Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (41 page)

So it was that between October 1942 and September 1943 the German occupiers—assisted by the Greek finance minister, the Bank of Greece, and various “trusted brokers”—propped up the drachma using gold they had plundered from the Jews of Salonika. In so doing, they directly financed the German Wehrmacht.
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“The point of the gold campaign,” Neubacher recalled, ;was as follows: The hard currency purchased was used to cover occupation costs. Consequently, pressure on the treasury to print more money was relieved.” The campaign allowed Neubacher, despite heavy inflation, to maintain the Greek currency as a means of payment.
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The Greek budget was also indirectly relieved of occupation costs.
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The dispossession of the Jews of Salonika was carried out to the direct financial benefit of German troops. As German bank commissioner Hahn concluded, “the main goal of the gold campaign” was to “raise the necessary means of payment for financing the Wehrmacht.” Even today, more than sixty years after the war, Germans and Greeks who took part in the campaign refuse to acknowledge that at least three-fifths of it was funded by gold that belonged to Greek Jews. It’s hardly surprising that they remain reluctant to discuss a scheme that masked—through innocuous-seeming transactions on the gold exchange—the dispossession of citizens of an occupied country for the welfare of the occupiers.

In an attempt at self-justification, Hahn published his final report of 1944-45 as a monograph in 1957. There he confirmed that international law had been violated but tried to shift the responsibility, noting: “The entire gold campaign was in the hands of the bank commissioner, who also had sole responsibility for administering inventories of gold”—including gold from the Jews of Salonika.
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According to German military reports, “between two-thirds and three-fourths” of the occupation costs during the gold campaign were “covered by the gold proceeds.”
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That was also true during the first, unofficial phase of the campaign—only in that case the gold in question represented the assets of 46,000 Jews from northern Greece, almost all of whom were murdered in Auschwitz.

The transactions remained so secret that, after the war, there was no need for either Germans or Greeks to deny them. No one asked where the gold had gone. Instead, for decades, the public chose to believe a story told by Max Merten to a fellow prisoner while serving time in a Greek jail in 1957. According to Merten, the gold of the Jews of Salonika—a veritable “hoard of the Nibelungs”—had been lost at sea. This tall tale, which was repeated by Neubacher, Hahn, and Altenburg, convinced even the legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who in 1971 sued representatives of the Greek government in a Vienna court for 100,000 deutschmarks “for his help in discovering a fortune in gold and platinum that was carried off by the Germans from Greece in World War II.” (The representatives successfully argued that “Wiesenthal’s information in this matter was worthless.”)
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Even as late as 2000, Merten’s story was still taken seriously. That year, professional divers searched the ocean floor near the southwestern tip of the Peloponnesus for a fishing boat containing the “Jewish treasure” of Salonika, which Merten claimed to have intentionally sunk there. A conflict soon arose as to who would claim the treasure, depending on whether it was found in national or international waters. Speculation about the value of this sunken treasure—“more than $2 billion,” according to reports by both the BBC and CNN in August 2000—was as baseless as the story itself.
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After the war, it must have been common knowledge in Athens financial circles where the gold had gone. It had neither been sunk at sea nor carted off to Germany. Most of it had remained in Greece, where it had changed hands for money. A 1998 volume entitled
Documents on the History of the Greek Jews
draws on the archive of the Greek Foreign Ministry, but it only really begins in 1944; the gap could be filled by publishing the relevant documents from the archives of the Reich Finance Ministry and the Bank of Greece and the papers of the major Greek collaborators. The main decrees leading to the dispossession of Greek Jews between 1942 and 1943 deserve to be carefully documented. Particularly important would be the agreements struck by the Greek government with Hahn, Schaefer, Neubacher, and Altenburg regarding the stabilization of the drachma.

Without a public reckoning of this sort, the reputations of the civil servants involved remain untarnished. On July 18, 1960, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
published a letter to the editor marking Neubacher’s death. It was written by the historian Percy Ernst Schramm. The headline read, “Recollections of Dr. Neubacher.” Schramm wrote: “The world has become poorer today because a person has taken his leave of us who, while he may have engaged with the Nazis, never sold himself; a person who knew how to survive even under the most terrible circumstances and in the end found an opportunity to show just what he could do.”

