[ALBSA-Info] G. Institute and WWII (more)

[Agron Alibali]

The Times (London) 

July 13, 2001, Friday 
Court win for Nazi massacre families 

John Carr in Athens 




The small Greek town of Distomo claimed a breakthrough yesterday in its seven-year legal battle for Pounds 20 million from the German Government for a 1944 Nazi massacre of more than 200 inhabitants. 

An Athens court ordered that German government property in the Greek capital should be auctioned to raise the amount. 

The ruling dismissed Berlin's claim that war reparations had been settled in a treaty 40 years ago and challenged Greek Justice Ministry and Supreme Court efforts to thwart Distomo's claims for compensation for one of the worst massacres of the Second World War. 

The ruling opens the way for other Greek claims for Nazi atrocities, which would strain relations with Berlin. 

Germany's two chief cultural organisations in Athens, the German Archaeological Institute and the Goethe Institute, would be among the first to be sold if the court order goes ahead. However Germany is likely to challenge this week's ruling and the Greek Supreme Court, which is divided on the issue, will consider the case later this year. 

The Greek Government yesterday refused to comment.Costas Simitis, the Germaneducated Prime Minister, is reluctant to damage relations with Berlin as Athens relies on German support to maintain its flow of EU funding. 

"We are enthusiastic here," Loukas Papachristou, the Mayor of Distomo, said. "Justice has risen to its true height at last. I'm sure now that we are on the right road." 

As a boy of six on June 10, 1944, Mr Papachristou watched as troops of the German Army's 4th SSPanzergrenadier Division roared into the town in the foothills of Mount Parnassus and took 218 local people from their homes. 

In retaliation for a partisan attack on the German occupation forces, the troops marched their victims up nearby Kanales Hill and shot them. 

The names of the dead etched on a plaque on the hill include an infant of two months and women in their eighties. Since 1994 Yannis Stamoulis, a lawyer encouraged by the successful actions of Jewish groups in making Germany compensate relatives of Holocaust victims, has been pressing for a Pounds 20 million payment. 

In this week's ruling Judge Aikaterini Setta threw out a German Government claim that national court decisions cannot bind foreign governments. She also ruled that Greece's Justice Ministry, which has vetoed all attempts to get Germany to pay for its Nazi misdeeds, has no power to halt the process. 

Mr Stamoulis said yesterday that he would take the Distomo families' case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. 

Meanwhile there was consternation in the German Archaeological Institute. "I can see the logic of the court's decision," admitted Hermann Kienast, the acting director. But he added: "None of us, either here or in the Goethe Institute, is happy with this." 

Two years ago officials were sent into the institute at Mr Stamoulis's request to draw up an official document of confiscation. The process was halted when both institutes were declared public-interest agencies and immune from seizure. Judge Setta yesterday overruled the public-interest claim. 

According to diplomatic sources, lawyers for Germany will seek an injunction on the ground that in 1961 West Germany paid Greece Pounds 40 million in final compensation for victims of the occupation. Non-Jewish Greeks, mostly survivors of the Third Reich's slave labour camps, received just one-eighth that sum. 

After the war German contributions helped to build the Kanales Hill monument, including the plaque with the victims' names and a fallen crucifix. Germans join Greeks each year in a commemoration. 



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