Balkan Wars 1912-1913

"The present work focuses on the underlying seminal causes of the Annihilation of Jewish Greeks in Bulgarian occupied Northern Greece, in particular the regions of Eastern Macedonia (the cities of Kavala, Serres and Drama) and Thrace (the cities of Alexandroupolis, Komotini and Xanthi), along with the Annihilation of their brethren of the cities of Didimoteixo, Nea Orestiada and Soufli of the Evros Prefecture of Thrace occupied by the Germans 70 years ago.  A definition of the Holocaust is given that broadens the term beyond its peak point that of the actual assassination of Jews by the Germans and some of their allies.  The definition includes all past historical events and practices that fermented the path to destruction of the European and North African Jewry during the World War II as well as the now and current state practices.  Starting milestones are the Preliminary Peace Treaty at San Stefano and the Peace Treaty at Berlin both of the year 1878.  The root causes of the complicity of the Bulgarian governments of the time in the deportation of the Jewish inhabitants of the “New” Bulgarian territories are analyzed and, given the documentary and archival evidence presented, conclusions are reached.  Also, the nation states that were created in the wake of the First World War and the ensuing Peace Treaties are shown to be fraught with all those ingredients that fertilize the national psyche to accept as legitimate racist and exclusive policies along with anti-Semitic and prejudicial ones.  The distinction of Racial Anti–Semitism versus the millennia old Religious one is emphasized.  Memory is an inseparable part of the Holocaust and, as such, it is both a means of remembrance and link with the past as well as instructive and educative for all generations and as a shield against Holocaust denial, revisionism and/or whitewashing of the past.

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""English Summary – Abstract

An aspect of recent Modern Greek History, known to a minimal degree (and, also, minimally recorded), is the forced apprehension and deportation by Bulgarian occupying forces of all Jewish Greeks from the cities of Alexandroupolis, Komotini, Xanthi, Kavala, Drama & Serres of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace during WWII in March 4, 1943.  They were swiftly deported to Treblinka in occupied Poland where they were immediately annihilated–murdered upon arrival by gassing in the Extermination Camp bearing the same name.  A few days later (March 15), the first rail convoy of Jewish Greek deportees “departed” Thessaloniki.  The train was “loaded” with 2800 souls, packed like sardines, 80 to a single cattle car.  Final destination was the Concentration and Extermination Camp Complex Auschwitz – Birkenau, also situated in Poland.  Almost a total of 50000 doomed humans were deported by the Germans from Thessaloniki in a succession of convoys.  2000 survived and none survived of those deported to Treblinka.  I narrate with documentation how this abominable crime was perpetrated and reach the conclusions with factual interpretative synthesis.  For the first time ever, I attempt a quantification of Memory – Remembrance.  I calibrate the Memory Stick (“yardstick”) by introducing the (unit of) Measure of Remembrance.  For comparative purposes, for this particular case, I define this unit as the sum total of all remembrance – memorial expressions, outward manifestations, events, publications, etc pertaining to the Massacre of 149 Christian Greek inhabitants of Chortiatis in September 1944[ http://en.tracesofwar.com/article/5303/Memorial-Massacre-Chortiatis.htm , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chortiatis ].  I assign to this unit the value of 100.  I leave to the individual reader the task of assigning a Memory – Remembrance gradation to the Memory Stick pertaining to the annihilation of their Jewish Greek inhabitants for each of the 6 aforementioned cities based on the facts and numbers presented in my work.  Bear in mind that the Christian Greeks of Chortiatis were massacred in retaliation for an attack of Greek Resistance against Germans whilst the Jewish Greeks were murdered just because they were . . . Jews!

For Bulgarian occupied Eastern Macedonia and Thrace the catastrophic fate of their Jewish inhabitants was inexorably linked and woven into the fabric of Bulgarian lingering irredentism since the abrogation of the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) that, for a few months at least, had created the “Greater Bulgaria”.  Appending to that, the simmering Anti-Judaism, always present, never really extinguished, and even State sanctioned, critical mass, that led to genocide, was reached in 1943.  By that time, all excuses for not handing in “their” Jews were exhausted and, having to redeem the “largess” of their ally, the German Reich, for their territorial enlargement and, choosing amongst the less of the two “evils”, the Bulgarian government handed over the Jews of the “new” territories for certain assassination.  Even though they were not Genocidist themselves, they had no real qualms for their deed so they are not absolved of their guilt.

Memory and Remembrance teaches and educates the new generations.  It also acts as a catalyst for further research and also, as I show, as a yardstick of how far words of noble thoughts have transubstantiated into fact and daily practice and/or if the de jure incorporation of the Jew, or any other minority for that matter, as enshrined and mandated in the Constitutions of our Democratic States turned into a de facto one.  The omens are fortunate.

URL link of the Power Point Presentation (in Greek):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9wutahdh8tlaykw/Paul%20Hagouel_Holocaust%20Annihilation%20Memory%20Jews%20EMacedonia%2C%20Thrace%20%26%20Thessaloniki_20130406_.pps
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Political literature customarily defines secession as a movement developing in the periphery against the centre. This article questions this common assumption by raising the possibility that secession may be propelled by the centre. A working definition of `central secession’ (or `secessionism by the centre’) will be limited to those cases where a powerful nationalist movement operates from within the core or dominant nation(al- ity). The focus will be on the break-up of Yugoslavia ± the disintegration of which was consistently and widely perceived as a con ̄ ict of secessionist republics opposed by, and confronted with, a unitary state. A brief geo-political excursus of recent secessionist movements will serve to highlight the singularity of the Yugoslav `model’. In the case of Serbia, the rhetoric was adamantly unitarian, anti-secessionist, even anti-nationalist. It emphasised the defence of territorial integrity at all costs. In this way, the centre could cast itself as the spotless saviour of the country’s integrity versus a `treacherous’ periphery. In fact, the hidden agenda of the regime was ethnic separation ± of Serbs from non-Serbs.

