A fresh demand from Greece for Germany to pay reparations for crimes committed both during World War I and the Nazi occupation of World War II was rejected Wednesday.
“I can repeat… that over 70 years after the end of the war and more than 25 years after the Two Plus Four Treaty (allowing German reunification) the question of reparations has been legally and politically settled,” a foreign ministry spokesman told AFP.
A Greek parliamentary committee last year determined that Germany owes Greece at least 270 billion euros ($300 billion) for World War I damages and looting, atrocities and a forced loan during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
In addition, the Greek state accounting office has estimated that private claims for war dead and invalids could be worth an additional 107 billion euros.
Germany has repeatedly apologized for war crimes committed but argues that West German reparation payments in the 1960s settled the issue legally.
Last year German President Joachim Gauck stirred his government by saying Germany should at least “consider” demands the nation pay billions of euros in reparations for the Nazi occupation of Greece.
“We are not only people who are living in this day and age but we’re also the descendants of those who left behind a trail of destruction in Europe during World War Two — in Greece, among other places, where we shamefully knew little about it for so long,” Gauck said in an interview with German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “It’s the right thing to do for a history-conscious country like ours to consider what possibilities there might be for reparations.”
Now Berlin says all former claims were finally settled with the 1990 Two-Plus Four Agreement signed by the former West and East Germany as well as former Allied occupying powers the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.