The Two Greek-Jewish Holocausts 1821 and 1943-1944
by Dr. Michael Matsas
Note: This article is based on a Lecture
that was part of the Yom Hashoa Event at the Sephardic Center, Forest
Hills, New York on April 15, 2007.
We
all know that the Germans and their collaborators killed 6 million Jews, including
67,000 Greek Jews. Religious hate for the Jewish people had a lot to do with
the Holocaust. The United States and Great Britain are indirectly responsible
for the loss of 87% of the Greek Jews; a loss that could have been prevented,
as you are going to see.
Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel wrote, “We are who we
are because of what we learn and remember.” Christian children learn about
the noble teachings of Jesus Christ, and also that the Jews killed him. They
also learn that the Jews cannot go to heaven, no matter how good they are,
because they don’t believe in Jesus Christ. With this kind of indoctrination,
it is very difficult for a good Christian to love a Jew.
Anti-semitism in Greece today is almost as virulent as it was
in 1821. It is worse than it was in 1953 when Greek Jews could become
officers in the Greek Army. Today Jewish architects and engineers serve
as soldiers or corporals, while their classmates serve as officers.
In
Agrinion, my high school teacher took our class out of the city and told us
an extraordinary story. We knew that in 1821, the Turks in Constantinople
killed the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Gregory the Fifth, and asked some Jews
to throw his body to the sea. Our teacher told us the story that is not taught
in the Greek schools, what I call “the neglected Holocaust”. He said, “As
soon as the news of the murder of the Patriarch arrived in Greece, the Greek
Jews were massacred.” In the city of Agrinion alone, over 200 Jewish families
were killed. The same happened in Mystra, Kalamata, Corinth, Thebes, and
other cities. Some people, like the family of my teacher, survived by converting
to Christianity. The Vrahoritis family moved to Ioannina.
There was one
Greek, powerful enough to be a “righteous gentile.” He was one of the Greek
leaders, Kanellos Deligliannis. He saved 12 Jews from the massacre of the
prosperous Jewish community of Tripolitsa. The anti-Jewish feeling was so
strong that he kept them in his house for 3 years and only in 1824, was he
able to secretly move them to Zakinthos, which was not then under Greek control.
So the kingdom of Othon and Amalia did not have even one Jew alive. Their
Viennese dentist, Dr. Lefkovits converted to Christianity when he came to
Athens. Of course everyone knew that the Greek Jews were innocent of the murder
of the Patriarch, but for almost 2,000 years the Christian church persecuted
and indirectly killed countless Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,
a murder they did not commit. The noble teachings of Jesus of love and forgiveness
were forgotten, and by 1543 the greatest German theologian, Martin Luther,
gave this advice: “Set fire to their synagogues, confiscate their assets,
and if any Christian shows pity for a Jew, he will burn in Hell”.
Hitler
took advantage of this long hatred of the Jewish people. He wrote “Anti-semitism
is a useful expedient. It is the most powerful weapon in my propaganda and
of deadly efficiency.”
In
the book “Hiltler’s Pope,” by John Cornwell, Pope Pius XII gave his message
of indifference, not only by his silence, but also especially by his “Reich
Concordat,” a treaty with Hitler, which insured that the Nazis would rise
unopposed to power. This treaty, by Hitler’s own admission, sealed the fate
of the Jews in Europe.
For
Greece, war started on October 1940, when Italy invaded Greece. Germany had
to come to the aid of Italy in the conquest of Greece which was divided into
German and Bulgarian zones with 62,000 Jews and the Italian zone with 15,000
Jews.
The
extermination of the Jews of Europe started as soon as Germany attacked Russia
on June 22, 1941. The United States knew about the mass killing of the Jews
as early as July 1941. The American military attaché in Berlin reported: “The
normal procedure for the Nazis upon taking over a city in the East is to establish
local commandos, to separate the Jews and to shoot them.”
Professor
Breitman discovered that the coding system of the German Order Police that
dealt with the Jews was broken by British Intelligence. The British were able
to follow transports of Jews all the way to the killing grounds by intercepting
radio messages. They knew the names of the units involved and the names of
the officers who were in charge, the number of the transported Jews, and the
location of the executions. Winston Churchill was given such reports daily
and he circled with a red pencil the numbers of the Jews who were killed.
I
thought it would have been inconceivable if the Allies did not warn the European
Jews of such a mortal threat. In response to my request, Mr. Nathanael of
the BBC wrote to me that: “No broadcast in the Greek language during the war
mentioned anything about the Jews.”
