In the Shadow of the Nazi Past: Post-war Reconstruction and the Claims of the Jewish Community in Salonika

German Occupation of Salonika

When the Wehrmacht entered Salonika on 9 April 1941, the local Jewish community was terrified, ⁹ but since anti-Jewish measures were introduced more slowly than expected, only a negligible number of Jews left the town. ¹⁰ Over time, however, anti-Jewish policies intensified. The German civilian administration, which, since the summer of 1942, was led by the Military Administration Counsellor (Kriegsverwaltungsrat) Max Merten (1911–1971), harassed local Jews and supported anti-Semitic propaganda. ¹¹ The activities of some Greek anti-Jewish associations were revived after having been banned by the Prime Minister and Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas (1871–1941). ¹² Some Jews were arrested, including members of the board of the Salonika Jewish Council, whom the Nazis later replaced with more compliant members of the community. But soon enough, most board members were released and the tense atmosphere started to relax to a certain degree. The Jews of Salonika began to hope that they were not in immediate danger. ¹³

In Greece, the German officials assisted by Greek collaborators started applying anti-Jewish regulations in their occupation zone only in mid-1942. ¹⁴ The first public measure against Jews was taken in July 1942, when with the consent of Vasilios Simonidis (1899–1960), the Greek governor of Macedonia, the German occupiers ordered all Jewish males of Salonika aged 18 to 45 to carry out forced labour. ¹⁵ On the morning of 11 July 1942 more than 9000 Jewish men reported for registration, which was accompanied by severe harassment of the assembled Jews. ¹⁶ The registered men were then deported to work on construction projects for the Reich. ¹⁷

The forced deportation of these Jews proved ‘unprofitable’ because high mortality among the slave labourers, which was due to extreme working and living conditions, slowed down the completion of the projects they were assigned to. The occupation authorities therefore expressed their willingness to conclude an agreement on their ransom with the representatives of the Salonika Jewish community. On the German side, the negotiations were led by Merten. He was willing to free about 5500 forced labourers if the Jewish community paid for their release ¹⁸ and the ancient Jewish cemetery in Salonika was transferred to German administration. Under the given circumstances, the Jewish community accepted the ‘offer’. ¹⁹

Nevertheless, in late 1942, the SS-Obersturmbannführer of the Reich Main Security Office, Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), decided to start implementing the ‘final solution’ in the parts of Greece under German administration. ²⁰ He assigned the organization of deportations to Dieter Wisliceny (1911–1948) and Alois Brunner (1912–?), both of whom had proved efficient when performing similar tasks earlier in Bratislava and Vienna respectively. ²¹ Wisliceny and Brunner arrived in Salonika at the beginning of February 1943. ²² Immediately thereafter, they contacted Merten, who promised to assist them in every possible way. ²³ In early February 1943 they informed Rabbi Zvi Koretz (1884–1945), the highest representative of the Salonika Jews, that anti-Jewish measures would take effect and local Jews would be sent to Poland to join their fellow Jews. ²⁴

On 3 March 1943, the destruction of Salonika Jewry was launched with an article called ‘The Jewish Question: The Greek Nation Demands Final Solution!’, which appeared in Nea Europi, a Greek newspaper established by the occupiers. ²⁵ The occupation authorities issued directives, on the basis of which Jews were deprived of their property and gradually isolated in ghettos, which they were forbidden to leave on pain of death. ²⁶ The whole process was extremely fast and the administrative framework was essentially in place within two weeks in March 1943. Only a few of the Jews of Salonika escaped to the Italian zone of Greece, while some others reached the mountains and joined the resistance fighters. ²⁷ Overall, several thousand Jews managed to flee from Salonika. ²⁸

Regarding the administration of Jewish property, the German military authorities opted for a tactic which had been previously used mainly in western and northern Europe but also in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, that is, close collaboration with local institutions, based upon the support of Greek economic and political elites. ²⁹ On 8 March 1943, one week before the beginning of deportations, an Office for the Disposal of Jewish Property (Ypiresia Diaxeiriseos Israilitikon Periousion, YDIP) was established on Brunner and Wisliceny’s orders by Vassilis Simonides, the Governor of Macedonia. The Greek state authorized this office – which was subordinated to the German occupation authorities and later to the puppet Ministry of Finance in Athens – to administer Jewish commercial and private property across the entire German zone, in which Salonika, with 2300 shops and 12,000 apartments, was the richest community. The board of directors of YDIP was headed by Ilias Douros, a senior official of the Greek Ministry of Finance and since 1941 economic inspector of the Cadastral Office of Salonika. It consisted of respectable Greek citizens, including law professors, directors of local banking institutions, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and heads of guilds. The YDIP removed virtually all equipment and furnishings from approximately 2000 Jewish properties to 27 warehouses, where they were to be kept for their owners. Other movables were left in the Jewish houses and passed together with the real estate to caretakers. ³⁰

During the German occupation, Jewish homes as well as the warehouses holding Jewish property were looted. The looters were assisted by Treuhänder (trustees), mostly local collaborators, authorized by the YDIP. This organization was also formally assigned the task of finding suitable provisory Treuhänder of formerly Jewish real estate. These caretakers were then supposed to pay rent to the city administration ‘for the benefit of the Jewish owners’ but in reality no one checked the payments. Later on, however, the German military administration headed by Merten issued a new directive which permitted the sale of the real estate acquired in this way to third persons, which in many cases brought the formerly assigned caretakers significant financial profit. Whenever the YDIP tried to assign Jewish property to ‘temporary caretakers’, in some cases refugees from other parts of Greece who had lost their own property, this was allegedly prevented by the Nazis. Eventually, the German administration divided a large part of the real estate among themselves, the rest being split between the Municipality of Salonika, other local but also international institutions, and both Greek and foreign collaborators who were in some way related to these institutions or to Germany (working experience, knowledge of the German language, German spouse, etc.). ³¹ Cash was handed over to the German military authorities, while the movable and immovable property was in many cases quickly sold by the new administrators who did not expect that the Jewish owners would ever return and claim their property back. ³²

