Haidari Concentration Camp, in the sparsely populated suburb of the same name west of Athens (5,868 inhabitants according to the 1940 census), began to be built in 1937 at the foot of Mount Poikilon as a training centre for the Greek army; however, construction works were interrupted with the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War. From then on it was abandoned and remained unused until 3 September 1943, when it was “inaugurated” as a concentration camp with the transfer of 590 detainees from the Italian camp of Larissa, which was to be dissolved. These consisted of 243 communists transferred from the prisons of Akronauplia, 20 former exiles from Anafi, and 327 prisoners of the Italians.[1] On 10 September the camp facilities passed into German jurisdiction, remaining so until the dissolution of the camp on 27 September 1944.[2] During the first two months the camp functioned as an annex of Averoff Prison, until the end of November 1943, when it passed definitively under the control of the SS.
In the approximately one year of its operation, Haidari developed in parallel with the reorganisation and expansion of the purely police services—the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, SiPo), the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), and the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei)—and evolved into the largest camp in occupied Greece. It is estimated that approximately 20,000–25,000 persons passed through the camp: men and women, captured military personnel, resistance fighters, all the members and cadres of the Communist Party of Greece who had been imprisoned since the Metaxas Dictatorship (1936–1941), Jews, hostages arrested in various clearance operations in the countryside and in “blockades” in the capital region, political leaders such as the leader of the Liberal Party and later Prime Minister Themistoklis Sophoulis, Stylianos Gonatas, and Georgios Kafantaris. From the beginning of 1944, members of EAM, EDES, espionage networks, British services, and even isolated cases of members of the Security Battalions or German services who had been accused of contacts with the Allies or criminal offences, as well as trade unionists, military men, pupils, workers, and senior civil servants, coexisted in Haidari as hostages. The use by the occupation authorities of those convicted as “hostages” turned Haidari, on the one hand, into a central field of application of the Nazi policy of exterminating the political and racial enemies of the Third Reich and, on the other hand, into a vital node in the network of repression—arrests, executions, and deportations—in Athens and throughout Greek territory.[3] In November 1944, the newspaper The New York Times included Haidari among the largest Nazi Lager in occupied Europe, documenting that the scale and reputation of the camp had exceeded Greek borders.[4]
Its first commandant—who assumed his duties on 29 November 1943—was the major (Sturmbannführer) of the SD, Paul Otto Radomski, a former officer of Einsatzgruppe C in the Kiev area, one of the “Special Action Units” responsible for the mass murders of Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians on the eastern front. Radomski is described, both in official German documents and in numerous testimonies, as extremely violent and sadistic. His superiors regarded him as an “old thug” (alte Schläger) and as “primitive in thought and feeling,” a man who had risen to leadership positions exclusively because of his seniority in the SS.[5] In the same documents from his personal file it is noted that his National Socialist worldview could be considered “at best elementary” and that he himself was nothing more than a typical example of “blind bureaucratic obedience and sense of duty.”[6] The condemned Major Zambetas states in his testimony:
In the month of January [1944], Major Radomsky, wishing to punish the prisoners because some of them had gone to the lavatories near the entrance of the camp for their bodily needs, despite the fallen snow, ordered all of us to crawl on our bellies for five hundred metres, while he followed us in this manner with pistol in hand and his two wolfhounds, which had torn to pieces the elderly men who lagged behind.[7]
This overt violence seems to have stemmed from a sense of absolute personal power. Describing the character of the camp commandant, Themos Kornaros noted that “he had enormous camp-commandant experience, took drugs, and had no respect for the other German SS men. He did as he pleased, supplementing the regulations. He reckoned with no one, and he never let any order pass without modifying it in his own way.”[8] On 7 December 1943 Radomski shot dead in cold blood with his pistol the Jewish prisoner Haim Levi from Ioannina, a second lieutenant in the Greek army.[9] In the end, it was less the increasing excesses against the prisoners and more his brutality towards his subordinates that led to his removal from command, specifically the incident of 17 February 1944, when, in a state of drunkenness, he punched his adjutant and broke his jaw. His demotion to lieutenant (Obersturmführer) and his sentence of six months’ imprisonment for embezzlement and theft is connected with the fact that
