Forced labour: from Kokkinia to Auerbach

The Tragedy of Kokkinia took place on Thursday, August 17, 1944. The Greek collaborationist military groups known as Security Battalions stockaded the area of Kokkinia and rounded up all men over the age of 15 on Osia Xeni Square. Those who were known to the collaborators for their participation in the Resistance were tortured and executed on the spot to set an example. Others were sent away to be executed. Most of the gathered crowds, thousands of Kokkinia residents, were taken to the SS army camp in Chaidari. 

A few days later, two months before the withdrawal of the Nazi army from Greece, the last shipment of Greek prisoners-forced labourers was sent to Germany. A few of them, about 130 people, disembarked in the area between Bensheim and Auerbach in Hesse where they worked for the Heimann military industry. For eight months, the hostages of Auerbach worked to build a factory hidden inside a mountain quarry. At least fifteen of them lost their lives there and were buried in a mass grave outside the wall of the Auerbach cemetery.  

This unknown story was unearthed when, in 1987, a group of Greek students discovered a rock next to the wall of the Auerbach cemetery engraved with some Greek names among others. In 1990, a research team sent a letter to Nikos Maniatis, a social worker who had migrated to Germany, asking him to locate survivors from Auerbach. Upon receiving the letter, Maniatis published an announcement in some Athenian newspapers and was eventually able to contact some of the survivors. In spring 1991, he met seven former hostages taken from the Osia Xeni Square. As he mentions in his text, ‘After 46 years they didn’t recognise each other, even though most of them lived in Kokkinia. They were deeply moved when they showed the number carved on their arm by I.S. They embraced each other and exchanged stories from Auerbach’. 

In spring 1992, the Municipal Council of Bensheim invited the hostages and their relatives to visit the city on the Municipality’s expense. Nikos Maniatis accompanied them. After that, six more such trips were arranged, the last being in November 2003. By that time, five of the hostages had died. The Municipal authorities built a monument on the site of the mass grave that the students discovered in 1987.

Giogros Maniatis, the son of Nikos Maniatis, studied anthropology and, in 2004, wrote a paper on this story. He has kindly allowed us to use the material presented here.

The refugee neighbourhoods today

The urban refugee neighbourhoods funded by the Refugee Settlement Commission or other housing schemes tend to look alike for many reasons. They were built based on the same or similar urban zoning plans; they were characterised by small houses which incorporated public space as part of the house when the weather allowed; the people who lived in these houses had similar migration histories and gradually developed relationships and a shared everyday life. The original residential area of Nea Kokkinia is no different.

Today, the refugee houses of Nikaia and the other refugee neighbourhoods established in the 1920s house the migrants and refugees of the 20th and 21st century. The houses built for the refugees of 1922 offered a safe haven to the newcomers of different periods over the century that followed: internal migrants, migrants from Albania, Eastern Europe, or the global South, war refugees in 2015. This constant ebb and flow of mobility highlights the common characteristics and needs shared by migrant populations. Whether frictionless or tense, the co-existence of the adults and the shared games of the children in the neighbourhood’s courtyards signify the continuation of life in space despite all the hardships. The houses of the first refugees continue to host the hopes and dreams of successive waves of newcomers to the neighbourhood.

When we look at refugee houses and refugee interwar settlements in general, our gaze tends to focus on the past and not the present. We analyse how important and valuable they were 100 years ago from a social, economic and urban planning perspective, while we disregard an entire century of movement and how it has affected their population composition. We also tend to ignore the problems their current residents face, having to live in old houses with numerous construction issues. To this day, the original refugee settlement of Nea Kokkinia is composed of houses and courtyards full of life and stories of mobility spanning a century marked by successive population movements. They have housed the hopes and dreams of newcomers from different eras and continue to do so. The entire history of mobility of the 20th century is contained within the few square metres of the houses of Nikaia.