Talk:World War I reparations/Archive 1

Updated

I've cleaned this up, inserted references. I've got more but haven't organized them all yet, there in a .odf sitting on my university workstation, I'll put them up in the next few weeks. If anyone has any critisicm or advice please share. The article is I think a usable reference now though. Also it still gives the alternative viewpoints space, but focuses again on the mainstream understanding most of the time. Hvatum 04:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

U.S. Dollar amount note

...is missing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#_note-0 Should be replaced by a 'citation needed'? --Dood77 01:43, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

A little questionmark:

Is this article referring to the American-English definition of "a billion" or the Brittish-English?

Agreed, i would like to know whether this is short scale or long scale —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.82.144.163 (talk) 21:15, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

NPoV

I didn't (yet) insert an NPoV notice, but this article needs rewording and expanding to present the unbiased facts. - Ted Wilkes 14:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Reparations and the War Guilt Clause is much better. Could this article be merged there? --RedJ 17 01:43, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Table

It would beineresting to have a table of dates, amount due, interet and repayments made. Rich Farmbrough, 11:55 11 January 2007 (GMT).

Poor quality of article

This is a bit of a poor article. Secondly, it views the reperations payments only from an economic point of view. This is really one-sided and fails to analyze the more important implications of the reperations. Germans had expected a treaty based upon the widely publicized fourteen points, reperations twenty times those (adjusted for inflation) of the Brest-Litvosk Treaty were not expected by any means. Even Stephen Schuker, who believes the reperations were economically feasible, wrote at length that they were not diplomatically advisable and had very significant phsychological repercussions. There is a very large difference between reperations which are theoretically economically practical and reperations in line with what the German people had expected, based upon previous rhetoric comming from the allies.

Secondly, I disagree and agree with Stephen Schuker's assertion that the reperations were payable. Yes, they were payable in theory, but the gross volume of exports required to actually meet reperations payments would have been totally unacceptable to industries in the allied countries. They would have been swamped by cheap German exports and governements would have either levied steep taxes on German imports or revised the payment plan. As it stands there is also a major logical problem with his theory: Hyperinflation vastly de-valued German currency, so why didn't exports pick up enough then? German products would have been very cheap. Germany was a capitalist economy so it's not as if the Weimar Government could "direct" production to gear it all for export. The only easy thing for them to do was print money, and this they did! For Schukers theory to hold weight he should have explained with greater depth why the devaluation of German currency didn't result in a more significant uptake in German exports.Hvatum 06:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you think this article is salvageable? Aside from the issue around the economic feasibility of the reparations, what other changes would you make? --Richard 15:58, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Check the article, I just made them :). Please feel free to offer any advice or critiques you please Hvatum 04:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I question the math

RE: In January 1921, the total sum due was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission and was set at 269 billion gold marks (2790 gold marks equalled 1 kilogram of pure gold), about £23.6 Billion, about $32 billion (roughly equivalent to $393.6 Billion US Dollars as of 2005[1]).

269 billion or 269,000,000,000 / 2790 = 96,415,770 kilos of pure gold. 96,415,770 kilos of pure gold x 1000 grams/kilo = 96,415,770,000 grams. 96,415,770,000 grams / 31.1 grams/oz. = 3,100,185,530 ounces of gold.

But according to the World Gold Council, there have been about 155,000 tonnes of gold mined in all of human history, up to 2007. 155,000 tonnes x 32150 oz./tonne = 4,983,560,000 ounces of gold in all the world.

I assume that the world had much less gold than 5 billion ounces in 1920, perhaps less than 1/2 of what it has today.

Therefore, my question is, did Germany really have to pay the equivalent of more than all the gold in the world, ever mined in all of human history, up to 1920?

