With a concert in Berlin, the DW-choir to a choir of Greece to the massacre of Kalavryta. In the Greek village, the Wehrmacht shot and killed in December of 1943, more than 700 people.
Under the Motto “to Sing for peace and reconciliation. Reminiscent of Kalavryta” is the DW-choir together with the choir of the city of Athens three games in Germany. After the concerts in Cologne and Bonn, the last guest will find game on Saturday (26.01.) at 18 o’clock in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin-Dahlem. The proceeds of the action “All together, we benefit to create the” of the Greek channel Skai, and so destitute residents of Kalavryta. The Federal Foreign office supports the project and the visit of the Greek chorus members in Germany.
Already in October 2016, the DW had attended-the choir, the place of the massacre and with a concert at the crimes of the Wehrmacht remembers. In the same year the choir to Director Maja Braun was under a great deal of media coverage, together with the choir of the city of Athens in the Greek capital. “Our current concerts, we rededicate to the memory of the events in Kalavryta,” says Maja brown. On the parts of the program of the Kalavryta-oratory, dedicated to the youth of the village. “The plant does not want to make a future audible, crimes against humanity repeat. It stands for encouragement and vigilance, and aims at understanding, forgiveness, and reconciliation,” said brown.
Members of the DW choir in the Holocaust Museum in Kalavryta 2016
13. In December 1943 a command of the German Wehrmacht killed all able-bodied men and boys from Kalavryta, a mountain village in the North of the Peloponnese Peninsula. Over 700 people fell to massacre. The German soldiers burned down the village.
Wehrmacht killed more than 700 people
“City of widows” is called Kalavryta since then. It was one of the worst war crimes in Southeast Europe during the Second world war. The Wehrmacht justified the massacre of civilians as a retaliatory action. Previously, the Greek partisans had taken 81 German soldiers captured and later shot.
Above Kalavryta, a memorial commemorating the victims of the massacre
The occupation by Nazi Germany and its allies Italy and Bulgaria fell, tens of thousands of Greeks to the victim. In the course of the partisan war and the German retaliatory actions between 60,000 and 70,000 Greek men, women and children were killed. 90 percent of Greek Jews – about 60,000 people – were also murdered. Hundreds of thousands of people died in addition to the by the crew caused famine.
Discussion of reparations to take
Those responsible for the massacre of Kalavryta were not moved to the end of the war to the responsibility. Only Hellmuth Felmy, commanding General for southern Greece, was convicted in 1948 in the Nuremberg trials as a Co-applicant to 15 years in prison. He was, however, already in 1951 a Christmas Amnesty.
The debate about reparations for the occupation. A Commission of experts of the Greek Parliament, estimated the extent of the war damage in 2015, to at least 289 billion euros. These claims of the Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos reiterated in January 2019, at the most recent Meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Athens.
Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel during a Meeting with Greek President Pavlopoulos 11. January 2019
In 1961, the Federal Republic of Germany Greece had paid a lump sum of 115 million D-Mark as a “reparation”. Further payments they refused since then. Complaints by the Victims were dismissed by the European court of justice, the International court of justice in The Hague, as well as by the Federal constitutional court.