Dodecanese campaign and the failure of the Allied offensive meant that the haven disappeared. Most of the Dodecanese Jews were murdered by the Germans; 1,700 members of the ancient Jewish community of Rhodes (of a population of about 2,000) were rounded up by the Gestapo in July 1944 and only some 160 of them survived the camps. Out of 6,000 Ladino-speaking Jews in the Dodecanese, about 1,200 people survived by escaping to the nearby coast of Turkey. Italian prisoners of war were transferred to the mainland by the Germans in overcrowded unseaworthy vessels, which led to several accidents, of which the sinking
Dodecanese sources in the 8th century, as a naval command under a "droungarios", encompassing the southern Aegean Sea, which eventually evolved into the Theme of Samos. However it was not applied to the current island group, but to the twelve Cyclades islands clustered around Delos. The name may indeed be of far earlier date, and modern historians suggest that a list of 12 islands given by Strabo ("Geographica" Χ.485) was the origin of the term. The term remained in use throughout the medieval period and was still used for the Cyclades in both colloquial usage and scholarly Greek-language literature until the