On June 10,
1944, three Wehrmacht units converged on the village of Distomo in
Nazi-occupied central Greece. They had received reports of black market
activity in the area – a hanging offence under the Nazis, who stockpiled food
to supply their armies overseas, leaving the local population strictly
rationed. Instead of smugglers they found a dozen resistance fighters and
rounded them up.
“A
representative ran off and warned the resistance that was encamped three or
four kilometres from the village,” says Thanos Bouras, who was then 20. “The
resistance attacked, and they mortally wounded the German commander. A woman
brought him some water. He thanked her, and said, ‘the entire village kaput,
but don’t harm this woman.’”
What followed
was one of the worst Nazi atrocities in Greece during their three-and-a-half
year occupation. Angelos Kastritis, who was eight, remembers the Germans going
from house to house, bashing down doors and spraying the interior with machine
gun fire.
Kastritis’
mother had told him and his father to make themselves scarce. She stayed home
with her in-laws, kneading bread dough, believing that women and the elderly
would not be harmed.
“When I
returned I first saw my grandfather. The back of his head was gone and his
brains had been splattered against a staircase. My grandmother was seated next
to him [dead]. Inside the house I saw my mother. She had baked all the loaves
except one. She had her hands above her head. They had killed her
execution-style from behind. Her blood stretched in a line several yards long.”
Sture Linner, a
Swede who had taken over as head of the Red Cross in Greece, arrived in Distomo
three days later. He described what he saw in his autobiography, My Odyssey: “For
hundreds of yards along the road, human bodies were hanging from every tree,
pierced with bayonets – some were still alive… In the village the last remnants
of the houses were still burning. Hundreds of dead bodies of people of all
ages, from elderly to newborns, were strewn around on the dirt. Several women
were slaughtered with bayonets, their wombs torn apart and their breasts
severed; others were lying strangled with their own intestines wrapped around
their necks. It seemed as if no-one had survived…”
Seven percent of
the Greek population at the time of the war - over half a million people – was
wiped out. Four fifths of those were civilian – partly the result of mass
executions and punitive massacres like that at Distomo – but the single
greatest cause of death was starvation, stemming from Germany’s disastrous
management of the Greek economy. Greece lost 97 percent of its exports.
Agricultural production fell. Industrial and transport infrastructure was
systematically destroyed (see table).
A year into the occupation, Germany was so worried about a collapse of civil
society that it allowed Britain and the International Red Cross to distribute
food and medical assistance.
For decades,
Greece’s official position - that the issue of reparations for this disaster
remains an open question - has directly contradicted Germany’s, that the subject
is closed. That may now be changing.
On March 6,
Greece’s president aired the reparations issue during a visit from his German
counterpart. “Greece never gave up its claims and a solution is needed through
the opening of negotiations as quickly as possible,” said Karolos Papoulias.
A Greek foreign
ministry source says that negotiations were given the go-ahead during
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s last visit to Athens, on April 11.
“The [Greek]
government has sent the entire dossier to the Court of Audit for a legal
opinion,” said the source, on condition of anonymity. “As soon as that is
delivered, talks will begin between foreign ministers Frank Walter Steinmeier
and Evangelos Venizelos.”
It is still
unclear, however, how much Greece will ask for. Since the Allies disagreed on
how much Germany should pay in reparations after World War Two, they set up the
Inter-Allied Reparations Agency to distribute amongst themselves German overseas property and what was left of
movable property in Germany. Entire factories and blast furnaces were sawed to
pieces and shipped.
Greece was
awarded 2.7 percent of the fixed assets and 4.35 percent of the movable assets, says Hagen Fleischer, professor emeritus
at Athens University and one of the world’s leading experts on World War Two
reparations. “Some of this got to Greece and some didn’t.”
Fleischer’s
estimates of what Greece received will be detailed in a forthcoming book: “We
might estimate that it was between 25 and 80 million dollars’ worth [in 1938
dollars],”– roughly equivalent to the share of the spoils Greece
was awarded, given that “the total worth of what IARA handed out was well under
$1bn.”
Also unclear is
what legal basis Greece has for demanding reparations. A class action suit
Distomo survivors brought in 2001 ended in defeat at the European Court of
Human Rights after a series of court victories over eleven years. Hague judges
ultimately accepted the premise that non-German courts weren’t fit to put the
German state on trial.
Meanwhile,
international treaties offer no clear indication of whether the Greek state may
make demands. The country’s hopes may hang on a 1953 agreement between Germany
and the allies that reparations issues would be examined at a future date, says
Fleischer: “But even here, in the final declaration, things are unclear.”