The first transport left from Salonika to Auschwitz on 15 March 1943. Most of its approximately 1700 mainly Salonikan Jewish passengers were immediately sent to the gas chambers, while others were assigned to forced labour or subjected to ‘medical’ experiments. Subsequent transports met with a similar fate. Only one did not go to the General Government and was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp instead. It consisted of 367 Jews who managed to retain the citizenship of neutral Spain and of the Prominenten (privileged or protected persons), including Rabbi Koretz. Most of them survived the war. In total, about 45,000 people were deported from Salonika to Auschwitz and about 85 per cent of them were murdered immediately after their arrival. ³³

Post-War Situation of Jewish Survivors in Salonika

After the German occupation ended in the autumn of 1944, the Salonika Jews who had spent the war in their homeland started to come out of hiding. Of the approximately 60,000 Jews deported from Greece, fewer than 2000 returned from the concentration camps, about half of them to their home town Salonika. ³⁴ In total, about 10,000 members of the Jewish community of Greece survived the Shoah. ³⁵ Some had spent the war in Athens where they were assisted by their non-Jewish countrymen, often for financial compensation. Others survived in the mountains with the help of the partisans. ³⁶

The Jewish community of Salonika never again exceeded 2000 people, but over time it became one of the best organized and most determined communities in Greece regarding the return of lost property and the punishment of perpetrators. It was also the most vocal of the Jewish communities when it came to compensation claims. As in many other centrally administered countries, a certain animosity existed between Athens, the capital, and Salonika, a regional metropolis. This rivalry can be traced throughout the history of the Greek state. ³⁷ After the war, relations between the Jewish communities of the two cities were made even more complicated by the fact that their situations were in a way reversed: before the war, Salonika had a Jewish population of approximately 56,000 (see above); after the war, it was the second largest of the 16 Jewish communities in Greece ³⁸ but its population had shrunk to a mere fraction of its former size and the community had lost its exclusive status. The community in Athens, on the other hand, experienced significant growth after the war – among other things due to an influx of Shoah survivors. Before long, it counted some 5000 persons, which made it almost twice its pre-war size and the largest Jewish community in Greece. ³⁹

After the ‘liberation’, that is after the Greek exile government returned to Athens on 18 October 1944, the Jews of Salonika and other communities which had survived the war were impatiently waiting for the return of their relatives. But Auschwitz, the extermination camp where a majority of the Jews of Salonika had been interned, was liberated only in January 1945. The first survivor to return to Salonika was Leon Batis, who arrived in the middle of March 1945. Those who heard his story could not or would not believe his descriptions of the scale of the ‘final solution’, of which no one in Greece seemed to have had any idea. ⁴⁰ After several more survivors came back in the course of the year, a suspicion that most Salonika Jews had been murdered in the camps began to sink in. And yet, the majority population, but also Jews who had not experienced the extermination camps, were reluctant to listen to descriptions of the horrors of the war and, consciously or subconsciously, avoided those who had returned from Auschwitz. ⁴¹

The post-war situation of Jews in Greece was very similar to that in other places where a majority of the Jewish population had been murdered. ⁴² By the time the survivors returned home, whether from hiding or from concentration camps, everything had changed. Virtually all the survivors had lost most of their family and friends. Community life practically ceased to exist. Jewish shops, schools and synagogues had been closed and buildings where members of the Jewish community had formerly gathered were mostly in poor condition or destroyed. The restoration of Jewish property was often prevented by people who had stolen or otherwise misappropriated it during the war. In some cases, Greek refugees who had lost their own homes during the occupation were living in Jewish houses and simply refused to move out. Buildings had been bombed, dismantled for construction materials, or looted when treasure hunters tried to find valuables which they believed the Jews had hidden. ⁴³

During this turbulent time, mere survival was the supreme imperative both in Greece and beyond. ⁴⁴ In the immediate aftermath of the war, when most of the country was administered by the partisans, the living conditions of the Jewish survivors were little different from those of the majority population. Moreover, much like in 1916, Salonika became in a way again a centre of opposition to the king in Athens. Tensions escalated after the return of former prisoners from concentration camps, since, in many cases, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs. ⁴⁵ Plagued by disease, malnutrition and severe depression, many of them died shortly after the war. ⁴⁶ One of them was the Chief Rabbi of Salonika, Zvi Koretz, who was still in Germany when he died of typhoid fever several weeks after the war. Even so, fellow Jewish survivors accused him and several other members of the Jewish Board of collaborating with the Nazis and of complicity with the massacre of the Jews of Salonika. ⁴⁷

Within the post-war community, there were also tensions between Zionists, non-Zionists, deportees and people who had not been deported. ⁴⁸ Bitterness and guilt were like shadows cast over the survivors’ everyday lives. Material deprivation and shame linked to ‘abandoning’ their families and surviving was mixed with anger that others returned while their family and friends had been killed. ⁴⁹ Jewish survivors accused each other of collaboration: a belief that some people survived at the expense of others was for many people an acceptable explanation for the death of their relatives. ⁵⁰ This bitterness was reflected in the efficiency with which the Salonika Jewish community acted against Nazi collaborators in their own ranks. These men were among just a handful of people in Greece who were actually convicted of aiding the occupiers. ⁵¹

