On the loan deal, it has a bit of interesting history to it. Germany could have ‘robbed’ Greece at the time, but oddly enough signed a loan paper, with ZERO-percent interest. The loan, by the way, is not with the government of Greece....but with Greek national bank. If you use the no-interest situation....it equals somewhere in the ten-billion Euro range. But there’s this odd feature of the Greek national bank....after the war, the government limited itself to only one-third ownership...the rest is private funds. So the gov’t of Greece (max) could only get around 3.5 billion Euro off this deal, and the rest would go to private stock-holders of the Greek national bank.
On the topic of deaths and private property destroyed, the West German gov’t paid out 115-million DM in the early 1960s. Greece accepted the money, and readily spent it. No one has ever said that private citizens themselves got any part of the money.
The only way that the 185-billion number can really work is that people pretend there was an interest rate stated on the paperwork (there wasn’t), and that the 115-million DM pay-out in 1960 never covered everything.
> Germany could have ‘robbed’ Greece at the time, but oddly enough signed a loan paper, with ZERO-percent interest. <
That the loan was made in 1942, when Greece was under Nazi occupation. So that the loan was certainly made under duress. Any Greece banker who refused to sign the loan agreement would have been immediately punished.
A fair resolution: Assign to that loan what was the prevailing interest rate at the time.