Distomo Memorial

The Wehrmacht invaded the Kingdom of Greece in April 1941. The country was divided up between the Third Reich and its Axis allies Italy and Bulgaria. The occupying powers exploited Greece’s agricultural resources as well as the country’s limited industrial capacity. This resulted in a famine in the winter of 1941-42, which probably claimed the lives of over 100,000 Greeks. Jewish life in occupied Greece was dominated by expropriation, public abuse, arrests, murder and forced labour. Between March 15 and mid-August 1943, around 46,000 Jews were deported in 19 transports from Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka extermination camps. These transports were organised by an SS special commando with the support of the local military administration. At the beginning of March 1943, the Bulgarian occupation authorities in the Greek province of Thrace had already arrested over 4,000 Jews, who were subsequently deported to Treblinka by the SS. Following the capitulation of Italy in autumn 1943, the Wehrmacht advanced to the Italian-occupied part of Greece. In March 1944, the SS and locals deported over 8,500 Jews from Athens, Ionnina and Rhodes to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Italy had previously refused to deport these Jews. Around 59,000 Greek Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The German occupation regime met with growing Greek resistance. The Wehrmacht responded in 1943-44 with numerous brutal attacks, reprisals and mass shootings. Entire villages were destroyed, for example the villages of Kalavrita and Distimo. Over 100,000 Greek civilians are believed to have died in the process. The period from 1944, whilst Greece was still occupied by Germany, saw conflict between right-wing royalists and left-wing communist groups in the country. These conflicts escalated into a civil war from 1946-49. The royalists won this war with the support of Great Britain and the USA and adopted a strict anti-communist approach. Faced with a likely left-wing election victory in 1967, the military staged a putsch, seized power, and governed the country for the next seven years. The left-wing’s role in the resistance during the Second World War was only acknowledged following Greek accession to the European Economic Community in 1981. With the fall of communism in 1990-91 the divisions in Greek memory were finally overcome, allowing a confrontation with the 1946-49 civil war. To a large extent, the Greek culture of memory continues to be dominated by remembrance of the resistance against the Germans. Memorial inscriptions often use the term »Holocaust« to refer to the murder of the civilian population, for example the »Holocaust of Kalavrita«. For a long time it was left to the Jewish community to remember the 85 percent of Greek Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Until 1997, the country’s only Holocaust memorial was to be found in the Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki, the town with the largest Jewish community in Greece before the war. A Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in the centre of Saloniki in 1997 in conjunction with the ceremonies marking the town’s status as European City of Culture that year. In 2005, the memorial was moved to another site in the city. In 2010, a new holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Athens as well. Currently, a major holocaust museum is under construction in Thessaloniki, to which Germany contributes a sum of 10 million euros.