RTE News Thursday, 30 September 2010 15:14
Germany will this weekend pay the last instalment of the reparations it owes from WWI, 92 years after the conflict ended.
The reparations were imposed by the victorious allies.
At midnight on Sunday, they will receive the last payment of €70m.
These 'reparations' were intended partly by the Allies, particularly France, to keep Germany weak.
However, the ultimate effect was the opposite, playing a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power and WWII, according to historians.
The victors forced the Germans to admit in effect in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that the war was their fault, and to commit to pay crippling amounts for decades to come.
After much in-fighting among the Allies, who were also in debt to each other from the war, Germany, on the brink of starvation and revolution, was presented with a bill of 269bn gold marks.
It soon became clear that Germany could not pay.
First came hyperinflation, which saw at its height a billion-mark note, and France, frustrated by the lack of payment, occupied Germany's Ruhr industrial area in 1923, the same year as Hitler's abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.
The 1924 Dawes plan and the 1929 Young plan dramatically reduced the burden, and the 1932 Lausanne Conference suspended all repayments in the wake of the Great Depression.
Many historians say that Germany in fact could have paid, particularly after the reparations were sharply reduced and Germany was loaned huge amounts of money.
But it was their symbolism that counted. Hitler was able to play on resentment to the reparations and the famous 'War Guilt Clause' in the Treaty of Versailles to gain support in the chaotic inter-war years.
After WWII, the new West Germany - but not the communist East Germany - agreed at the 1953 London conference to repay its interwar debts, albeit a much reduced amount, something it completed in 1980.
One loose end though was interest payments on loans taken out under the Dawes and Young plans that piled up between 1945 and the conference in the English capital.
It was agreed that this would be paid when and if East and West Germany ever reunified.
This was seen as so unlikely at the time that it was akin to forgiving the debt, and the original loan certificates became historical curiosities for sale at flea markets.
But in 1990, the unthinkable happened, and Germany - whilst celebrating unity after decades of painful division - said it would repay, costing it around €200m.
The debts have been resold so many times that nobody really knows whom exactly Germany now owes.
Germany to complete WWI reparations at last.
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Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy
now it's all paid off apparently
Silence is beautiful
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