Congratulations to the Greek left! The movement against austerity....

The Yalta and Potsdam councils agreed not to impose Versailles-style massive reparations, but Germany has often paid out voluntary reparations

The true figure would obviously be staggering - German actions led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, crippled entire countries and laid waste to much of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other territories..

As it has done to Greece.


The whole problem with this is that Greece doesn't want equal treatment, it wants to re-open all the WWII settlement treaties going back to conferences held during the war itself by people who are now dead, in order to arrive at a fundamentally different settlement that would effectively force the Germans, almost none of whom are now responsible for NG, into slavery for a few years or perhaps decades.

Their position isn't morally unreasonable but I would tend to agree with MatureStudent that pushing it as a serious solution to the current debt problems is idiotic to the point of childishness.

I think the forced loan is a special case, there is no doubt that Germany has repaid state-to-state forced loans in full or almost in full in the case of other countries, that was not done for Greece for whatever reasons.

I wasn't proposing it as a serious solution and MatureStudent was rubbishing the whole idea of German reparations and claiming that the case has no merit, both of which are either false or tendentious claims, given that at least part of the Greek case does have merit and that Germany often has settled claims.

Reparations were sorted out a long time ago.

How so?

Why now? There's been 70 years.

Greece was told to do one 18 months ago when they first came up with this hair brain idea. They'll be told to do one again.

Can the UK claim money back from Greece for liberating it?

Why not now? If Germany had already compensated Greece on time, we wouldn't discuss about this now.
The country which started the most monstrous war in modern history has not compensated a country which fought vigorously.
The UK indeed helped Greece greatly during wartime but after the war was over, the UK government played a role for the Greek civil war to develop, what about that. With all due respect, the comparison is not valid, from my point of view it's not the same thing.

Greece has had 70
Years to make a claim.

It's acting like a child now. No Suprise whe you look at its recent behabiour though.

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly do you mean by '' its recent behaviour '' ?

Why not now? If Germany had already compensated Greece on time, we wouldn't discuss about this now.
The country which started the most monstrous war in modern history has not compensated a country which fought vigorously.
The UK indeed helped Greece greatly during wartime but after the war was over, the UK government played a role for the Greek civil war to develop, what about that. With all due respect, the comparison is not valid, from my point of view it's not the same thing.

Why now? There's been 70 years.

Greece was told to do one 18 months ago when they first came up with this hair brain idea. They'll be told to do one again.

Can the UK claim money back from Greece for liberating it?

Greece has had 70
Years to make a claim.

Why not now? If Germany had already compensated Greece on time, we wouldn't discuss about this now.
The country which started the most monstrous war in modern history has not compensated a country which fought vigorously.

Obviously not just as someone who saves you from a burning car can't sue you for the time and expense.

This is not a strong argument against Greeks reparations from Germany.


They've been asserting the claim for a long time, just no one outside Greece noticed or cared.

They asserted the claim for the first time last year. The German government told them to do one.

The loan claim has been in dispute since the war itself.

I don't know if they have made a specific large new claim for war damages, but the trend at least is not new. In 2000 the Greek Supreme Court (not the executive) ruled that Germany should pay compensation for war crimes committed in Greece.



The basic problem here is not that Greece has suddenly about-faced or even that Greece's claims are inherently unreasonable, but rather that Greece and even individual sub-divisions of the Greek state are trying to totally re-write the legal basis of the current world order for their own convenience. The most consistent feature (and folly) of the Greek approach throughout all this, which has been shared by all the self-identified Greek posters on this subject, is a totally unjustified and overbearing sense of self-importance. The allies could have decided to destroy Germany and bind it in debt-servitude for generations. They had the power to do so and they could have made a plausible moral case for doing so. But they chose not to and are not going to restart WWII now in order to patch a short term hole in the finances of a small country on the periphery of nowhere in particular.

You're link doesn't say that at all.

"Greece's highest court, the Areopag, ruled in 2000 that Germany must pay damages to Distomo's [relatives of people murdered by the Germans]."

Of course not. And they won't, because it would open the flood gates. But this is just another facet of the the-world-owes-us-a-living mentality that seems to pervade Greek culture. It's not just the Elgin Marbles. This is a people who are simply not willing to accept a good-enough and functional settlement to an ancient problem when there is the far more attractive alternative of screaming your head off at anyone who will listen about how you should get 100% your own way and to hell with what wider consequences it could have.

The debt crisis hasn't created these demands it has just brought them to world attention, because people briefly started paying attention to Greece.