That's a good question. Working out the exact conversion of marks to gold at the time the new reparations were set would be difficult. I believe it is roughly correct actually; Given that the volume of trade between the US and China in two years today also exceeds the total value of all the gold in the world (1,950 billion dollars, vs. 1,250 billion worth of gold currently existent). I would guess that the total output of the German economy in the 1920s would have matched the value of all the gold if you summed up seven or eight years of production (this is very conservative estimate).

Remember, Gold is a precious and very limited commodity. That's why it's worth so much! Germany wasn't expected to actually pay in gold, that comparison is only their for reference. Hvatum 06:24, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Factual accuracy

I'm looking at my A-level history textbook right now (Farmer, Alan (2006). Britain: Foreign Affairs. p. 25. ISBN 0-340-90703-7.) which says pretty inequivocally that the reparations were eventually set in 1921 at "£6600 million", or £6.6 billion. I also note that the 'source' provided for the relevant sentence in the article is actually to the currency converter used to calculated the 2005 inflation-adjusted value. I am therefore led to tag this article with a factual accuracy dispute. Unfortunatley I've misplaced my old GCSE History textbook which I'm sure would also have a figure. Can anyone else find a reliable source for the £23.6 billion figure? If not I am going to change it. Happy-melon 15:04, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

This is a rough estimate, because I do not know the value of the pound sterling with respect to gold after the war. But let's assume it's £5.07 for one ounce. The reparations demanded from Germany were roughly equal to...

3,100,185,530 ounces of gold

Which means...

3.1B ounces * 5.07 = £15 billion

So assuming my calculations are somewhere close to correct the 21B figure would seem too high, while the 6.6B is too low. The real figure may be somewhere in between. I'd also be wary of the currency converter. Textbooks are long and usually very accurate, but the exactness of every figure is not certain. A book entirely devoted to early 20th century economics with detailed exchange rate tables would be more satisfying for me then a history textbook covering a much wider range of topics. Anyway, 6.6B seems very low to me, just based on the value of gold alone. I've posted a link below to a JSTOR article which analyzes the value of the pound during the 1920s. Hopefully you don't need to be going through a college library to access it, I think it's public but I don't use JSTOR much so I'm not totally sure. Hvatum 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

http://www.jstor.org/view/00359238/di992924/99p0679e/2?frame=noframe&userID=82476013@stolaf.edu/01c054501000502d0f&dpi=3&config=jstor

Text that has been deleted recently

I noticed that the following text has been deleted recently. Would someone comment on why this text should or should not be included in the article?

Deletion 1

- In 1921, Carl Melchior, a World War I soldier and German financier with M. M. Warburg & Co who became part of the German negotiating team, thought it advisable to accept an impossible reparations burden. Melchior said: "We can get through the first two or three years with the aid of foreign loans. By the end of that time foreign nations will have realized that these large payments can only be made by huge German exports and these exports will ruin the trade in England and America so that creditors themselves will come to us to request modification."

Deletion 2

These ideas are countered by A. J. P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War, in which he claims that the settlement had been too indecisive: it was harsh enough to be seen as punitive, without being crippling enough to prevent Germany regaining its superpower status, and can thus be blamed for the rise of the Reich under Hitler within decades.

I just checked in my gcse textbook and i can confirm that it says £6.6billion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.159.73.61 (talk) 15:21, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Fallacy with Keynes Reference

The article mentions Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" as saying that the reparations played a role in the rise of Hitler. The problem is, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" was written in 1919, and therefore couldn't possibly say anything at all about Hitler. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.101.254.154 (talk) 08:56, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Good point. I've updated it. Whoever last cleaned the article up probably just missed that, that goes back to very old versions of the article. Too bad, the sentence was well written :)130.71.241.182 (talk) 12:32, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality disputed

This article tries to describe, why the reperations were neccessary and why they were appropiate. That you can do in an essay. For an encyclopedic article it is not a proper proceeding. The choice and the weight of the literatur is pro-French/allied. La Fère-Champenoise (talk) 19:38, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

