Encouraged by false accusations of Jewish collaboration with Bulgarians and communists to bring about the independence of Macedonia from Greece, refugees from Asia Minor, reservists of the Hellenic Army and members of nationalist organisations enacted a campaign of antisemitic violence and intimidation throughout June 1931.

Following limited responses from the local authorities, including the governor-general of Macedonia, Stylianos Gonatas, nationalists attacked several Jewish neighbourhoods on the night of 29–30 June 1931.

The greatest violence took place at Campbell, where the attacks resulted in the destruction of the neighbourhood, the deaths of a Christian resident, and dozens of injuries.

The government of Eleftherios Venizelos stated that it would support the Jewish community, but provided minimal financial assistance towards its recovery, with the result that thousands of Jews permanently left Thessaloniki, particularly for France and Palestine.

[10] The total number of displaced people exceeded 70,000, of whom more than 50,000 were Jews, but the Greek government prioritised finding homes for Orthodox Christians.

[12] The latter expulsions occurred with the approval and assistance of the Ottoman state, which employed punitive taxation and conscription policies, and similar pressures were placed upon Greek villages in western Anatolia in 1913 and 1914.

[13] The rate at which refugees arrived increased after the loss of Greece's territories in Ionia and Eastern Thrace in 1922,[b] creating widespread poverty in the Thessaloniki by the late 1920s in conjunction with a decline in the market for tobacco, one of its major industries .

The move was an attempt by the governing Liberal Party, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, to gerrymander a political bloc considered likely to vote against them, and exacerbated stereotypes of Jews as unpatriotic and as opposed to Greek national interests.

Working closely with Makedonia,[32] and with the tacit approval of the security forces,[33] the EEE's activities included writing anti-Jewish graffiti and attacking cafes, bookstores and cinemas popular among leftists.

[25] Maccabi Thessaloniki sent a delegation,[20] including one Yitzhak Koen,[25] which was seen by local Greek nationalists as a sign of the Jews' disloyalty towards Greece.

[20] The Maccabee event was roughly contemporary with a conference of Bulgarian Macedonians in Sofia, which passed a resolution for the independence of Macedonia from Greece and Bulgaria.

[25] Makedonia called again for the dissolution of the Maccabee movement: EEE issued an aggressively worded exhortation urging the Christians of Thessaloniki to boycott Jewish businesses, accusing Jews of collaborating with communists and Bulgarian revolutionaries.

Gonatas publicly denied that any Greek Jews had participated in the Macedonian conference, and issued a statement in Eleftheron Vima urging EEE and its allies to stop their anti-Jewish activities.

[46] At the same time, the Greek parliament, including the Venizelist government, denounced the attacks: Venizelos condemned them and labelled the accusations made against Maccabi Thessaloniki as slanderous.

[49] In Thessaloniki, at around 21:30, a member of the EEE led a group armed with axes and revolvers to attack a café in the working-class area of Campbell, where around 220 Jewish families, refugees from the 1917 fire, lived.

[31] The attackers were pushed back by police, but further clashes broke out between Jews and nationalist rioters around 22:00, in which a member of the Royal Hellenic Air Force was injured.

[53] Hearing news of the airman's injuries, a group of around 250 nationalists and soldiers made a reprisal attack into Campbell, looting property and beating and raping the inhabitants.

[54] This grew into a group of around 2000 nationalists, largely from the refugee districts of Toumba and Kalamaria,[31] who began setting Campbell on fire under the direction of EEE members.

[55] Most of the rioters were refugees from Asia Minor, often impoverished petty traders of similarly low economic status to Campbell's Jews.

[58] Police prevented Jewish residents from leaving their homes, and stopped a group of Jews from other neighbourhoods, who had come to assist, from entering Campbell.

[60] By 02:00, the violence had stopped: in addition to the death of Pappas, twenty Jews were injured, several had been raped, and fifty-four families in Campbell had been made homeless.

[64] On the same day, a further bout of antisemitic slogans were graffitied on Jewish homes and businesses: the local authorities failed to act on orders from Athens to address the situation, and instead the government blocked the sending of newspapers and telegrams abroad, and censored letters leaving the city, so that news of the continuing crisis would not spread outside Greece.

[76] The historian Devin E. Naar has suggested that memories of the students' involvement in the Campbell pogrom may have partly explained the lack of Jewish representation at the University of Thessaloniki: between 1932 and 1935, no Jews enrolled.

[77] Under Law 5369, issued on 2 April 1932, the Greek government refused to grant any restitution to the Jewish community for the damages to their property, and annulled the mortgage previously owed by them to the state for the land on which Campbell was built.

[59] Later in 1931, representatives of Greek Jewish organisations joined rallies at the city's church of St Minas, calling for the union (enosis) of Cyprus and Greece.

[80] La Vara, an American Sephardic newspaper, condemned the 1932 acquittal of the EEE members, blaming Venizelos and calling him "a second Hitler".

The memory of these untrustworthy reports resurfaced when news of the Holocaust first reached the United States, as Sephardic Jews were initially uncertain whether these accounts were also exaggerated.