Kavala Maria
University of Crete, Department of History - Archaeology
Type: Dissertations

The present doctoral thesis examines aspects of the social and economic history of Thessalonica during German Occupation in order to become comprehensible the social and political processes of period (interruption of making homogeneous the population by the genocide of the Jews, a process that had begun from 1912, configuration of new social hierarchies, politicization of young persons etc.). The study is supported by written sources, metrics and oral testimonies.

Despite the high number of poor and refugees from East Macedonia and Thrace, in Thessalonica the food crisis didn’t result in serious increases in mortality, as in Athens and the islands. The citizens dealt with the lack of products by taking trips to the near productive areas, by organizing commons and associations, by working in public work and services for Germans, but also by dealing in the black market. The space of provisioning elected new collective forms of claim (associations, E.E.A.M.- Labour National Liberation Front, E.A.M. - National Liberation Front and their civil organizations), it became a field of convergence (organisations of city E.A.M. and Church), a field of society oppositions (traditional institutions of aid - new institutions, Jews - Greeks), of recklessness (government, Germans and collaborators), of exercising propaganda and control on behalf of the Greek and German beginnings to the population.

While the unemployed, the destitute but also the salaried sought solutions of survival, the industries of foodstuffs, clothing, medicines and chemists functioned under bearable conditions as ordained from the Germans or even favourable conditions either as main executants of their orders. The economic inequalities that the inflation caused, led to the massivity of resistance in the city on the one hand, but also to the most important social coiling against it on the other. The crowd of «new riches» and the enterprising circles, in combination with an anticommunist, antibulgarian and anti - Semitic ideology didn’t want things to change.

As far as it concerns speculation during occupation, Thessalonica has a particularity. After the displacement of the Jews, the exploitation of Jewish fortunes constituted a new source of enrichment, legalised and official. In the study it is proved that the Jews of Thessalonica were in the majority members of middle and low class, although it was believed the opposite. A small part of the population was wealthy and economically powerful. With regard to the opinion that the mobile fortune of Jews and concretely the gold covered the occupation’s cost, the study shows that the mobile fortune was not enough to do so. However the Jewish fortune was the most expedient solution. It is essential that historical research explores what happened with the real estate property, to clarify the frame in which it was exploited and how are involved in this German and Greek government, their collaborators and enterprising circles.