Did Germany’s President Joachim Gauck read the Nobel Prize-winning op-ed columnist Paul Krugman in the New York Times? Krugman recently travelled to Greece and wrote, that he ‘visited a shelter for the homeless in Athens and was told heartbreaking tales of a health care system in collapse: patients turned away from hospitals because they couldn’t pay 5 euro entrance fee, sent away without needed medicine because cash-starved clinics had run out, and more’. He called it an endless nightmare and advocate for a standstill on further austerity. But Krugman knows the merciless response of the Eurogroup: we want our money back!
May be President Gauck saw ‘Athens Album’,
by photographer Filip Claus? Images of aged, often middle-class, people
searching refuse containers; of streets of the once lively Greek capital with
more than half the shops closed; of longtime unemployed men and women camping,
since May 2014, in front of the ministry of finance building. It is a reportage
of a humanitarian crisis…
A few weeks ago, the new Greek government and
parliament re-opened the claim on compensation by Germany for World War 2
crimes. The Nazi’s not only stole billions from Greece’s Treasury at the end of
the war but massacred and wiped out complete villages. President Gauck said
last week: “We are descendants of the Germans who in World War 2 left a trail
of devastation in Europe in their wake, including in Greece”; advocating taking
Greece’s demands for compensation for the slaughter by the Nazi’s
seriously.
The remarkable intervention of President
Gauck came before on May 3 an apologetic Bundeskanzlerin Merkel , at the 70
years commemoration of the Liberation of Dachau concentration camp (near Munchen), pledged to
keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes.
‘We will not forget the incomprehensible Nazi terror. We will remember,
for the sake of the victims, for our sake and for the sake of future
generations’…