At first, the Jewish returnees did not know where to turn for help. Eleven Jewish communities had lost over 90 per cent of their members. ⁵² Early on, the basic material needs of Shoah survivors, reintegration into society, and renewal of communal religious life were provided to a large extent by international organizations. On the other hand, the mission of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the largest and most important relief provider in Greece at that time, was to assist all people in need regardless of race or religion. It was not therefore really in a position to provide special aid to the Jewish survivors. Each claimant only received rations, clothing from charities and a few blankets, which homeless Jews covered themselves with when sleeping in the streets or in temporary shelters. Those who had returned from the camps often had no possessions at all, ⁵³ and one year after liberation about 6–7000 Jews in Greece were still dependent on humanitarian aid. ⁵⁴

Some organizations, most notably the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or simply the Joint) focused specifically on helping the Jews. The Joint launched its activities in post-war Greece in March 1945. It provided Jews from all around the country with financial and social support, which included food, medicine, clothing and initially also a basic allowance to help individuals buy the staples. For young couples, the organization arranged the wedding rings and dowries required by Greek law. ⁵⁵ Furthermore, the Joint disbursed small loans: it run a lending institution, loan kassas, which provided new Jewish businesses with short-term credit at minimal interest rates. ⁵⁶

In December 1945, Alfred Cohen was appointed a Regional Director for JDC in Salonika. ⁵⁷ With its assistance, a Jewish school, youth centre, retirement home and a synagogue were restored and reopened. In both Athens and Salonika, Jewish medical dispensaries and girls’ schools where Jewish girls could study foreign languages, office work, and handicrafts were established. Young Jews could also learn crafts in training programmes offered by the World Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, an associated Jewish foundation. ⁵⁸ The Joint thus clearly contributed to the renewal of Jewish communities in Greece in various ways. During the civil war, however, the country was split, which hampered the relief and reconstruction efforts of the Joint as well as communication between the Jewish communities in various parts of the country.

The Greek civil war (1946–1949) revived among the Jewish population in Greece fears of atrocities and led to anxieties about being forced to participate in an armed conflict and of being accused of leftist sympathies. During the wartime occupation, many Jews had been helped by leftist partisans. It was natural, then, that after the war quite a lot of them sympathized with the Greek Communists and their cause. ⁵⁹ The new establishment, however, viewed these Jewish survivors as a potential threat to the system, which in many cases led to their persecution and even imprisonment. ⁶⁰ Other survivors were forced to join the royalist army and fight against the leftist resistance. Those who refused faced sanctions. ⁶¹ In this situation, it is unsurprising that many Jews decided to leave the country. It is estimated that by the mid-1950s, the total number of Greek Jewish emigrants reached approximately 5000 and more than three-quarters of them had gone to Palestine and later Israel. ⁶²

Shoah survivors, however, received help not only from international organizations and Jewish foundations but also from local Jewish communities which were officially re-established by law in the summer of 1945. ⁶³ Where a Jewish community was reduced to less then half of its pre-war size or included fewer than 20 families, care of the survivors was delegated to the newly established Central Board of Jewish Communities (Kentriko Israilitiko Symvoulio, KIS) which was located in Athens. The KIS was supposed to represent communities – including the Jewish community in Salonika – in property matters and negotiations with the Greek government but also to establish and mediate contact with national and international humanitarian organizations. ⁶⁴ In terms of material support, the Jewish community in Greece believed its needs would be met by the return of confiscated property. ⁶⁵ That, unfortunately, turned out to be a much longer and more difficult process than Jewish negotiators anticipated and the Greek authorities originally promised.

The Return of Jewish Property

As mentioned above, many Jews after the war had no financial resources. They also faced increasing anti-Semitism, often motivated by efforts to retain confiscated or stolen Jewish property ⁶⁶ – a phenomenon occurring with varying intensity in all European territories previously under German administration. ⁶⁷ People who had moved into Jewish houses were most reluctant to vacate them when the original owners returned, ⁶⁸ and even former friends and neighbours in some cases denied that Jewish property had been entrusted to them for safekeeping. ⁶⁹ The ancient Jewish community of Salonika was paralysed and the former Jewish quarter, Baron Hirsch neighbourhood, which during the war had been turned into a ghetto and a transit centre, was completely destroyed. Only one of its original 32 synagogues and a former psychiatric hospital, Lieto Noah, had survived. During the war, they had been used as warehouses; afterwards, they served as temporary shelters for survivors. ⁷⁰

It was the settlement of property issues (the ownership of real estate but also companies, etc.) that in the immediate aftermath of the war became the biggest problem of Greek legislation concerning Jews, since the relevant legislation in force was based on laws passed during the occupation. Just two weeks before the liberation, the Greek quisling government in Athens passed a law which made changes to the custody of Jewish property and established a new centralized office for its return, the Central Office for the Disposal of Jewish Property (Kentriki Ypiresia Diaxeiriseos Israilitikon Periousion, KYDIP), which was to be administered by the Greek Government. ⁷¹ This law, however, applied only in the former Italian zone, where the ‘final solution’ and confiscation of Jewish property happened later than in Northern Greece. It was not in force in the former German province of Macedonia and therefore not in Salonika. ⁷² The post-war reconstruction legislation had similar shortcomings. One of its crucial problems was that German legislation concerning Jewish property was not annulled all at once. Rather, it was gradually superseded by individual laws and, for some time, these laws did not address the general problem of material damage resulting from racial persecution. ⁷³

