ATHENS – German President Frank-Walter Steinmeir was hit with a request during his visit to Greece for his country to pay reparations for World War II damages, but said it’s not going to happen, rejecting it outright.
“The issue is pending. It is important to address matters of the past,” Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou told him but he cut that idea short when he said that it was settled many years ago.
“Our legal position on reparations differs; you know that. For us, legally, the matter is considered closed,” he said during a trip that saw him go to the site of a Holocaust museum being built in Greece.
He was accompanied by Sakellaropoulou, who earlier in October visited the site of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp during a trip to Poland, Steimeier going to a site in Thessaloniki used to deport Greek Jews to concentration camps.
Successive Greek governments, to no avail, have insisted that Germany hasn’t fully paid for what the Nazis wrought, along with atrocities, calculating the damages exceed 278.7 billion euros ($301.89 billion.)
Greece also wants 10.3 billion euros ($11.16 billion) to reimburse a forced wartime loan but while German governments apologized, there’s been no willingness to discuss paying, after compensating Greece in 1960 with 115 million Deutschmarks.
