World War II catches up with Merkel on Greek front

A document lying in the political archives of the German Foreign Ministry could be the cause of many sleepless nights for Chancellor Angela Merkel. The report, titled “Economic Management in Greece under the German Occupation”, is now being hotly debated by historians.
It concerns Greece’s recent demands for World War II reparations from Germany as the two countries are engaged in a modern battle over the terms of continuing financial aid for the heavily indebted government in Athens.
Historian Goetz Aly in an essay for the Berliner Zeitung newspaper used the term “Greek debt legends” while in the same newspaper, Hagen Fleischer, a scholar on Greek-German relations, retorted, “Germany’s debt has not been paid”.
Not only historians but also Athens and Berlin are at odds regarding the archived document and what it means for the reparation claims.
It concerns a loan that the Nazis forced Greece to make in 1942 as “compensation” for the costs of the German occupation.
Today’s Federal Republic of Germany, as Nazi Germany’s legal successor, regards the matter as resolved long ago.
Munich historian Hans Guenter Hockerts, who has intensively researched the issue of war reparations after 1945, observes, “Since credits must be repaid and the 1953 London Agreement on German External Debts places no restrictions on this category, it means in principle that, to this day, there can be reparation claims made.”
In his view, this could be Greece’s biggest chance for compensation.
The sum involved in 1942 was 476 million reichsmarks. But even this amount is disputed.
Aly points out that Germany spent much money sending food and gold to Greece to support the drachma at the time.
Also, German assets and liabilities were not properly documented, and Athens’ own archives that could shed light on the matter are in a desolate state.
But for Athens – and for the head of Die Linke party in the German parliament, Gregor Gysi – that sum today, after accumulated interest, amounts to 11 billion euros (Bt382 billion).
Hockerts says he thinks it would be more like 5 billion euros.

Debts unpaid?
The larger question being raised is whether Germany has really paid off its financial debts from the war years.
The issue of “coercive loans” is a special case. And the even larger issue that Athens is also raising is whether German war reparations have really been settled.
In purely formalistic terms, Germany paid off its last reparations on October 3, 2010.
But long before the election victory of the leftist Syriza Party of Premier Alexis Tsipras, Athens had sought time and again to counter German pressure for austerity measures with what Greece sees as Berlin’s own unpaid bills from the past.
Merkel countered such Greek demands in July 2013 with a blunt “we don’t agree with this legal interpretation” – in other words, the book is closed.
And Berlin pointed out that West Germany concluded a reparation treaty with Athens in March 1960, under which it paid Greece 115 million marks.
Bremen-based international legal expert Andreas Fischer-Lescano calls Berlin’s stance “legally intolerable” and says it is “shameful” how Germany is blocking the debate.
“A policy of drawing a bottom line is being pursued with unrelenting toughness because of fears of a precedent-setting case,” he says, given the number of additional claimants who could line up if Greece is successful.
But a Goettingen University colleague, Frank Schorkopf, disagrees.
He told the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel that all debts had been met, and he pointed out that decades later, in the course of European integration, Berlin had made 11-digit payments to Athens.
“This sum easily matches any possible reparation payments,” he argued.
In 1946, according to Hockerts, Greece demanded 14 billion dollars in reparations from Germany. But the Western Allies were opposed. They remembered how the crippling war reparations demanded of Germany in 1919 after World War I helped fuel the economic chaos that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Such a mistake was not to be repeated.
Moreover, amid the East-West tensions of the Cold War, West Germany came to be looked on as a partner. So the 1953 London Agreement provided for a moratorium on reparations issues pending a final German peace agreement. West Germany went on to make individual reparations. Israel became the first recipient, of 3 billion marks. A so-called “global agreement” was concluded in 1960 with West European states, but for Athens, the reparations question was by no means settled.
A 1990 treaty involving West Germany, East Germany, the Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France followed the collapse of communism. In it, reparations were declared resolved. Dozens of states, including Greece, acknowledged that treaty later in the year with the Charter for a New Europe, but that document was not an internationally binding treaty, so Athens’ reparations demands were still alive.
Meanwhile, the German public television channel ZDF pointed to yet another important document. A verbal communication from the Greek embassy in Berlin to the German Foreign Ministry in 1995 cautioned that “Greece has not relinquished its claims for compensation and reparation for the damage suffered in World War II