Germany is among donors committing millions to the long-awaited project, to be completed in 2026, which will tell story of those who perished

Few places are more representative of the horrors that befell Greece during Nazi occupation than the old railway station of Thessaloniki.

It was here, in what is now a dusty building site on the outer edges of this northern city, that thousands of Greek Jews were loaded with brutal efficiency on to cattle trucks that took them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And it is here, on ground set aside for the construction of a long-awaited Holocaust museum, that Germany’s head of state, Frank–Walter Steinmeier, last week launched an emotionally fraught three-day visit, declaring: “Anyone who stands and speaks here as German president is filled with shame.”