With all due respect, La Fère-Champenoise, I would have to disagree with your placing a neutrality tag here. The majority of historians and economists today accept that Germany could had paid reparations had the political will been there. First thing, prior to this fall, this page's accepted the popular viewpoint promoted by Keynes that reparations were an impossible burden placed on Germany. Besides for being wrong, that is hardly neutral. In addition, it was rather sinister with the implicit claim that the Nazi dictatorship was the result of impossible to pay reparations, despite the fact that Germany stopped paying reparations in June 1931 and reparations had been formally cancelled in 1932, all this remember before Hitler came to power in January 1933. The claim that reparations caused National Socialism is a classic case of a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, made all the more egregious as it implicitly excuses the Holocaust by presenting National Socialism as an excessive, but understandable response to supposedly unreasonable economic demands of the French in the 1920s. In the 1980s, the German philosopher Ernst Nolte occasioned much (well-deserved) notoriety with his claim that the Holocaust had been an extreme, but logical defensive reaction forced on the Germans by the fear of the Communists and by an alleged “Jewish declaration of war” on Germany in 1939. Take out Communism, and substitute it with reparations to France, and you have the attitude that dominates much of this page. The implict claim here is that if the Germans did really terrible things under the Third Reich, it was only because the Allies were really mean to them at Versailles by imposing a purportedly impossible reparations bill, and in this way, responsibility for Nazi crimes is subtly shifted from the Germans to the Allies.

I don't mean to be putting words into your mouth, La Fère-Champenoise, but I believe this what you are getting are when you wrote "just an onesided description, why everything what happened was allright" is meant to imply that you want the article to say that it was reparations that wrecked the German economy in the 1920s, and hence brought National Socialism to power in the 1930s. I don't think any reasonable person can conclude that the page says what happened in the 1920s was "allright". Anybody who knows anything about international relations in the 1920s knows that the reparations was one of the thorniest issues of the times, as I think the page shows quite clearly. Things did go very wrong with reparations, and that was because the Germans simply did not want to pay reparations as a way of undermining Versailles, a determination that caused all sorts of havoc, most notably in 1923 with the Ruhrkampf and the Great Inflation. Since this page does give prominent, through at present inadequate attention to this issues, the only reason why I think that you complain that the page says everything that happened was "allright" is that you want the page to say the NSDAP only came to power was because the Allies were so mean to the Germans about reparations. I am sorry, but this sort of apologistic view of the origins of National Socialism as a reaction to allegedly harsh and putative Treaty of Versailles, which is once very popular in Germany in the immediate years after 1945 is (justly) no longer accepted by the majority of historians.

The reasons for the rise of National Socialism are many and varied, but reparations played only a minor role. Please remember that the greatest electoral success for the Nazis occurred in the July 1932 Reichstag elections, which came just after the Lausanne Conference had formally cancelled reparations, and a good year after the Hoover Moratorium of June 1931 had come into effect. In the Reichstag electiosn of July 1932, in which the Nazis won 37% of the vote (their greatest success in a free election), the NSDAP fought the election as a referendum on the Weimar Republic; reparations were hardly mentioned at all, not the least because they just been cancelled. The quality of this page before the fall can be seen in the claim that "The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition, are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. Some contemporaries to the signing of the treaty predicted such an outcome (John Maynard Keynes. The Economic Consequences of the Peace at Project Gutenberg)". In 1919, nobody had heard of Hitler, so how anybody could had warned that reparations would bring him to power is absurd. Despite what the sentence implies, nowhere in The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Hitler mentioned for the reasons that I have just outlined.

