europe".
Confiscation of all kinds of property from both Jews and non-Jews was undertaken on a massive scale; wealthy Jews were arrested and their businesses expropriated. During the first year of occupation, Jews shared in the same hardships as other Greeks, including the 1941 Greek famine and hyperinflation. Black market activity was widespread despite being punishable by immediate execution. The famine disproportionately affected Greek Jews as many were members of the urban proletariat and lacked connections to the countryside. In Salonica, German occupation forces tried to exacerbate the divisions between Greek Jews and the Christian population, encouraging newspapers to print antisemitic material and reviving the EEE, which Metaxas had banned. In the Bulgarian occupation zone, hundreds of Thracian Jews were forced into Bulgarian labor battalions, thus escaping famine and the deportation of Thracian Jews in 1943. In Macedonia, all recently arrived Jews, mostly a few hundred refugees from Yugoslavia, were required to register with the police in November 1941. A handful were immediately placed in German custody, deported, and executed.
Greek collaborators provided the names of alleged Communists to the German authorities, who held them as hostages and shot them in reprisal for resistance activities. Jews were overrepresented among these victims. In the second half of 1941, Jewish property in Salonica was confiscated on a large scale to rehouse Christians whose residences had been destroyed by bombing, or who had fled the Bulgarian occupation zone. In February 1942, the collaborationist government acceded to German demands and fired high-ranking official because of his alleged Jewish ancestry. Soon after it agreed to ban all Jews from leaving the country at German request.
On 11 July 1942, 9,000 Jewish men were rounded up for registration in Eleftherias Square in Salonika, in a joint operation by Germany and the Greek collaborationist government. The assembled Jews were publicly humiliated and forced to perform exercises. After this registration, as many as 3,500 Jewish men were drafted into labor battalions by Organization Todt, a Nazi civil and military engineering organization. Greek gendarmes guarded the forced laborers as they were transferred to work sites and former Greek military officers oversaw the work projects. Conditions were so harsh that hundreds of Jews died. Some escaped, but the Germans shot others in retaliation. Neither the Greek authorities nor the Orthodox Church made any protest. As a ransom for the laborers, the Jewish community paid two billion drachmas and gave up the extensive Jewish cemetery of Salonica, which the city administration had been trying to obtain for years. The municipality of Salonica destroyed the cemetery beginning in December 1942, and the city and the Greek Orthodox Church used many of the tombstones for construction. By the end of 1942, more than a thousand Jews had fled from Salonica to Athens—mostly the wealthy, as the journey cost 150,000 drachmas (£300, ).
Deportation
More than 2,000 Greek Jews were deported in late 1942 to Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust in France. Historian Christopher Browning argues that German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the deportation of Salonica's Jews on 2 November 1941, citing a passage in Gerhard Engel's diary stating that Hitler "demands that the Jewish elements be removed from Salonika". Salonica's chief rabbi, Zvi Koretz, was interned in Vienna from May 1941 to January 1942—a year before the deportation process began in Salonica.