In his speech on Sunday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Greece had a “moral obligation” to claim reparations from Germany for the damages wrought by the Nazis during Worle War Two. He said that this was “a moral obligation to our people, to history, to all European people who fought and spilled their blood against Nazism.”

Ignoring Germany’s refusal to requests for reparations 70 years after the war, Tsipras has vowed to claim this because of a “historical obligation”.

The problem began during Germany’s four-year occupation of Greece and a forced war-time loan taken by the Third Reich that forced the Greek central bank to give it, an event that ruined the country financially, forcing it to poverty and bleeding it dry. The forced loan was for 476 Reichsmarks, valued at 8.25 billion dollars in a 2012 German Bundestag report.

Tsipras’ anti-austerity SYRIZA party calculates that the money owed is around half the country’s debt.