On
August 1st, 1942, Edward Shulte, a German industrialist transmitted
to the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland the information that “Hitler had
ordered the liquidation of all Jews throughout the territories occupied by
Germany.” The information was transmitted to England and the United States.
Professor
Wyman wrote in his book, “The Abandonment of the Jews”, that “anti-Semitism
was widespread and the State Department was actively blocking information
about the genocide and deliberately obstructing rescue efforts. The press
had little to say and this was in the inner pages. The United States and Great
Britain were deeply committed to a policy of not rescuing the Jews, while,
if the US accepted a policy of rescue, hundreds of thousands would have been
saved and in the process it would have saved the conscience of the nation.”
Professor Wyman concluded with this statement, “A fact that particularly pains
me as a Christian is that the American churches were silent.”
John
Pehle, the Executive Director of the War Refugee Board said: “The State Department
was actively suppressing information about the Holocaust, while Undersecretary
of State Breckinridge Long tried to cover it up. By suppressing information,
the Government becomes an accomplice in what the Germans were doing.” Officials
of the Treasury Department revealed the “nasty scandal” in a report entitled,
“Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews of Europe.”
The
abandonment of the European Jews by President Franklin D. Roosevelt became
obvious when he refused entry to this immense country to the 900 German Jews
of the “St. Louis,” six hundred of whom were eventually killed by the Germans.
As
a Greek Jew, I want to express my gratitude to the people of the United States.
To those who fought as members of the Armed Forces, to the 460,000 who fell
in action and their families, and to those who contributed to the war effort
with their labor in the farms, the factories, and the merchant marine.
It is the Government of the United States, which, with its silence,
indifference and malicious motives, is indirectly responsible for the death
of millions of Jews and especially for the death of the 67,000 Greek Jews who
could have saved themselves relying on their own resources alone if the United
Stated had told them that the Germans planned to kill them.
Saving
the Jews of Europe should have been a moral obligation for the US and not
simply a humanitarian act. Five hundred fifty thousand American Jews served
with distinction in the Armed Forces of the United States. Eleven thousand
were killed, 40,000 were wounded, and almost all of them had relatives in
Europe who were abandoned to the hands of the Germans. The American government
rejected thousands of applications for immigration to this enormous country.
Among these applications was that of Anne Frank’s family of Amsterdam.
The
Congress of the United States refused to allow entry to this country to 20,000
German Jewish children who were allowed to leave Germany. They were all below
14 years old. So the Germans killed them all. And while 6 million Jews were
dying in Europe, the United States was becoming a nuclear superpower, thanks
to Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Zillard, Teller, Rabbi,
and Admiral Hyman Rickover, while the relatives of these Jews were left to
die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Professor
Daniel Goldhagen, in his book “Willing Executioners,” asks the question, “How
could the Holocaust happen?” The answer can be found, he writes, “in the
widespread, profound, and virulent anti-Semitism based on the traditional
religious enmity to Jews. The German Protestant and Catholic churches, their
bishops and their theologians watched the suffering that the Germans inflicted
on the Jews in silence.”
In
Greece, the Jews knew nothing about mass killings or concentration camps.
Early in 1942, partisan groups formed in the mountains and they were fighting
the enemy. The Germans were afraid to visit the thousands of the villages
in the mountains. There were no roads leading to them. They had to go on foot
and they were afraid of being ambushed. In July 1942, the Germans made their
first move against the Jews in Salonika, with the events in Eleftherias Square
and the forced labor battalions. This was the time when the Jews should have
dispersed themselves to these mountain villages and not remain at the mercy
of the Germans. To do that they needed close Christian friends. They were
the ones who had trusted relatives in these villages. But thanks to anti-Semitism,
very few Jews had close Christian friends. So what happened was that over
3,000 wealthy Salonikan Jews went to Athens. The others stayed in their homes.
The Christians had a far better understanding of what had to be done than
the Jews. But the Christians, with rare exceptions, saw what was happening
to the Jews with indifference and some with pleasure. Many became rich because
of the Holocaust. Finally out of 77,000 Jews, only 6,500 remained in Greece
and most of them found safety in the Free Partisan-Controlled Areas where
my family went by taxi on October 3, 1943, and remained free.
This window of opportunity for the Greek Jews to remain free
was lost for the Jews of the German zone on February 8, 1943 and for the
Jews of the Italian zone on October 8, 1943. On these dates German regulations
prohibited Jewish families from leaving the cities. Escape became perilous
if not impossible. In spite of that, Rudolph Vrba who escaped from Auschwitz,
asked this question, “Could anyone send me alive to Auschwitz if I knew
what was going on there?”
