Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (66 page)

The wife of the Swiss consul, who returned home at the end of 1941, painted a grim picture of city life. Emaciated adults were collapsing on the pavements; their bodies were later removed on open carts “drawn by gaunt horses, staggering in their traces from the effects of hunger. Subsequent burials are carried out without coffins owing to the lack of wood.” As the death toll rose, fear of famine gripped the population. The Greeks, she reported, blamed the Germans for their plight and called them “locusts.” “The spectre of a contrived extermination of a whole population,” she concluded, “cannot be dismissed as a hallucination conjured up by starved stomachs but rather viewed as a logical appraisal of German behaviour in Greece since the invasion of Russia.”
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In fact, the Germans certainly did not plan to exterminate the population and even imported a little food from other Balkan countries. Yet in the spring of 1942 hundreds of people were still dying of hunger, and that summer, malaria—the city’s traditional scourge—killed many more. Not until the spring of 1943 did death rates return to something close to normal levels or births begin to outnumber deaths. In all, more than five thousand people died of starvation—far fewer than in Athens, or the islands, but a catastrophe without parallel for Salonica. And yet, frightening as this was, for the city’s Jews it was only the beginning.
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T
HE
R
OSENBERG
C
OMMANDO

T
HE FIRST SIGN
that the Jews might be singled out came right at the start of the occupation when representatives of the communal council called on the German commander and were dismissed without being seen. A few days later, the entire council was arrested, and Chief Rabbi Koretz was sent to Vienna. Gestapo officials raided Zionist clubs, while the previously banned anti-Semitic EEE party was re-formed. On 29 June, a week after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jewish homes on two streets—Miaoulis and Misrachi—were requisitioned for the use of German families fleeing Allied bombardment; Christian-owned homes were not touched.

More damaging than this were the activities of Hitler’s ideological commissar, Alfred Rosenberg, who was setting up a research centre in Frankfurt for the study of world Jewry. When Greece fell, he immediately sent a team to Salonica—“one of the main Jewish centres, as you yourself know,” he told Martin Bormann. Led by a German Hebraicist, the Sonderkommando Rosenberg plundered its Jewish libraries, clubs and synagogues, seizing tens of thousands of books, archives, manuscripts and rare objects to send back to Germany. To men more habituated to the world of East European Jewry, Salonica was unfamiliar territory: in August, one enquired where the ghetto had been located, only to be politely informed by a local scholar that after more than twenty years of his own historical research, “he had never encountered in any manuscript, or any document of whatever kind, the least indication allowing one to believe that there existed at any time a ghetto in Salonica.”
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The Rosenberg commando left Greece laden with looted Jewish goods, some of which would turn up, many decades later, in the KGB special archive outside Moscow. But after appointing a new, more pliable president of the community, the Germans apparently lost interest in the Jews. Jewish businesses continued to play an important part in the life of the town, and at school and university Jewish and Christian children found that life went on little changed. The members of the pre-war communal council were released, Chief Rabbi Koretz returned to Salonica, and the quisling Greek prime minister stated publicly that “there is no Jewish question in Greece.” The Sonderkommando Rosenberg agreed; its final report concluded with evident disappointment that “for the average Greek there is no Jewish question. He does not see the political danger of world Jewry.”
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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.
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L
OCAL
A
NTI
-J
EWISH
M
EASURES

I
T 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 survivor:

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.
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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.
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