Event on Nazi occupation held at Goethe institute

Memories of the brutal Nazi occupation (1941-1944) and the mass extermination of Greek Jews were recounted during an event on Tuesday evening at the Goethe institute in Thessaloniki, entitled “Northern Greece, Epirus and Thessaly in the Era of National Socialism”, which was jointly organised by the German consulate in Thessaloniki, the city’s Jewish community and the Pan-Hellenic organisation of 1941-44 resistance fighters.

The event was organised on the 68th anniversary of the violent displacement of the Jews of Thessaloniki to Nazi concentration camps — March 15, 1943. The event was also attended by Holocaust survivors.

Former German ambassador to Greece Wolfgang Schultheiss referred to a landmark 2004 book written by a committee of historians — two Germans, an American and an Israeli — upon the initiative of then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who cited what he called the “myth” of Germany’s foreign ministry in the post-war period, namely, that German diplomats had no complicity in war crimes or were active Nazi members.