Greece Finds a Cure: Germany

Greece demands billions for German war crimes: Relations between EU partners plunge to a new low

Greece has threatened to hit Germany with a bill for tens of billions of pounds in outstanding reparations for Nazi war crimes during the Second World War.

The move is an indication of growing outrage in Athens at the strictures being placed on the Greek economy by EU paymasters led by Germany.

The finance ministry said yesterday that four experts would scour archives and determine by the end of the year how much is owed.
Economists say that if Germany had paid Greece what it is alleged to owe, it would dramatically improve the country's likelihood of coming through its debt crisis.

Greece suffered greatly after being invaded by Hitler's forces but, unlike every other country Germany went to war with, has not been paid compensation. Campaigners say the Paris Reparations Agreement of 1946 obliges Germany to pay Greece around £86 billion.

Deputy finance minister Christos Staikouras said: 'The matter remains pending. Greece has never resigned its rights.'

Soon the Golden Dawn will be enjoying golden showers.

Frankly, they'd probably have better luck suing Turkey and Iran.

They just want the money to offset their current economic crisis. That doesn't fix what caused in the first place.

Hehehe.

The sooner the EU blows up, the better. The good approach wrt. bankers' debts was that of Iceland; not of getting taxpayers to refund private companies that lost money in speculative endeavors, forcing nations to destroy their public function and welfare programs to pay for the completely artificial debt thus created.

I really want the political destruction of the IMF (which has recently admitted they were completely wrong about austerity being the magical cure, but hey, how many politicians heard that? None), the ECB (which is an abomination that should never have been created), the European Commission (ditto), and so on. The only good part of the whole EU business is the Parliament, because it is the only part that is actually democratic. Everything else is by appointment only, and as removed as possible from the common interest of the people since they are instead obsessed with pleasing their foreign corporate masters.

I wouldn't hold my breath on this "reparations" thing. It's more like a "sugar mountains" type fairytale that they tell the aboriginals, leaving them a tiny spiral of hope, just enough so they pull through another day, and another, and another.

In reality, the truth about reparation claims is much more complex than that: if not outright forfeited, they certainly were partially waived by Greece as part of the "winning Allies" after WW2: the UK, France, Holland etc. did the same after NATO's bidding, as there was a much more direct danger to worry about: the Soviet Union.

West Germany was the "shopping window" of Capitalism for the East, and similarly East Germany was the "shopping window" of Communism for the West. Neither side would risk "looking bad", so both sides had to look their best (...so to speak, for the GDR). Certainly, you wouldn't make the people in the East jealous of the "Western way of life" if they left West Germany in ruins, bankrupt and under choking Allied control.

In addition, there's irrefutable evidence that a further part of the reparations was waived in exchange for Germany's acceptance of Greek Gastarbeiter with favourable terms.

I don't know whether I should laugh, cry or do the both at same time.

Yeah, sure. Got a reference that's not the Daily Mail?

Urban Space Cowboy said:

Yeah, sure. Got a reference that's not the Daily Mail?

Do bother skimming through Greek newspapers with the magic of Google Translate, and you can confirm for yourself that this is one boat they've been rocking regularly since the beginning of the crisis -how strongly, depends on how much spin doctoring is required at the moment.

It doesn't make international headlines very often, because it's a fariytale designed exclusively for internal consupmtion, a kind of appeal to emotion by grasping at straws, trying to communicate a sense that "justice is at last being served", "the Nazis will finally have to pay up" etc.

But as I said, the legitimacy -or the applicability- of those claims is quite dubious, by now, and unless someone was a major figure in Cold War politics with direct involvement at the time of those events, it's unlikely that any one man knows the full truth.

Edit: it's interesting. Greece doesn't figure as a reparations recipient neither in the Potsdam 1945 agreements, nor the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947. Perhaps there's some truth to the "forced to drop reparations claims" story.