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Originally Posted by chemgear
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Eh that article is pretty much all wrong.
The 279 billion in question is NOT for war damages, technically speaking. It's actual unpaid debt. The number however is highly debatable.
During the Nazi occupation of Greece the Nazis forced Greece to "loan" them 476m Richtsmarks. A whole bunch of different numbers have been thrown around as to what the current value for that loan would be. 279 bn is on the high end, but with interest the number actually can go all the way up to 1 trillion.
As far as propaganda moves go, I actually think this one is quite interesting, and it's not without merit.
After all, if that loan had been made under any other circumstances, it would be considered obvious that the Germans should pay. Is it somehow more okay for them to not pay if they originally quite literally forced Greece at gunpoint to give that loan?
It's also not really a new issue, Greece has been on occasion asking for that money pretty much since WWII ended, without gaining much traction. There's of course very little Greece can do to pressure Germany to pay, as they would need international support for their claim, and Greece doesn't have much in the way of powerful allies. (It's actually a good example of the hypocrisy of western countries that nobody cares about the money Germans owe to Greeks, but once the Greeks own money it's a completely different issue.)
If you ask me it's really complete BS that Germany hasn't paid the debt, at least the 10 billion euros that is the low end estimation, which they could easily have done. At one point for example they argued that oh noes, only a unified Germany can pay that debt... But of course once there actually WAS a unified Germany and the Greeks came asking for their money again, the Germans just shrugged and went "oh noes well it's such an old debt now".
It's really pretty clear the Greeks do have a case, and probably they would win that case if there was court for such issues.