Meanwhile a Polish politician has urged Warsaw to follow suit with a compensation claim of its own. The Greek Parliament backed the resolution, which obliges Mr Tsipras’ Government to pursue a payout of £325billion (€376billion) “with all necessary diplomatic and legal action”. Both the deputies of Mr Tsipras’ governing party Syriza and the opposition conservative Nea Demokratia and the Social Democratic Movement of Change (Kinal) backed the resolution.
Speaking in Parliament, Mr Tsipras said: “This is a historic and moral task.”
He pledged to initiate a dialogue on the subject by delivering “an oral communication” to Berlin.
Mr Tsipras campaigned on a platform of claiming compensation from Germany, and the resolution states his government should ensure “Greece’s demands are fully met”.
The long list of claims includes, among other things, a compulsory loan, which Greece had to grant the German Reichsbank during the war, as well as payments for war crimes and damages.
The resolution adds: “The problem of unpaid reparations to Greece from the First and Second World Wars persists as an inalienable debt”.
Nazi Germany occupied Greece from April 1941 to September 1944, during which time an estimate 300,000 Greeks were killed.
German forces are blamed for massacres including those at Lyngiades, Distomo, Kalavryta, Kandanos or Viannos.
Afterwards, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, who heads the Polish parliamentary committee on reparations, tweeted that the Greek vote showed WW2 compensation had become an international issue, and called on his country’s Government to follow suit.
Poland has in the past demanded about 800 billion euros. Six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during the war. The capital Warsaw was razed to the ground by Nazis in 1944 after a failed uprising in which 200,000 civilians died, with 98 percent of it having to be rebuilt.
Germany says the award, under Soviet pressure, of East German territory to Poland in 1953 settled its debt to Warsaw. It says it settled its obligations to Athens in 1960.
A German government spokesman said today: “The question of reparations has been definitively closed, in legal and political terms.”