A day after a formal Greek request to open negotiations on the matter of war reparations, Germany outright rejected the request, insisting the issue is legally closed.
The government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sent a formal request to Berlin to open communications on the matter.
A German foreign ministry spokesman in Berlin reiterated that- while Germany stands by its moral responsibility and seeks “dialogue with Greece” and a “common culture of remembrance” it considers the payments issue closed and owes nothing more to Greece.
“Over 70 years after the end of the war and more than 25 years after the Two Plus Four Treaty (allowing Germany’s 1990 reunification), the question of reparations has been legally and politically settled,” said the spokesman, Rainer Breul.
the question of reparations has been concluded legally and politically.
German Foreign Ministry
A Greek parliamentary committee last year determined that Germany owes Greece at least 270 billion euros (US$300 billion) for World War I damages and World War II looting, atrocities and a forced loan to the Nazi regime.
In addition, the Greek state accounting office has estimated that private claims for war dead and invalids could be worth a further 107 billion euros.
Berlin says all former claims were finally settled with the 1990 Two-Plus Four Agreement signed by the former West and East Germany and the post-war occupying powers the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.
2 comments
Germany entered into an agreement in which Greece was not a party. How dare they believe that the Greeks are beholden to that agreement?
WeThe Greeks have always been on the right side of history. This little country with its great people have done more for human dignity than the rest of the world put together
The Greeks stopped the Persians from overrunning Europe in the 5th and the 6th centuries BC.,
The Greeks prevented the Ottoman Turks from moving into Europe in the 15th century, but thanks to the “civilized” west who helped the Turks the Greeks payed for their “insolence” with over four hundred years of Turkish occupation.
The Greeks destroyed the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and payed for their “insolence” with the genocide of the Greeks by the Turks with the help of the “civilized” west, again, in l919-1922.
The Greeks fought on the right side of history in the 1st world War which was started by the Germans and which the Germans lost,
The Greeks were on the right side of history in the second World War when they stopped Musolini’s Italians and spurred the British Prime Minister Winston Chirchil to say that “until today we said that the Greeks fight like heroes. From this day onwards we shall say that heroes fight like the Greeks”.
And so the Greeks gave the Germans a fight for their money, so to speak, by delaying the Germans’ advance for six months tchus giving the Brits, The Americans and the Russians enough time to prepare and produce enough airoplane so as to be able to give the Germans another hiding for their money, so to speak,. My father in law was one of the resistance fighters who with Velouhiotis AND Zervas blew up the Gorgopotamos Bridge preventing thus the Germans from getting to Africa and thus running out of fuel.
And the Greeks payed for their “insolence” when the Germans, Yes IT WAS THE GERMANS NOT JUST THE Nazzis, went on a rampage of looting and killing never seen before by a highly disciplined army. They killed old women, they killed thousands upon thousands of children by even burning them alive in churches with their mothers and grand parents, they looted the banks, the shops, the farms of their crops and what they could no Cary they burned it. The Germans in the Second World War behaved and acted like common criminals and they should be seen as such when they appear before the International Court Of Justice.
MAKE THEM PAY. Many of those who took part in those atrocities are still very much alive and very much rich enjoying their parents’ and their grand parents loot.