he ceased. In 1943, the Germans began the extermination of the Jews of Greece, and their deportations to Nazi concentration camps. Damaskinos formally protested the actions of the occupational authorities. Damaskinos first spoke out on behalf of the Jews in March 1943 when he published public letters addressed to Prime Minister Konstantinos Logothetopoulos of the Hellenic State and Günther Altenburg of the Auswärtiges Amt, which together with the Wehrmacht administered Greece. Using his moral authority as archbishop of Athens, Damaskinos also had 19 distinguished Greeks from the arts, the law, academia and business worlds co-sign his letter. Referring to the deportation of the Jews of Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz death camp which already began earlier in March 1943, Damaskinos wrote that he and others in the Orthodox faith followed the words of St. Paul that "there is neither Jew nor Greek". Altenburg in his reply to the archbishop denied that the Jews of Thessaloniki (which was one of the largest Jewish communities in the Balkans) were being exterminated when they arrived in Poland, claiming that they were merely sent to Poland to work in factories while Logothetopoulos never replied. According to the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, the appeal of Damaskinos and his fellow Greeks is unique as no document similar to the protest against the Nazis during World War II has come to light in any other European country. The letter in part reads: Damaskinos went on to publish the letter, even though the local Schutzstaffel (SS) commander, Jürgen Stroop, threatened to execute him by firing squad. Damaskinos's famous response to him was: The Archbishop was being boldly sarcastic, as he was referring to the lynching and hanging of Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople by a Turkish mob in 1821, the point being made that the SS commander would be acting in a similarly barbaric fashion if he were to carry out his threat. The churches under his jurisdiction were also ordered quietly by Damaskinos to distribute Christian baptismal certificates to Jews fleeing the Nazis, thus saving thousands of Romaniote Jews in and around Athens. Damaskinos advised his priests to do everything they could to help the Jews and to hide those for whom it was not possible to forge baptismal certificates. For his actions in saving Greek Jews during the Holocaust, he was named among the Righteous Among the Nations distinction by Yad Vashem. After the liberation After the