His successor in command was the lieutenant of the SiPo, Karl Fischer, who assumed his duties on 27 February 1944. Born in 1908 in Eckward near Hanover and a member of the SS since 1931, with membership number 42987, Fischer had served from 1933 to 1937 in the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” the principal paramilitary body of the SS that acted as the Führer’s guard in Berlin and later evolved into the 1st SS Division of the same name. Before being transferred to Greece in January 1944 to be placed under the orders of the Commander of the Security Police (Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei, BdS), he had served for two years in Einsatzgruppe D on the eastern front.[10] Vivid descriptions of the commandants survive from their very victims, emphasizing their different personalities in relation to the mission they had undertaken. Compared to the “sadistic, drunken, beast-like type” Radomski, Fischer was “cold, devious, and sinister” and “concealed, beneath a somewhat less barbarous exterior, the same criminality and a comparable sadism.”[11]
The German guard of the camp was divided into an external guard (one guard company [Wachkompanie] headed by one police lieutenant [Schutzpolizei], 23 non-commissioned officers, and 126 soldiers[12]) and an internal guard, composed of 38 SS officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men. The internal guard, whose regular strength amounted to 15–20 men, consisted of ethnic Germans from Hungary and Romania, with an average age of 30.[13] There are several testimonies concerning persons and events, mainly from depositions after Liberation for the purpose of building case files for war crimes:
The deputy commandants were Warrant Officer Franz Loeffler, an Austrian, and Warrant Officer Techt, distinguished for his inhuman behaviour. The other executioners were all ordinary soldiers, most of them Hungarians. Of some of them I remember the names Richard Weiss, E. Hirschmann, Nikolaos Schäffer, Jakob Sunerits (the prison executioner), Schmitzer, A. Meltzer, Jakob Mourgessan, and the worst of all, Emmerich Kovats.[14]
The level of detail in some of these depositions (ranks, names, descriptions of facial characteristics), beyond their accuracy or otherwise, also reflects the high degree of “familiarity” between guards and prisoners in a delimited space of absolute domination of the former over the latter. Particularly characteristic in this respect are the nicknames, such as “Charos” [Death], “Jaw-breaker,” and “Wire,” and the descriptions of tortures and acts of violence belonging to a special universe of confinement.
The wildest, most unfeeling, and most ruthless of all the men of the internal guard was the Hungarian German Kovats. An eighteen-year-old youth, fiery blond, short, thin, ugly-faced, with small eyes and the fingers of his left hand cut off—for which reason the prisoners called him “the cripple”—he was a harsh and relentless torturer, a veritable executioner. Ever in motion, with pistol at his waist and whip in hand, and endowed with a rich imagination, he had become the terror of the camp.[15]
As was the case in all German concentration camps, the topography of Haidari corresponded to an internal logic of distributing detainees according to functions and levels of isolation. The camp consisted of block-buildings that functioned as detention barracks, as well as various structures, offices, barracks, storage areas, and workshops. Four blocks, originally intended for use as barracks, had been built in tiers from the entrance of the camp in the west towards the east. They were numbered 1–4 and had two storeys with windows on all sides, and each was divided into two mutually independent sections, eastern and western, each with its own entrance with 8–10 steps on the south-eastern and south-western sides of the building, lavatories, a washroom with taps, and a concrete cistern. In blocks 3 and 4 were the cells for men; in the basement of block 4 a space for “light isolation” had been arranged, while the western section of block 3 functioned as an infirmary, with an internal arrangement of wards, offices, a dining room, and a storeroom. Entering from the central entrance—the western gate—one found, in order, the kitchens; diagonally to their left block 21, which served as a store for materials and workshops; and directly behind it block 20, which housed the camp headquarters. In front of 20 and 21, to the north, were block 16 (baths) and block 15, the disciplinary building of the camp, which was converted into the isolation block, undoubtedly the most emblematic building of the whole complex.
