German magazine Spiegel reports that the Greek government will be initiating a formal claim for war reparations from the German government upwards of 280 billion euros for the destruction caused during World War II.
The article says the Greek government has been holding on to a 2016 report that outlines the reparations claims since August of 2016 and has been waiting for the European Union bailout package to end, before deciding to act on the request.
The matter re-surfaced in a formal manner when Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos brought it up during a commemoration of a Nazi massacre at the village of Kalikratis in Crete on October 3, where he said that Greece’s demands for reparations were valid and legal.
Only a few weeks earlier in the village of Kandanos, which was burned to the ground by the Nazi Germans during World War II, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras referred to reparations from Germany as their “historic duty” and suggested that the matter could either come in the form of a bilateral agreement with Germany, or even be decided by international courts.
The matter of war reparations is popular amongst Greeks, whose country was ravaged by the Nazi occupation forces, and could buy Tsipras some points in the polls.
Reparation claims against Germany were a key election promise made by Tsipras.
