‘In an op-ed for Spiegel Online, Gesine Schwan, a former presidential candidate, said Germany "needs to clean before its own door" when it comes to its Nazi past, noting that victims and descendants have longer memories than perpetrators and descendents.
"It looks awkward when well-off Germany demands the repayment of debts from poor Greece but is itself not prepared to even speak about the repayment of a forced loan by Nazi Germany on Greece," she wrote.
[….] Greece is seeking compensation on three accounts – general war reparations, a claim resulting from a massacre of 214 people in the Greek village of Distomo in 1944 and the repayment of the forced loan that the Nazis got from the Greek central bank in 1943. The total amounts to hundreds of billions of euros.
Germany, for its part, says it has honoured its obligations, having paid Greece 115m Deutchmarks in 1960. It also argues that the matter was closed by the 1990 ‘two plus four treaty’ signed by West and East Germany, as well as the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the US.
But this has been disputed in a 2013 report by the German parliament’s research service which argued that these agreements do not necessarily fully close the matter…’
via Prominent German politicians side with Greece on war reparations.