Second, the Keynes viewpoint has been widely discredited. Indeed, the fact that Germany, after having been allegedly impoverished in the 1920s by reparations, yet somehow had enough money in the 1930s to built a mighty war machine that was able to last through six long years of total war before it was finally destroyed ought to by rights gave supporters of the Keynes line pause (unfortunately it usually doesn't). As long ago as 1946, the great French economist Étienne Mantoux in his book The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes established that reparations amounts were not impossible to pay, and that Keynes was simply wrong in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. For more recent accounts, please see the article by Sally Marks "The Myths of Reparations" pages 231-255 from Central European History, Volume 11, Issue # 3, September 1978, which quite conclusively demolishes Keynes's case, which anyhow has more to do with Keynes's love for Carl Melchior then a rational economic assessment of the German capacity to pay. Reparations were divided into A, B and C bonds; the Allies only intended to collect the A and B bonds, totalled 50 billion marks, which was an amount that was slightly smaller then the 51 billion marks that the Germans had offered to pay earlier in 1921 (Marks, Sally "The Myths of Reparations" pages 231-255 from Central European History, Volume 11, Issue # 3, September 1978 page 237). That fact alone undermines everything Keynes had to say on the subject, and I see no reason why this article should not reflect the current scholarly consensus on the subject. Even Niall Ferguson in his otherwise strongly pro-German book The Pity of War concludes that reparations were within quite payable. After all, even Ferguson points out that between 1958-1998 Germany paid out 163 billion marks to the E.E.C/European Union without lowering living standards (on the contrary German living standards rose in those years), which even if you adjust for inflation is a substantially greater sum then the 20 billion marks paid out in reparations between 1921-1931 (Ferguson, Niall The Pity of War, Basic Books: New York, 1998, 1999 page 415).

If the article seems pro-French, that is because the facts lean that way. If we were to follow your suggestion that an encyclopedic article should reflect different viewpoints (presumably meaning in this case that just as much space should be devoted to the now discredited Keynes line as to the current consensus), then by the same "equal time" logic one should give just as much space to Holocaust denial arguments on the Holocaust page as to the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust did occur. We have the same argument running on the David Irving page, which says correctly that he is a "discredited" source. There are on-going attempts to have the article say that Irving is a great historian as promoting a diversity of viewpoints on Irving, a tendency that has rightly been resisted by the majority of the editors. The point of an encyclopedic article should be to reflect what is the current academic consensus on the subject, not an "equal time" attitude to every viewpoint on issue. There may been two sides to an issue, which does not necessarily mean two equally valid sides. Equal time only works if there is two equally valid sides, and when there are not, there is no need for equal time. So on the Holocaust page, the views of Dr. Raul Hilberg are worthy of consideration whereas the views of Mr. Ernst Zundel are not. Now, if there is no consensus on the subject, then I think the article should fairly and objectively seek to summarize the main schools of thought on the subject, but since such a consensus does in fact exist, I see no need to provide equal time for both sides. As already noted, even Ferguson does not defend Keynes. I hope that this provides enough to warrant removing the neutrality tag, but for the moment I will leave it on.--A.S. Brown (talk) 00:06, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Well the problem of your argumentation is just, that you present the opinions of just 2 editors as _the_ relevant scholary conensus, which i doubt is true, if there even exists such one. Of course the reparations did not cause the rise of the nazis, but the financial burden was another brick in the whole economic depression in Germany, which boosted the NSDAP elections results.

Anyway the problem with the article is, that it seems to be really one sided and is trying to defend the reparations, plus is pushing the opinion (which i heard for first time here) that Germany could pay the reparations easily, which i hardly doubt too. Therefore the article also fails to mention a single point of how there reparations really affected Germany, as it is just justifying the reparations but discussed nowhere the real topic. So the headline is miesleading.

There are also problems with several assumptions and assertions. The discrediting of Keynes opinion by mentioning that he "had fallen in love with Carl Melchior, a member of the German delegation," is definetly not encyclopedic and i also think Keynes is much more reliable than a statement from a french economist directly after WWI.

