By William Mallinson
Athens, 21 April 2026
Introduction
Before dealing with the case of two collaborationist Jews of the Netherlands and Greece, I must write the following: any reader who thinks that criticising Jews is ‘anti-Semitic’ is mistaken, and a victim of subtle propaganda. This is because the vast majority of the Semitic peoples are Arabs. Thus the term actually means ‘dislike/hatred of Semites, i.e. mainly Arabs, Assyrians and Jews. The term ‘antisemitism’ was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr to replace the term Judenhass (‘Jew-hatred’) with a more respectable- and ‘scientific’-sounding term. It would have been more honest to simply use the term ‘Jewish’, as I do in this article.
A few years after the introduction of the pseudo-term, came a backlash, in the form of modern political Zionism, established as a movement in 1897 when Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress. While the idea of returning to Zion had existed for centuries, perhaps from when the Romans expelled the Jews from Palestine, the organised political movement developed in the late 19th century in response to European ‘antisemitism’ (i.e. anti-Judaism).
At the risk of being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ by fanatic Zionists, who seem to control the Western media today, I am now going to criticise two Jewish collaborators, one a Dutch citizen, the other a Greek one.
The Dutch Experience
In 1939, there were around 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands (total population about 9 million), of whom around 75% were taken away and died. The Dutch police were rewarded by the Nazis for every Jew they identified. Given the extreme behaviour of the German occupiers in the last year of the war, a staggering 200,000 collaborators were imprisoned, and thirty-four executed, including a Jewess, Ans van Dijk.[1] As late as May 1948, there were still some 10,000 ‘political delinquents’ in camps. When the UK withdrew her armed forces, she did not hand the Netherlands to the US, as she did with Greece. The Dutch were in any case naturally anti-communist as a whole: there were about 200,000 members of the National Socialist Movement, and a Dutch Waffen SS Division.[2] A major exception was a Jew, Hans Hirschfeld, who kept his job as head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs throughout the war. He was rather luckier than the likes of the above-mentioned Ans van Dijk. Bizarrely, he was merely discharged with honour from the Dutch Civil Service, then becoming Dutch Representative on the Committee on European Economic Co-operation.
The Greek Experience
In 1939, there were about 75,000 Jews in Greece (total population about 7.5 million), of whom around 85% were taken away and died. The Greeks, unlike most conformist Dutch, protected and hid Jews from the Germans whenever they could. Unlike other German-occupied countries, there was no Greek SS division. Emulating the Dutch Jew Hirschfeld, the most famous collaborator was the Chief Rabbi of the Jews, Zvi Koretz. He provided the German occupiers with a list of the Jews of Thessaloniki, and encouraged them to obey the deportation orders and go to Poland[3]. Such stories have never been satisfactorily explained. An apologist, (Jewish) had a paper published, where she tries to ‘explain’ Koretz’s behaviour with the following weasel words: ‘The portrayal of Koretz as a collaborator and a traitor should thus betreated with caution and evaluated in the context of the needs of thevarious actors in this tragic story. Each actor had his own wounds to lick,his own house to rebuild, his own scruples to assuage. The memory bequeathed to their descendants is the product of these needs. History deals with narratives, not morals. It is up to readers to draw their own moral conclusions from these narratives. It is very hard, therefore, to judge whether the mere existence of a Jewish leadership at this historical crossroads was detrimental to the Jewish people and served Nazi plans. Possibly even in Salonika a power vacuum might have caused a turbulence that would have enabled more Jews to save their lives. If this hypothesis were a certainty, we would have to conclude that Koretz’s actions were detrimental to his community. However, this was something no one could have foreseen at the time. We can only theorize about it now, post factum and post mortem.’[4]
Perhaps, for some Nazis as well, the above words would go well with Hitler’s apologists.
