Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [312]
In Germany itself, grievances were kept fresh by the myriad of nationalist groups who made much of the fact that millions of German-speakers now found themselves under alien rule, in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, in Poland and in the free city of Danzig. The disarmament clauses were seen as hypocritical and the prohibition on union between Germany and Austria a clear violation of the principle of self-determination. Reparations were “punitive” and “savage,” their unfairness compounded by the fact that Germany had to sign the Treaty of Versailles without knowing what the final amount would be. In Germany the Diktat (“dictated treaty”) took the blame for all that was wrong with the economy: high prices, low wages, unemployment, taxes, inflation. Without the burden of reparations, life would go back to normal; the sun would shine and there would be happy afternoons in the beer gardens, wine cellars and parks. Germans ignored the fact that fighting the Great War had been expensive, and that losing it had meant they could not transfer the costs to anyone else.58 Like most people since, they also did not grasp that reparations payments never amounted to anything like the huge amounts mentioned in public discussions.
The final figure was set in London in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about £6.6 billion or $33 billion). In reality, through an ingenious system of bonds and complex clauses, Germany was committed to pay less than half that amount. It would pay the remainder only when circumstances permitted, such as an improvement in Germany’s export figures. Germany also got generous credit for payments in cash or in kind it had already made, such as replacing the books in the Louvain library in Belgium that German troops had burned at the beginning of the war, or for German railways in the territory transferred to Poland. (It tried unsuccessfully to claim the ships scuttled at Scapa Flow.) Even when the payment schedules were revised downward several times, however, the Germans continued to argue that reparations were intolerable. With a unanimity rare in Weimar politics, Germans felt they were paying too much. Germany regularly defaulted on its payments—for the last time and for good in 1932. Orlando had warned of this in 1919, when he said that the capacity to pay was related to the will of the debtor. “It would be dangerous,” he added, “to adopt a formula which would, as it were, reward bad faith and a refusal to work.”59
In the final reckoning, Germany may have paid about 22 billion gold marks (£1.1 billion, $4.5 billion) in the whole period between 1918 and 1932. That is probably slightly less than what France, with a much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. 60 In one way the figures matter; in another they are completely irrelevant. The Germans were convinced that reparations were ruining them. If Germany was not prepared to pay reparations, the Allies were not prepared to enforce their will. While the Treaty of Versailles provided for sanctions— specifically, prolonging the occupation of the Rhineland—the Allies had to want to use them. By the 1930s neither the British nor the French government was prepared to do so over reparations or anything else.
In 1924, a British member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, which was established by the Treaty of Versailles to monitor Germany’s compliance with the military terms, published an article in which he complained that the German military had systematically obstructed