Throughout the German occupation of Greece, the square in front of my home was taken over by the Wehrmacht. Streaming into Athens on the morning of 27 April 1941, the tanks, motorbikes and cars of the 6th Armoured Division headed for the city centre and, in particular, the ancient Plaka district. Within an hour, the swastika had been hoisted from the Acropolis.

It was thus that the square was turned into an army depot, German guards posted at each of its four corners. My neighbour, Lina, who was 12 at the time, remembers German officers taking over the top floor of the building next to the neoclassical house she lives in – which happens to be my home. On the floor below lived Mr and Mrs Michaelides, with their three children. "Incredibly, they stayed throughout the war," she recalled. "I was always scared for them, my mother always made sure I called them by their first names, because they were Jews."

Last week those memories returned with the outbreak of a very different sort of war. "Economic Nazism threatens Europe," proclaimed one newspaper, lashing out at German media jibes that the Greeks, being "cheats", should pay for allowing their debt-ridden country to reach the point of bankruptcy.

"Racist frenzy and calumny against Greece," railed another after a German weekly saw fit to cover its front page with an image of Venus de Milo gesturing obscenely under the headline "frauds in the Euro-family".

The war of words has worsened not so much as a result of an impending invasion but an interview given by Theodore Pangalos, the Greek deputy prime minister, to the BBC. When my colleague Malcolm Brabant went to see the septuagenarian, he intended to discuss the mounting hostility Greece's debt crisis has triggered towards the EU. He did not think he would be treated to a tirade about the devastation Nazi Germany had wrought on the Greek economy. But after declaring "we don't want to open the chapter of the Second World War," Pangalos could not help himself: "There is an issue that stands there," he said, before lunging into a vitriolic description of the role Hitler's forces had played in plundering Greece "of gold and money".

There was the issue of war reparations, too; after borrowing the money "using violence" they had failed to return the ill-gotten gains and the Greek economy was still suffering: "They shouldn't complain much about [us] stealing and not being very specific about details."

This is not the first time Pangalos has upset Germany. In 1993, as foreign minister, he declared that it behaved as "a bestial giant with a child's brain". But, although prone to the odd clanger, Pangalos also has his finger on the pulse of the nation.

For older Greeks last week, his only crime was that he did not go far enough. It wasn't just the stolen loot, plundering of homes and factories, crippling of the economy, or destruction of the countryside and burning of villages and schools. It was the sheer brutality of a regime that allowed some 300,000 to die from starvation after it requisitioned food, killed at least 100,000 in reprisals following mass resistance, and with frightening efficiency virtually wiped out Greece's entire Jewish community.

Like so many others of her generation, Lina, my neighbour, is still haunted by the howls of the hungry. In 1941, when famine took its biggest toll, they would line the streets, hands outstretched over swollen stomachs. "My father died of famine," she says matter-of-factly. "The Germans kept all the food."

The bravery of the Greeks was not lost on the Führer – or Winston Churchill, who would famously pronounce that "the heroes fight like Greeks" after their extraordinary defeat of Mussolini's forces in 1940.

Not long ago I had the honour to shake the hand of Manolis Glezos, who as an 18-year-old tore down the swastika from the Acropolis in the first act of defiance. A lifelong fighter with leftist ideals, he would go on, after the war, to spend nearly three decades in prison under authoritarian right-wing rule. "Removing the swastika was an act of resistance for all of Europe," he said, eyes glinting. "Please don't ask me any more."

Today it is not the Wehrmacht but German tourists outside my door.

Ever chipper, the white-haired Glezos is the first to say they should be here. But, like so many others, he is also living proof that the wounds of Hitler's Greece have not fully healed even after so many years.