In vivid contrast to the Netherlands, in Greece there were no executions, and only a few imprisonments, despite the Greek Resistance having been the toughest in occupied Europe. But in 1943, matters changed, and Churchill’s vicious anti-communism and emotional obsession with the return of an unpopular king reared its ugly head: the Security Battalions (Tagmata Asfalías) were formed: they were Greek right-wing, anti-communist paramilitary groups. Created by the puppet government of Ioannis Rallis and backed by the Nazis, their primary role was fighting the communist-led resistance group ELAS. Britain had secretly agreed with Germany in Lisbon that they would work together to destroy the ELAS. So it was that the Germans retreated from Greece with no fighting against the British, even supplying the Security Battalions with weapons. Unlike the Dutch Nazi leader Jan Mussert, who was executed, Rallis was only sent to prison. After the war, although security battalion members were put on trial, it quickly became clear that the Greek state did not really intend to punish collaborators, contrasting vividly with what happened in The Netherlands. Thus former supporters of Nazism were incorporated into the anti-communist state. Although the warring factions agreed to a truce at Varkiza in February 1945, the damage had been done. The parties had become so polarised that the agreement began to break down, due to a considerable extent to right-wing revenge. Even the Foreign Office wrote that a number of EAM complaints about the activities of the National Guard and right-wing organisations had ‘considerable justification’.[5] Greece was, in fact, the only previously German-occupied country that ended up being controlled to some extent by a small minority, the wartime collaborators.
To Consider
If some of you readers are indignant or even shocked by the above, it is important to remember the rôle of atavism, where in the end the lies are eventually overtaken by the truth, even generations later. Today, Greece still suffers from Churchill’s anti-communist obsession. Consider also that Hitler and Churchill, for all their social differences, had the following in common: both were competent painters, both hated communism, both had fought in uniform for their countries, and both disliked Jews. Indeed, before Churchill was told not to criticise Jews, he had already referred to ‘the schemes of the International Jew’, referring to a ‘sinister confederacy’, and calling them ‘a world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society’.[6] The language is redolent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
In contrast, according to the BBC, an Israeli soldier who recently hit a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in the Lebanon and the soldier who photographed the incident will receive 30 days of military detention. In other words, a slap on the wrist for public consumption. The genocidal Netanyahoo is probably sniggering in secret.
Finally
Many believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Jewish religion and those who believe and practise it. Jesus Christ tried very hard to make it humane, but was crucified for his attempt. Many are suspicious that the parts of the Old Testament claiming that God chose the Jews above all others were written by politically- and real estate-minded Jews. For some common sense, you readers can turn to Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honour and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.[7]
Perhaps it is time for Constantinople to convene another Holy Synod, to revisit old theology. If Bartholomew is worried about the Christian Zionist fanatics in the USA and elsewhere, then perhaps Moscow can do it.
Fanatics fear common sense.
[1] Some estimates put the figure at 40.
[2] For those of you wishing to delve deeper, I recomend Hirschfeld, Gerhard, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration, Berg, Oxford, 1988, and Mazower, Mark, After the War was Over, Princeton University Press, 2000, and ‘British Historians of Greece since the Second World War’, Synthesis – Review of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1996, in Mallinson, William, Cyprus, Diplomatic History and the Clash of Theory in International Relations, I.B. Tauris, 2010 and Bloomsbury, 2025, and From Neutrality to Commitment: Dutch foreign Policy, NATO and European Integration, I.B. Tauris, 2010, Bloomsbury 2020.
[3] Lewkovitz, Bea, ‘ “ After the War We Were All Together”: Jewish Memories of Post-war Thessaloniki”, in Mazower, Mark (ed.), After the War Was Over, Princeton University Press,2000, pp. 255 and 264.
[4] Rozen, Minna, ‘Jews and Greeks Remember Their Past: The Political Career of
Tzevi Koretz (1933-43),’ Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 111-166.
[5] Ibid., p.17, FO memorandum, 12 June 1945, NA-371/48323, file R 10376/48/19. See also Mallinson, William, The Real Story of the Relationship between Britain and Greece, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024, and Οι ελληνο-βρετανικές σχέσεις: Ξετυλίγοντας το μύθο, Papazisi, Athens, 2024.
[6] ‘A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People’, Illustrated Sunday Herald, London, 8 February 1920 in Irving, David, Churchill’s War, vol. 1, Arrow Books, London, 1989, p. 20.
[7] Letter of Paul to the Romans, 2 (9-11).
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