Visiting German President Steinmeier and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis held talks on international developments, the prospects of Greek-German relations, and bolstering the two countries relations within the EU framework.
These international developments obviously include the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but Greek and German leaders routinely discuss Greek-Turkish relations and now the current efforts to solve the Cyprus Problem (Germany in the past has had an active role in pushing for a peace settlement).
An overarching issue remains immigration, as Germany has in the past pushed Greece to take back 50,000 migrants.
No means no
Yet, it was Steinmeier’s reiteration that the issue of German reparations for Nazi crimes in Greece is closed is what dominated media attention, in a rather sensationalist manner, as Berlin has had the same, unswerving stance for decades.
At all meetings between Greek and German heads of state and government, Greek leaders have persistently and publicly raised the issue of reparations.
The German response for decades has been a firm no.
Berlin’s stance is based an October 1961 bilateral agreement, by which Bonn paid Greece 115mn DM, a pittance compared to the huge actual reparations debt.
That is the basis on which the Germans keep reiterating that the issue has “closed”.
Leonine contract
However, at the end of the bilateral agreement, then Greek ambassador to Bonn, Thomas Ypsilantis, managed to insert a codicil (which is legally part of a contract) that Greece reserves the right to make claims in the future.
Athens’ acceptance of a truly leonine contract may well have had an economic underpinning.
At a time that Greece was still recovering economically from the wounds of WWII and the Civil War, Germany opened its doors to tens of thousands of Greek guest workers, obviously to serve its own economic need for human capital.
The agreement in any event does not absolutely restrain Greece from raising future claims, and it explicitly reserved the right of individuals to seek compensation from the German government.
Germany has the precise opposite interpretation of the agreement.
Only in one instance has a Greek government dared to timidly push somewhat – with a note verbale in 1995 from the Greek ambassador in Berlin formally inviting Germany to negotiations.
The proposal was promptly rejected.
Official government reports
In a confidential report by the State Legal Council in 2014, it was argued that Greece indeed retains legitimate legal claims.
Concomitantly, another report was issued by the State Accounting Office, which pored through a mass of financial documents to assess the amount of the German debt.
Greek governments eschew aggressive push
Yet, each time strong pressure was placed on governments, whether by reparations crusaders like the late left-wing icon Manolis Glezos, who spent much of his life studying and publicizing the issue, or by opposition parties that seek to showcase their patriotic stance, the rationale was always, for various political reasons, that it was always that it is no time to pick a fight with Germany.
That is in large measure because the cooperation with Germany and its support for Greece within the EU framework is the overriding consideration and is too important to jeopardize.
Der Spiegel’s reparations calculation
A file report in the German magazine Der Spiegel, estimated that the German debt to Greece amounts to the whopping sum of 162bn euros – 108bn compensation for the destruction of the country’s infrastructure and 54bn euros for the compulsory occupation loan.
Most legal scholars and analysts believe that there is a greater, but still very limited, chance that Berlin would enter into negotiations on the loan, which has a formal, contractual status. That is demonstrated by the fact that the Nazis began repaying part of the long before the end of the war.
Yet most analysts believe that the issue is much more political than legal, as any agreement for negotiating the loan repayment would have to be made at the government level.
Most all observers consider the chance of that happening negligible.
