Greek Parliament’s interparliamentary committee on German reparations was briefed on Thursday by officials from the Finance Ministry on methods used to calculate the loan that Greece was forced to give Germany during World War II. The loan at the time had left the nation stripped of funds while the Nazis stockpiled food to supply their armies overseas using Greek money.
Coordinator of the special working group looking into the method Panagiotis Karakoussis explained the method being used to collect information and to evaluate the extent of the German loan from Greece He said they converted the total amount the Nazis received from the Bank of Greece during the country’s three-and-a-half year occupation into 1941-value U.S. dollars because that was the only relatively stable currency at the time.
The group said it will begin calculating the interest repayments on the original disbursement from January 1, 1945, with an interest rate based on the average return of the 10-year U.S. Treasury bill. To do this, the group has gathered 45,000 documents from the Foreign ministry, 761 files from the Gemeral Accounting Office and 5,000 documents from the State Legal Council. The final report with the exact figure that Germany has owed Greece for decades will be ready by December 31, 2014. It will include an invoice of all the types of German reparations owed to Greeks.