German-Greek Relations 1940–1960 and the Merten Affair by Heinz A. Richter

Abstract

Reviewed by: German-Greek Relations 1940–1960 and the Merten Affair by Heinz A. Richter Mogens Pelt (bio) Heinz A. Richter, German-Greek Relations 1940–1960 and the Merten Affair. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2019. Pp. 106. Cloth €30.00. This book takes up the so-called Merten Affair. Max Merten was a military administration counsellor who served with the Germans in Salonica during the Axis occupation of Greece from 1942–1944. He was arrested during a visit to Greece in 1957, and in 1959 he was convicted by a Greek military court for war crimes. Merten was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but did not serve any time as he was released soon after the conviction. Upon his return to West Germany, he was arrested again on the same charges—but released only a few days later. Proceedings in West Germany dragged on for another nine years until the case was finally dropped due to lack of evidence. [End Page 476] Merten is one of the very few Germans ever brought to trial for crimes committed in Greece and the only one tried for crimes against Greek Jews. The Merten Affair garnered tremendous attention in both Greece and Germany and led to mutual recriminations. In Greece, the main accusation was that West Germany had demonstrated a total lack of interest in prosecuting war criminals for acts committed in Greece. Conversely, Greece was accused by West Germany of wanting to blackmail Bonn by using Merten as a proxy. The essence of these recriminations is that the West German authorities never took action against any individuals suspected of war crimes in Greece, while Greece had proposed an amnesty for German war criminals in exchange for reparations from Germany. The most sensitive issue was a confidential annex to the economic agreement of 13 November 1958—which paved the way for a DM 200 million state-to-state loan. Seemingly in response, Prime Minister Konstantine Karamanlis promised that Greece would suspend all charges against Merten and hand him over to Germany (Spiliotis 2000, 297), which only added fuel to the controversy. Merten himself exacerbated the situation; once he returned to West Germany, he launched a series of accusations against German and Greek political officials, including the claim that Karamanlis had profited from a stolen Jewish estate during the occupation and had collaborated with the German Security Service. These accusations were rebuffed by the German authorities and caused great consternation in Athens. The main argument of Richter's book is that Max Merten was innocent of war crimes and was used as a bargaining chip by the Greek state to extort money from West Germany. None of these claims is new, but they do reflect how Merten's defence proceeded in the West German media during the late 1950s (cf. e.g. Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, 19 April 2015). However, Richter's claim that Merten was innocent runs counter to the conclusions reached by scholars during the last decades. Recent scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that Merten was deeply involved in the procedures that formed a part of Holocaust or resulted in other war crimes (Spiliotis 2000; Hagen Fleischer 1999, 2006). The book is divided into six chapters discussing in a chronological order Merten's career before and during and after the war. The first two chapters discuss Merten's role in Germany's deportation of the Jews of Salonica, the expropriation of the Jewish cemetery, the confiscation of Jewish property and the shooting of hostages and executions. Together the two chapters cover 29 pages of a total of 88 pages. The following two chapters discuss the relationship between Greece's perennial need for loans and foreign economic assistance to deal with its economic problems and the unfolding of the case against Merten covering 42 pages of a total of 88. The last two chapters focus on Merten's fight [End Page 477] for rehabilitation and the alleged existence of treasures belonging to Merten covering 11 pages of a total of 88. Richter bases his defence of Merten on later evidence given by witnesses to the German crimes against the Jews in Salonica, Merten's own accounts published in the daily newspaper Hamburger Echo and...