In the summer of 1944, a few weeks before most German troops withdrew from Greece, 1,673 Jews from Rhodes and 94 from the neighboring island of Kos were loaded onto ships and deported via the port city of Piraeus. Their terrible journey began on July 24 and ended on August 16 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most standard reference works on the Holocaust—with the notable exception of those by Raul Hilberg—view this particular deportation as evidence of the blind racial hatred of Nazi policies since shipping Jews to the death camps was seemingly given priority over the safety and other interests of the retreating German troops.

“At a point in time,” writes historian Hagen Fleischer, “when the Red Army was preparing to topple the Axis states in southeastern Europe like so many dominos, and when Army Group B was making its initial preparations for evacuation, [an act] that would necessitate abandoning valuable military material on the [Greek] peninsula, the waste of precious transport space along the sole, already overburdened line of retreat makes a mockery of any sort of strategic considerations.”
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Lea Rosh and Eberhard Jäckel also speculate that in Greece—the outermost fringe of Germany’s sphere of power in July 1944—the “whole insanity of the Nazis” was revealed.
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Assertions like these may represent the prevailing wisdom, but they do not correspond either to the reality on the ground or to the military decision-making process. The deportation of 1,767 people, who were first put aboard small cargo ships and then onto a freight train, did not divert resources from the Wehrmacht’s other transport needs. In fact, the military had its own interest in the deportations, which will now be described.

RHODES, WHICH sits in the Dodecanese chain of islands, was officially still part of Italy in 1943. Occupied by Germany in September of that year, after Italy switched over to the Allies, the island had 45,000 inhabitants. The local Italian administration remained in place, and the local branch of the Banca d’ltalia was made responsible for organizing financial support for the German trosup>94 On May 10, 1944, the head of the Wehrmacht High Command gave the commanding officer of the extremely isolated Sturm-division Rhodos the inflated title of commander of the eastern Aegean. The promotion order also defined the role of the island’s intendant: “He is responsible for Wehrmacht-related administration, especially for supervising the exploitation of the countryside to meet the needs of the three branches of the Wehrmacht, including the acquisition and distribution of monetary resources. The intendant is subordinate to the Wehrmacht intendant of the Military High Command in Greece.”
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In early June, the commandant of Crete informed Hitler that the heavily fortified island had “four months’ worth of supplies” and needed only 1,500 tons of monthly replenishments. But Hitler, who wanted the island to have six months’ worth of reserves, ordered that 6,000 tons of supplies be sent every month from Piraeus to Crete.
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The situation was similar with Rhodes, which was also conceived as a bulwark. Most of the other German forces were being withdrawn from the Aegean Sea in what the German leadership kidded themselves into believing was a temporary retreat.

It was already clear by the second half of June that German troops on Crete and Rhodes—a total of some 70,000 men—would soon be cut off from their supply lines. Their military mission was “to offer the greatest possible resistance to the enemy, even in isolation, to sacrifice themselves to buy time and occupy enemy forces.”
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For several weeks, the Wehrmacht tried to replenish supplies of food, vehicles, weapons, and munitions by sea. Most German supply ships that were able to make the perilous voyage returned to Piraeus with empty holds. Fuel shortages, the superiority of British warplanes and submarines, and heavy air raids on the ports of Piraeus and Salonika increasingly limited the number of journeys that could be made. Short nights under clear, moonlit skies didn’t make the undertaking any easier.
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It made practical sense to use the ships’ cargo capacity to maximum effect. On June 8, the Jewish population of Crete—around 300 people—was herded onto a ship bound for Piraeus. They died, along with some 200 other prisoners, when the ship came under enemy fire and was sunk.
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In the first weeks of July, the head of sea transport for the Aegean redirected ships from western Greece in order to “bring higher-priority supplies” to the Dodecanese.
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From mid-June to July 10, German sailors succeeded in shipping 4,000 tons of supplies to Crete and 5,000 tons to Rhodes; subsequent deliveries brought additional supplies to the two outposts.
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While the Jews of Rhodes were being deported there was no talk of German retreat. In fact, on July 31, the chief intendant in Greece, Werner Kersten, ordered an emergency program of repair for “ships indispensable for supplying the islands.”
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In August, 3,626 tons of supplies were received in the Dodecanese, mostly in Rhodes.
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On September 6, 1944, the freighter
Pelikan
docked off the city of Rhodes with supplies from Piraeus.
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All the ships involved in these deliveries sailed back to the mainland with empty holds.