Basing in the first part solely on one source, Sally Marks "The Myths of Reparations", which even in the title admits that it is biased in one specific direction, the problem is also, that the whole article takes the "german unwillingness to pay, despite that the could, if they would" assertion as a fact and is building completly on this statement. It doesnt even consider the possibility that the reparations could have any negative impact on Germany.

The language is therefore of course also biased, bringing in statements which just dont belong there and only give the article a biased tone, like this "A British onlooker commented that..." and so on. The next problem are several dubios statements, as for example, that the Germans caused their hyperinflation deliberately to pay the Ruhrkampf, which is just, well, really really far fedged if not just complete bullshit. German government actions are well known (as a "democracy" at this time), especially in the 21 century, so there is no need to rely so heavily on contemporary statements of people of had obviously no insight in Germany at this time.

Next are other dubios assumptions, like this "Brünings real reasons were etc", which is definitly not proven in any way and so highly speculative and its also again is claiming that the reparations were no real harm for the german economy. The tone of the last paragraph also seems to be not very neutral, as it lets me feel as the evil Germans did nothing for paying the war and largly avoided every punishment and payment, which is of course not true, regarding the facts of Versaille and the provided payments in reality. All in all i have to say, this article has several weak points. At first its style and tone is not neutral, it is completly anti german in several instances. As second it is based and nearly full quoted from just 2 sources which seem to be based partly on contemporary opinions from straight after the war, which aren't very neutral of course. The only opinion of the other side is discreditet with a strange quote. This way the paragraph presents the opinions of those 2 authors as an indisputable fact, which, regarding lots of questionable statements and the non-neutral style of those editors, cant be the whole truth. The neutrality tag is definitely justified and the article has to be reworked. This is not about bringing in different viewpoints, this is about the tone, the style and the question whether this reflects the topic really complete accurate.

Ah and btw 20 billion in 1920 are much more worth than 20 billion in 1989 + the financial situation of western Germany was much better than the one of Germany after WWI.StoneProphet (talk) 05:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

With all due respect, StoneProphet, I must disagree with your criticism. To start with, it is two books, not "two editors" that you issue with. As opposed to you just stating the works of Marks and Ferguson are "the_ relevant scholary conensus, which i doubt is true, if there even exists such one". Actually, that is "scholarly consensus" on the subject that the problem was that Germany was unwilling to pay as opposed to being unable. If you want more books to confirm, I'll happy to oblige. So far, are you offering in way of criticism is that stating you have not read any of the more recent works, you know for fact what is the "scholarly consensus". Moving on:

