GERMANY'S GREEK WAR CRIME JUST A "GENERAL WAR TRAGEDY" -

BUT ITALY FORCES GERMANY TO COMPENSATE GREEK VICTIMS

Dateline 10th May 2007

While the German State has sought since 1945 to distance itself from the evils of Nazism and the domestic and international war crimes of the Hitler regime, post war German politicians have repeatedly delayed or refused payment of compensation to victims of Nazism. A large percentage of the Jewish victims of the concentration, extermination and slave labour camps never received any compensation because they died long before the German political class could no longer maintain their studied procrastination.

The same applied to victims of Nazi war crimes in occupied countries - in particular Poland, Greece and Italy. Here, as reported by our friends at German Foreign Policy, we have two examples of Germany's deliberate flouting of EU law and the political manipulation of the rule of law in both Greece (successful) and Italy (attempted) rather than pay compensation to the victims of the Distomo massacre of men, women and children committed by the "Fourth SS Police Division" in occupied Greece in June 1944.

In 2002 the victims families won a High Court case in Greece against the German State clearing the way for German State assets in Greece to be used to pay compensation. But the German Government put pressure on the Greek "Justice Ministry" which then prevented the implementation of the Court's decision! (NEVER TRUST ANY GOVERNMENT THAT THINKS IT CAN DEFINE AND MAINTAIN JUSTICE THROUGH A MINISTRY! - AS THE BLAIR REGIME HAS JUST DONE IN THE UK.)

The German institution in Greece which had been lined up to take the hit for this compensation was the Goethe Institute which performs a similar if somewhat more politicised function to the British Council. The Goethe Institute is particularly forceful in utilising the power and institutions of the EU to promote German interests and is an active supporter of EU integration and the disastrous Euro!

However by using political muscle to overturn the rule of law in Greece the German political class frustrated the victims of Distomo. They therefore took their case to Italy where a court in Florence ruled that the Greek court's ruling was realisable in Italy. The compensation was payable by Germany and could be realised by sequestrating German assets in Italy. This ironically is due not least to the terms of European Union law which makes the judgement of one country's courts applicable in another EU country!

Of course the victims of this Nazi war time atrocity had previously tried to obtain compensation and justice in Germany but the German Constitutional Court ruled that the Distomo dead were "victims of a general tragedy of war" and therefore could not claim compensation! They were undoubtedly not unusual victims of a typical Nazi war where such crimes were rather run of the mill but by any civilised standards this was a heinous war crime, comparable with the suffering of Jewish victims of German Nazism.

The SS men who committed the crime and survive today have never been brought to trial and continue to have jolly get-togethers of old "comrades" in the Austrian town of Groebming. (Such Nazi reunions are addressed as we know by among others the British revisionist historian David Irving!) We also know that the German State still pays pensions to former SS men - regardless of their crimes!

But the German State must now pay 30 million Euros to the victims of Distomo - unless of course the German State can once again unduly and unashamedly influence an EU member state to set aside the rule of law.

The German State has a long track record of attempting to overturn the rule of law - in Sweden (the Mein Kampf case) and in Turkey (where a trial of Germany's political foundations was frustrated by the murder of a vital witness) in the refusal to extradite Germans to other EU countries and to obey international law on children in divorce cases (even the British Ambassador in Washington became a victim of that one!).

Plus ca change………..