Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (39 page)

On March 1, 1943, Jewish families in and around Salonika were required, ostensibly for statistical purposes, to declare their total assets. Those affected by the rule had to fill out forms in Greek and German with lists of all valuables, including, under category F, “gold, precious metals, currency, and jewelry.” On March 8, the Greek government established the “Office for the Management of Jewish Assets” (Yperesia Diacheiriseos Isrilitikis Periousias, or YDIP), headed by a lawyer named Elias Douros. The office was initially under the command of the German military administration; oversight was later transferred to the Greek Finance Ministry.
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Greeks who purchased Jewish property were required to pay the sale price into account no. 707 at the Salonika branch of the Bank of Greece. German auditor Eberhard Kuhn monitored the account to ensure that “it benefited Greeks who are in some sense positively inclined toward Germans or have rendered various services for them.”
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The deportations began on March 15, 1943, and were intended to “be concluded in six weeks’ time.”
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(The process actually took somewhat longer.) In total, 43,850 Jews were deported from Salonika and a further 2,134 from surrounding areas under German occupation. Several thousand fled to Italian-controlled areas.
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On March 16, Altenburg directed Wisliceny to provide Logothetopoulos with “an overview of the anti-Jewish measures.” According to the German minutes of that meeting, Wisliceny was able to “fully convince [Logothetopoulos] and remove all doubts.”
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Thadden was also present in Greece for the crucial period of March 2 to April 4, further evidence of the close collaboration between officials responsible for Jewish matters and those working on fiscal policy.
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Some of the residences and household furnishings left behind by Jews were given to Greeks who had fled from Bulgarian-occupied areas of northern Greece.
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The ancient Jewish cemetery at the center of Salonika was obliterated as part of the general dispossession of Jewish associations and religious institutions. The site, which encompassed 357,796 square meters, was quickly converted into available real estate, divided into lots, and auctioned off. Even the headstones were sold.
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As in other countries occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht’s seizure of private property had a single aim. Proceeds transferred into a central account at the national bank relieved inflationary pressure on the local currency, which had been caused by German greed. Such revenues obviated the need to print additional money. The sale of Jewish property helped absorb at least part of the excess consumer spending power that had accrued because of a lack of available goods. In the short term, however, this form of redistribution of wealth didn’t greatly benefit either consumers or the national treasury. The expropriation procedure was too slow and cumbersome. Neubacher needed and achieved quick results. The assiduousness of the Wehrmacht in collecting gold in Salonika is obvious and well documented. Neubacher’s interventions to stabilize Greek finances were directly linked to the deportations of 46,000 people to Auschwitz.

After the war, the exact workings of the deportation and expropriation process became clearer. In 2000, Heinz Kounio, the president of the Assembly of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki (as Salonika is now known), explained the role of Max Merten, the Wehrmacht officer responsible for the fates of these people: “Merten was the most powerful man in the city. He told us, ‘Bars of gold are the price [of survival].’” Several days before their deportation to Auschwitz, Jews were confined in a temporary concentration camp. “There they were required to hand over everything, including jewelry and all items of gold. From that moment on, the jewelry was gone. Merten and his assistants collected it in sacks.”
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Andreas Sefihas, president of the Jewish Council in Thessaloniki, told a similar story, also in 2000: “I alone had to pay [Merten] 1,000 gold British sterling in hope of winning my father’s release from one of those camps.”
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On October 17, 1942, a week before Hermann Neubacher’s arrival in Greece, Merten demanded that the Jewish community hand over 10,000 gold pounds in return for the release of Jewish men from forced labor.
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On October 21, after pressure from the Greek foreign minister to reduce occupation costs, Neubacher replied that “certain measures have already been undertaken.” (Shortly before his arrival in Athens he had made the local Wehrmacht command lower expenditures.
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He had already discussed the situation with the Wehrmacht High Command.)
