The Greek narrative of the Katochi in eastern Macedonia and Thrace invariably throws up bitter testimonies of the experience of Bulgarian occupation. That in itself might offer a discordant counterpoint to the “good Bulgarian” narrative as protectors of their Jews. But while the Bulgarian role in the “Final Solution” of Thracian and Macedonian Jewry synchronous with the Nazi destruction of the Salonika community is now well recognized - at least by Holocaust scholars - analyzing these events within a wider landscape of ethnonational struggle for the region has proved more elusive. The aim of this contribution is not primarily to reconfigure the hierarchy of perpetrators. Rather, our purpose is to consider how the 1941-1944 Axis reach into the southern Balkans provided the pretext for a renewed bout of competitive, geopolitically aggravated, nation-state building. Recent studies of wartime Croatia, Romania, and the Hungarian-annexed Carpatho-Rus, suggest how culturally homogenizing, genocidal urges of this kind were central to the mindset of essentially independent, elite-led, eastern European regimes. But does occupied Greece constitute one of them? To come closer to the answer of why Greece failed its Jews, more specifically its Salonika Jews, we argue for a reintegration of these events within a broader temporal as well as geographically Greek, Macedonian, and Balkan frame.