Finally, in late December 1945, Act 808 brought some order into this legal chaos and enabled the return of property not only to the original owners but also to their agents, guardians and relatives but only after paying a proportional transfer fee to the state treasury. This condition was for most claimants impossible to meet. One of its important provisions stipulates that real estate is to be returned to the owners together with all the movable possessions listed by the YDIP during the war. Whenever items specified on the YDIP list were missing, owners were to be financially compensated based on the items’ current market value. Moreover, the Treuhänder (trustees) were now supposed to pay rent for the use of the real estate since its forced transfer into their hands during the war. ⁷⁴

Immediately after this law was passed, a wave of indignation and protests swept through Greece and especially Salonika. The trustees in Salonika created an ‘Association of Tenants of Jewish Property in Northern Greece’ (Syndesmos Misthoton Israilitikon Akiniton Voriou Ellados, SMIAVE) and tried to legalize their ownership through slanderous media campaigns, lobbying, and even the courts. They repeatedly intimidated the government official who was sent to Salonika to represent Jewish survivors and even threatened him with violence. ⁷⁵

As the controversy made its way through the courts of Salonika, anti-Jewish sentiments escalated. The Greek majority felt offended and Jews were often labelled as ‘profiteers’. The return of Jewish real estate became politicized and the majority society voiced opinions to the effect that a handful of returnees are stealing housing and jobs from Greeks (who were actually living off Jewish property). ⁷⁶ The Ministry of Justice recommended to the Salonika courts that hearings on the return of Jewish property should be repeatedly adjourned. ⁷⁷ In October 1948, a legal directive granted the trustees the status of tenants who could not be evicted and postponed the enforcement of decisions pursuant to Act 808/1945 until the expiry of the directive in late September of the following year. Faced with all these delays, many survivors who wished to make a clean break with the past and wanted to start a new life decided to waive their restitution claims for good. ⁷⁸

Over time, the revived Jewish communities succeeded in having most of their property returned, though as they had little cash they had to sell some parts of it to restore their financial stability. ⁷⁹ The future of the property of Jews with no heirs or guardians as defined by the law of December 1945 was, however, still unclear. ⁸⁰ Where no legal heir could be found, the property was to revert to the state in accordance with applicable laws. On the other hand, the Greek government considered the option that such Jewish property should escheat not to the state but to the Jewish communities. ⁸¹

This decision was implemented on 22 January 1946 with the adoption of a law that revoked the state’s right to inherit Jewish property. This provision, however, presupposed the existence of an organization that would administer the returned property. ⁸² The Jewish communities then had to wait another three years before a decree was issued which created the Organization for the Relief and Rehabilitation of the Jews of Greece (Organismos Perithalpseos ke Apokatastaseos Israiliton Ellados, OPAIE). ⁸³ The full operation of the OPAIE was then hampered by problems with the issuing of death certificates without evidence of death. As late as 1959, the KIS was still trying to resolve this question. ⁸⁴ Because of all these difficulties, the Jewish community in Greece did not become self-sufficient until the mid-1960s. It was only 20 years after the end of the German occupation that the direct involvement of foreign Jewish agencies and relief from the AJDC could be gradually phased out. ⁸⁵ It was also at that time that the Jews of Greece received the first – and if at all then in most cases the only – compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany.

Initial Steps Towards German Compensation

After re-establishing, at least to some extent, their lives in post-war Greece, Jewish survivors started seeking material compensation for damage caused by the German occupiers. On the international stage, financial claims against Germany and compensation of the victims of Nazism were first discussed at the Paris Conference on Reparations in late 1945. The Paris Treaty, however, stipulated that compensation was to be paid out only to refugees unable to return to their homeland. This thus created direct entitlement primarily for concentration camp survivors and refugees from Germany, Austria and countries formerly under German occupation who had been prevented from returning earlier or whose repatriation had been impossible at the time. Victims of the Nazi terror from signatory countries of the Paris Treaty were to be compensated by their governments from their share of reparations established in the Paris negotiations. ⁸⁶ The Greek representative Athanasios Sbarounis urged the international community in Paris to seek a general solution to the issue of escheat from deceased persons of Jewish origin whose property could be used by the survivors, but no consensus was reached. ⁸⁷

Concerning the compensation of civilians in general, the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s responded to the requests of the victims of the Nazi regime and their organizations and took legal steps which also had an impact on the Jews of Greece. In September 1952, the Federal Government of Germany concluded, in Luxembourg, a bilateral reparations agreement with Israel. This was the first agreement to grant compensation to Shoah survivors. At this point, Bonn agreed to provide payments, goods and services to a total value of 3.5 billion marks to Shoah survivors. In order to receive individual compensation for physical and psychological damage, however, claimants had to be permanent residents of Israel. ⁸⁸ The Luxembourg Agreement was directly related to the Second Hague Protocol, which stipulated that about one seventh of the total sum, that is, approximately 0.5 billion marks, would be used to compensate Jewish survivors outside Israel. Since 1951, they were represented by a Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, an umbrella organization based in New York which was created in order to allocate the granted funds, decide on individual claims of Jews and their communities in the Diaspora, and provide them with financial support from the available funds. ⁸⁹