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It was no accident that the Wehrmacht demanded that payments be made in gold. In July of that year, Merten had selected several thousand Jews for forced labor, employing them in the construction of roads and airstrips, in railroad maintenance, and in mining for ore. Their work was supervised by the Todt Organization, the Nazi public works authority, which often used slave labor. The authority needed forced Jewish labor because inflation had made it impossible to pay Greek workers. But there was no place to house the slave laborers, and most of them, according to one internal document, “had to sleep outside.” Food, too, was in short supply, and “a great number of [Jews] developed lung infections and died.” This was clearly an inefficient way to carry out construction projects, and so on October 17, 1942, Merten revoked the order forcing Jews to do slave labor. Instead, he demanded ransom in the form of gold. Gold could be stored as a hedge against inflation and could be sold on the gold exchange, its wartime value having appreciated, on the day the wage laborers had to be paid.
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In early November, Merten demanded 3.5 billion drachmas from the Jewish community, which were to be paid directly to the Wehrmacht. He later reduced the amount to 2.5 billion but stipulated that it be paid in gold. According to the terms of the agreement Merten dictated to the Jewish community, the gold was to be delivered in installments of 5,000 British pounds by December 15, 1942.

In total, the Wehrmacht squeezed 25,000 gold pounds from Jews in Salonika to meet its operating costs for November and December 1942. According to figure drac the German commissioner at the Bank of Greece, Paul Hahn, that was the equivalent of 500,000 reichsmarks.
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The coins were sold on the gold exchange and thereby converted into paper money, which went to pay the wages of German soldiers and Greek workers performing services for the Wehrmacht. On January 11, 1943, a Todt Organization official, reporting on construction projects, wrote: “As I have already stated, the military commander has promised Salonika-Aegean [divisions] a half billion drachmas, as soon as the sum has been raised by the Jewish community. He was not, however, able to name a precise date.”
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After the war, Merten also openly admitted using proceeds from the sale of Salonika’s Jewish cemetery to pay Greeks working for the German occupiers.
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In 1943, the Reich Economics Ministry stated that in late 1942 wages for road construction and the mining of ore in northern Greece “had been made available from what was then an unknown source. It later emerged that these funds were money that had been raised from Greek Jews.”
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THE REICH’S initial measures in Greece had a haphazard quality; theft on a grand scale commenced with the ghettoization of Jews in March 1943. Using spies and torture, Eichmann’s henchmen—Brunner, Wisliceny, and their staff—compelled defenseless people to confess where they had hidden jewelry and money. “Thus,” writes historian Michael Molho, “the cellars in Vélissariou Street [in Salonika] were filled with a treasure trove like that of Ali Baba. Atop the tables were neat piles of rings with diamonds and gemstones of all colors and sizes, brooches, medallions, armbands, gold chains, wedding rings, watches of all sorts, coins sorted according to stamp and date, American and Canadian dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs, etc. On the floor were heaps of vases, Chinese porcelain, rare objects, and rugs. Crammed into a relatively confined space was a surfeit of riches that Alexandre Dumas himself, with all his imagination, couldn’t have pictured reflected in the eyes of the Count of Monte Cristo.”
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After the war, the Jewish community of Salonika estimated that some 130 million marks in gold and jewelry had been stolen from them. That would be the equivalent of forty-six tons of gold. A more conservative and thorough estimate was made by the historian Joseph Nehama in 1946. Nehama calculated that the Germans plundered “the impressive amount of more than twelve tons of pure gold” from Greek Jews.
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That figure corresponds exactly to the “most moderate calculation” made by the World Jewish Congress in 1948 of 1.7 million gold pounds.
