It’s one of those little things that irks me so much. I remember reading something about how the reparations germany had to pay were not at all excessive (especially when compared to other wars at the time).
Someone brought it up, so naturally, I’d like to counter it.
What people also don’t really understand is that the reparation debt was almost all purchased by the americans from the Brits and French. And Wall Street then leveraged that to get their tentacles into the heavy industry of germany and create the wall-street backed oligarchy of industrial monopolies in Europe which eventually funded the fascists.
This book , written by the DOJ chief of german de-cartelization, is a good place to start on this.
Superimperialism talks a lot about this as well. The actions of the Americans in the interwar period were really strange from an international finance perspective, but shaped the playing field of WWII and set the stage for the American hegemony to come.
Weirdly enough, even though France and Britain had no chance to pay their war debts to the US without first receiving German reparations, the Americans refused to connect these two debts in principle. The investment of private American capital in Germany came right back to the US treasury as well, as that was the only means the Germans had of paying reparations, and reparations payments were the only way the Allies had to pay the war debts.
Why thank you! This is actually quite useful :)!
I never knew that the debt was actually mostly purchased. That alone really puts the whole waah waah unfair reparations myth
to restin perspective.You’re welcome. I may be getting my facts a bit mixed up, I haven’t looked at this stuff in a while (and I was still just getting a handle on the whole US=fourth reich thing so I wasn’t being as meticulous as I should have been). I think actually what happened is that the private US banks loaned the money to the Germans with a lot of strings attached, which the germans used to pay back the Brits and French. Some arrangement of that sort.