Today in 1939, WWII began with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland and went on to claim over 60 million lives. While German fascism was finally defeated in 1945, there was no "final settlement" on reparations for its victims, a legacy that's shaped vast inequality within Europe until today.

By the end of WWII, 5.2 million people in Poland were killed and afterwards the country's population decreased by 11.4 million. On this anniversary last year, Poland demanded €‎1.5 trillion in reparations which Germany rejected saying the issue is "closed".

This year Poland has sought an alliance with Greece, whose government demands €290 billion in reparations which although it excludes the value of antiquities stolen by the Nazis, amounts to more than half of Greece's ever-growing external debt.

Outside of Eastern Europe, the occupation of Greece was Nazi Germany's bloodiest. Over 7 per cent of the population was wiped out and the economy collapsed under Germany's catastrophic mismanagement, causing Greece to lose 97 per cent of its exports.

In the post-war years, Britain sparked the Cold War when it sponsored right-wing forces in Greece to crush communists who had led the resistance to the Nazis. This, and the legacy of the Nazi occupation, meant hunger, poverty and economic catastrophe plagued Greece for decades.

Meanwhile, Germany was on the road to becoming an economic giant thanks to the 1953 London Debt Agreement whereby the UK, US and France cancelled over 60 per cent of Germany's external debt to enable it to become a powerful ally in their Cold War against the Soviet Union.

The agreement also postponed any decision on reparations until a peace treaty was concluded. That peace treaty never came and Germany continues insisting that no country has a legal claim to reparations.

Experts are divided on Germany's obligation under international law but almost unanimously agree it has a moral responsibility to pay up. But for Germany, Europe's largest economy and the fifth largest in the world, reparations threaten its domination of the continent.

Last year Greece's GDP was more than 18 times lower than Germany's. While Germany blames Greece for its economic struggles, notwithstanding how Germany enforced more crushing debt and austerity on Greece via the EU in 2015, the fact remains that Germany's post-war prosperity and the poverty of the countries it occupied was by design.

German historian Karl Heinz Roth calculates the total amount of damages caused by Nazi Germany across Europe amounts to €‎7.5 trillion in today's money, equal to more than half of the Eurozone's debt. It's a sum that would cripple Germany and transform Europe's power balance.

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