Actually, Germany plays a slightly different role.

Up until around 2008, things were going really well for everyone involved. As you may remember, some slight economic disturbances then happened on a rather global scale.

Germany kept selling Greece its goods and when Greece had no money left, further loans were offered, provided Greece agreed to use that money to buy... German submarines. This was at a time when Greece was already deeply in trouble.

Germany then arranged for further loans, which Greece had to use to pay off exisiting loans at private banks (which obviously had made huge profits as long as the party was still going.) This was not about helping Greece, it was time to socialize the losses of the big financial players. That much was obvious even back in 2012.

As a matter of fact, by 2015 only 10% of all the bailout money had actually made it into Greek government coffers. Everything else went right back abroad to foreign private lenders. Shockingly, this did not lead to an economic upturn for the Greek.

Even more shockingly, extreme austerity measures introduced right into the middle of a deep recession did not lead to 4-5% growth rates (more than any European nation in decades), as the models had assumed. Instead, strangely enough, all those lovely forced austerity measures only drove Greece further towards a point of no economic return. Meanwhile, the Greek population learned that cancer medication is kind of a luxury good, when you think about it.

You might think that Merkel, who understood just fine that recession time is spending time, would not somehow forget about that whole concept a year later. But somehow it slipped her mind. Whoops.

"We need to spend billions to bail out the freakin' banks again because they again took a huge and utterly retarded but highly profitable gamble" didn't sound so good in 2010. So things were handled a bit more discretely.

All said and done, the risk associated with Greek debt had been slightly shifted

Back in 2010, nearly all government debt was owed to private entities such as banks. Today 78 per cent is owed to the public sector, primarily people in other Eurozone countries, but also throughout the world through the IMF’s loans.

I could go on, but as I said, my point is: Germany's role is not exactly what you may think it is.