In late August, a few days after Romania and Bulgaria changed sides and more than a month after the deportation of Jews from Rhodes, Hitler ordered occupying troops in mainland Greece to withdraw north and secure a line stretching from Corfu, in the northwest, through Ioánnina and Kalabáka, in north-central Greece, south to Olympia in the Peloponnesus.
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Until then, contrary to Hagen Fleischer’s assertion, German troops had few problems transporting weaponry and other material
out
of Greece. The real difficulty was moving supplies south
within
Greece: the fragile network of railways and roads leading south had been continually subjected to partisan attacks and disruptions at key points. The retreat north began after Hitler issued his order, which was forwarded to the various Wehrmacht units in Greece. Only then, a full month after the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes, was a second decree issued: “Use empty trains to transport materials to the north.” Even at this late juncture the Wehrmacht had empty trains at its disposal. In his final report, under the heading “Transports toward Germany,” the special deputy for Greece wrote that because of the relatively limited volume of cargo, “no difficulties” had arisen.
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The “overburdened” lines of retreat claimed by many historians simply did not exist.

On August 28, the commanding admiral in the Aegean ordered that supplies continue to be sent to Rhodes and Crete. (The order, as other documents show, was never carried out.) Several days later, Hitler allowed the partial evacuation of the heavily fortified islands. For security reasons, the retreat was carried out via air. The planes carried fresh supplies for the 12,000 troops who were to remain behind on Crete and the 6,300 on Rhodes.
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Their orders, communicated by telegraph, read: “If pickup impossible, battle to last bullet” to “free troops for operations on the mainland and defense of home front.”
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The evacuation continued into early October.

GERMAN COMMANDERS hadn’t decreed any special anti-Jewish measures when they occupied Rhodes in September 1943—for the simple reason that they had no interest in doing so. But by July 13, 1944, the troops needed funds. It was then that Lieutenant General Ulrich Kleemann, the commandant of the eastern Aegean stationed on Rhodes, ordered Jews detained. The arrests were to be carried out within four days.
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On July 13, the day of the order, three ships set sail from Porto-lago on the island of Leros, a night’s sail from Rhodes, to pick up the detainees. The ships were forced to turn around “because of enemy positions,” but they succeeded in making the journey, loaded with fresh supplies, on the night of July 20-21.
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There were protests from the soldiers on Rhodes against the deportation order of July 13, and although it is not known what form it took, Kleeman found himself compelled to issue a second, explanatory order on July 16, aimed at combating “doubts.” He tried to convince his troops of the necessity of a “radical solution to the Jewish question,” about which ordinary soldiers were unqualified to pass judgment.
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Almost all the island’s Jews were rounded up within a few days.

Shipping agents in Portolago, where the deportation was organized, filed regular reports. According to one report, 96 Jews from the island of Kos arrived on July 24, followed the next evening by the Jews from Rhodes. The daily log read: “July 25: Wind NW, Speed: 6; Surf 4-5.” There was a level 2 alert until “0400 hours, when the Jewish transport from Rhodes on the MS
Störtebeker, Horst
, and
Merkur
made port.” The log continued: “Necessary provisions and water supplies for 1,750 Jews immediately provided for scheduled journey.” Because of poor weather, the ships could not set sail again until July 28, and when they did the convoy had been expanded by two more ships and given a military escort. The log recorded: “2030 hours MS
Horst, Störtebeker, Merkur, Seeadler
, and
Seestern
embarked for Piraeus. 51 tons scrap, empty commercial containers, and 1,700 Jews.”
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The convoy made a stopover in Samos.