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The Occupation

A short background:

Following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 in which Greece was defeated, overt anti-semitism in Greece increased and propaganda and violence became commonplace. But still, on the eve of World War II, Salonica had the largest Sephardic community in the world.

Greece remained neutral when the Second World War broke out. In October 1940, Italy attacked Greece but the Greeks managed to force the Italians back to Albania. Thirteen thousand Jews fought in the Greek army and six hundred and thirteen Jews from Salonica were killed in action. In January 1941 the Governor-General of Salonica wrote to the president of the city's Jewish community: "In the name of the Greek state, I congratulate you on the heroism displayed by the Jews on the field of battle."

The Germans brought troops to help the Italians. Though the Greeks were helped by a British expeditionary force in March of 1941, German forces successfully invaded in April.

The British force was evacuated and the Greek King and his government fled. Italy occupied most of Greek territory, while the Germans occupied Macedonia and Eastern Thrace. Bulgaria, a German ally that provided the transports for the German troops into Greece was rewarded with Western Thrace. Finally, in 1941 the Germans invaded Crete and drove the British out of there as well.

The Germans installed a puppet Prime Minister in Athens whose jurisdiction included both the German and the Italian zones. Germany itself maintained a military government in Greece, with Max Merten, councelor to the military governor, in charge of civilian affairs. Soon, conditions of famine intensified in the Greek cities and resistance activities became more widespread. In Thessaly, where partisans were trying to deprive the Germans of the harvest, Leon Sakkis was among several Jewish resistance fighters in action against German military units. On the night of June 14, 1944 he was killed by machine gun fire as he was trying to help a wounded colleague.

In September 1943, after the Badoglio government in Italy surrendered to the Allies, German forces occupied Italian-held Greece and extended their military rule over all of Greece.

Note to long-timers: if this sounds familiar, it's because it's a rerun! Since we're using zorkie's Terra Nostra posts as our weekly feature over at Winds of Change.NET we decided to start the series over from the beginning because it makes more sense that way. We don't really have to rerun it here in order to post it there, but we decided to anyway, because our traffic then was about 200 unique visitors a day and is now about 2000, so, um, that's a lot of people, and this deserves their attention.