The Full Catastrophe (13 page)

Glezos also made some dubious claims involving his signature issue—reparations. On a few occasions, I watched him tell a crowd that Germany had recently compelled the Czech Republic to recompense the Sudeten Germans—who were expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the war—for their expropriated homes: “Germany now obligated them, three years ago, and the Sudeten Germans took back their properties. Is that the past?” This point was meant to underscore the hypocrisy of the German argument that it was too late for Greece to receive compensation for World War II–era damages. Glezos invariably added a second example—“the most important of all.” The German government, he said, had recently agreed “not to pay lump-sum reparation to Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity, but to give them pensions,” accentuating the part about “pensions” with a syllabic staccato. “In other words, the Jew who became a victim of Nazi atrocity, his descendant, and his next descendant, and his next descendant will continuously receive pensions!” One onlooker shook her head in disbelief. “And that happened three months ago,” Glezos went on. “Is that the past?” Glezos said he brought up both these examples to Gauck when the men met, and the German president “had no answer for me.” If Glezos indeed made these arguments, Gauck’s alleged speechlessness could probably be explained by the fact that both of Glezos’s examples were false. Sudeten Germans have never been compensated by the Czech Republic, nor have their properties been returned. Second, the German government had recently chosen to broaden the scope of existing pension benefits for Jews who had worked in ghettos occupied by the Third Reich. Glezos, however, failed to mention that the benefit applied only to Jews who had worked, and therefore were deemed entitled to the pensions. Furthermore, their offspring would not inherit the pensions. By using inexcusable falsities to make his case, Glezos certainly was not helping his cause.

Glezos nevertheless had a considerable talent for appealing
to people’s emotions, and I found myself vacillating between revulsion over such populist disinformation and shedding tears of sympathy for him. The night Glezos spoke in Galatsi, he was particularly energetic and emotional. It was the seventieth anniversary of the execution of his brother, and he began the night by dedicating the event to him. The speakers were turned up very high, and Glezos yelled with fervor into the microphone, his voice blistering the night air. Near the end of his speech, he lowered his voice. People often asked him if he got tired of doing this sort of work at his age, he said. “Beloved friends, you think right now the one talking to you is Manolis Glezos.” He paused for a moment and snapped, “That’s wrong!” His voice started to break as he began to raise it again. “All my dead friends are talking to you! Companions, fellow fighters who I lost in the battles. They come to me and say: ‘Manoli, what’s going on? Our dreams. Where are they?’ And my brother is in front, who speaks to me with a hard tongue: ‘You, Manoli, are living, but I didn’t even manage to live out the years of my youth. I want back the years that you live and I don’t live.’ How do I answer him?” By this point, Glezos was crying out like he was beseeching a lover who had scorned him. “How do I answer him? How?” I looked around to see what effect he was having and saw lots of tears on people’s faces. Glezos finally answered. “I say: ‘Niko, believe. We are trying. We are fighting. We’re in front. We’re not leaving anything behind. And we’re building continuously. We’re destroying the old and building the new. Niko, sometime, you’ll live your dreams, you’ll see them fulfilled. I can’t give you your years back. But I can give you the vindication of your fight. Yours and the others’.’ That’s why I’m here. That’s why I continue the fight.” The audience applauded. “There’s no way I’m going to die in bed. I will die standing up, close to you, in the common struggle.” Then Glezos finished the speech with a line I’d heard him utter on more than one occasion. People always said to him, “We need you,” he said. But this was the wrong way of
looking at things. “As long as you tell me, ‘Manoli, we need you,’ the country is not going forward. When you tell me, ‘Manoli, we don’t need you,’ then the road for everything opens.”