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Since gold was not the only type of valuable stored in Vélissariou Street, the actual worth of the stolen property would have been far greater. In all likelihood, some of this property was sold to Greeks for more gold. The figure of twelve tons seems about right. According to records from the Bank of Greece in 1944, the occupation costs for June 1942 amounted to 250,000 gold pounds. Taking this figure as the monthly average for the following twelve months, Greece would have had to pay exactly 3 million gold pounds in occupation costs. But the bank’s figures show that drachmas with a value of only 1.26 million gold pounds were handed over to the Germans. There was thus a shortfall of 1.74 million gold pounds to cover the Wehrmacht’s running costs. That is almost exactly the sum arrived at by the World Jewish Congress ss sup filepos-id="filepos654405">53

So where did the gold end up? It was only on June 15, 1943, several weeks after the deportations, that Merten ordered “the sum total of Jewish assets secured, or to be secured in the near future, in Salonika-Aegean transferred to the Greek state as represented by the governor general of Macedonia.”
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In his testimony before a war-crimes tribunal in 1964, however, Merten said that the gold remained in German hands. Reich emissary Altenburg then ordered it transported to Athens and brought to the German consulate. Statements made by the usually precise Wisliceny also point toward Athens.
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According to Wisliceny, Mertens “deposited money, jewelry, and similar items at the Bank of Greece.” Wisliceny also testified that some 280 million drachmas in cash had been deposited “in a general account at the Bank of Greece,” from which the money then went to the German military commander.
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A statement by an assistant of Eichmann’s, Otto Hunsche, corroborates Wisliceny’s postwar testimony. In a dispute over how to pay for the transport of 46,000 people from Salonika to Auschwitz, which cost 1,938,488 reichsmarks, Hunsche insisted that the “confiscated wealth of the Jews” be allocated not to the SS but to “the military commander of the Aegean [military administration] in Salonika.”
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Nazi Germany may also have sent a small portion of the precious metals plundered from Greece to Vienna. (Shipments may have included platinum, which was desperately needed for industrial purposes, or silver, which was required by the flourishing German film industry.) This author was unable to find any German documents proving that such deliveries took place. But Jacques Stroumsa, who was forced to board a train for Auschwitz with his family in 1943, recalls in his autobiography a stop, “probably at a small train station near Vienna, when the train doors suddenly opened” and Alois Brunner motioned for him and his brother to get out. “When we reached his compartment in a normal train car,” Stroumsa wrote, “he commanded us to carry a heavy wooden crate, followed by a second, equally heavy one, over to the main entrance of the station. Immediately thereafter, the train went on.”
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It remains unclear why most of the gold from Salonika was transferred to Athens. The most likely theory is that it was to stabilize the inflationary drachma—with the cooperation of the Greek Finance Ministry and the Bank of Greece—in the period before November 1943. Three personnel decisions support this hypothesis. First, from October 1942 to February 1943, the beginning of the Nazi intervention in currency policies, the German commissioner at the Banque de France, Carl Schaefer, was assigned to Athens to work with Paul Hahn.
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Schaefer had gained valuable experience curbing inflation in France. Second, in January 1943, after the governor of the Bank of Greece was forced to resign, he was replaced by a cooperative deputy governor named Hadjikyriakos.
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And third, Neubacher appointed a new finance minister and minister without portfolio, Hektor Tsironikos, whose “friendliness toward Germany was beyond question.” He was soon put in charge of the Social Services, Health, Economics, Labor, and Agriculture Ministries, since he “possessed the complete and utter trust of the special emissary.”
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It appears that, with cooperation from Hadjikyriakos and Tsironikos, Greek brokers sold off the gold looted from the Jews of Salonika at the exchange in Athens. They accepted payment in huge sums of paper drachmas, with which the Wehrmacht then covered its expenditures. In this way, inflation could be checked or at least slowed for a few months and prices could be kept stable.
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As a result of such transactions, most of the gold of the murdered Jews of Salonika would have ended up in the hands of Greek gold traders and speculators, while Germans used the drachmas to pay for Greek goods and services and to pay German soldiers’ wages. To support this thesis, it’s necessary to present a chain of evidence. The first links in this chain are the discussions and decisions that led the Reichsbank to deliver gold to Greece in the latter half of 1943.