The Holocaust in Northern Greece: The war against the Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki

This dissertation studies the Holocaust in Greece during World War II, and particularly the Holocaust in Northern Greece where 81% of Greece's 78,500 Jews lived. Although increasing scholarship has been devoted to the Holocaust that occurred in Greece in recent years, it remains a backwater in terms of the overall Holocaust and the genocide perpetrated against its 6 million European victims. During the war, the majority of Greece's Jews were Sephardic or "Spanish Jews" whose ancestors came to Ottoman (Turkish-occupied) Greece in the late 15th century. The Jews of northern Greece, and particularly the 56,000 Jews of Thessaloniki, constituted a unique civilization that---until the arrival of the German Army in the spring of 1941---had developed and endured first in Spain and then Greece for almost two millennia. This project examines the circumstances by which the Germans were so successful in their goal to murder the vast majority of Greek Jews, and particularly the large community of "Spanish" Jews in Thessaloniki.