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Today, as European nations continue to struggle with the legacy of the Holocaust, the role of the Greek state in facilitating genocide against its own Jews remains unacknowledged and ignored. Greece has rarely confronted its past; but with increasing demands for all nations to face their history, it is time that Greece followed suit.
The fulcrum of the Holocaust in Greece was the northern port city of Salonika, a now-thriving corner of southeastern Europe that portrays itself as the "Gateway to the Balkans." As my research on recently opened Greek archival papers demonstrates, in March 1943 the Nazi German occupiers of Greece - willingly assisted by Greek officials at all levels, and by the Greek police - began deporting Jews from Salonika to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Non-Jews, according to eyewitness accounts, demonstrated indifference to the fate of their Jewish compatriots, and after the deportations they engaged in mass looting of Jewish property. The Greek collaborationist prime minister at the time, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, was considered so trustworthy that he received nearly two months' advance warning of the deportations - a warning upon which he chose not to act. Out of a Salonika Jewish...