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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Cachecoins, post: 4361294, member: 111237&quot;]Yes, well the French wanted their money and began loading up anything not tied down. They wanted to take control of the country as a whole ( they were already occupying the most productive area of Germany). However, as you say, the German government had promised to support the workers for NOT working&nbsp; (on top of those who couldn&#039;t) so they had to print that money anyway because they most certainly did not have it to pay out. Of course printing more money was not the answer but after a certain point it was like a car half over the cliff, no stopping it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Germany funded much if the war through loans and war bonds already, intending to pay them back once they won.... This was another serious problem as those loans were due and they had to pay them as well as reparations and support a population, many of whom could not work, find work, or were told not to work.</p><p><br /></p><p>They also began using the money they were printing to buy foreign currency which simply made matters worse still. On top of that they had sold war bonds they could not pay off...and although they were technically on the gold standard they had made it legal to issue unbacked notes out of neccesity . It was just all bad.</p><p><br /></p><p>When they did pay reparations their money almost immediately devalued. Then they made higher denominations and more of it to compensated. But the currency was being valued to currency on the gold standard and without gold, even though they were still quite resource rich and retained most of their infrastructure after the war, their money became comparatively worthless.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are those who say they COULD pay reparations or that they deliberately crashed their own economy but in researching this topic using many primary sources I have found that indeed they were in a hole they could not dig out of and I did not find any evidence they had a deliberate plan to crash the economy as much as they knew what they were doing WOULD eventually do so but they were unable to achieve any political consensus on any other way forward so the reichsbank just continued to print and buy foreign currency.</p><p><br /></p><p>Politically Germany was fractured to put it lightly. There was no unified way forward and it seems to me that once it was clear their attempts had failed they were more in a state of paralysis than in a nefarious plan to tank the economy but they were well aware that was what was happening.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t envy them because even this far from the event, I couldn&#039;t tell you or see a way to prevent what happened, it was just a long series of bad choice beging with the implementation of the schlieffen plan.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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