• "Of course the reparations did not cause the rise of the nazis, but the financial burden was another brick in the whole economic depression in Germany, which boosted the NSDAP elections results". No, that is not true. It was the Great Depression that led to electoral support for the Nazis as proved by the fact that in 1928 when Germany was still paying reparations, the Nazis won only 3% of the vote. Anyhow, it was mostly the Protestant middle classes who voted for the Nazis. The religious divide between Protestants who did generally did vote for the Nazis, and Catholics who generally did not might suggest a far complex picture than you are mooting, StoneProphet. Second, by and large the middle classes in Germany did not suffer materially from the Great Depression-the popular picture of a German people having backs pushed against the economic wall and having no other choice, but to vote Nazi is not true.
• "Anyway the problem with the article is, that it seems to be really one sided and is trying to defend the reparations, plus is pushing the opinion (which i heard for first time here) that Germany could pay the reparations easily, which i hardly doubt too". So, the fact that you have not read of the more recent scholarship on the subject proves your right?
• "The discrediting of Keynes opinion by mentioning that he "had fallen in love with Carl Melchior, a member of the German delegation," is definetly not encyclopedic and i also think Keynes is much more reliable than a statement from a french economist directly after WWI." Étienne Mantoux was writing after World War II, not World War I. Mantoux was writing at a time when he had much fuller access to the relevant sources then did Keynes, which might suggest that we place greater credence on his views. Second, the statement about how Keynes's love for Melchior is from a reliable secondary source, so I don't see the problem.
• "Basing in the first part solely on one source, Sally Marks "The Myths of Reparations", which even in the title admits that it is biased in one specific direction, the problem is also, that the whole article takes the "german unwillingness to pay, despite that the could, if they would" assertion as a fact and is building completly on this statement. It doesnt even consider the possibility that the reparations could have any negative impact on Germany." So Marks, a professional historian writing 50 years or so after the events is wrong because you don't like the title of your essay? Your statements here show that you have not read Marks's essay because otherwise you would not be saying those things. Actually, Marks does consider that possibility, which if you would take the time to actually read her essay instead of just attacking me in badly written sentences full of the most elemental spelling and grammarian errors, you would know that. When this article cited no sources and claimed that the Allies had destroyed the German economy in the 1920s, you had no complaint. When the article starts citing reliable, secondary sources that you don't like, you start banging on about bad sources. Your actions speak for themselves.
• "The language is therefore of course also biased, bringing in statements which just dont belong there and only give the article a biased tone, like this "A British onlooker commented that..." and so on. The next problem are several dubios statements, as for example, that the Germans caused their hyperinflation deliberately to pay the Ruhrkampf, which is just, well, really really far fedged if not just complete bullshit. German government actions are well known (as a "democracy" at this time), especially in the 21 century, so there is no need to rely so heavily on contemporary statements of people of had obviously no insight in Germany at this time." That is not true about using "contemporary statements". I add statements like that to give some color and insight to the times. Sally Marks is Professor Emerita, Rhode Island College, Providence, and is one of the most respected historians writing on international relations in 1920s Europe, so your efforts to discredit her by saying that she relies on "contemporary statements of people of had obviously no insight in Germany at this time" shows that you not read her essay, which I strongly urge to do. As for the Ruhrkampf, it is in fact well known that the German government let the printing presses into overdrive in 1923. Your problem here is you are confusing results and intentions which lead to the conclusion that no democracy would ever destroy its economy on purpose, so ergo Germany did not destroy its economy via inflation in 1923. The problem is through the German government did have not the intention of destroying its economy, that was the net result of its policies when they had blundered into the Ruhrkampf. The essential German miscalculation was they assumed that if got into a confrontation with France, that Britain would do more to help them than in fact proved to be the case.
• "Ah and btw 20 billion in 1920 are much more worth than 20 billion in 1989 + the financial situation of western Germany was much better than the one of Germany after WWI". Actually, Ferguson takes into account the differences in value between 20 billion in 1920 and 1989, and he says that even with that, reparations were payable. Given that Ferguson is a historian and an economist who are present serves as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, and judging by your struggle with the English language, you are not StoneProphet, I would put more credence in his views than yours. Anyhow, if according to your logic, reparations destroyed the German economy in the 1920s, than surely the higher payments after World War II should had an even worse effect (which clearly did not happen). --A.S. Brown (talk) 02:59, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Reparations, plural

I can think of at least one other country that had to pay reparations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Amanitin (talk • contribs) 16:38, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

The article says that Ferguson claims that speculators buying marks caused he inflation (Note 34). That cannot be right. A rise in the exchange rate educes the inflation. Whether the mistake is Ferguson's or he is being misreported I don't know., but it's wrong. 80.169.162.100 (talk) 16:03, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Is this, in essence, correct?: If the 1921 reparations was set at 269 million marks, and the Germans were required to pay 3 billion per year, it would have taken them until about 90 years (2011) to pay off the full sum. This was approximately 5% per year of Germany’s GDP as of 1921 (about 60 billion marks). Since today (2010) the U.S. GDP is about $14.6 trillion per year, German reparations, if paid by the US today as a percentage of its GDP (and thus, its impact on the economy and relatively percentage of the total national income per year), would be 730 billion per year, for 90 years. That is a substantial impact on an economy.--Ibycusreggio (talk) 18:35, 2 May 2010 (UTC)