Sense of Victimhood (17/02/15)

The new Greek Government continues to stoke the flames of anti-German feeling amongst its citizens by bringing up the issue of reparations from World War II.

If you ask me the whole notion of is quite ridiculous after all these years and this deliberate 'playing the Nazi card' will only help fuel a sense of victimhood when the Greek Government  would be better spending its time finding out how the payment of 115 million marks managed to trickle away in Athens more than 50 years ago.

Because the guilty people are Greeks not Germans.  

Germans slap down Greek call for WWII reparations


“Austerity is over,” Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, declared Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

By David Charter in Berlin and Anthee Carassava in Athens - The Times

A call by the new Greek government for Germany to pay billions of euros in reparations for the crimes of the Nazis in the Second World War was brushed aside in Berlin today.

Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, repeated his party’s manifesto demand for Germany to compensate Greece for the damage, suffering and a huge “loan” imposed by the Nazis in 1942 which has never been directly paid back.

Mr Tsipras did not put a figure on his demand but today’s equivalent of the 476 million Reichmarks loan was said to be €11 billion, rising to €70 billion with a modest rate of 3 per cent annual interest.

A Greek commission of inquiry last year put the total cost of damages for Nazi destruction and looting at €160 billion - rising to €235 billion with interest. The Greek national debt currently stands at €326 billion.

Greece had “a moral obligation to our people, to history, to all European peoples who fought and gave their blood against Nazism” to demand Germany pay compensation, Mr Tsipras said in his speech to the Greek parliament on Sunday night.

Germany has insisted that it was no longer liable for new payments arising from the Nazi era because the treaty that unified the country in 1990 drew a firm line under any outstanding claims from the Second World War.

“The question [of war reparations] is not on the agenda, there are neither legal nor political grounds to raise it,” said a spokeswoman for the German finance ministry yesterday.

In his first major speech to parliament since winning last month’s election, Mr Tsipras listed plans to reverse reforms imposed by European and International Monetary Fund creditors. He pledged to reinstate pension bonuses and cancel a property tax, end mass layoffs and raise the mininum wage back to pre-crisis levels.

“Austerity is over,” Mr Tsipras declared. “The bailout failed . . . and this government, elected on an anti-austerity platform, is not justified to request an extension of the existing programme, a programme of mistakes and continued catastrophe.”

A few hours before Mr Tsipras’s speech, Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US central bank, predicted that Greece would have to leave the 18-nation single currency because none of its creditors was prepared to put up more loans.

George Osborne said that Britain was “stepping up” its contingency plans to prepare for a Greek exit.

Nazi Germany’s occupation of Greece from 1941-44 was particularly brutal, with numerous atrocities and a huge death toll from starvation as local produce was requisitioned.

No Greeks were present when Nazi lawyers signed an agreement obliging the Bank of Greece to provide Germany with a “war loan” of 476 million Reichsmarks in March 1942 which was used to fund fighting in north Africa.

While this sum was not directly repaid, German historians argue that other reparations have been made.

At the Paris conference on reparations in 1945, Greece demanded $10 billion, which was considered excessive by other participants, given the emphasis on reconstruction. The onerous reparations imposed after the First World War at Versailles were widely accepted to have contributed to the hyperinflation of the Weimar years and the rise of Nazism which no one wanted to repeat.

Instead, Greece was awarded 30,000 tonnes of German industrial goods worth $25 million under the US Marshall plan to rebuild Europe.

However, only 10,000 tonnes of this was ever put on a ship and most never reached Greece. The remaining 20,000 tonnes was said to have been stranded in Hamburg harbour and was eventually sold to the British.

In 1960 West Germany and Greece reached agreement on a payment of 115 million marks for the victims of the Nazis, but most of this was said never to have reached the individuals, having “trickled away” in Athens.

The issue tends to flare up at moment of extreme tension between Athens and Berlin, as now when the Syriza government is desperate for a three-month financial lifeline to enable it to re-order the country’s economy.

In April 2013, when it also became a flashpoint between the two countries, Mrs Merkel’s spokesman said: “Under different agreements, Germany has made reparation and damage payments on a high level. On that backdrop, the government therefore assumes that the question has lost its relevance.”

Reparation payments were not raised in Berlin by Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister, on his visit last Thursday when he met his German counterpart Wolfgang Schaeuble, she confirmed.

This would suggest that Syriza was keeping the issue boiling for its domestic audience but had little intention of seriously pursuing what would be a bitterly contested legal case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Eurozone ministers are due to discuss the country’s perilous economic situation on Wednesday prior to an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels on Thursday.