German President’s Trip to Greece Opens Up Old Wounds in a Country of Long Memory

ATHENS — Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will conclude a three-day trip to Greece on Thursday on the strategic island of Crete, where he is scheduled to visit a village that was razed by the Nazis in June 1941. While the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has said that Mr. Steinmeier’s visit acknowledges wartime atrocities committed by Nazis in Greece, the sojourn reopens not only old memories but also the thorny question of reparations. “These issues remain unresolved, and we hope that one day they will be addressed,” Mr. Mitsotakis stated this week. Greece’s General Accounting Office estimated in 2015 that Germany owed 278.7 billion euros, or slightly more than $300 billion in reparations, along with an additional $11 billion for the reimbursement of a forced wartime loan. Five years ago a Greek parliamentary committee estimated the cost of reparations to be approximately $293 billion.The Nazi occupation of Greece from 1940 to 1944 was brutal. A historian of World War II, Hagen Fleischer has written that “in no other non-Slavic country did the SS and the Wehrmacht operate as brutally as in Greece.” The village of Kandanos as well as others was razed by the Germans in retaliation for its inhabitants’ brave participation in the Battle of Crete, a last-ditch effort by Allied forces to repel an airborne invasion by Nazi paratroopers in May 1941.Most of Greece’s Jews were deported to concentration camps — mainly Auschwitz — while an estimated 250,000 Greeks died from starvation. German reprisals against Greek partisans also led to massacres of villagers at Kalavyrta and elsewhere on the mainland.Though Germany has apologized for Nazi-era crimes committed during the war, it has been unwilling to discuss reparations. The country has denied owing anything to Greece for World War II since it paid Athens the sum of 115 million deutschmarks in 1960. Greece has previously maintained that the sum failed to cover payments for damaged infrastructure, various war crimes, and the return of the forced loan. For Berlin, the issue of compensation was legally concluded in 1990, prior to German reunification. However, this is an issue that will not go away. A reminder came when early in his term the former Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, laid a wreath at a memorial to Greeks massacred by Germans soldiers at a site just outside Athens. At that time, in 2015, Greece was reeling from a years-long financial crisis and the former enemy, Germany, had suddenly become its most important creditor. However, the global mood on reparations in general has shifted, and subjects once considered taboo are now on the table, in places as varied as California and remote island outposts of the Commonwealth. There are Greek villages that still bear the scars of the Nazi occupation. As this correspondent can attest, whether it was Ottoman savagery or Nazi brutality, Greeks have a long memory. In a demonstration of that the head of Pasok — the country’s second most popular political party but not yet its official opposition — Nikos Androulakis, wrote on X that the issue of German war reparations “is a living and fair historical claim of our country, which the government must raise and claim at every opportunity of political dialogue with Germany. We will not let anything be forgotten.”fDespite outward appearances of European Union comity, and despite the hundred of millions of dollars Germans pour into Greece’s tourism-dependent economy every year, the relationship with Germany itself is not one of unconditional love. The highly regarded president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, said as much on Wednesday when she reminded Mr. Steinmeier during a meeting at the presidential palace that the issue of wartime reparations is “pending,” adding that “it is important to address matters of the past.”Greece’s biggest wartime scars are mostly unseen — case in point, Thessaloniki, once home to a large and thriving Jewish community that was almost completely wiped out in the Holocaust. The port city was Mr. Steinmeier’s first stop on his visit. It included a visit to the former train station from which tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps. Nearly 54,000 Thessaloniki Jews were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. That was a calamity from which, socially and culturally, Thessaloniki and indeed Greece have never fully recovered. It was therefore not without some emotion, echoed in the Greek press, that the German and Greek presidents planted symbolic pomegranate trees during their visit to the site of the city’s future Holocaust Museum. Right now, it doesn’t have one. The octagon-shaped museum is being designed by a trio of Greek, German, and Israeli architects. The head of Greece’s Central Jewish Council, David Saltiel, said on Tuesday that when completed in about two years’ time the museum “will not only be a place of remembrance for the millions of victims, but a tribute — a bright symbol against racism and anti-Semitism — serving as a constant reminder of the importance of humanity, tolerance and peaceful coexistence.”It will also serve as an unofficial aide-mémoire to Berlin that as far as the ten and a half million people living in postwar Greece are concerned, Germany still has some outstanding debts to pay.

German President’s Trip to Greece Opens Up Old Wounds in a Country of Long Memory

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