If the general idea is that past debts should be paid always, regardless of government changes, then either the German government pays up or it doesn't demand that others do. The 1940s isn't that far away. It is frequent that countries pay off debts incurred a century ago.

As for the loan itself, this is what it is all about according to the renowned German historian Hagen Fleischer, a man who is one of the foremost authorities on the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Greek Civil war:

...it's important in this case to make a distinction between reparation payments for war crimes and repayments of so-called Besatzungsanleihe: monthly loans demanded from the Greek government in 1942-44 to pay for the maintenance costs of the German army in Greece and further military activity in the Mediterranean, even delivering food from starving Greece to Rommel's "Afrika-Korps". In early 1945, in the final days of the Third Reich, a group of high-ranking German economists calculated this "German debt (Reichsschuld) to the Greek state" to amount to 476m Reichsmarks, which would be roughly €10bn today.

Compared with the highly emotionally charged issue of wartime reparations, this debt is relatively free of moralistic baggage. It could - and should - form the basis for talks about the foundation of a "future fund", a foundation dedicated to a joint rehabilitation of a "shared" history and the financing of a symbolic infrastructure project.

This would however require a major change of attitude on Germany's behalf. Only Berlin has the power to open talks about a historic consolidation with Greece. Until then, we continue to exist with an absurd situation where democratically elected German postwar governments of all colours continue to be in denial about the existence of this debt, which was officially recognized even by the Nazi regime.