Greece, after shying away from testing Germany, the biggest contributor to international bailouts propping up the Greek economy, said it will press for payments of reparations from damages caused by the Nazis in World War II.
The Finance Ministry has compiled a report that takes stock of all relating available documents spanning more than six decades, Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos told Parliament and it will be given to legal advisers and then Athens will decide how to officially press its claim, he said.
Avramopoulos did not say how much would be sought. “We will exhaust every means available to arrive to a result,” he told lawmakers. “One can’t compare the times, but also not erase the memories. ”
Germany, whose forces occupied Greece in World War Two, says it has already paid all reparations owed. The issue has resurfaced since last year as Greece suffers under austerity measures imposed on it by its creditors, mainly Germany, as a condition for $325 billion in two rescue packages from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB).
Avramopoulos said it was wrong to link the issue to the debt crisis. “This has been an open issue for 60 years, it is too large an issue to fit into the confines of the fiscal crisis,” he said.
Greece’s fragile coalition government has so far earned praise from Chancellor Angela Merkel for starting to fix Greece’s finances. But conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was pushed to raise the reparation issue by the main opposition, the anti-bailout major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA).
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