A wave of individual compensation claims made by Jewish victims from the Federal Republic of Germany and elsewhere was initiated by the supplementary law (BErG) adopted on 18 September 1953, that is, several months after the Luxembourg Agreement and shortly before the end of the first session of the Bundestag, the Federal Diet. ⁹⁰ This law, and its amended version (the BEG, adopted on 29 June 1956), ⁹¹ granted compensation to a wide range of persons who had been victims of Nazi terror based on racial, ideological or religious grounds and who had suffered harm not only to their lives, health and freedom, but also to their property or career. The law, however, had an important limitation: the right to compensation was granted only to German citizens and to persons who were directly bound to Germany in its 1937 borders and currently had permanent residence in the Federal Republic of Germany. ⁹²

These conditions, however, did not prevent foreign nationals from claiming financial compensation from German authorities for personal harm caused by the Nazi regime. In November 1953, Lévi Allalouf, Chairman of the Salonika-based Association of Deported Greek Jews (Enosi Omiron Israiliton Ellados) who had been incarcerated in Auschwitz for two years, sent an open letter to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Allalouf emphasized that he saw the promulgation of the BErG as a beginning of a compensation process that would provide support to many victims, including camp survivors currently living in Greece. On behalf of the four hundred Salonika Jews who had survived the concentration camps, he stressed the hardships they had suffered during the war and urged the government to consider their situation and provide support. ⁹³

The German Embassy in Athens soon notified the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany that Jews in Greece seemed to believe that the BErG provided compensation to all Jews who had been deported to Nazi concentration camps and were forced to work there during the war. But the embassy report also stressed that after the war, only 800 of the original 63,000 [sic] Jews returned to Salonika and it would therefore be desirable to grant them some compensation, at least as a symbolic gesture. ⁹⁴ In the end, the claim of the Greek Jewish victims never reached the German Chancellor. The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, supported by the Ministry of Finance, was convinced that signatories of the 1946 Treaty of Paris were required to compensate the entitled persons from their reparations. Through the stipulations of the Second Hague Protocol, they also granted compensation to Shoah victims abroad but that was to be distributed solely by the Claims Conference and not by Bonn. And this is also why in early February 1954 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed its diplomats in Athens that the claims of Salonika Jews could be settled through the Claims Conference. ⁹⁵

The Association of Deported Greek Jews had a chance to raise their case directly with the Federal Chancellor in March 1954, when Adenauer paid an official visit to Greece. At this point, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintained that, for the abovementioned reasons, compensation of the Jews of Salonika was not within Bonn’s competence. It therefore advised the Chancellor not to meet with the delegation of the Salonika association. If such an audience turned out to be impossible to refuse, the delegates were to be received only by the German ambassador or some member of Adenauer’s team. If need be, the delegates were to be assured that the Federal Government would draw the attention of the Claims Conference to the particularly dire situation of the Greek victims of racial persecution and ask the Conference for financial support. ⁹⁶

It took more than three years for the German Foreign Ministry to actually contact the Claims Conference. ⁹⁷ At first, it tried to ascertain what financial support the victims of Nazi persecution had received from Greece itself. It found out that the situation was dismal. Although a law had been passed in Athens in 1950 which generally stipulated that pensions ought to be paid to victims of the Second World War, the qualifications for claiming a pension were difficult to meet and the pension was thus paid only to a very limited number of Greek survivors. Compensation for property damage caused by the enemy was not mentioned in Greek legislation at all and there was no prospect of change. ⁹⁸

Bonn also asked the German Embassy in Athens to provide detailed information regarding people of Jewish origin who would qualify for financial support. ⁹⁹ The Salonika Jews cooperated in this matter with the German Embassy in Athens and compiled a list of 226 surviving Jewish victims of other than German nationality who wished to claim compensation. All the listed persons were survivors of concentration camps and nine of them were victims of ‘medical’ experiments. Only two of them had by that date received any compensation and none of them under the BErG. In addition to the victims’ name, camp number, home address, marital status, nationality, occupation, date and place of birth, place of deportation, duration of internment in concentration camp(s), and health condition, the list also included information on each claimant’s social background. The listed persons were divided into four groups: the first comprised persons with no regular income (32 survivors); the second listed employed persons living in poverty (86 persons); the third group consisted of owners of small businesses with sufficient income (99 persons); and the fourth group included real estate owners with substantial income (9 persons). Theo Kords, the German Ambassador to Athens, thought it desirable that at least the first two groups, that is, 52 per cent of the claimants, should be granted assistance. ¹⁰⁰ But the relevant department of the Federal Foreign Ministry took only the first group into account and in November 1954 stated that drawing the attention of the Claims Conference to a group of just 32 persons did not seem appropriate. ¹⁰¹

Since advocacy by the Association of Deported Greek Jews had been unsuccessful, in 1955 the Jewish community in Salonika founded a new organization, the Union for the Support and Rehabilitation of Salonika Jews (Enosis Perithalpseos ke Apokatastaseos Israiliton Thessalonikis), which continued to explore various ways of claiming compensation. ¹⁰² The original lists were supplemented with information about additional people and official certificates issued by the local department of the Greek Welfare Office which documented their material need. ¹⁰³ The Union got in touch with Henry Ormond, a Frankfurt-based attorney-at-law, and requested legal advice. In the years to follow, Ormond represented the Union in negotiations with Federal Institutions. Already in the autumn of 1956, however, the Federal Ministry of Finance informed him it could not satisfy his clients’ claims. In its statement, the Ministry referred not only to the provisions set out in the BEG and the Hague Protocol, but also to Article 5 of the London Agreement on External Debts, which was signed by Bonn and its Western creditors in February 1953. The latter prohibited ‘the review of similar claims until the final settlement of the matter of reparations’, effectively until a peace agreement with unified Germany was concluded. ¹⁰⁴ From April 1957 onwards, citing the argument of ‘charity support’ (which Germany applied to all of its Western partners including Greece), Bonn rejected virtually all claims of Shoah survivors from Greece which had been lodged either through the Union for the Support and Rehabilitation of Jews or through foreign institutions. ¹⁰⁵

