“It is an open issue that must be resolved,” Greece’s deputy foreign minister, Markos Bolaris, told the Guardian, hitting back at German insistence that compensation claims had been conclusively settled.  “For matters of this kind there is international justice,” he said on Friday. “In all disputes the EU abides by it, on principle. Germany may say it has been resolved but what counts is international law.” 

Greeks suffered hugely at the hands of Hitler’s forces, enduring what Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently described on a visit to Greece as “unimaginable” horrors.  Tens of thousands were killed in reprisals as Greeks mounted what historians would later hail as a heroic resistance against the Wehrmacht [German army], with entire villages being wiped out between 1941 and 1944.  By the time the occupation ended, an estimated 300,000 people had died from famine and the country’s Jewish community had been almost entirely obliterated.

Indicative of the emotions Nazi-era crimes are still prone to elicit, within hours of the vote in the Greek parliament, the MP in charge of Warsaw’s reparations campaign announced that Poland should follow suit.  Greek compensation claims pale by comparison. Warsaw was razed to the ground by the Nazis after an abortive uprising in which 200,000 civilians died. The lives of 6 million Poles – including 3 million Polish Jews – were lost. Poland, which also faces parliamentary elections this year, has since demanded €800 billion in war debts it insists it is still owned by Germany.