Haidari Concentration Camp - Under The Germans

Under The Germans

The new German commandant, sergeant Rudi Trepte, quickly imposed a more rigid regime, with prisoners confined to their rooms in their free time, and visits were restricted to once a month. Meanwhile, the camp's population began to grow: 300 prisoners from Kalamata arrived in October, and 400 were transferred from the Averof prisons in early November. On 23 November however, Trepte and his two Greek translators were arrested by the Gestapo, for reasons as yet unknown. After a few days, on November 28, the camp passed under the authority of the SS, and the Sturmbannführer Paul Radomski.

Radomski was an "Old Fighter" of the Nazi Party, and one of the early companions of the feared security chief Reinhard Heydrich in Hamburg. However, he was considered as brutal even by his fellow SS officers. His personal file called him "primitive", and as commander of the Syrets concentration camp near Kiev he led a terror regime, ordering severe punishments for the smallest infractions, and often personally shooting or whipping the inmates, a habit he carried over at Haidari.

Under Radomski, the camp inmates were put to labour in two four-hour shifts each day except Sundays. The inmates were divided into groups of 100 men, with a hecatontarch in charge of each. However, the labour was not intended for any productive purposes, but merely to break the prisoners' morale: they were made to dig holes and then refill them, build walls and then break them down.

The first execution in the camp was carried out on 7 December, when Radomski personally executed a Greek Jewish man named Levi in front of the prisoners because he "attempted to escape during his arrest". This execution was to serve not only as a warning to the others, but, according to post-war psychological research, to "put the inmates in constant fear of their lives". In total, in the camp's one year of operations, about 1,800 people were executed, while another 300 died as a result of torture either at Haidari or in the Gestapo headquarters at Merlin street in central Athens. These numbers included 30 women, 104 invalids, and 230 students.

Radomski was relieved of his post in February 1944, after he threatened to shoot his own adjutant while drunk, and was replaced by Lieutenant Karl Fischer. Fischer reversed his predecessor's policies: instead of Radomski's brutal treatment, he relied on informants and spies among the prisoners. Despite the somewhat relaxed atmosphere, Fischer also oversaw the period of most activity on the camp: during spring and summer 1944, the Germans engaged in constant razzias, blockades and mass arrests in Athens, and the camp's inmate population peaking at several thousands in August, barely two months before Liberation. Several hundred of the people captured in these round-ups were then transported to Germany for forced labour.

German reprisal policies also saw a sharp rise in executions, most famously the case of the 200 Communists who were executed on 1 May 1944 at Kaisariani as a retaliation for the ambush and murder, by ELAS partisans, of German General Franz Krech at Molaoi in Laconia.

In March, the Germans also imprisoned several prominent politicians, whom they suspected of contacts with the British. These included the former Prime Ministers Georgios Kaphantaris, Themistoklis Sophoulis and Stylianos Gonatas, all leaders of the pre-war Liberal Party. The Athens SiPo/SD chief, Walter Blume, intended to execute them, along with other public figures, as the German army would withdraw, leaving the country in turmoil. In the end, Blume's "Chaos Thesis" was dismissed by his superiors, and the politicians were released in early September. Blume was arrested but released in 1953; he died in 1977.