Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [118]
15
Footing the Bill
IN 1995, there was a faint echo of that most contentious issue in the German peace when a newly reunified Germany agreed that it would pay the interest still due on the loans it had received in the years between the wars to pay off the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. “The subject of reparations,” said Thomas Lamont, the banker who represented the American Treasury in Paris in 1919, “caused more trouble, contention, hard feeling, and delay at the Paris Peace Conference than any other point of the Treaty.”1
Reparations helped to poison relations between Germany and the Allies, and among the Allies themselves, for much of the 1920s and 1930s. The issue facing the peacemakers was at once very simple and very complicated. Simple, because, as Lloyd George put it, “Somebody had to pay. If Germany could not pay, it meant the British taxpayer had to pay. Those who ought to pay were those who caused the loss.”2 Complicated, because that involved drawing up the bill and working out how much Germany could actually afford. The very mention of reparations caused disagreements. Were they simply compensation for damages or were they really a disguised fine, an indemnity for war costs for the victors? Should these costs include uncollected taxes or earnings lost because of invasion, death or damage? Pensions to widows and orphans? Compensation for animals that had died when their owners fled? Were they in essence an acknowledgment by Germany and whichever of its allies could still be found of their moral responsibility for the whole catastrophic war?
France, Britain and the United States, which worked out the final agreement, had different needs and different views. The United States took a high moral line. It did not want anything for itself, but it expected the Europeans to pay back the money they had borrowed during the war. For the Europeans, reparations promised a way to pay off their debts and to reconstruct their societies. What should be included in the reparations bill therefore assumed great importance because it affected sharing out the spoils. France had suffered the most direct damage, Belgium the next most, but Britain had spent the most. There were also intense debates over the question of how much Germany could pay. If the figure were set too high, the German economy might collapse, which would not help British exporters. If too low, Germany would be getting away lightly; it would also recover more quickly, a prospect that worried the French. Getting clear figures was not easy then and since, because it was in almost everyone’s interest to exaggerate and obfuscate: in the Allies’, to exaggerate how much they were due, and in the Germans’, how much they were paying. Because the peacemakers could not agree on a final figure, the German treaty merely included a provision for a special commission, made up of Allied representatives, which would have two years to determine what Germany should pay. This understandably brought charges from the Germans that they were being asked to sign a blank check.
Although historians are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the burden was never as great as Germany and its sympathizers claimed, reparations remain the preeminent symbol of the peace made in Paris.3 While most of the 440 clauses of the Treaty of Versailles have long been forgotten, the handful dealing with reparations stand, in what is still the received view, as evidence of a vindictive, shortsighted and poisonous document. The new Weimar democracy started life with a crushing burden and the Nazis were able to play on understandable German resentment. Responsibility for the disastrous consequences, so the argument goes, begins with the peacemakers of 1919: the vengeful, grasping Clemenceau, the pusillanimous,