abstract
| - In January 1921, the total sum due was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission and was set at 132 billion gold marks. However, the actual amount of reparations that Germany was obliged to pay out was not the 132 billion marks cited in 1921 but rather the 50 billion marks stipulated in the (schedules A 12 billion marks, B 38 billion). The historian Sally Marks stated the 112 billion marks in "C bonds" were entirely chimerical—a device to fool the public into thinking Germany would pay much more. The actual total payout from 1920 to 1931 (when payments were suspended indefinitely) was 20 billion German gold marks, worth about 5 billion US dollars or one billion British pounds. Of this amount, 12.5 billion was cash that came mostly from loans from New York bankers. The rest was goods like coal and chemicals, or from assets like railway equipment. The total amount of reparations was fixed in 1921 on the basis of the German capacity to pay, not on the basis of Allied claims. The highly publicized rhetoric of 1919 about paying for all the damages and all the veterans' benefits was irrelevant to the total, but it did affect how the recipients spent their share. Austria, Hungary, and Turkey were also supposed to pay some reparations but they were so impoverished that they in fact paid very little. Germany was the only country rich enough to pay anything; it owed reparations chiefly to France, Britain, Italy and Belgium; the US received $100 million. Payments were suspended for one year in June 1931 as proposed by U.S. president Herbert Hoover in the "Hoover Moratorium", and ended at the Lausanne Conference of July 1932. About one-eighth of the initial reparations had been paid. West Germany resumed payments on the debt in the London Debt Agreement of 1953. The final payments were made on 3 October 2010 the twentieth anniversary of German reunification.
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