Germany holds
that reparations issues were settled in September 1990, a month after German
reunification, when Russia, the US, Britain and France signed a settlement of
outstanding issues with Germany. “All European countries hailed it, and
Germany has ever since seen it as a final settlement of the reparations issue,”
says Fleischer. “But it is a de facto
peace treaty, not a de jure treaty.”
All this is
difficult to hear for Greeks who witnessed the devastation Germany wrought. “Are
German governments avenging themselves upon us because we demolished the myth
of the indefatigable Axis in 1940?” asks Manolis Glezos, president of the
National Council for the Reclamation of Germany’s Debts to Greece, formed in
1996.
Greece scored the
first Axis defeat when, in 1940, it pushed Mussolini’s invading army through
southern Albania. The morale boost from the Albanian front was such that
British and American newspapers plastered the news in capitalized headlines across
their front pages for weeks. Hitler postponed his invasion of Russia to deal
with the rebellious Greeks.
“Is it because
by pinning down 12 select divisions we helped end the war sooner?” asks Glezos.
“I want the German government to answer these questions. Are they taking revenge?”
To many Greeks,
the crisis has felt like a vengeful new occupation. Germany effectively took
the helm of the Greek economy in 2010, when it led the EU imposition of austerity
policies on the country. German officials frequently emphasised the need to cut spending, including for welfare programmes. Meanwhile the level
of unemployment hit 27 percent, leaving an estimated fifth of society medically
uninsured. Comparisons with 1941 inevitably surfaced, as Greeks felt their
sovereignty drain away with their wealth.
Last week
Eurostat confirmed that Greece did succeed in producing a primary surplus of 0.8
percent of GDP last year, but this came at a cost of more than a quarter of its
economy and a third of its living standard.
“That
reinforced the view that ‘we don’t owe you, you owe us,’” says Fleisher, who is
of German extraction but often speaks of Greece in the first person plural. He
notes that Greek indignation during the crisis may have led to inflated
expectations. The Council, for instance, sticks to Greece’s original 1945
request of $10.45bn from Germany. Inflation-adjusted, it expects reparations
running into hundreds of billions of dollars. “The more we ask for, the less
seriously the matter is taken in Europe,” Fleischer says.
Greece’s
conservative-led coalition is careful not to put a figure on reparations, but
it pursued the matter systematically from its assumption of power in 2012. This
may be about more than popular pressure: Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is a
self-proclaimed nationalist; his great aunt, one of Greece’s most celebrated
fiction writers, famously ended her life in May 1941, a few days after the
Nazis rolled into Athens.
Any settlement
now would likely have to be a political rather than a legal decision. Greece’s
strongest suit is to demand repayment of two wartime loans Germany forcibly
extracted from the Bank of Greece in 1943, worth an estimated $238mn at the
time.
Unlike
reparations, these unpaid loans are not covered by international treaties.
Former finance minister, Nikos Christodoulakis, last year estimated that they
could now be worth as much as $21bn.
“I think today
Greece has a valid claim with this occupation loan,” Christodoulakis told Al
Jazeera. “In current terms the value is more or less similar to the loan that
has been given by Germany to Greece three years ago in the framework of the
bailout agreement. So I think that a very fair compensation and settlement of
the issue would be to count one for the other.”
If any of this
money does one day transpire, it will likely be a government-to-government
settlement rather than a handout to individuals. It might be earmarked for
specific use, such as education or development – a subject that has been discussed
among Distomo residents, says Angelos Kastritis. “They’re nice ideas, I don’t
deny it,” he says. “But then again, some of us suffered by losing loved ones. I
lost my mother. My father remarried. I never went to school. My life would have
been different if my mother had lived. I’d like to be the recipient of the
money, and I would like to be the one to give it away.”
Greek War Losses 1941-1945*
|
|
1. Population losses
|
|
Combat
|
35,000
|
Guerrilla war
during occupation
|
50,000
|
Executions
and punitive massacres
|
70,000
|
Starvation
|
260,000
|
Deported to
forced labour camps and killed
|
105,000
|
Total deaths
|
520,000
|
Population
growth lost due to negative birth rate
|
410,000
|
Total population loss
|
930,000
|
|
|
2. Infrastructure
|
|
94% of
passenger ships
|
|
74% of
merchant fleet
|
|
56% of road
network
|
|
90% of
bridges over 6m long
|
|
60% of trucks
|
|
80% of buses
|
|
93% of train
engines and almost all rolling stock
|
|
100% of
civilian aircraft
|
|
100% of
telephone and telegraph network
|
|
|
|
3. Natural Resources & Production
|
|
40% of grain
& cereals production
|
|
50-80% of
livestock
|
|
25% of
forests
|
|
97% of
exports
|
|
88% of
imports
|
|
*Source: The Sacrifices of Greece in the Second World
War, official government audit, 1945
