Post-doc researcher: Dr Alexandra Patrikiou
Academic Supervisor: Prof. Christina Koulouri
The Holocaust in the different Jewish communities of the Greek state (as indeed elsewhere) was affected by several local factors, including local agents and their role, the size of the community itself, the degree of their integration, which zone of occupation they belonged to and the different conducts of local authorities and elites. Even though the topic has recently received systematic academic attention, there are still many aspects of the phenomenon worth examining so as to understand it in a more holistic way. One of these aspects is the role of those agents that didn’t act decisively for the course of events, but may have contributed to the events being smoothly carried out. The regular publishing of anti-Semitic articles both in collaborationist newspapers and in censored ones constitutes a characteristic example of that kind of agents. The regularity of anti-Semitic articles appearing both in collaborationist and censored local Press and anti-Semitic discourse that ranged from a mild critical prejudice against the Jews to a full-blown racist discourse, is very likely to have contributed to paving the ground for the justification of local or nation-wide deportations to their audiences. On the other hand, such anti-Semitic discourse in the local press may have reflected and served already established anti-Semitic dispositions of local audiences. Focusing on the press newspapers and journals issued in the cities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Volos and the two largest cities of Crete, Chania and Herakleion, this research aims to provide valuable input on the role of the press in the promotion of anti-Semitism through an analysis of the ways anti-Semitic discourse was employed by the Greek press during the years of Axis occupation. What is also important is the objective that the Greek paradigm will allow us to test some of the current academic conclusions in Shoah history: like Jeffrey Herf’s important conclusion: whether (and how much) the Holocaust was indeed evident when it was actually being carried out, or David Bankier’s analysis of the German media, who concluded that the Nazi party used the technique of “imposed guesswork” or Jan Grabowski’s point of view that the German anti-Jewish propaganda in Poland scarcely changed its rhetoric, even after the annihilation of Polish Jewry in 1942-43. At the end of the research, apart from the publishing of papers in academic journals, an open access database of all relevant articles will have been created.
