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With its defeat, Germany could not impose reparations and pay off her war debts now, which were now colossal. [ 116 ] Historian Niall Ferguson partially supports this analysis: had reparations not been imposed, Germany would still have had significant problems caused by the need to pay war debts and the demands of voters for more social ...
Most of Germany's reparations payments were funded by loans from American banks, and the recipients used them to pay off loans they had from the U.S. Treasury. Between 1919 and 1932, Germany paid out 19 billion goldmarks in reparations, and received 27 billion goldmarks in loans from New York bankers and others.
Of this figure, Germany was only required to pay 50 billion gold marks ($12.5 billion), a smaller amount than they had previously offered for terms of peace. [65] Reparations were unpopular and strained the German economy but they were payable and from 1919 to 1931, when reparations ended, Germany paid fewer than 21 billion gold marks. [66]
When Germany stopped making payments in 1932 after the agreement reached at the Lausanne Conference failed to be ratified, [12] Germany had paid only a part of the sum. This still left Germany with debts it had incurred in order to finance the reparations, and these were revised by the Agreement on German External Debts in 1953. After another ...
The government of Adolf Hitler declared all further payments cancelled in 1933, and no further reparations payments were made until after the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Germany finally paid off its debts under the Versailles treaty, which had been reduced by 50% at the 1953 London Debt Conference, in 2010. [157]
132 billion gold marks ($31.5 billion, 6.6 billion pounds) were demanded from Germany in reparations, of which only 50 billion had to be paid. In order to finance the purchases of foreign currency required to pay off the reparations, the new German republic printed tremendous amounts of money—to disastrous effect.
Dawes, who was the U.S. vice president at the time, received the Nobel Peace Prize of 1925 for "his crucial role in bringing about the Dawes Plan", specifically for the way it reduced the state of tension between France and Germany resulting from Germany's missed reparations payments and France's occupation of the Ruhr.
The aftermath of Germany's loss in World War 1 saw the country experience severe hyperinflation, with the Weimar Republic finally tackling the issue by 1923. A period of known as the Golden Twenties then saw major economic stabilization and growth fuelled largely by foreign investments and loans. However, the Great Depression resulted in the ...