‘Please Respect our Traditions’
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
1943
King George VI 1936-1952
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens and All Greece, while acting as Regent in February 1945. On the table is the daughter of John Georgakis, the Archbishop’s political adviser.
Introduction
This post is number 7 in the series Holocaust Resistance
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
DIMITRIS Papandreou was elected Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens in 1938. At that time, Greece was under a state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas, whose Fascist sympathies Damaskinos emphatically did not share. The appointment was blocked, and Damaskinos was kept under house arrest in Salamina until the Germans came in 1941.
Two years later, he was ill in bed when representatives of Jewish communities in Greece came to him looking for help. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he listened to their tale of harassment and deportation to the concentration camps of Germany and Poland,* and at once began organising formal letters of protest to the authorities, signed by leading Athens dignitaries, which asserted the equal rights of all Greeks regardless of religion, appealing to the Constitution and to Scripture.
Later he picked up a copy of his letter, and burst into the Athens offices of SS General Jürgen Stroop, the man who had masterminded the Nazis’ atrocities in the Warsaw Ghetto.*
That is to say, German camps in what is now Poland. Poland, as part of Prussia, was incorporated into Germany in 1871. A brief period of independence after the Great War ended when the Germans invaded in September 1939, in defiance of a British ultimatum, so triggering The Outbreak of the Second World War. The former Polish Republic subsequently became part of the German administrative region of Danzig-West Prussia. In 1945, Poland became part of the Soviet Union.
The Warsaw Ghetto was essentially a suburb turned into a prison by the occupying Germans in 1940. Some 400,000 Jewish people were kept in just over a square mile, before being taken away to be murdered. About 300,000 died in this way; almost all the remainder died of starvation or disease. A revolt in 1943 was brutally suppressed by Stroop, who chose the eve of Passover to blow the ghetto up, with the rebels still in it, block by block.
