Office for the administration of Jewish property

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The office for the administration of the Jewish assets ( Greek Υπηρεσία Διαχειρίσεως Ισραηλιτικών Περιουσιών Ypiresía Diachiríseos Israilitikón Periousión ; short: ΥΔΙΠ YDIP ) was an authority for the German occupation and management of the Greek lands was founded in 1943 at the time of the Jewish occupation and YDIP . After the Second World War she was responsible for the restitution of the formerly Jewish property.

Occupation time

1943: YDIP in Saloniki-Aegean

Greece was conquered and occupied in the Balkan campaign in 1941 . On February 6, 1943, the special command of the security police for Jewish affairs in Saloniki-Aegean under the direction of SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner and Dieter Wisliceny arrived in Thessaloniki to organize the deportation and extermination of the Jews in the Thessaloniki and Aegean area with the large Jewish community of To organize Thessaloniki on behalf of Adolf Eichmann . The Jews had to move to a specially formed ghetto on the orders of the German Wehrmacht administration, and business owners and Jewish tenants were forced to label their shops and apartments. They had to leave their possessions behind. It was registered by German units and loaded onto trucks. The apartments were occupied by German officers, Greek collaborators and Greek refugees from the Bulgarian-occupied areas of Greece.

The Greek Governor General of Macedonia , Vasilios Simonidis, instructed the lower Greek authorities to support Eichmann's Sonderkommando and campaigned for the distribution of Jewish property among the Greek refugees from the Bulgarian zone of occupation.

On March 8, the "Office for the Administration of Jewish Assets", the YDIP ( Ypiresía Diachiríseos Israilitikón Periousión ) was set up at the instigation of War Administrator Max Merten (Wehrmacht Administration Saloniki-Aegean ) and the Macedonian Governor General Simonidis in order to collect so-called hostile and friendly foreign assets manage. The lawyer Elias Douros became the director. The office emerged from the land registry in Thessaloniki and had already gained practical experience in the regulation of abandoned Muslim property after the Turkish-Greek War of 1919 to 1922 and the subsequent ethnic resettlement. It was initially subordinate to the German Wehrmacht administration and later to the Ministerial Director Mavraganis in the Greek Ministry of Finance.

At the beginning of March 1943, the plan for the deportation of the Jews entered the final phase. All Jews had to provide information about their property and give the keys to their shops to the YDIP. This should find provisional "administrators" for the Jewish assets. In the meantime, Greek Orthodox Greeks and German soldiers had looted so much that Douros complained that he was only able to properly register about a third of Jewish businesses (about 600 from 1898). In total, the YDIP was responsible for the utilization of 2,300 shops and over 10,000 apartments. War Administrator Max Merten from the Wehrmacht administration often intervened in the selection of the “administrators” . At the Athens trial in 1959, according to calculations by the Jewish Central Council, he was accused of having enriched himself with more than 1.5 million gold sovereigns.

1944: KYDIP in the rest of Greece

After the armistice of Cassibile in September 1943, the German Reich took control of the former Italian-occupied areas of Greece and planned the deportation of the Jews there, who had been under Italian protection until then. In 1944, the Government of Ioannis Rallis entrusted the Central Office for the Administration of Jewish Property KYDIP with the administration of Jewish property in the rest of Greece with Law No. 1180 . Two days before Athens was evacuated from the German Reich, the Greek government renamed the KYDIP as the Central Office for the Settlement and Return of Jewish Property . This was supposed to give the appearance of greater legitimacy.

post war period

restitution

At the end of October 1944, two weeks after Athens was liberated, a law was passed requiring all seized assets to be returned to their rightful owners. This law did not abolish the YDIP, but confirmed the competence of the YDIP. While the Greek Foreign Ministry tried to bring Jewish affairs in the national interest into negotiations for reparation by Germany, the Greek military and the judiciary did not enforce the Jewish claim for return against Greek Orthodox Greeks. In addition, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tried to delay the return of Greek survivors from the concentration camps .

Michael Molho points out that the restitution by KYDIP took place to a large extent in the formerly Italian-occupied territories, which hardly happened to the Jewish assets confiscated in Thessaloniki. Rena Molho states that the Jewish survivors from Thessaloniki were only able to obtain the return of 543 houses and apartments, 18 barracks and 51 shops until 1953.

Processing of the collaboration

With the formation of a special court for collaborators in Thessaloniki in spring 1945, the privileges listed in the YDIP files and their recipients also became relevant. The returning surviving Jews demanded the punishment of these “Nazi collaborators”, but because of the Greek Civil War , the state now decidedly valued many “administrators” as valuable anti-communists who could pursue post-war careers. Many “administrators” were able to successfully assert their claim to the property of the Jews a second time and keep it.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Steven B. Bowman: The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945. Stanford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-5584-9 , pp. 64 f.
  2. ↑ Dordanas and Kalogrias: The Fight against Inflation in Greece and the Deportation of the Jews from Saloniki . P. 107 ff.
  3. ↑ Dordanas and Kalogrias: The Fight against Inflation in Greece and the Deportation of the Jews from Saloniki . P. 114.
  4. ↑ Kostis Kornetis: Expropriating the Space of the Others: Property Spoliations of Thessalonican Jews . In: Holocaust in Greece . P. 233.
  5. ↑ Götz Aly: The fight against inflation in Greece and the deportation of the Jews from Saloniki . P. 9.
  6. ↑ Dordanas and Kalogrias: The Fight against Inflation in Greece and the Deportation of the Jews from Saloniki . P. 114.
  7. ↑ Rena Molho: The Holocaust of the Greek Jews - Studies of History and Memory . Dietz-Verlag 2016, p. 70.
  8. ↑ Stratos N. Dordanas: The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and the Christian Collaborateurs: "Those did are leaving and What They are leaving behind". In: Holocaust in Greece . P. 212.
  9. ↑ Stratos N. Dordanas: The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and the Christian Collaborateurs: "Those did are leaving and What They are leaving behind" . P. 215.
  10. ^ Maria Kavala: The Scale of Jewish Property Theft in Nazi-occupied Thessaloniki . In: Holocaust in Greece . P. 203 / Document VEJ 14/258 in: Sara Berger u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 14: Occupied Southeast Europe and Italy . Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-055559-2 , pp. 608-613.
  11. ^ Maria Kavala: The Scale of Jewish Property Theft in Nazi-occupied Thessaloniki . P. 203 f.
  12. ^ Maria Kavala: The Scale of Jewish Property Theft in Nazi-occupied Thessaloniki . P. 204.
  13. ↑ Rena Molho: The Holocaust of the Greek Jews . P. 84.
  14. ↑ Stratos N. Dordanas: The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and the Christian Collaborateurs: "Those did are leaving and What They are leaving behind". P. 219 f.