The round-up in Liberty Square in Salonika

On Saturday 11 July 1942, from eight in the morning, some 9,000 Jewish men aged 18 to 45 gathered in Liberty Square (Plateia Eleftherias) in the centre of Salonika (Thessaloniki). They had been summoned by the German occupation authorities, officially in order to be registered for forced labour. The registration turned into a display of violence and humiliation lasting many hours: in the July heat the men were made to perform gymnastic exercises, crawl and roll on the ground; they were beaten, set upon by dogs and photographed. Because it happened on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, the day passed into the memory of the people of Salonika as the “Black Sabbath” (Greek: Mavro Savvato). It was the occupier’s first mass action against the largest Jewish community in Greece, and the beginning of a road that less than a year later led almost the entire community to Auschwitz.

A community five centuries old

For centuries Salonika was one of the great centres of the Jewish world. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Sephardim settled there in large numbers, bringing their language, Ladino, and for a long time they made up the majority of the city’s inhabitants. The port, trade and crafts of this “Jerusalem of the Balkans” were largely in Jewish hands, and on Saturdays the city came to a standstill. After Salonika was annexed to Greece in 1912, and especially after the great fire of 1917 and the influx of Greek refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, the community’s position weakened, but when the war broke out it still numbered, according to the most commonly cited estimates, some 50,000 people.

The Jews of Salonika fought in the Greek army during the Greco-Italian War, which began when the Italians attacked Greece in October 1940. According to community figures, between ten and twenty thousand Greek Jews served in the army, and several hundred of them were killed. On 9 April 1941 the Germans entered Salonika, and at the end of the month they also took Athens. The country was divided into three occupation zones. Salonika and Central Macedonia fell within the German zone, under the authority of the military command “Salonika–Aegean”; most of the rest of the country was occupied by the Italians, and Eastern Macedonia and Thrace by the Bulgarians. In Athens a collaborationist government of the Hellenic State was set up, headed by General Georgios Tsolakoglou.

During the first year of the occupation the Germans did not introduce racial laws in Salonika in the form seen in other countries. Jewish newspapers were closed, the hospital and some of the community’s buildings were requisitioned, Jews’ radios were confiscated, and Alfred Rosenberg’s men carried off valuable libraries and archives to the Reich. Chief Rabbi Zvi Koretz was arrested and taken to Vienna for several months. In the winter of 1941–1942 the Jews suffered along with the rest of the Greeks from the Great Famine, which in Salonika alone, by the community’s estimates, was killing dozens of its members a day. The relative calm in “racial” matters gave many a false sense of security.

The order of 7 July

In the summer of 1942 the Wehrmacht needed labour for roads, airfields and mines in northern Greece, while in Berlin, after the Wannsee Conference, the deportation of the Jews of all Europe was already being prepared. On 7 July 1942 the German military commander in Salonika, Generalleutnant Curt von Krenzki, announced that all Jewish men aged 18–45 were to report on Saturday to Liberty Square to be registered for “civilian work”. According to documents of the Reich Security Main Office, the decision had been agreed with the Greek Governor-General of Macedonia, Vasilis Simonidis, who on the same day published his own version of the order, defining the Jews as a racial category. Anyone who failed to appear was to be sent to a camp in the Pavlos Melas barracks.

Many accounts link the organisation of the round-up to Max Merten, a councillor of the German military administration, who in the following months was responsible for the ransom, the destruction of the cemetery and the preparation of the deportations. His biographer Gerrit Hamann has established, however, that Merten was appointed military administration councillor in Salonika only at the end of July 1942. The order of 7 July was signed by the military commander, and the action itself was carried out by the Germans with the participation of the Greek administration, police and doctors.

Saturday in Liberty Square

The men began to arrive in the morning. Liberty Square lies right on the seafront, in the heart of the commercial district, and that day it was surrounded by soldiers. Instead of a quick registration, those detained had to stand for hours in the full sun. According to survivors’ accounts, those who tried to shield their heads with a hat or a handkerchief were beaten. Soldiers of the army, the navy and the SS forced them through hours of exercises: squats, jumps, crawling and somersaults. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were doused with water, kicked or set upon by dogs until they got up. Several men were seriously injured, and according to some sources several died. Germans watched from the surrounding balconies, among them, witnesses say, German actresses who applauded the spectacle and took photographs. German propaganda photographers took pictures too.

The action lasted until about two in the afternoon. Greek passers-by, according to accounts, reacted in various ways, from indifference to amusement. The collaborationist daily Nea Evropi (New Europe) published photographs from the square and wrote that the spectators gathered round had only one wish: that scenes of this kind should last as long as possible. The representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the city, René Burkhardt, who demanded a list of the injured, drew the attention of the Gestapo.

The registration was completed over the following days, by 15 July. Only small groups were exempted, among them some officials and veterans of the war of 1940–1941, whose jobs were protected for a year after demobilisation. The rest were given labour assignments.

Forced labour and ransom

As early as the second half of July the first groups – according to various sources between about 2,000 and 4,000 men – were sent to work for German construction firms, above all the Müller company, and for the Organisation Todt. They built roads, including the route from Salonika through Katerini to Larissa, and worked in quarries, chrome mines and on airfields. The conditions were deadly: the areas were infested with malaria, there was a lack of food, water and medical care, and the overseers beat the labourers. According to some studies about 12 per cent of those sent died within the first ten weeks, and many others returned sick and exhausted.

The community tried to save its people. In August it reached an agreement with the German command allowing labourers to be bought out of forced labour. In October Merten, now military administration councillor, demanded an enormous sum for the release of all the men – according to the most commonly cited figures, 3.5 billion drachmas. The community, even with help from the Jews of Athens, was unable to raise such money. In the end, according to various findings, a sum of 2–2.5 billion drachmas was agreed, together with the handing over to the city of the old Jewish cemetery, whose removal the Greek authorities of Salonika had long demanded in order to expand the university. The first instalment was paid at the end of October, and the labourers were released by the end of the year.

The price was terrible. On 6 December 1942 workers employed by the municipality, under German supervision, began demolishing the cemetery, one of the largest Jewish necropolises in Europe, where according to various estimates between 300,000 and 500,000 people had been buried. The gravestones were used as building material for paving streets, building walls and even a swimming pool for German soldiers. Today the site of the cemetery is occupied by, among other things, the Aristotle University.

Place in the war

The ransom saved no one. The money and the cemetery extracted from the community were simply extra plunder for the occupier. On 6 February 1943 Adolf Eichmann’s envoys, Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, arrived in Salonika. Within a few weeks they introduced the yellow star and confined the Jews in ghettos and in a transit camp by the station in the Baron Hirsch quarter. The registers drawn up in July 1942 and the experience of cooperation with the local administration made their task much easier. The first train to Auschwitz left on 15 March 1943, and by August, according to various findings, between 45,000 and almost 49,000 people had been deported from Salonika. Most of them were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival: according to historians, about 37,000. More than 90 per cent of the city’s Jewish inhabitants perished, and after the war fewer than 2,000 Jews were living in Salonika.

In the memory of Greek Jews the “Black Sabbath” marks the beginning of the destruction of their community, not merely a foretaste of it. One of the survivors, Yitzhak Nehama, spoke about it in 1961 as a witness at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Max Merten, arrested in 1957 while travelling in Greece, was sentenced by a Greek military court in March 1959 to 25 years’ imprisonment for his part in the deportation of the Jews of Salonika. As early as November that year, under pressure from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and after the Greek parliament passed a law ending war crimes trials, he was sent back to Germany, where he regained his freedom. None of those responsible for the events in Liberty Square was ever held to account for them separately.