Since the war reparations KILLED the German and its allies’ economies,though the later treaties hurt too, it all really began in Paris. And that was on top of the early onset of the world wide Depression, which began in the early 1920s and which Coolidge save American from being pitched into. Also, his put down of the police strike, in 1920, stopped the roiling here,unlike the many strikes in the UK.
“Since the war reparations KILLED the German and its allies’ economies,though the later treaties hurt too, it all really began in Paris. “
John Maynard Keynes, whom most freepers think was a socialist although he wasn’t, was at the Paris Peace Conference and he immediately saw that the Reparations plan was setting up a disaster.
He first came to public attention with a little book about it titled “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” which essentially was a warning that the reparations were impossible for Germany to perform; not “too hard”, but rather “cannot be done”.
Reparations were probably to blame for the enormous inflation that plagued the postwar Weimar Republic. This impoverished the German middle class, embittered the German people, and left them receptive to the angry, vengeance seeking speeches of one Adolph Hitler.