East of the four blocks, at some distance, stood block 6, where the women were held, Jewish and political prisoners in different sections of the building. Next to the building were the washhouses. Between block 4 and block 6 rose an internal elevated watchtower that marked the eastern boundary of the “free camp” area, where prisoners were permitted to be. In the remaining areas the space was occupied by those working in labour details or assigned to fatigues.[16] In the northern part of the camp, east of block 15, was the guards’ dormitory and a large single-storey building—block 13—which was used as a storage area for goods looted from warehouses, houses, and shops in Athens, many of them Jewish, such as the shop of Joseph Megir on 17 Aiolou Street and that of Benroubi on Nikious Street. The processed items—furniture, fabrics, jewellery—were intended for various SS services or were sent to Germany.[17] Antonis Flountzis gives a detailed description of the objects:
What they were carrying cannot be described: rolls of cloth—woollen and silk—ready-made clothes, men’s and women’s, dinner services and glassware of every kind, sewing machines, irons, cutlery, kitchen utensils, stoves, furniture, paintings, etc., etc. They unloaded everything into block 13, a large single-storey building, which because of all the glassware in the camp they called the “glass shop.”[18]
Because of its size and of its importance for the German occupation regime, Haidari became an important centre of forced labour. Prisoners were divided by speciality (electricians, carpenters, plumbers, etc.) and assigned to one of the tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking workshops, or the machine shop. Holding a high place in the society of prisoners were the interpreters—the Akronauplia prisoners Panagiotis Mavrommatis and Napoleon Soukatzidis, and the resistance fighter of German origin Dinos Vassenhoven—the doctors, such as Antonis Flountzis, also from Akronauplia, the ward leaders, the barbers, and so on. External labour was also extensive, mainly on works of military importance such as airfields, while in the history of the camp special prominence is given to the dispatch of four “centuries” (work groups of 100 men) to Piraeus to clear rubble after the great Allied bombing of 11 January 1944.[19] Some information on forced-labour projects is also derived from post-war judicial sources. In 1956, the Greek War Crimes Bureau officially informed the Bonn prosecutor’s office about a Luftwaffe officer who was accused of the following offences: “The prisoners in Haidari camp were transported daily to the airfields of Faleron, Hassani, and Skaramangas in order to carry out forced labour connected with the military operations of the German Wehrmacht. The work was very hard and lasted from 6 in the morning until 6 and sometimes until 7.30 in the evening. Commander of the aforementioned military airfields was Air Force Major Dönninger, who behaved particularly harshly towards the prisoners. He inspected the work sites and beat with clubs, stones, or fists any prisoner who, in his judgment, did not work hard enough. Sometimes he even shot prisoners with a revolver which he usually held in his hand. He showed particularly criminal behaviour towards women relatives of the prisoners who gathered every day at Faleron airfield to see the prisoners from afar or to learn whether their relatives in Haidari camp were still alive. He shot two women and seriously wounded them. He intimidated them and forced them to plunge into the sea with their clothes on.”[20]