And
this is my question. Why did these God-fearing British and American officials
not report this massive terrorist plot to kill, not just 3,000, but
8 million people? Why did these religious hypocrites help the Germans kill
the Jews?
The British and the Americans had the means to tell the Greek
Jews that the Germans planned to kill them, as they had killed the German and
the French Jews.
- There were BBC radio broadcasts, distributed by the resistance daily;
- There were American and British secret agents in the cities;
- There were British military missions;
- There were leaflets dropped by planes.
If
the allies had alerted us, they would not only have done their duty, but they
would have helped the war effort since thousands of Jews would have become
partisans fighting the Germans.
In the American archives, I discovered over 500 pages of documents
related to the Greek Jews sent by American diplomats from Istanbul and
Cairo. They were all ignored and placed in the archives. They were classified
as secret. They certainly were not secret from the German murderers. They
were secret only from the Jewish victims and from any decent people who
could have saved them.
Conditions
in Greece were different than in any other country and favored the survival
of large number of Jews.
- The anti-Jewish measures started
very late. From August 1941, when the Americans and the British understood
that the Germans killed Jewish men, women and children for no other reason
except that they were Jews, until February 1943, when the Germans were ready
to kill the Greek Jews, 18 months passed. There was more than enough time
for the Greek Jews to take with them their gold and precious items and disperse
to the thousands of mountain villages and survive.
- There was an Italian zone of
occupation which offered safety until October 1943.
- There were free partisan- controlled areas.
-
There was proximity to Turkey.
Some 1,500 Jews with the assistance of ELAN, the naval branch of the resistance,
crossed the Aegean Sea went to Turkey and from there to Palestine.
There
was cooperation between the Greek resistance and Haganah, the Jewish resistance
of Palestine. Haganah provided to EAM-ELAS medicines, uniforms, blankets and
gold. In March 1943, while most of the Jews of Europe were already dead, the
first transport of the unsuspecting Jews left Salonika for Auschwitz. The
other Jews remained in their homes hoping that the Germans had no reason to
deport them. They hoped in vain. Even when Italy capitulated the Jews remained
paralyzed in their homes, trusting the promises of the deceitful Germans.
The
deportation of the Jews in the Italian zone started one year after the deportation
of the Salonikan Jews, in March 1944, and it was not finished even by July
20, 1944. There is information which supports my view that the only reason
the Jews of Zakinthos and the Jews of Albania were not deported was that the
Germans were forced to leave Greece and Albania.
The
historian Cornelius Ryan writes about a German, a half-Jew, whose mother was
a Christian and his father a Jew. He lost an arm while fighting as a German
soldier in the Eastern Front. Half-Jews served in the German army until 1942.
In April 1944, Joachim Lipschitz had been marked for internment in a concentration
camp. From that moment on, he had been in hiding (in the house of his fiancée)
in Berlin. The Gestapo planned to round up all those with even a drop of Jewish
blood on May 19, 1945.
I
believe that Bishop Chrysostomos of Zakinthos and Mayor Karrer deserved to
be honored as righteous gentiles for their bravery. However, I cannot believe
that the Germans would have allowed the Jews of Zakinthos and Albania to remain
alive while they killed the German Jewish invalids, including those who received
the highest awards of valor while fighting for Germany in World War I. The
Germans even killed the half-Jewish invalids who fought for Germany in World
War II, while they sent to concentration camps and probable death all other
half-Jews, including two close friends of mine whose father was a Christian
and who almost died in the camps.
And
now I will talk about some interesting things that happened in Greece. In
March 1943, when the deportations started in Salonika, the Jewish wife of
George Politis, was allowed to be present in a clandestine meeting of 42 deans
and presidents of organizations, meeting under the chairmanship of Archbishop
Damaskinos. Mrs. Politis gave a heart breaking presentation pleading for assistance
for her co-religionists. The great poet Angelos Sikilianos wrote the famous
protest which was signed by the Archbishop and the 42 prominent Greeks.
Elias
Venezis, the biographer of Archbishop Damaskinos, revealed in 1982 that the
Archbishop met in March 1943 the German Ambassador, Günther Altenburg, and
asked him to stop the anti-Christian deportations. The Ambassador replied
that, “They could not be stopped and, on the contrary, they would expand to
the rest of Greece.” Unfortunately, the Archbishop did not transmit this
information to the Greek Jews.
