What does Germany owe Greece?

Foreign minister Evangelos Venizelos has been handed the findings and the relevant report from the State Legal Counsel task force concerning German wartime reparations and the forced occupation loan, while parliament has already formed a committee to examine the issue and how it will be handled.

In Germany, the Nazi crimes against the Greek people have been almost forgotten. While many Germans are aware of the Holocaust, and the crimes and atrocities against the inhabitants of Russia, or Poland are well known, those against the people of Greece have been utterly forgotten.

As Die Zeit notes Germans and Greeks have been exchanging mutual accusations that one owes the other. Athens feels it's owed by Germans for a forced occupation loan, the rivers of blood, the atrocities and the hundreds of thousand of deaths. Berlin feels Athens owes Germany for tens of billions of euros in aid packages and guarantees.

On 5 March the German president will visit Greece and is expected to talk about the past, visiting along with Greek president Karolos Papoulias the village of Lygiades, where troops of the Edelweiss Gebirgsjager Division executed 82 civilians, half of them children. As Die Zeit notes “Gauck is νοτ coming as a negotiator of the debt, or a overseer of reforms, but as a German.”

The newspaper wonders how German war crimes in Greece have been forgotten, while also never mentioned in schoolbooks. For the most part German officials vising Greece have avoided visiting such places with the exception of a visit by president Rau to Kalavryta in 2000, and Richard von Weizsacker to Kaisariani. The newspaper believes that this expungion of the crimes against Greece from German collective memory hurts Greeks, and thus the German president's visit comes at the right time.

The newspaper notes that Berlin is afraid that if it honors such demands of Greece will cause a deluge of similar requests from all the other peoples the German Reich hurt.