The Greek Finance Ministry conducted a study in 2012 focused on German war reparations under the government of interim Prime Minister Loukas Papademos. Now completed, the 194-page report that was continued by Panagiotis Karakousis and a team of experts. The team scoured through dozens of thousands of original documents to find new facts on Nazi atrocities in Greece. The central focus of the report is that of the Nazi forced loan from the Greek central bank in 1941 that left the Greek economy in tatters. The report looks at whether the right for the loan’s repayment has been forfeited by the Two-Plus_four Treaty of 1990 or if it is a genuine loan that should be paid back.

The report finds that forced loans are not within the category of classical war reparations as they fall under “debt” to the Greek central bank. The total sum of the debt is at $12.8 billion or 11 billion euros.

The Greek government received 115 million deutsche marks in 1961 as reparations for peoples’ suffering during the occupation that included massacres of villages such as Distomo and Kalavrita and deportations. This figure however did not include the debt taken by the German Reich, the predecessor of today’s Federal Republic of Germany. There is evidence that shows that the heirs of the Nazis, ie. today’s Germans, may indeed be responsible for paying back loans that had been extorted by the Nazis.

Greek auditors as well as Nazi bookkeepers had placed the debt that the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks. Auditors calculate the “open credit” at $213 million. The dollar exchange rate to the Reichsmark was placed at a level of 2:1. Interest rates also increase the value of the outstanding debt to more than 11 billion euros in today’s value.

IN FIGURES

Nazi forced loan (outstanding debt) – 476 million Reichsmarks (11 billion euros today)
on euros)
Cash reserves from central bank branch offices as they pulled out – 634,962,691,995,162 drachmas (20 million euros)
Wehrmacht requirement for Greeks to finance German war efforts – 25 million Reichsmarks per month (1.5 bln drachmas). Payments from August-December, 1941, totalled 12 billion drachmas
Gold plundered from private individuals – 7,358.0014 kgs of pure gold (235 million drachmas)