ATHENS — German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will conclude a three-day trip to Greece on Thursday on the strategic island of Crete, where he is scheduled to visit a village razed by the Nazis in June 1941. While Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said that Mr Steinmeier’s visit recognizes the war atrocities committed by the Nazis in Greece, this stay reopens not only old memories but also the thorny question of repairs.

“These issues remain unresolved and we hope that one day they will be resolved,” Mr. Mitsotakis said this week.

Greece’s General Accounting Office estimated in 2015 that Germany owed 278.7 billion euros, or just over $300 billion, in reparations, plus an additional $11 billion to repay forced borrowing. in times of war. Five years ago, a Greek parliamentary committee estimated the cost of repairs at around $293 billion.

The Nazi occupation of Greece from 1940 to 1944 was brutal. Hagen Fleischer, a historian of the Second World War, wrote that “in no other non-Slavic country did the SS and Wehrmacht operate with such brutality as in Greece.”

The village of Kandanos and others were razed by the Germans in retaliation for its inhabitants’ courageous participation in the Battle of Crete, a last-ditch effort by Allied forces to repel an airborne invasion by Nazi paratroopers in May 1941.

Most Greek Jews were deported to concentration camps – mainly Auschwitz – while around 250,000 Greeks died of starvation. German reprisals against Greek partisans also led to massacres of villagers in Kalavyrta and elsewhere on the continent.

Although Germany has apologized for crimes committed during the war during the Nazi era, it has been reluctant to discuss reparations. The country has denied owing Greece anything for World War II since paying Athens 115 million Deutschmarks in 1960. Greece has previously claimed the sum did not cover payments for damaged infrastructure, various war crimes and the return of forced prisoners. ready.

For Berlin, the question of compensation was legally settled in 1990, before German reunification.

However, this is a problem that will not go away. A reminder came when early in his term, former Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras laid a wreath at a memorial to Greeks massacred by German soldiers at a site just outside. Athens. At that time, in 2015, Greece was rocked by a years-long financial crisis and former enemy Germany had suddenly become its biggest creditor.

However, global opinion on reparations in general has changed, and topics once considered taboo are now on the table, in places as varied as California and the United States’ remote island outposts. Commonwealth.

There are Greek villages that still bear the scars of the Nazi occupation. As this correspondent can attest, whether it is Ottoman savagery or Nazi brutality, the Greeks have a long memory. In a demonstration of this, the leader of Pasok – the country’s second most popular political party but not yet its official opposition – Nikos Androulakis wrote on right of our country, which the government must raise and demand at every opportunity of political dialogue with Germany. We will not let anything be forgotten. »

Despite the European Union’s outward appearance of courtesy and despite the hundreds of millions of dollars the Germans are pumping into the tourism-dependent Greek economy. every yearthe relationship with Germany itself is not one of unconditional love.

Well-respected President Katerina Sakellaropoulou said this on Wednesday when she reminded Steinmeier during a meeting at the presidential palace that the issue of war reparations was “on hold”, adding that “it is important to address questions from the past. »

Greece’s biggest war scars are mostly invisible – e.g. Thessalonikiwhich was once home to a large and thriving Jewish community that was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust.

The port city was the first stop on Mr. Steinmeier’s visit. It included a tour of the old train station from where tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps. Nearly 54,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.

It is a calamity from which, socially and culturally, Thessaloniki and even Greece have never fully recovered. It was therefore not without a certain emotion, relayed by the Greek press, that the German and Greek presidents planted symbolic pomegranate trees during their visit to the site of the city’s future Holocaust museum. For now, he doesn’t have one.

The octagonal-shaped museum is designed by a trio of Greek, German and Israeli architects. The head of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, David Saltiel, said Tuesday that, when completed in about two years, the museum “will not only be a place of remembrance for the millions of victims, but a tribute – a shining symbol against racism and racism. anti-Semitism – serving as a constant reminder of the importance of humanity, tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

It will also serve as an unofficial reminder to Berlin that, as far as the ten and a half million people living in post-war Greece are concerned, Germany still has unpaid debts to pay.