Abstract
Besides the massacres in the Czech village of Lidice and Oradour in France, it is the Greek town of Distomo that symbolizes the extreme violence of the Nazis against the civilians of occupied countries in Europe during World War II. Later on, in the Cold War climate and following the policy of containment emerging from the civil war in Greece (1946-1949), the crime was often downplayed, and its narrative blunted for the sake of the stabilization of the Western Bloc, but never fully forgotten.
This paper focuses on the postwar reconstruction of Distomo memory in Greek-German relations from the perspective of justice and compensation. Based predominantly on archival and legal sources, it elaborates on the interstate negotiations relating to this massacre.
Further, it follows the bottom-up actions of the survivors, opening a possible path to an understanding of postwar reconciliation, not only on a trans-European level but globally.