In
Thessaloniki, out of possibly 10,000 Jewish families, only one family was
offered asylum in the city. A few days before the Germans left, their saviors
forced the Jewish family to legally transfer to them all their real estate
holdings. The family survived, but it became destitute. These saviors are
included in the list of Greek righteous gentiles which consists of 70 couples
and 79 individuals, to whom I am deeply grateful. Even after the Jews had
to wear the yellow star in Verria, Menahem Stroumsas, decided to take his
family, including the elderly grandmother, to the mountains. At one point
they had to cross a river. The old lady for the rest of her life kept talking
about the parting of the waters as in the time of Moshe Rabbenu. 160 Jews
followed his example and survived.
According
to the book “In Memoriam,” Rabbi Koretz sent a telegram requesting the arrest
of the Jews of Katerini and that the chief of the police Papageorgiou saved
the 30 Jews of his city. I was told this is not true by Mr. Iosafat from
Katerini. “A telegram arrived ordering the arrest of the Jews. The telegrapher
immediately contacted my father and said he would delay the delivery of the
telegram for 24 hours. The Jews of Katerini went to the mountains.” So the
true hero is an unknown telegrapher, to whom I am deeply grateful.
In
Patras the German half-Jew, Mr. Wolfson, who worked as an interpreter for
the German Army visited Isaak Matsa, President of the Jewish Community, and
told him that the Germans planned to register the Jews. Most of the Jews of
Patra went to the mountains and survived. Only the poor stayed in the city.
In
Athens, Baruch Shibi, a journalist and a leader of the resistance, knowing
what happened in Salonika with Rabbi Koretz, conceived the plan of abducting
or killing Rabbi Barzilai. The other leaders agreed to the plan. The Rabbi
was sent to the mountains. The disappearance of the Rabbi forced the Jews
to hide, go to the mountains, or to Turkey. The chiefs of the police Evert,
Vranopoulos and Glykas issued hundreds of false identity cards. All three
are honored as righteous gentiles. In contrast, the Greek Police and the
Greek security battalions cooperated fully with the Germans in the deportation
of the Jews. In addition there were thousand of traitors, including six Jews
who were betraying hidden Jews.
Over 650 Jews became partisans of ELAS. Six received the
highest awards for valor. In the battle of Karalaka 150 partisans including
Jewish fighters like my cousin Joseph Matsas, Lieutenant Marco Carasso,
and others ambushed a German battalion that captured five Jewish families.
252 Germans were killed. A man from New York sent me a photo of the monument
which was erected there. Click here
to see the photo
In
the battle of Menina, partisans of EDES attacked a German column. My cousin,
Dr. Michel Negrin, a medical officer of General Zervas, treated wounded partisans
and also ten wounded Germans who were picked up by a British submarine.
In
loannina, out of 1,860 Jews, only one family of four survived intact. On
the day of the arrest an unknown man to whom I am also deeply grateful, asked
the Vehoropoulou family to follow him at a distance, until he led them out
of the city. After the war they tried to find him. They did not and Mrs. Vehoropoulou
who was very religious told me: “He must have been an Angel sent by God”.
And
now I will give you an idea as to what I found in the archives. Following
is a report, sent to the Secretary of State by the American Consul Burton
Berry from Istanbul.
“Michael
Boyiadjoglou, a Greek tobacco merchant, arrived in Turkey. On April 30, 1944
while on a train from Athens to Salonika, Mr. Boyiadjoglou talked with three
German SS officers who said that they were on their way to Corfu, where they
were to deport all Jews.” This life-saving information was ignored and placed
in the archives. Almost 40 days later the unsuspecting Jews of Corfu were
arrested.
It
would have been extremely easy to warn the Jews of Corfu, via the British
military mission in Greece and the resistance. According to the German Archives,
the commander of Corfu, Colonel Emil Jaeger, sent a lengthy report to his
superiors explaining why the Jews should not be deported. He insisted that
“they should first transfer the Italians of Badoglio, who as former soldiers
are much more dangerous than the Jews, against whom, by the way, we never
expressed any complaint.” Out of 2,000 Jews of Corfu only 187 survived, 300
women, many of them pregnant, accompanied by midwives, formed a transport
which eventually arrived in Auschwitz. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Polish Jew, wrote,
“Last night they burned the Greek Jews from the Island of Corfu, one of the
oldest communities of Europe. The victims were kept for twenty-seven days
without food or water, first in launches, then in sealed cars. When they arrived
at Auschwitz’s loading platform, the doors were unlocked, but no one got out
to line up for selection. Half of them were already dead and half in a coma.
The entire transport, without exception, was sent to crematorium No. 2.”
I
conclude with a poem by Yitzhak Katznelson, which was written a few days before
the poet was killed. It was buried in front of many people and it was recovered
after the war by a man who survived.
Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they protest,
Nor shake their heads, nor did they warn the murderers.
Never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations
Were afraid that the killings might stop. |
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