As Berlin and Athens lock horns over debt relief, Greece’s claim that Germany has never compensated it for all the damage wrought by the Nazis during World War II is again straining ties.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose party swept to power last month promising to reverse spending cuts imposed under the indebted country’s rescue package, has vowed to tackle the long-simmering dispute.
However, he is likely to run up against a firm “no” from Europe’s biggest economy, which argues that Berlin does not owe it anything and that the historic issue has long been closed.
“Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, the question of reparations has lost legitimacy,” a German Ministry of Finance spokesman said recently.
The issue of wartime reparation claims over Germany’s four-year occupation of Greece, which ruined the country financially and left thousands dead, has complicated relations between Athens and Berlin for decades.
Now, with Greece struggling under more than 300 billion euros (US$340 billion) of debt, calculations that Athens is still owed just over half that amount, or 162 billion euros, left over from the war, is sure to touch a nerve.
Tsipras’ SYRIZA party and its unlikely coalition partner, the Independent Greeks Party, plan to reopen the claim, whose impact is highly symbolic in Germany for harking back to its darkest chapter.
Haunted by its Nazi past, Germany prides itself on its efforts to come to terms with its history.
Tspiras, a former Communist, lost no time after his election victory in laying flowers at a memorial near Athens where dozens of Greek leftists were executed by German occupation troops in 1944.
Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis, during a bruising first visit last week to Germany, stressed that it had not been “a sign toward Germany,” but rather was targeted against Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party, now the country’s third-biggest political force.
During his election campaign, Tsipras said he would press the “unfulfilled right” to reparations for a “people who bled and paid heavily for the brutality of Nazism.”
Greece’s occupation by the Nazis from 1941 was one of the most bloody in Europe, with Hitler’s forces rampaging, pillaging and shooting, and encountering a nation that fiercely resisted.
The Nazi regime ended up bleeding Greece dry. The Third Reich forced the Greek central bank to lend it 476 million reichsmarks, which has never been reimbursed.
A German Bundestag lower house of parliament report in 2012 put the value of the loan at US$8.25 billion.
In Greece, its estimated value is higher, at 11 billion euros, according to a confidential report to the Greek ministry and reported by Greek daily To Vima last month.
After Germany’s capitulation and the end of the war, the US’ main concern was to halt any advance by the communists in Greece’s civil war.
It asked the Greek government, keen for economic support under the Marshall Plan — the US aid package to rebuild Europe after World War II — to drop its reparation claims until the signing of a peace treaty.
Germany rebuilt itself and paid practically nothing to its former enemies, “which obviously helped the German economic miracle hugely” in the post-war period, according to an analysis by Rabobank.
Albrecht Ritschl, a professor of economic history, said in an interview with Germany’s Spiegel news weekly in 2011 that “Germany has been the 20th century’s worst payer of debts.”
Just before German reunification in 1990, the two former Germanys signed a treaty with the Allies, considered as the formal end of World War II.
Although the document, which was approved by Greece, among others, was not officially termed a peace treaty, for Berlin it effectively drew a line under possible future claims for war reparations.
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