The chapter will analyze the process through which the Thessaloniki city authorities dealt, in a rational and legalistic way, with the German anti-Jewish orders and how these orders were implemented at the local level. Studying the issue of decision-making at the local level can answer many of the questions that are lost in broader approaches. The chapter will study the limits of complicity and collaboration, a common theme related to the Holocaust, where the distinction is often unclear. Moreover, it can answer whether the state acted as a kind of “protective screen” against the persecution of the Jews, in the words of Jacques Semelin, by using, for example, bureaucratic “tricks” to delay the implementation of the Nazi orders.Using archives from the City of Thessaloniki and several other sources, most never before used in Holocaust research, five case studies are presented: the renaming of the streets with Jewish names prior to the deportations; the city’s involvement with the destruction of the Jewish cemetery; the use by the city of Jewish slave labor; the replacing of Jewish employees in the municipality of Thessaloniki; and the acquisition of Jewish property.