Haidari’s role as a camp of concentration and transit began immediately after it commenced operation. In October 1943, 300 men from Kalamata who had been arrested by the Security Battalions entered the camp. On 4 November there followed a contingent of 400 prisoners from Averoff Prison, mainly members of resistance organisations, and two months later 324 of the approximately one thousand disabled men who had been arrested on 30 November in various hospitals.[21] From the beginning of 1944, all those arrested by the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Security Battalions, the Special Security Police, and the Gendarmerie in Athens and Piraeus began arriving at Haidari at a geometric rate, with the most massive arrivals being those from the “blockades”: 150 inhabitants from Kokkinia and 130 from Kalogreza in March, 600 from Vyronas, 800 from Dourgouti-Katsipodi, and more than 4,000 from Kokkinia in August. In addition to being a place of confinement, Haidari functioned as a transit camp for those deported to the territory of the Third Reich. The first transport of political prisoners left from Rouf railway station on 25 May, carrying approximately 850 men and 61 women. The women ended up in Ravensbrück camp, while the men were sent to Neuengamme.[22]
The camp soon developed into the main reservoir of hostages for German firing squads, with the principal site of executions being the Kaisariani Shooting Range. The relevant announcements in the occupation press were often accompanied by full lists of names. The most significant event—and the largest execution of hostages—was the execution of 200 communists, former inmates of Akronauplia, on 1 May 1944 at Kaisariani, as a measure of “atonement” for the loss of the commander of the 41st Fortress Division, Major General Franz Krech, in an ELAS ambush in the Molaoi area on 27 April. May was the bloodiest month in the dense history of Haidari, as it was followed by three further mass executions, with more than 250 victims, including 10 women who were shot on 10 May at the Kaisariani Shooting Range.[23] Also notable are the executions at Harvati in Attica on 21 July (54 by hanging), at Mandra in Attica on 9 August (50), and the execution of 59 men and women, mainly members of espionage networks and organisations, on 8 September 1944 in the area of Daphni Monastery, at the site where today the Diomedes Botanical Garden is located, among them Lela Karagianni and the EDES second lieutenant Manolis Litinas.[24] The number of victims cannot be calculated with absolute precision, but in any case it far exceeds 2,000 persons.[25] The camp was so closely identified with the process of mass reprisals that:
the dissolution of Haidari, the yard of slaughter, which every little while sent innocent victims to the sacrificial altar of Kaisariani, could leave no doubt that it was the beginning of the end. Of an end, that is, in which until the very last day of the Germans’ departure the crimes did not cease.[26]
Some of the most dramatic pages in the history of the Holocaust in Greece were written at Haidari. From March to August 1944, 4,468 Greek Jews from the communities of Athens, Corfu, Rhodes, and Kos passed through the camp, gradually being deported to German camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among the first Jews of Haidari was also the twenty-one-year-old Shlomo Venezia from Thessaloniki, who was led to Haidari together with the other detainees from the Synagogue on 24 March 1944:
As there was no room for us in the main building, they dumped us in the baths, which were in the prison yard. There was nothing there, neither beds nor even a mat, only cement on the ground and the showers above our heads. It was very exhausting and unpleasant. From the yard gunshots could be heard constantly—the executions, after summary procedures, of the political prisoners.[27]
Although the Jews’ stay was relatively short, the conditions of confinement and the treatment by the guards were so dreadful for them that they remained indelibly impressed in camp memories. Sam Nehama, fourteen years old, was violently transferred to Haidari from a house in Athens where he had been hiding, after going through the ordeal of interrogation on Merlin Street. Of his experience he characteristically states:
The worst period was in Haidari; there it was worse than Auschwitz. I worked very hard at forced labour, moving heavy stones back and forth pointlessly all day long, under the constant threat of the whip.[28]
