There is a nasty contagion sweeping across Europe, and it's not economic.

I'm talking about the anti-German feeling which has been growing rapidly in Greece and spreading across southern Europe, and now appears to be seeping northwards.

There has even been a whiff of it in the House of Lords, of all places. During a recent debate a UK Independence Party peer, Lord Willoughby, suggested that German economic policy recalled slogans used by the Nazis. The Tory peer – and former European Commissioner – Lord Tugenhadt then said anti–German feeling was now rising in many European countries, and he rightly described this as "very worrying and disturbing".

In Greece itself it does not help that the country was invaded by the Italians and then the Nazis. Mussolini's troops were incompetent; the German forces were only too competent, though the Greeks fought heroically in a futile but valiant defence of their country. These bitter times are long since over, but in the current context their rancid residue is never far way. When Germany's Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, suggested that Greece was becoming a "bottomless pit", Greece's 82-year-old president, Karolos Papoulias, over-reacted with fury.

Mr Papoulias served in the Greek resistance and he could not contain himself. "Who is Schaeuble to insult Greece?" he demanded. The answer is: well, he's just the finance minister in the country that is in effect the paymaster of Europe. But Mr Papoulias wanted to open old wounds, not deal with current unpalatable realities.

Of course Mr Schaeuble could have chosen a more diplomatic phrase, yet what he said hardly amounted to an insult. He and Angela Merkel, a rare European politician of real stature, do not wish to crush or to dominate Greece. They want to help that stricken country out of its self-inflicted woes. And they are without doubt self-inflicted: wholesale tax evasion, absurd labour practices, often incompetent public sector workers putting in very short hours yet enjoying job security for life and earning on average 25% more than those in the embattled private sector.

But the medicine on offer from Mrs Merkel and her colleagues is proving unpalatable. The demagogue Alexis Tsipara, supposedly the most popular man in Greece right now, happily boasts about "destroying" the European Union if necessary.

There is in much of Europe a festering dislike of Germany which is now being unleashed. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale recently carried on its front page an attack on Germany which included: "The Germans are a superior race. We read that in the speeches of Hitler."

Hitler died in 1945. Can we not, please, forget him, for the time being anyway? The truth is that the Germans are, in modern Europe, indeed superior. They have done most things right, and not just economically. The integration of the former East Germany – a failing state if ever there was one – was a political and social triumph. Mrs Merkel herself comes from East German stock. But for all that, Germany is becoming ominously isolated. There is something in the human psyche, some nasty little weevil, that resents efficiency, hard work and success.

As long as France, the second most dominant country in the EU, was a key economic ally of the Germans, it was difficult for other countries to challenge Germany. That changed with the election of Francois. Hollande, who, if not anti-German, is certainly determined to assert France's independence.

Before he was elected Mr Hollande said something fascinating: "Germany and France are not a genuine partnership, because one is currently driving and the other is a passenger. France has become a follower in the relationship." When I read those words I realised that if Mr Hollande were elected, there would be an immediate, dangerous division at the heart of Europe, at the very time when it most needs to be united.

Divisions over economic policy are one thing; divisions that hark back to old atavistic sores and even hatreds are quite another.