Global Agreements and the Merten Trial

Notwithstanding these difficulties, the situation of Salonika Jews did start to look more promising in 1957 when Greece joined the governments of eight previously occupied Western European countries who decided to file jointly claims for compensation from Bonn. At this point, the Federal Foreign Ministry also contacted the German headquarters of the Claims Conference in Frankfurt and drew their attention to the situation of the Shoah survivors in Salonika. ¹⁰⁶ The Federal Republic, however, clearly linked any direct German compensation for Shoah victims with the results of negotiations on global agreements with European governments, which in the Greek case did not happen until the spring of 1960. ¹⁰⁷

The beginning of the compensation negotiations coincided with another breakthrough, namely, the start of an investigation of Max Merten, former Military Administration Counsellor in Salonika, who was at the time the only German citizen imprisoned in Greece for war crimes and the only Nazi war criminal ever charged with participating in the Shoah in Greece. ¹⁰⁸ In April 1957, the Greek Ministry of Justice published the details of his crimes, including information about his participation in the deportations of Salonika Jews. This incited a massive response in the Greek society and the Jewish community in particular. ¹⁰⁹ The local daily press wrote not only about the Merten case but also about the wider context of post-war Greek–German relations. ¹¹⁰ Gustav von Schmoller, then serving as the German Ambassador in Greece, noted that the articles were not of a generally anti-German nature but they did reopen wounds from the past. ¹¹¹ The massive press coverage faded only when the Greek authorities, in response to objections voiced by the German Embassy, issued a ban on covering the investigation. ¹¹²

Andreas Tousis (1903–?), Attorney General of the Greek National Office for the Prosecution of War Crimes, insisted on at least some limited compensation for the victims of Nazism and was prepared to use the Merten case to this purpose. As negotiations with Bonn continued, he was gradually narrowing down the group of people who would be entitled to compensation in order to make his proposal as palatable for the German Federal Republic as possible. In the end, the group included only about 300 individuals who had demonstrably been harmed solely by German perpetrators. Where it was possible to refer to wartime legislation (that is, wartime retaliatory measures and the like), the case was to be excluded. ¹¹³ In the end, compensation was to be granted only to the residents of Salonika who suffered from Merten’s actions. Moreover, after Bonn agreed to this compensation settlement, Merten would be extradited to Germany. Under the prevailing circumstances, however, Bonn did not accept this option. ¹¹⁴

Merten’s trial began on 11 February 1959, drawing much attention in both the Greek and the German press. ¹¹⁵ Just a week later, a new Greek law suspending the prosecution of German citizens accused of war crimes was published in the Greek government digest of laws, closing the chapter of prosecution of Nazi criminals in Greece with the exception of Merten. ¹¹⁶ In March 1959, Bonn invited the Greek government to an informal meeting regarding the compensation of the victims of Nazism. ¹¹⁷

The Merten trial was followed by a large audience, including many Salonika Jews. The prosecutor proposed the examination of 90 witnesses, while the defence proposed 89. ¹¹⁸ Witnesses for the prosecution gave evidence for the entire first week, in which the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors were among the most powerful. Testimonies of some other witnesses for the prosecution, on the other hand, ultimately indirectly supported Merten’s defence. Most surprising in this respect was the testimony of Ilias Douros, former President of the YDIP who had been accused of collaboration after the war. In contrast to his previous deposition, in his actual testimony Douros downplayed Merten’s role in the confiscation of Jewish property. ¹¹⁹ Moreover, his testimony largely agreed with a report on the situation of the YDIP from June 1945. As for Greeks testifying in Merten’s favour, Vassilis Simonidis, former Governor of Macedonia, became the most important witness for the defence. It is worth noting that after the war, both Douros and Simonidis had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis but neither had been sentenced. ¹²⁰

The defence appreciated the atmosphere of objectivity in which the main hearing took place. It stated that the trial had been conducted properly and conscientiously. The German consul, on the other hand, saw Merten’s attitude as tactless and inappropriate. He claimed that the Athenian public, too, viewed Merten’s behaviour as a ‘mixture of humility and arrogance’. ¹²¹ After the defence succeeded in proving that Merten could not have participated in the summer of 1942 in the registration of Jewish men for forced labour, they awaited judgement with undisguised optimism. ¹²² The final verdict therefore came as a surprise: the court found Merten guilty of 13 counts out of a total of 20. He was, however, acquitted of crimes against humanity, including the extermination of Salonika Jews, which would have necessarily resulted in a death sentence. ¹²³

On 5 March 1959, Merten was sentenced to a total of 25 years in prison. He was to serve his sentence in Greece and the chance of a review or commutation seemed virtually nil. Moreover, since the representatives of the Jewish community were not entirely satisfied with the sentence, a new trial in Greece could lead to an even harsher punishment. Bonn therefore seriously considered the advice of Merten’s counsels, took into account economic claims presented by the Greek government, and continued its efforts to arrange for Merten’s extradition to Germany. ¹²⁴

