German president asks for forgiveness for wartime crimes against Greece
On the final day of his three-day official visit, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has asked for forgiveness for the crimes committed by occupying German forces in Greece during World War II.
“The brutality, the savagery, the contempt for human life shown by the German occupiers still leaves me speechless,” Steinmeier told a commemoration for the victims of a massacre perpetrated by German troops in the village of Kandanos in Hania, Crete.
“I would like to ask for your forgiveness today on behalf of Germany,” he said, speaking in Greek.
“I ask you, the survivours and descendants, for your forgiveness for the heinous crimes perpetrated here by Germans. I ask for forgiveness for the fact that over many decades my country failed to punish these crimes. That after the war it initially turned a blind eye and remained silent.
“We cannot undo the suffering. We will never be able to properly make up for it. But we must keep its memory alive to ensure that what happened once does not happen again,” he added.
He said the German-Greek Future Fund has been working since 2014 to establish a “common culture of remembrance, a common future.”
Addressing the residents of Kandanos, he thanked them for their generosity in welcoming him, saying that he recognized how difficult it was for a German president to come to this village, one of the first razed to the ground by German soldiers, and expressed his gratitude.
Steinmeier did not touch on the subject of German war reparations and the forced occupation loan, issues with which President Katerina Sakellaropoulou and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis raised with him during his visit.
In his intervention, Kandanos Mayor Antonis Perakis said that that the highly symbolic visit by the German president could lay the foundations for the start of a dialogue between Greece and Germany on the subject.
Earlier, Steinmeier laid a wreath commemorating the dead of Kandanos and talked with the survivours of the atrocity, who again raised the issue of reparations and the occupation loan.
Source: ekathimerini.com
