On this day in 1941, the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. The Nazi invasion devastated the civilian populations and wiped out the Jewish community in Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and others. The invasion began one year earlier when Italy, then under dictator Benito Mussolini, was still allied with Germany. The Nazis stormed and occupied both Yugoslavia and Greece, killing over 17,000 civilians in one bombing raid on Belgrade, the modern capital of Serbia. The Nazis then immediately rounded up Jewish populations throughout the Balkans, placed the Jews in ghettos, and deported them in cattle cars to death camps throughout Europe. These Jews were the descendants of ancient communities and those exiled from Spain in 1492, many of these communities even still spoke Ladino (the Hebraic-Spanish dialect of ancient Spanish Jews) in the 20th century. They lived happily in southeast Europe for several centuries, until the rise of Nazi Germany. About 77,000 Jews lived in Greece before World War II; most Greek Jews had been living in the region since the Roman Empire over 2,300 years ago. Most of Greece’s Sephardic Jews that descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492 lived in Salonika. Of Salonika’s 43,000 Jews, 40,000 were murdered by the Nazis. In total, about 60-70,000 of Greece’s Jews were wiped out; that was over 80% of Greece’s Jewish community. By the spring of 1944, the Wehrmacht rounded up thousands of Jews from Athens, Rhodes, and Corfu and deported them to extermination camps in Poland. Many Greek Christians hid Jewish families from the Germans, while Greek Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau attempted a mass uprising and even managed to blow up the crematorium in the death camp. The Jewish population of Yugoslavia totaled about 80,000. The Yugoslav government at first attempted to appease the Nazis by passing antisemitic laws, but those laws were met with opposition from ministers and citizens attempting to overthrow the government. Jews then became required to wear a yellow Star of David or identification badge, were forbidden from owning businesses, and were forcibly relocated to ghettos. Men ages 16 to 60 were forced into hard labor, and from 1941 to ‘42, most of Serbia’s Jewish community was murdered by mass executions, gas vans, or starvation. Only 1,500 Serbian Jews survived; others were deported to Auschwitz and various concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe. Over 20,000 Jews were murdered in Croatia alone, and only a few were rescued by individuals who would later be designated as Righteous Among the Nations. Out of Macedonia’s 8,000 Jews, only 1,000 survived. About 50,000 Jews lived in Bulgaria before World War II, but by February 1943 the Bulgarian government planned to deport over 20,000 Jews from the occupied regions of Thrace and Macedonia. Before the deportations were set to begin, a Bulgarian deputy speaker of the parliament managed to convince the government to cancel the deportations of Jews from Bulgaria itself but did not stop those of Thrace and Macedonia. Most of the Bulgarian people protested their government’s compliance with Nazi policies. When the Soviet army reached Bulgaria in 1945, they claimed that not a single Jew had been murdered there, and in fact, 48,000 survived, although they suffered property and wealth confiscations, forced relocations, and forced harsh labor. Additionally, 600 Albanian Jews were killed during the War, but most of the Albanian people sheltered Jewish refugees throughout its mountainous regions, resulting in some 1,800 Jews that survived by the end of the War.