Nazi Extortion: Study Sheds New Light on Forced Greek Loans

Written on March 23rd, 2015 in politics Comments Off

Published on Spiegel Online International, by Manfred Ertel, Katrin Kuntz and Walter Mayr, March 21, 2015:

Is Germany liable to Athens for loans the Nazis forced the Greek central bank to provide during World War II? A new study in Greece could increase the pressure on Berlin to pay up … //

… Outstanding German Debt:

  • The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands — demands that may have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips and bank statements.  
  • They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German “debt” to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014, which would amount to about €11 billion.
  • As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from 1961 onwards for its peoples’ suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by the Nazi occupiers. There’s some evidence to indicate that this may be the case.
  • In terms of the amount of the loan debt, the Greek auditors have come to almost the same findings as those of the Nazis’ bookkeepers shortly before the end of the war. Hitler’s auditors estimated 26 days before the war’s end that the “outstanding debt” the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks.
  • Auditors in Athens calculated an “open credit line” for the same period of time of around $213 million. They assumed a dollar exchange rate to the Reichsmark of 2:1 and applied an interest escalation clause accepted by the German occupiers that would result in a value of more than €11 billion today.

No Ifs or Buts: … //

… 50,000 Pages of Documents: … //
… Unlimited Sums in the Form of Loans: … //
… Debts Have to Be Paid Back: … //

… Careless Statements:

  • In February, Lau warned German President Joachim Gauck in an open letter against propagating the “violation of international law” with careless statements about the reparations issue. In his view, the legal situation is clear: Greek and Italian citizens and their relatives affected by “shootings, massacres by the Wehrmacht, by deportations or forced labor illegal under international law” have the right to individual claims.
  • For the past decade, Lau has been pursuing the claims of the Distomo victims in Italy. The Court of Cassation in Rome affirmed in 2008 that the claims were legitimate and that he could pursue the case. Earlier, the lawyer had already succeeded in securing Villa Vigoni, a palatial estate on the shore of Lake Como owned by Germany — and used by a private German association focused on promoting German-Italian relations — as collateral for the suit. In 2009, Lau succeeded in having €51 million in claims made by Deutsche Bahn against Italian state railway Trenitalia seized. On Tuesday, the high court in Rome is expected to rule on the lifting of the enforcement order.
  • Following a ruling made by Italy’s Constitutional Court in October 2014, private suits in Italy against Germany have been possible again. One of the justices who issued the ruling is the current president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella.
  • It remains unclear whether this ruling will unleash “a wave of new proceedings” in Italy, says Lau, who currently represents 150 cases, including various class-action lawsuits.

Present and Past, Guilt and Anger:

  • Everything connects in the mountain village of Distoma – the present and past, guilt and anger, the Greek demands on Germany today and past calls for reparations. Efrosyni Perganda sits in the well-heated living room of her home. The diminutive woman, 91 years of age, has alert eyes and wears a black dress. She survived the massacre perpetrated by the Germans at Distomo and she’s one of the few witnesses still alive in the village.
  • When the SS company undertook a so-called act of atonement in Distomo following a fight with Greek partisans, the soldiers also captured her husband. Efrosyni Perganda stood by with her baby as they took him. She never saw him again.
  • As the Germans began to rampage, she hid behind the bathroom door and later behind the living room door of the house in which she still lives today. She held her baby tightly against her chest. “I forgive my husband’s murderers,” she says.
  • Loukas Zisis, the deputy mayor, silently leaves the house as the woman finishes telling her story. He needs a break and heads over to the tavern, where he orders a glass of wine. “I admire Germany: Marx, Engels, Nietzsche,” he says. “The prosperity. The degree to which society is organized. But here in the village, we aren’t finding peace because the German state isn’t settling its debt.”
  • Zisis admires Germany, but the country remains incomprehensible to him. “We haven’t even heard a single apology so far,” he says once again. “That has to do with Germany’s position in Europe.” This is something that he just doesn’t understand, he says.

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Links:

The New American Order, 1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of “We the People” - Tom Engelhardt, on naked capitalism, by Lambert Strether, March 22, 2015;

​US aggressively threatened to ‘cut off’ Germany over Snowden asylum – report, on Russia Today RT, Mach 22, 2015;
Edward Snowden on en.wikipedia;

Ecuador: Why Did It Take Sweden 1,000 Days to Agree to Question Julian Assange in Our U.K. Embassy? on Dissident Voice, by Democracy Now!, March 20, 2015
(other articles; Wistleblowing;  WikiLeaks; Julian Assange);

South Africa’s Troubled Alliance and the Road Ahead, an Interview with Karl Cloete, on The Bullet, Socialist Project’s E-Bulletin No. 1092, by Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon, March 20, 2015;

Greece: Breaking out of the euro prison, on Intrepid Report, by Eric Walberg, March 20, 2015;

Sudanese regime lashes out, on Al-Ahram weekly online, by Haytham Nuri, March 19, 2015: Isolated and unpopular, the Khartoum regime of Omar Al-Bashir is cracking down on opposition activities;

… und noch dies:

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