Posted on 10/02/2005 9:08:17 AM PDT by nickcarraway
ATHENS -- Jewish community leaders on the Greek island of Salonica reported a breakthrough on Thursday in their campaign to sue the German state to recover a ransom paid to Nazi invaders in 1942.
The head of the campaign group, David Saltiel, said that the group had unearthed written evidence, recovered from banking archives, showing that a payment of 1 billion drachmas was made to the Nazis with seven different checks.
The group "has started a legal process aiming to recover the ransom from the German state", Saltiel said.
"We are waiting for an imminent decision from the Greek Supreme Court about the continuation of this action," he added.
The Nazis invaded Salonica in 1941 and exterminated 95 percent of the Jewish population during their three-year occupation. About 50,000 Jews were deported and killed in Germany in 1943.
The ransom of 1 billion drachmas was paid - before the exterminations began - to secure the release on December 1942 of 10,000 men and adolescents imprisoned in forced labor camps, Saltiel said.
Records of the seven different checks used to settle the ransom demand, paid from the now-defunct Bank of Salonica, were found in the archives of the Greek National Bank by a historian employed by the Jewish group.
The historian, Evangelos Hekimoglou, estimates that the billion-drachma ransom was the equivalent to about 1 million daily salaries of the time.
Six of the checks, made out to the German administration of Salonica, were endorsed by the Nazi leader of the area, Max Merten, and the seventh by his interpreter.
The Jewish community also accuses Merten of embezzling 500 million drachmas in cash.
Merten was arrested in Greece and condemned to 25 years in prison after returning to the country to do business after the war.
He was later released under an amnesty agreement between Greece and Germany in which Germany agreed to pay substantial damages to the Greek state. Merten returned to Germany and escaped justice there until his death.
As did far too many of the Nazi bastards...
Semper Fi
There was a film about the Greek Jews who were deported, one of whom became a boxer and fought bouts for the amusement of his Nazi guards. The Film came out about fifteen years ago.
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