Greek Chatter

There are several news groups discussing the story today, and I'll just cover the basic story.

Greece has had some group working on reparations from Germany and wanted a 'true' estimate.  So today, it came out.....the Greeks say compensation for WW II comes out to 269.5 billion Euro (roughly 310 billion US dollars....more or less).

Additionally, they suggest that the repayment for a bank loan is sitting out there, and it would be worth about 10.3 billion Euro.

What happens now?  The report will be presented to the Greek Parliament, and likely approved....then they say it will be sent onto Germany and the EU.  They suggestion negotiation is possible.  Typically with Greeks, that means that you can get four-percent off the original price, and perhaps you could push it to 10-percent.

German attitude about this.  The working-class German will sit there and grumble a good bit....maybe use a curse word or two....just to indicate that this will absolutely never happen.  Chancellor Merkel, will be extremely polite and just refuse to acknowledge the suggestion was ever made.

The historical aspects of this?

First to the bank 'loan'.  The Nazis arrived and requested a loan.  Yes, this was not a robbery like you expect.  So they requested a fair sum of money in the spring of 1941 from the Greek National Bank.  This was written into the form of a loan, with ZERO-percent interest.  Yes, it actually says this.  Has the loan ever been repaid?  No.

But there is this odd aspect....this was a private bank, so if you returned the money (figure the 10-odd billion Euro, without interest)....who would get the money?  The people who lived in 1941 and their descendents.....or private owners of the bank today?  The government ownership?  After the war, their ownership was written into law....a max of thirty-five percent ownership.  So that's all that they could claim.

Did Greek Jews have a fair amount of this cash in the bank?  Well....no one ever asks that question.  My humble guess is that some fair sum of this money that the Nazis took (as a loan) was Jewish money sitting in Greece.

The reason for the loan?  Oh.....the Nazi Party was apparently going bankrupt with their economic program.  Yeah....with the war barely starting up....they were in serious economic trouble.

Even if people agreed to the bank loan deal.....it would take years to determine the rightful people to pay the billions to.

So onto the reparations deal....the second part of this discussion.

The Marshall Plan playing this?  Yes.  The plan basically said that there would be no reparations due from Germany.  We (the US) would fund all your damage money.  Once you accepted the US money....you were supposed to sign off and 'shut up'.  What did the Greeks get from the US (in today's dollars)?  The historical number is 3.5 billion dollars.

The reparations game here? What happened after the Trojan War (1194 BC)? What happened after the Greece-Punic War in 600 BC? What happened after the Greece-Persia War (499 BC)? What happened in the Social War of 357 AD? What happened in 334 with Alexander the Great and his Greek Army invading various neighbors? What happened in the Greek Civil Wars of 1823 (phase one and phase two)? The sad truth is that Greece has had over sixty various wars or campaigns over the past four-thousand years. Greece ought to be paying for reparations of various wars to their neighbors, if they take this reparations game serious.

My take on this is that the Germans will grumble and pretend this wasn't said.  What the Greeks really want?  They want these loans made to them five years ago....into the billions....to be forgiven.  The amount?  Roughly 60-billion Euro (if you use the numbers from 18 months ago).  German acceptance of some free money deal?  Don't dare bring this up in the company of working-class Germans.