In early March Wisliceny notified Chief Rabbi Koretz that Eichmann wanted the entire commnity to be deported. Koretz was deeply shaken, and begged Wisliceny to use his influence to halt the process. He suggested instead using the Jews as labourers within Greece for this was the period when the Germans were finding it difficult to enforce their civil mobilisation decree among the rest of the Greek population. But not for the first time ideological considerations were put before economic rationality. Koretz’s pleas failed to sway Eichmann, who instructed his officials to proceed with the deportations. Once a German police unit arrived from Belgrade, the train transports to the north began. The German consul in Salonia, who had been monitroing local Jewry since before the war, informed Berlin on 15 March that the first transport of 2,600 people had already left the city.
→ Mark Mazaower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Εxperience of Occupation, 1941-44, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 1995
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