[markvdb]

Greece couldn't have asked in 1980. There was a debt conference in the early 1950s -by the world war winning superpowers of the time- that postponed compensation questions until the reunification of Germany (then thought to be coming soon). In 1990, after the reunification, the same superpowers convened again, and decided _instead of all countries and without consulting_ to drop the debt.

A mandatory loan from the Greek government to finance the German war effort would be at around 11 billion euros now. It is a multiple of that for many other EU countries.

I'm not saying that this "repay the war debt" is a good idea, but there certainly are a lot of hard to contest historical arguments for the validity of a small part of their claim.