THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

When they are doing it while their armies have conquered your country chances are good they will never consider repaying the "loan". No matter how valid the claim of the coerced lender. But Greece, which made loans to the Third Reich with a gun to its head during the war is now demanding Germany repay that loan so Greece can get the austerians of their back.

Germany has never repaid money that Germany forced Greece to lend it during World War II, says the Greek government. Now the Greeks would like it back, to help repay the $330 billion the country owes – $67 billion to Germany.

The German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel bristles at the suggestion. It insists that any German debt from World War II was eliminated with the so-called Two-plus-Four Treaty that made possible the reunification of Germany in 1990.

“Greece will not be able to cover their debts by constructing German responsibilities dating back to World War II,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said recently. “Greece suffers not because of Berlin, or Brussels, but because its own elites have failed for decades.”

“This has all been settled, there can be no more claims,” said Volker Kauder, a member of the German parliament.

But the view is not unanimous. Norman Paech, a retired law professor at Hamburg University and one of Germany’s leading experts on war reparations, has been making a case for more than a decade that the Greeks have a case.

“The Greek claims with regard to the loan and German war crimes are legitimate from a political, legal and even more so from a moral point of view,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Paech argues that German officials are fighting against this obligation for a simple reason: There are other claims.

He said the legal problem is that the 1953 London Treaty officially put all claims against Germany on hold until a lasting peace treaty could be reached. The 1990 treaty that unified Germany is that document, but it was signed only by the two Germanys and the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia. That means claims from any other countries are now active – for example, from Greece.

And gaps are appearing among Germany politicians, too. Can Germans really claim anything from a nation they occupied and looted only 70 years ago?

The German government is expected to fight this tooth and nail, if only because Greece is not the only country with legitimate claims. They are just the first one the Germans have pushed too far in the current economic crisis.