Report UE - The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers
extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for
repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands -- demands that may
have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine
loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and
agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips
and bank statements. They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical
war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German "debt" to the
Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014,
which would amount to about €11 billion. As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question
as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from
1961 onwards for its peoples' suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal
compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and
Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the
Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by
the Nazi occupiers. There's some evidence to indicate that this may be the
case. In terms of the amount of the loan debt, the Greek auditors have come to
almost the same findings as those of the Nazis' bookkeepers shortly before the
end of the war. Hitler's auditors estimated 26 days before the war's end that
the "outstanding debt" the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks. Auditors in Athens calculated an "open credit line" for the same period of
time of around $213 million. They assumed a dollar exchange rate to the
Reichsmark of 2:1 and applied an interest escalation clause accepted by the
German occupiers that would result in a value of more than €11 billion
today.
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