“Greece will not stop demanding the payment of German war reparations,” Foreign Minister Nikos Denias said on Tuesday on the occasion of the anniversary of the Massacre of Kalavryta.
In a post on Twitter, Dendias said:
“Today we honor the victims of the Massacre of Kalavryta by German occupation forces, on 13/12/1943.
The execution of hundreds of civilians and the complete destruction of the historic city will never be forgotten. Greece will never cease Greece will never cease to claim the payment of German war reparations as a minimum compensation for the suffering our country endured during World War II.”
Greece will never cease to claim the payment of German war reparations as a minimum compensation for the suffering our country endured during World War II. (2/2)
— Nikos Dendias (@NikosDendias) December 13, 2022
What is interesting is that while PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis refrains from make WWII reparations claims, the Foreign Minister keeps bringing up the issue on and off as in last summer to his German counterpart.
Attempts by previous governments to claim the WWII reparations> were rejected by German governments.
The Massacre of Kalavryta
With 693 executed men, women and children the Massacre of Kalavryta is the bloodiest by the Nazis in Greece and is also known as the Holocaust of Kalavryta.
It was carried out by the German Army’s 117th Jäger Division.
On December 13th, 1943, the German Nazi troops executed the whole male population of Kalavryta, children, and women and burned the entire town.
More pictures: Kalavryta Municipality Museum
The Germans did the same thing in Kragujevac in Serbia where between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly men and boys were executed as reprisal for the partizans killing 10 German soldiers and wounding 26. The Germans stated that for every German soldier killed they would execute 100 Serbs and 50 for every soldier wounded. 144 high school students were among the victims. Massacre victims included Jews, Romani, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, and members of other nationalities, but most were Serbs. Contrary to what the Germans expected, these mass executions only drove the population to the partizans.
Germany’s Federal Cabinet has never officially apologized for any of the mass executions committed in Serbia by the Wehrmacht during World War II, including the Kragujevac massacre. A German head of state or chancellor never had the decency to visit the memorial. Only in 2021, 80 years after the massacre, they sent the vice president of the Bundestag.