""Beginning with the restoration of the constitution in 1908, officers began to write and publish their thoughts and ideas about various aspects of the military, especially their combat experiences and criticisms of past campaigns. Various journals and newly opened literary clubs became the centers of discussion for the exchange of ideas. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of the empire, the military authorities encouraged these activities. Illustrating this, the official military science journal Mecmua-i Askeri (Military Magazine) became the most important vehicle for the transmission of new ideas and critiques in the Ottoman military renaissance.
However, the real breakthroughs came after the humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of the small Balkan states. The defeats caused a very serious mental depression to take hold of the officer corps, which forced them to discuss openly their concerns about the fate of the empire and the possible scenarios facing it. Most of the career officers voiced their frustrations on the apparent weakness of the army and its obvious military incapacity. Every publication (especially memoirs) immediately created new discussions and new publications. Even though most of them pointed out political issues, military problems and possible solutions were the essential components of these discussions. Some of the most favored topics were the performance of the Ottoman General Staff, outdated and cumbersome methods and procedures, the triangular divisional system, the mechanism and dynamics of attack and defense, new weapons (especially machine guns), combat support and service support, recruitment and how to increase morale and élan. Ottoman military history was often used (not always scientifically) to prove the validity of one’s claims.
Interestingly as the Turkish officers hesitantly but continuously became nationalistic their publications also mirrored this development. They tried to reach a wider public by simplifying their ideas or making use of various literary prose forms and poems. Ottoman historical figures, famous conquests and victories were widely used in earlier times to transmit nationalist messages. But this time the authors tried to blend military commentary with nationalism, religion and other popular feelings.
This military renaissance was the main force behind the vigorous reorganization of the Ottoman military. However, neither German officers, who were working within the Ottoman Army, nor other foreign military officers in the empire, seemed to notice these intellectual developments. They continued to perceive and describe the Ottoman military as archaic and its officer corps as ill-trained, corrupt and highly politicized. In short, western officers in the empire uniformly asserted that the Ottoman military was a hopeless case. Throughout the interim period and even during World War I, Turkish officers continued to communicate their ideas through official reports and personal letters to higher command echelons. Moreover, many of them maintained pocket diaries even during the most intense combat operations.
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At the Sephardic cemetery in Belgrade a memorial was built to Jewish soldiers who took part in the Balkan Wars and in WWI, a decade after the end of WWI. The memorial was designed by the architect Samuel Sumbul, and it was realized in Belgrade. This complex monumental and sepulchral entity had the roll of memorizing and permanent demarcating in front of the Serbian and Jewish public the role and participation of Jews, subjects of the Kingdom of Serbia, in the liberation of the original and the creation of the following state. The memorial to soldiers reflects the ideological and political complexity of the relations between the Jewish community and the Serbian state, but also the following Kingdom of SCS (Serbs, Croats and Slovenians) developing into a concept according to which Jews were called Serbs of Moses’ Faith, under the dynasty of Karađorđević. Building the monument had the goal of highlighting Jews as patriots who participated in the creation of a national heterogenous state in which the monument was built and also as loyal subjects of the dynasty under which they fought in this war. This sort of monumental memory legitimized the belonging of the Jewish people to the broader state community, by the principle of spilt blood and military merits, taking into consideration century’s old Jewish experience of resisting assimilation and preservation of the personal religious and national identity. Observed in this way, the monument reflects the complex discourses in which these parallel identities and narratives are visually constituted and expressed.

In this paper, our aim is to trace the emergence of a subject who speaks in the first person, testifies to his experience in view of the humanity contra West. Balkan Wars and the resulting paramilitary violence brought about a disorientation regarding the frameworks of action: neither Sultanate nor Caliphate survived from the war. Classical authorities lost their efficacy in healing wounds and resolving the conflict. First time in the Ottoman history, testimonies were collected and published by humanitarian organizations in various languages. Translating ‘sovereign people’ into ‘survivors’, the violence inflicted upon by the enemy became the identity-fixing event through which series of people recognized each other as belonging to a shared category. ‘Turkish Nation’ is the assemblage of absent, raped, tortured and wounded bodies. Identification through the violence of the other made possible a transversal relationship between spatially displaced peoples and the emergence of a new modus of being-in-the-world: muhacir (refugee). Between Ottoman-Russian War of 1877 and Population Exchange with Greece in 1924, Anatolia received more than 3 million refugees, making more than half of the new Republic. Histories of modern nations start with ‘the nation’ of the citizenship. I am not interested in origins, but beginnings. Can we think of the body ‘un’politic of peoples before the capture of the state machine? Displaced and deterritorialized, abandoned to themselves under a collapsing Empire, refugees point to a wounded belonging. I argue that the fleshy presence of wounds, epidemics and violent death somaticized this condition and made possible a resementicization of sovereignty/subjectivity. Can we think modernity through the event and the resementicizations it bears as the enunciation of this fundamental fragility and the resulting accusations and responsibilizations founding the modern Republic?