Visits from German leaders have always held special significance in Greece, and that was certainly the case in 1956, when West German president Theodor Heuss was invited to Athens by King Paul of Greece, who happened to be the nephew of the last German kaiser. This was the first state visit of the German president since the end of the war, and the Greek right-wing government was very much interested in providing a warm reception. West Germany was seen as an important economic partner and a valuable ally in the fight against communism. Considering Greece had been under German occupation eleven years earlier, the president’s welcome in Athens was incredibly positive, at least according to newspaper reports at the time. Crowds welcomed the German president, and battle tanks were positioned around the central Omonoia Square to add to the pageantry. At one point, Greek farmers—perhaps aware that Germans were buyers of their exported tobacco, fruits, nuts, and olives—were said to have laid flowers in Heuss’s path. The German president was moved by the Greeks’ “simple, great, and genuine hospitality,” and their propensity to “not forget the past, but to forgive,” wrote a reporter for the German newspaper
Die Zeit.
Like Gauck, Heuss made the pilgrimage to the Acropolis shortly after his arrival. “Europe is built on three hills,” he once said. “On the Acropolis of Athens, the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and on Golgotha,” the place in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.

Behind the official veneer of warm, forgiving relations, however, the reality was far more complicated. The Greek government may not have been interested in holding a grudge, but many
Greeks had not forgiven the Germans for wartime damages. A U.S. embassy account of the visit found “no observable enthusiasm on the part of the Greek populace in Athens,” and called applause for the German president “half-hearted and spotty.” Greek World War II victims’ organizations used the occasion to highlight their demands for German reparations. One group sent a letter to the German embassy saying that “friendship between peoples cannot be established as long as between them lies a chasm, opened by the bitterness, the pain and the injustice, and the recompense that could bridge the divide is not forthcoming.” The rising leftist opposition at the time called for German reparations. After all, in the Paris treaties struck in 1947, Greece received a combined 150 million dollars in reparations payments from Bulgaria and Italy, which also ceded the Dodecanese Islands. Why, leftist politicians argued, shouldn’t the main perpetrators also pay?

The United States, however, cognizant of the failures of the post–World War I reparations policy, and of the fact that Germany would never recover if forced to pay at a level commensurate with the damage it had inflicted, protected Germany from paying fixed monetary sums. The 1953 London Debt Agreement forgave half of Germany’s considerable external debt and put off the question of monetary compensation for wartime damages until “a final settlement of the problem of reparation.” The U.S.-backed agreement was vital to West Germany’s postwar recovery, giving the country a blank slate that allowed it to build the robust, export-oriented economy that has prevailed since the beginning of the 1950s. (Syriza leaders often underscore the debt forgiveness Germany received at this time, and suggest the Germans follow the same example in Greece’s present case.) Greece also experienced an economic boom following the end of its civil war, and it benefited from Marshall Plan aid, which allowed it to rebuild its infrastructure. That, however, did not erase the persistent calls from leftist politicians and victims’ groups for compensation from
Germany, and in the late 1950s, the demands grew stronger as Glezos’s United Democratic Left party gained popularity and accused the Greek government of a kind of collaborationist stance toward Germany.

The Greek government’s domestic image problem over the issue was worsened by what many Greeks saw as another postwar injustice: very few alleged war criminals had been held accountable for atrocities committed in Greece. Greek authorities had agreed to defer to German prosecutors the investigation of German war crimes. Yet, German authorities, uninterested in stirring up the Nazi past any more than was necessary, exhibited little desire to pursue the cases. Around the time of Heuss’s visit, the Greek government threatened to reopen its own investigations of German war crimes unless Germany agreed to pay monetary reparations, according to a CIA report at the time. Germany refused. It just so happened that in 1957, one presumed war criminal, a German lawyer named Maximilian Merten, traveled to Greece in order to testify in a civil case involving his wartime interpreter. During the occupation, Merten was the military administrator of Thessaloniki, where nearly the entire Greek Jewish population of some 50,000 was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the war, Merten was arrested by the Americans, but the Greek government showed no interest in prosecuting him, and he was eventually released. At the time of his trip, however, Merten was concerned Greek authorities might possess a different view on the matter, and so, before leaving he sought assurances from the Greek consul in Berlin that he would not have any legal troubles. Satisfied it was safe, Merten traveled to Greece and was promptly arrested. Why this happened is hard to pin down. The German government was convinced the arrest was politically motivated, and lobbied for Merten’s release. A CIA report at the time determined the arrest was simply a mixup, and said Merten wound indeed soon be released. Undoubtedly, however, Merten’s arrest also
gave the Greeks a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Germans. While Merten was in Greek custody, Germany and Greece signed an economic agreement that included a favorable 200 million deutsche mark loan for Greece. The German motivation for this was manifold. Germany wanted to help stabilize Greece and ensure it remained under the Western—not Soviet—sphere of influence. It was also a way of providing economic aid to Greece without recognizing any legal obligation to pay compensation for wartime damages—“veiled reparation,” in the words of the historian Heinz A. Richter. There was for the German government one additional benefit. In a confidential annex to the economic aid deal, the Greek prime minister at the time, Konstantinos Karamanlis, promised German chancellor Konrad Adenauer that Greece would return Merten to Germany and refrain from prosecuting suspected German war criminals, according to the historian Susanne-Sophia Spiliotis.