The first transport left for Auschwitz on 2 April 1944 with approximately 700 men and women who had been caught in Athens. The transports of the Jews of Rhodes and Corfu that followed in July were among the most violent. Nehama, as well as Flountzis, agree that the Jews of Rhodes arrived at the camp in horrific condition. Anna Almeleh, a Jew from Rhodes, refers to that transport: “We suffered; it was July and there was terrible heat. We lost many during that transfer. I never saw my mother again, nor my father and my brother.”[29] Lucy Amato, on the same transport, states that the Rhodian Jews cried, asking for food and water.[30] In his testimony Henri Botton emphasizes the appalling manner of their transport: “There were some 3,000 women and children, under infernal conditions, the mother losing the child and the child the mother. They were carrying unbelievable things, pots, pans…”[31] The same grim atmosphere is described by Matina Alalouf, who was detained in Haidari in June 1944: “We were in one room, piled on top of one another. Beatings, inspections from above and below. There was no food.”[32]
The occupation history of Haidari came to an end on 24 September 1944 and a few months later the camp once again passed into the possession of the Greek army and was officially renamed “Karaiskakis Camp A.” On 1 May 1946 it was transferred by the III Mountain Brigade “Rimini” to the newly established Signal Corps Training Centre, and from then until today it has functioned as the seat of the Signal Corps.[33] During the Civil War the camp continued to operate as a place of confinement, terror, and torture, with soldiers but also civilians of left-wing convictions among its victims.[34]
The camp continues to belong to the Greek Army. Until 1982, the year of the official recognition of the National Resistance by the PASOK government, entry into the camp was not allowed. In 1982 commemorative events were permitted inside the camp and Block 15 was recognised as a monument of the National Resistance in April 1984. At the entrance of the building a plaque has been placed bearing the inscription: “Block 15, 1943–44. Place of sacrifice and martyrdom of the fighters of the National Resistance. Stronghold and trench of the struggle for the freedom of our people.” The Municipality of Haidari has adopted as its emblem a poppy emerging from within the barbed-wire Block 15. The road leading to the camp was renamed “Street of the Fighters of Haidari Camp.” After many efforts and initiatives, Block 15 was renovated in 2016 and today is open to visitors by permission of the military authorities.
Footnotes
[1] Antonis I. Flountzis, Haidari: Castle and Altar of the National Resistance, Papazisis, Athens, 1976, p. 21.
[2] Ibid., p. 749.
[3] See Nikos Papanastasiou, Hagen Fleischer, “The ‘Organized Chaos’: the German occupation administration in Greece,” in Christos Hadziiosif and Prokopis Papastratis (eds.), History of Greece in the 20th Century. Second World War. Occupation–Resistance 1940–1945, vol. G1, Vivliorama, Athens, 2007, pp. 120–121.
[4] Diplomatic and Historical Archive Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (YDIA), 1945, file 4.8, A.C. Sedgwick, “Haidari Prison Outside Athens ranks high among Nazi horrors,” New York Times, 2 November 1944.
[5] See Hagen Fleischer, Crown and Swastika: Greece of Occupation and Resistance 1941–1944, vol. II, Papazisis, Athens, 1995, p. 334.
[6] Ralph Klein, “Chaidari,” in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 9, Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich, 2009, pp. 559–572 (566).
[7] Dimitris Gatopoulos, History of the Occupation, Melissa, Athens, 1961, p. 221. Cf. Flountzis, p. 55.
[8] Themos Kornaros, Haidari Camp, Athens, 1963, pp. 124–125.
[9] Civil Registry Archive of the Municipality of Athens, Death Certificate of Haim Levi, 51/IA/1945, where the registrar’s note on the cause of death reads: “execution by the German Camp Commandant Radomsky.”
[10] National Archives (NARA), T 175, Roll 475, fr. 2998336, Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei Athen, Personalliste, 15 July 1944.
[11] YDIA, 1945, file 4.1, Directorate of Studies, Kingdom of Greece, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate of Studies and Information, protocol no. 167/D.M. 2, Athens, 11 January 1945, “On the German concentration camp of Haidari.” In the same file, Konstantinos Vatikiotis, “My detention in the German concentration camp at Haidari,” n.d.