A few months later, in July and August of 1959, the German government concluded agreements regarding compensation claims with Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark. The amounts to be provided by Germany to Luxembourg and Denmark did not exceed 20 million marks each, while Norway received 60 million marks under a bilateral agreement. ¹²⁵ This sum was to serve as a benchmark for claims presented by other countries, including Greece. Athens, however, expected to receive in compensation a sum at least ten times higher than Luxembourg or Denmark. ¹²⁶

In the early summer of 1959, Greek associations of the victims of Nazism started to flood the German Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chancellor’s Office with letters and telegrams. ¹²⁷ This time, the Jews of Greece presented a unified front: the Ministry was contacted by an attorney-at-law based in Hamburg, Dr Georg S. Constant, who represented the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece on the matter of compensation. And while victims of Nazi persecution of political opposition in Greece were afraid that they might be excluded from any Greek–German agreements on compensation, Shoah survivors were concerned that the final amount could end up being divided among so many parties that Jewish victims would receive only a fraction of the sum originally claimed. ¹²⁸

On 1 January 1960, Evangelos Averoff, the Greek foreign minister, confidentially contacted Gebhard Seelos, the German ambassador, and indicated that Athens would expect some leeway in the distribution of the funds granted, otherwise ‘in practice, most of the money would go to the Jews and the Communists’. Seelos then informed his superiors that given a possibly broad interpretation of the term ‘compensation’, the finances granted as compensation could end up being misused by Greece ‘for its own political purposes’ unless some provision for German supervision of its distribution is agreed on. He therefore insisted that Bonn should commit the Greek Government at least to a general definition of the purpose of the payments, and should make sure that the money was disbursed to entitled claimants without unnecessary delay. He also recommended that after receiving and distributing the funds, Athens ought to issue a detailed report of payments made. ¹²⁹

On 11 February 1960, the Federal Republic of Germany renewed negotiations with Greece on this matter. Even before they began, it was known in Bonn that although Greece expected a sum of about 135 million marks, the negotiators could agree on a lower amount, around 100 to 135 million marks. Germany, however, initially considered 100 million marks to be the maximum. ¹³⁰ When the parties returned to the negotiating table two weeks later, Athens was offered a total of between 80 million and 85 million German marks. This proposal was rejected by Greece, ¹³¹ and the representatives of the German Federal Foreign Ministry realized before the renewal of the talks that they had to offer at least 110 million German marks. ¹³² In return, they demanded concessions both in favour of Bonn and on behalf of Shoah victims remaining in Greece. The proposal they made concerned the return of German property and an explicit inclusion of Jewish survivors in future Greek laws on the distribution of the funds. Bonn acted under considerable pressure from the Claims Conference, whose demands for compensation to Jewish survivors were indirectly supported by a rise in anti-Semitism. ¹³³ And although in January 1960 anti-Semitic incidents occurred not only in Germany but also in Greece, the delegates from Athens claimed that anti-Semitism was absolutely alien to Greek society. ¹³⁴

While the attitude of the Greek representatives to the return of property was initially rather neutral and, subsequently they decided to follow the suggestions made by the Federal Republic at least at the declaratory level, according to the minutes of the Bonn negotiations they ‘strictly refused to favour or disfavour any group of citizens’. ¹³⁵ As the Greek delegate, Constantin Tranos, had explained earlier in Bonn, ‘there is no racial discrimination in Greece’. According to him, ‘the need for the compensation in fact comes from “the sloppiness of the Nazis” since the total compensation amount would have been significantly reduced had the Jews been more thoroughly exterminated’. ¹³⁶ After this, according to the documentation of the Federal Foreign Ministry, the question of an explicit inclusion of the Jews of Greece in compensation distribution was never opened again.

On 5 November 1959, about three months before the launch of the last round of Greek–German compensation negotiations, Merten was transferred from Athens to Munich. ¹³⁷ He was arrested shortly after landing at Munich airport but remained in custody only for 11 days. ¹³⁸ Moreover, he received financial compensation (Heimkehrerentschädigung) from the German authorities for the time he spent in Greek prison. ¹³⁹ In Berlin, his case was at first stayed and then in June 1968 discontinued, partly because of lack of evidence and partly due to the statute of limitations. ¹⁴⁰ Further investigation of war crimes committed in Greece during the war by German citizens was now fully in the hands of the German legal system and no real effort to investigate German war crimes committed against Jews in Greece had been made. One year after Merten’s extradition, Athens and Bonn signed an agreement on the recruitment of Greek workers and on compensation for civilian victims, including the Salonika survivors of the Shoah. ¹⁴¹

Even so, it took another year before the Bonn Agreement was ratified. This delay was mainly due to prolonged negotiations in the Greek Parliament concerning the law on the distribution of the compensation, which was to supplement the Bonn Agreement in the Greek law. A clause which excluded victims of other than Greek nationality was hotly contested in October 1960. This particular stipulation would have disqualified mainly the Sephardic Jews of Salonika who had moved abroad after the war and accepted citizenship of another country. Their inclusion was supported not only by the representatives of Jewish organizations such as the Claims Conference, but also by Germany and Spain. ¹⁴² On the other hand, Athens and Bonn were concerned that if the clause was not included, compensation could be claimed by Communists, who, at the end of the civil war, when the defeat of the Left was imminent, left for countries in the Eastern Bloc and thereby lost their Greek citizenship. Both governments were afraid that an accommodation of claims made by Jewish refugees could create a dangerous precedent. ¹⁴³

