The continuing problem of Germany

The Great War failed to solve the German question. To be sure, Germany was exhausted and in the shackles of Versailles, but its strategic position actually improved in the war. Britain and France were at least as exhausted, Russia was in chaos and her boundary driven far to the east, and Italy was disaffected from her former allies, so that Germany’s eastern and southern approaches now consisted of a broad ring of weak states. If and when Germany escaped Versailles, therefore, it might pose a greater threat to Europe than in 1914.

This danger obsessed postwar French leaders, but they quarreled among themselves over the proper response: strict execution of the Versailles treaty and perhaps even the breaking of German unity, or a Wilsonian policy of “moral disarmament” and reconciliation? In late 1919 the French electorate returned a staunchly conservative decision. The peace conference had not solved France’s triple crisis of security, finance, and industrial reconstruction. Postwar French governments undertook to replace the abortive Anglo-American guarantee with an alliance system of Germany’s neighbours. Belgium shrugged off neutrality, which had failed spectacularly to shelter it in 1914, and concluded a military alliance with France in September 1920. The Franco-Polish alliance (February 1921) and a Franco-Czechoslovak entente (January 1924) created an eastern counterweight to Germany. But these states, while wedded to the Versailles system, needed more protection than they offered. France could come to their aid only by a vigorous offensive against Germany from the west, which in turn required access to the bridgeheads over the Rhine. Thus, not only French security but that of east-central Europe as well depended on German disarmament and Allied occupation of the Rhineland.

French finances were strained by the costs of rebuilding the devastated regions, the army, imperial obligations, and the refusal of the French chamber to accept sizable new taxes until Germany had paid reparations or France’s war debts were annulled. To the extent that Germany reneged, France would face deficits imperiling its currency. As to industrial reconstruction, France depended on Germany for the coal needed to revive iron and steel production and at the same time was forced to countenance a cartel arrangement to escape Germany’s economic competition.

Far from sympathizing with France’s plight, the United States and Britain quickly withdrew from the Versailles treaty. Britain found itself in the midst of a postwar economic slump magnified by its wartime losses in ships and markets. Lloyd George had promised the veterans a land “fit for heroes,” yet unemployment reached 17 percent in 1921. The war had accelerated the decline of the aging British industrial plant and the economy more generally. Unemployment never dipped much below 10 percent during the decade before the onset of the Great Depression, and in the early 1920s the pressure was on the British government to boost employment by reviving trade. Keynes argued persuasively that while Europe could never recover until the German economy took its natural place at the centre, virtually every clause of the treaty seemed designed to prevent that particular return to normalcy. To be sure, the British needed the reparations debt from Germany on the books to balance against their own war debts to the United States. But soon after the war Lloyd George came to favour German recovery in the interest of trade. The entente with France became strained as early as 1920 over the issues of reparations, Turkey, and the coal shortage of that year, from which Britain garnered windfall profits at the expense of the French.

German politics and reparations

Germany, meanwhile, weathered both the leftist agitation of 1919 and the right-wing Kapp Putsch of March 1920. But elections showed a swing to the centre-right in German politics away from the parties that had voted to ratify Versailles. The insecure coalition cabinets of the early 1920s, therefore, found themselves with little room to maneuver on the foreign stage. They dared not rebel openly against Versailles, but dared not endorse fulfillment too eagerly in the face of domestic opinion. Nor could the weak Berlin government take forceful measures to end inflation, impose taxes, or regulate big business. The industrial magnates of the Ruhr thus acquired a virtual veto power over national policy by dint of their importance to the economy, a fact the embittered French did not fail to notice. German leaders themselves differed over how to win relief from the treaty. Army chief Hans von Seeckt and the eastern division of the foreign office thought in Bismarckian terms and favoured close ties with Russia, despite its obnoxious regime. But other economic and foreign policymakers preferred to rely on Britain and the United States to restrain France and revise the treaty. German diplomats soon synthesized these approaches, threatening closer ties with Moscow in order to win concessions from the West.

The Reparations Commission bickered throughout 1920 over the total sum to be demanded of Germany and its distribution among the Allies. At the Spa Conference (July 1920), France won 52 percent of German payments, Britain 22 percent, Italy 10, and Belgium 8. At the conferences of Hythe, Boulogne, and Brussels, France presented a total bill of 230,000,000,000 gold marks, although the British warned that this was far beyond Germany’s capacity to pay. But when German foreign minister Walter Simons offered a mere 30,000,000,000 (Paris Conference, February 1921), French Premier Aristide Briand and Lloyd George made a show of force, seizing in March the Ruhr river ports of Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Ruhrort, taking over the Rhenish customs offices, and declaring a 50 percent levy on German exports. Finally, on May 5, 1921, the London conference presented Berlin with a bill for 132,000,000,000 gold marks, to be paid in annuities of 2,000,000,000 plus 26 percent ad valorem of German exports. The Germans protested adamantly that this was “an injustice without equal.” Historians have differed sharply as to whether the obligations were within the capacity of the German economy. But the May 1921 schedule was less harsh than it seemed, for the bill was divided into three series—A bonds totaling 12,000,000,000 marks, B bonds for 38,000,000,000, and the unlikely C bonds in the amount of 82,000,000,000. The latter would not even be issued until the first two series were paid and existed as much to balance against the Allies’ debts to the United States as actually to be paid by Germany. Nevertheless, Chancellor Konstantin Fehrenbach resigned rather than accept this new Diktat, and his successor, Joseph Wirth, acquiesced only under threat of occupation of the Ruhr.

The “fulfillment” tactic adopted by Wirth and his foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, was to make a show of good faith to demonstrate that the reparations bill was truly beyond Germany’s capacity. They were aided in this by the continuing deterioration of the paper mark. The prewar value of the mark was about 4.2 to the dollar. By the end of 1919 it reached 63, and after the first payment of 1,000,000,000 marks under the London plan, the mark fell to 262 to the dollar. The French argued that the inflation was purposeful, designed to feign bankruptcy while allowing Berlin to liquidate its internal debt and German industrialists like Hugo Stinnes and Fritz Thyssen to borrow, expand, and dump exports on the world market. Recent research suggests, however, that the government did not fully understand the causes of the inflation even though it recognized its social utility in stimulating employment and permitting social expenditures. Of course, the reparations bill, while not the cause of inflation, was a strong disincentive to stabilization for Berlin could hardly plead bankruptcy if it boasted a strong currency, a balanced budget, and a healthy balance of payments. And insofar as the German government was dependent on those who benefited most from inflation—the industrialists—it was incapable of implementing austerity measures. This financial tangle might have been avoided by a program of reparations-in-kind whereby German firms delivered raw and finished goods directly to the Allies. The Seydoux Plan of 1920 and the Wiesbaden Accords of 1921 embraced such a mechanism, but the Ruhr magnates, delighted that the French might “choke on their iron” in the absence of German coal, and the British, fearful of any continental cartel, together torpedoed reparations-in-kind. By December 1921, Berlin was granted a moratorium.