[12] BArch, RH 34/263, Anlage zu Stadtkommandantur Athen, Tgb. Nr. 730/44, Truppenliste der in Athen anwesenden Einheiten, 10 April 1944. The same document—April 1944—also indicates other German units with their headquarters listed as “Haidari barracks” (Chaidari Kaserne): (A) Anti-Aircraft Artillery School 21 (Feld-Flakartillerie-Schule 21) for the sector of Southeastern Europe, recently transferred from Belgrade, with a total of 2 officers, 28 non-commissioned officers, and 96 enlisted men; (B) 21/XII Motorised Anti-Aircraft Battery (Flak-Transport-Batterie 21./XII) with a strength of 2 officers, 13 non-commissioned officers, 82 enlisted men, and 12 Italian auxiliaries (Hiwis); (C) 2nd Naval Motor Transport Unit (Mar. Kw.-Einsatz-Abt.) with 3 officers, 46 non-commissioned officers, and 261 enlisted men.
[13] BArch, R/70 Griechenland/I, Durchgangslager Chaidari an Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei, 8 May 1944, various documents. The “Hungarian-German” origin of most of the men is also confirmed by Flountzis, p. 79.
[14] YDIA, 1945, file 4.1, Directorate of Studies, Konstantinos Vatikiotis, “My detention in the German concentration camp at Haidari,” n.d. On the other officers and soldiers of the guard, cf. Flountzis, pp. 78–81, where the information is given that the greater part of the guard consisted of Germans from Hungary.
[15] Flountzis, p. 79.
[16] Ibid., pp. 23–25.
[17] YDIA, 1945, file 4.1, Directorate of Studies, Konstantinos Vatikiotis, “My detention in the German concentration camp at Haidari,” n.d.
[18] Flountzis, p. 66.
[19] Giorgos Tzinis, Blood-Stained Notebooks. Kallithea–Averoff–Haidari, Thoukydidis, Athens, 1980.
[20] BArch, B 162/28317, Der Leiter des Königlich Griechischen Nationalen Kriegsverbrecherbüros an den Herrn OStA Bonn, Bonn, 10 April 1956.
[21] Flountzis, pp. 45, 282–285.
[22] Detlef Garbe, Konzentrationslager Neuengamme. Geschichte, Nachgeschichte, Erinnerungen, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme/Edition Temmen, 2014, pp. 104, 134.
[23] Georganta, Eleni, filmed interview, mog018, 29 July 2016, Digital Archive “Memories of the Occupation in Greece / Erinnerungen an die Okkupation in Griechenland,” occupation-memories.org, DOI: 10.1234/dis.mog018 (last accessed 30 November 2017). Cf. Flountzis, pp. 413–422.
[24] For all details, see Konstantinos Svolopoulos, Haidari, 8 September 1944: The Invisible Army before the Firing Squad, Patakis, Athens, 2002.
[25] Klein, p. 560.
[26] From a chronicle by Nikos G. Metaxotos (February 1982), in: Chatzipateras, Fafaliou, p. 99. Indicative of the strong psychological impact and the enormous dimensions acquired by the “Bastille of Greece” is the estimate, immediately after Liberation, that at least 85,000 prisoners had been executed. See Iris Skaravaiou, The Haunted Haidari (The Greek Bastille), Athens, 1944, p. 23.
[27] Shlomo Venezia, Sonderkommando. Through the Hell of the Gas Chambers, trans. Kyriaki Chra, Patakis, Athens, 2008, pp. 48–51.
[28] Visual History Archive, interview no. 687, 25 January 1995. Cf. interview with Anna Maria Droubouki, 9 January 2008.
[29] Visual History Archive, interview no. 06738-91, 16 November 1995.
[30] Visual History Archive, interview no. 14687-21, 8 May 1996.
[31] Visual History Archive, interview no. 42858.
[32] Visual History Archive, interview no. 48964.
[33] Greek Army website, last accessed 5 December 2017.
[34] ASKI, KKE Archive, box 421 25.3, file 25/3/5, letter of Petros Stamatinos, 13 August 1946. In the same file, letters of Ioannis Drakonakis (17 January 1947), Georgios Pantazis (16 January 1947), and Konstantinos Avtsardos (13 February 1947).