Negotiations about the wording of the distribution law went on until the summer of 1961. ¹⁴⁴ In the end, the Greek Parliament took into account significant international pressure and considerably extended the original proposal. The right to compensation was granted not only to the first generation of direct heirs but, in the event of their death, also to the grandchildren of victims of Nazism. Moreover, the victims had to be Greek citizens only at the time that they suffered personal damage as defined under the rules of the Bonn Agreement. ¹⁴⁵ A special provision was also made for ‘Greeks of foreign origin’, that is mainly Jews and Armenians who by a Royal Decree of 1927 lost Greek citizenship if they moved out of Greece. ¹⁴⁶ The highest sum to be paid out in compensation in cases where more than one family member had been killed was 75,000 drachmas (at the time equivalent to approximately 11,000 German marks). ¹⁴⁷

Some victims of Nazism thus received at least symbolic compensation, though the amount transferred from Germany to Greece was never fully distributed. What happened was that by June 1963, some 44,500 applications of both Jewish and non-Jewish candidates had been approved and the number kept increasing. The government in Athens soon realized that it could not satisfy all applicants from the sum allotted to this purpose. That is why, according to Fleischer, it started disbursing only 55 per cent of the sum to which successful applicants were entitled. Later, it adopted a method of minimal compensation, which in the most severe cases amounted to approximately 1 German mark. In December 1980, the remaining funds including interest, were quietly transferred by the Greek Ministry of Finance to the Greek national budget. ¹⁴⁸

Conclusion

This case study has focused on the reconstruction of the Jewish community in Greece in context of Greek–German relations. The tragic fate of Salonika Jews during the Nazi occupation and the situation after the return of Shoah survivors clearly demonstrates political opportunism on the part of the leading elites in the post-war period. As Europe was gradually sinking into the Cold War, the political leadership in Greece was becoming strictly anti-Communist, by which it strove to gain public support mainly on the international stage but also in Greece itself. In this situation it was inexpedient to point to Germany, which was by now an ally belonging to the same bloc as Greece. The political elites of both countries had nothing to gain from drawing public attention to the Shoah or its survivors, so while they tried to re-establish their lives at least at a basic level, the priority of the majority of Greek representatives was neither a search for justice nor relief for the victims of Nazi terror. Rather, they focused on what was to both sides, that is, Athens and Bonn, politically expedient. Moreover, this was happening at a time when the Cold War had turned West Germany and Greece into allies.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the direction of negotiations about compensation was determined by the superpowers (Paris Conference on Reparations in 1946, Luxembourg Agreement, and the London Agreement on External Debts in 1953). Later on, the initiative came mostly from Jewish protagonists, such as Jewish communities and local, national and trans-national organizations of Shoah survivors. In Greece, however, Jewish survivors’ attempts to receive compensation were largely unsuccessful. Therefore, they mostly had to rely on the assistance of international organizations such as the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish communities themselves. In the late 1950s, the initiative was once again taken by the relevant governments, which tried to address the issue of compensation for Nazi victims (in, for example, the 1960 Bonn Agreement). Afterwards, negotiations basically stopped because after concluding global agreements, the German Federal Republic could well claim that it had already met its legal obligations towards the states affected by the Nazi regime and its actions.

After the war, the Greek administration took a number of steps which on paper looked like they should improve the situation of Shoah survivors. In reality, however, the process of returning property and awarding compensation was protracted and endlessly postponed. This impeded both the efforts of individual Jews to rebuild their lives and the reconstruction of Jewish communities. With the single exception of Merten, the Greek authorities took no active steps to seek punishment for war crimes committed against Jews in Greece. And even in the Merten case, the relatively lenient sentence – and notably his later extradition – took many Shoah survivors by surprise. It is important to stress again the importance which Salonika played in Merten’s trial. Post-war Salonika had only the second largest Jewish community in Greece, but it was still significantly bigger than all other communities in post-war Greece with the exception of Athens. The legacy of a former Sephardic metropolis in the Balkans was still felt there. Moreover, the Jewish community of Salonika, despite all its internal disagreements, remained at the forefront of initiatives regarding compensation for the crimes and wrongdoings which Jews of Greece had suffered during the war. This is not all that surprising if we take into account that in the post-war years, ex-deportees constituted more than one half of the Jewish community of Salonika.

In some ways, the situation of Jews in Salonika may resemble similar cases elsewhere in Europe. In other ways, the situation in Greece was unique. It was deeply affected by the Greek civil war. Its aftermath enabled former collaborators and trustees of property confiscated from Jews not only to escape punishment, but even to reintegrate into society with relative ease as basically loyal citizens. Jewish survivors, on the other hand, who had in many cases been helped by the anti-Nazi resistance fighters during the war and thus naturally harboured some leftist sympathies, were sometimes seen as suspect. Moreover, all Shoah survivors were exhausted and traumatized not only by yet another conflict, but also by the seemingly endless process of trying to claim some restitution. In many cases, they ended up waiving their claims either because they wanted to make a clear break with the past and start a new life or because they could not bear to relive the trauma which affected not only the first generation of victims but also the second. Although the Greek government declared its support for the Shoah survivors, the implementation of actions taken on their behalf was frequently paralyzed by the unsympathetic and sometimes downright hostile attitude of the public who refused to see the Shoah survivors as a special group within the collective suffering of the Greek people.