Hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a fresh swipe at Israel Thursday by complaining that Germany was being exploited by "greedy Zionists" more than 60 years after WWII.

"Look at the German people. Three generations ago, there was a war. But today an intelligent people is still a hostage of WWII," he said in a speech carried on state television.

Germany, he said, "still doesn’t have the right to have independent
policies or proper defences."

"Every German born is indebted to the arrogant and greedy Zionists,"
Ahmadinejad said, referring to German reparations for the Holocaust.

"When you visit a country, in every town there is a symbol of national pride," Ahmadinejad said, but added that in Germany "every town has something saying to the great German people that their parent and grandparents were murderers."

The Iranian president has already dismissed the Holocaust as a "myth" and has also called for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

"Sixty years after the war, why do the Palestinian people have to burn in the crimes of Zionists under the pretext of the Second World War?" the president said in Zanjan, situated 300 kilometres west of Tehran.

"For 60 years they’ve been massacring Palestinians and destroying their homes under the pretext that a certain number of Jew were killed during World War II," Ahmadinejad said.