At first, however, Merten received what appeared to be stern justice. Two years after his arrest, a Greek military court sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison. Yet, the sentencing was a cosmetic exercise meant to satisfy the Greek public. Months later, the Greek government pushed through parliament a general amnesty for war criminals. The justice minister at the time argued that “agitation of the past” did not serve Greece’s interest in building economic and political ties with West Germany. Greece, the minister added, “was truly proud of its sacrifice, but is not resentful.” The bill was strenuously opposed by the leftist opposition, victims’ groups, and the World Jewish Congress, which called it a “concession to inhumanity and lawlessness.” Merten was quietly released and returned to West Germany, where the government granted him compensation for his time spent incarcerated in Greece. At home, Merten accused Karamanlis of having been an informant for the Nazis during the occupation. Karamanlis and his government adamantly denied the charge, though the allegations roiled
Greek politics for some time, becoming known as the “Merten Affair.”

A few months after Merten’s release, Germany also agreed to give Greece 115 million deutsche marks to compensate Greek citizens persecuted by the Nazis on account of race or creed—an agreement similar to those made with other nations around that time, intended to compensate Holocaust survivors. The German foreign secretary sent a letter to the Greek ambassador saying the language of the agreement meant that Greece would in the future make no further claims with regard to questions of Nazi persecution during the occupation. The Greek ambassador disagreed, however, and in his response said that Greece reserved the right to request reparations based on a future “final settlement” mentioned in the London Debt Agreement of the previous decade.

The time for that final settlement ostensibly came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Germany’s reunification. In Greece, there were renewed demands for reparations and repayment of the forced loan. During the ’90s, Greek victims’ groups filed class-action lawsuits against Germany for atrocities carried out during the occupation. Greek courts ruled in favor of the claimants, and ordered Germany to pay damages. The German government rejected the rulings as a violation of state immunity, and warned their Greek counterparts that relations between the two nations could be severely harmed. In response, the Greek plaintiffs tried to expropriate the Goethe Institute in Athens and other German state properties. The assets were to be auctioned off and the proceeds given to the claimants. The Greek government, however, did not allow the seizures to go forward. The arrival of the Greek debt crisis reinvigorated resentment over Germany’s so-called debts. Thus the Greek government found itself in a familiar postwar dilemma—how to placate its citizens’ demands for reparations while not alienating Germany, the powerful financial benefactor on which it relied.

In early 2014, German parliamentarians, largely from the socialist party Die Linke, an ally of Syriza, petitioned the German government to explain why it believed the reparations demands from Greece were illegitimate. One argument the government gave in response involved the 1990 international treaty that recognized a reunified Germany. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany—signed by East and West Germany as well as the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France—constituted the closest thing to a World War II peace treaty. The German government argued that the treaty was a conclusive settlement on all legal questions arising from the war, including reparations. When I met Glezos in his living room, he pointed out that Greece had never signed that agreement, nor any peace treaty with Germany. Herein lay his plan. After Syriza took power, he would ask Germany to sign a peace treaty which would compel it to finally pay its debts, though he did not want to elaborate on how. “I’m sure that once we discuss a peace treaty, they will pay,” he told me.