World War II (continued from WW I) German Occupation

Metaxas is best known for his refusal in 1940 of Mussolini’s demand to let the Italian army pass through Greece at the beginning of World War II. Though widely believed to have said simply, ‘Okhi’ (No) (with a national holiday celebrating this event called ‘Okhi Day’) his actually words were French ones: ‘C’est la guerre’ (It’s war!!), marking the entry of Greece into the struggle.

Two months earlier, the Italians had tried to push Greece to enter the war by torpedoing the Greek ship, ‘Elli’ in the harbor of Tinos island on the day of the annual pilgrimage to the icon in the church there (and one of the most holy days in Orthodox Christianity, August 15th, day of the Assumption of the Virgin), but it took the Italian invasion to rise to the cause.

Fighting in the bitter cold mountains of Ipiros in winter (a battle described most chillingly in Louis de Berniere’s acclaimed novel, ‘Corelli’s Mandolin’) the Greeks drove the Italians who survived back into Albania.

In the process the Greeks took control of northern Ipiros (in southern Albania), which was primarily populated with Greeks. The Greek army failed, however, to coordinate forces with the British, as had been proposed, to defend the Macedonian border, which left it open to the invasion of the Nazi army the following April, 1941, which greatly outnumbered the combined Greek, British, Australian and New troops defending it.

By late May all of Greece, including Crete and the other islands (the latter invaded by both airborne and seaborne German forces) was occupied by the Germans. Metaxas had died earlier, and King George fled into exile in Cairo.

During the winter of 1941-2, nearly half a million Greeks starved to death, with all food confiscated to feed the occupying armies, mostly the Germans, who had not been provided for by their superiors. People who survived in Athens have reported the death of some 1700 Athenians per day, with corpses constantly carted through the streets and thrown into piles. Stories abound, of Nazi soldiers throwing the pits of olives just eaten to staring children, who sucked the pits for any bit of juice and flavor left on them, and of children having their arms broken for trying to steal a loaf of bread. Equally terrible were the burning of entire villages, (some say as many as one thousand) even suspected of harboring resistance fighters, and terrible massacres, such as the one in the village of Kalavryta in themountains of the Peloponnese , where some 1400 men and boys (all males over the age of 13) were taken to a field and shot, the village then burned, leaving the women and young children to fend for themselves in the bitter cold of winter. In Crete, where resistance fighters (including English and Australians as well as Greek) kidnapped a German general, a whole string of villages were burned in retaliation by the German army. In northeast Macedonia, the Bulgarians (allied with the Nazis) desecrated ancient churches and sites, with an agenda of future annexation of ‘Slavid Macedonia’.

During the German occupation, the Jews of Greece had some protection in the areas of Greece assigned to the Italians, but after the Italians surrendered in 1943, they were taken en masse to concentration camps. The largest Jewish population in Greece was in Thessaloniki, where the Sephardic Jewish population was a majority, with 68,000 of the 80,000 (85%) taken away on trains to the camps over a period of months.. Other old Jewish communities were in Rhodes, Kos, Crete, Kerkyra (Corfu), Volos, Evviia, and Zakynthos, though in the last three places the church or municipal authorities, in cooperation with the resistance, saved most of them. In Zakynthos island the mayor and bishop, risked themselves the save the local Jews, ordering Christian citizens to hide and feed them, as did the bishop of the city of Halkidha (the capital of the large island of Evvia); in Athens, the archbishop and police chief arranged for false identity cards to be issued, as well as certificates of baptism, which saved many Jews.

Romaniot Jews (those who had been in Greece since Roman times), were easier to hide than the Sephardhic Jews (who had come to Greece mostly in the 15th century from Spain where non-Christians had been expelled) because the latter spoke a dialect of Spanish called Ladino, had surnames that identified them, as well as different customs.

It has also been asserted by some that the huge Sephardic community of Thessaloniki (more than half of the population of that city at the time) could have been alerted to the fate awaiting them at the hands of the Nazis by the British news agency, the BBC, but that anti-semitism in Britain prevented this.

Similar assertions about the United States, in relation to the Jewish holocaust in general were made in a book entitled, ‘While Six Million Died’, with the difference that the latter asserted that anti-semitism among higher-ups in the U.S. State Department, were against American partipication in the war, even when journalistic reports were filtering back, attesting to the tens of thousands of Jews per day being taken to concentration camps.

It is also known that in Thessaloniki, many Greek businesses helped themselves to the goods remaining in Jewish shops after their owners were taken away by the Nazis, and that insult was added to injury after the war when the huge Jewish cemetery, which had been desecrated by Nazis, became the site for the construction of the University of Thessaloniki and fairgrounds expansion.

After the war, most Jewish survivors in Greece moved to Athens, or emigrated to Israel and other countries, with some 6000 in Greece in 1997, about 1000 of them in Thessaloniki (Sephardim), and about 3000 in Athens (where one can visit the Jewish Museum of Greece to learn of the long history of Jews in this country), with about 300 Sephardic Jews in Larissa (Thessaly), and some smaller communities of around 100 members in Halkidha, Kerkyra (Corfu), Ioannina, Trikala and Volos.

The Greek gypsies also suffered severely at the hands of the Nazi, whose policy was to send them directly to their deaths, with no preliminary period of slave labor. Gypsies had been in Greece since the 11th century, and traditionally practiced such trades of metal-smithing, animal (especially horse) trading, shadow puppeteering, and music.