Talk:World War I reparations

Updated

I've cleaned this up, inserted references. I've got more but haven't organized them all yet, there in a .odf sitting on my university workstation, I'll put them up in the next few weeks. If anyone has any critisicm or advice please share. The article is I think a usable reference now though. Also it still gives the alternative viewpoints space, but focuses again on the mainstream understanding most of the time. Hvatum 04:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

U.S. Dollar amount note

...is missing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#_note-0 Should be replaced by a 'citation needed'? --Dood77 01:43, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

A little questionmark:

Is this article referring to the American-English definition of "a billion" or the Brittish-English?

Agreed, i would like to know whether this is short scale or long scale —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.82.144.163 (talk) 21:15, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

NPoV

I didn't (yet) insert an NPoV notice, but this article needs rewording and expanding to present the unbiased facts. - Ted Wilkes 14:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Reparations and the War Guilt Clause is much better. Could this article be merged there? --RedJ 17 01:43, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Table

It would beineresting to have a table of dates, amount due, interet and repayments made. Rich Farmbrough, 11:55 11 January 2007 (GMT).

Poor quality of article

This is a bit of a poor article. Secondly, it views the reperations payments only from an economic point of view. This is really one-sided and fails to analyze the more important implications of the reperations. Germans had expected a treaty based upon the widely publicized fourteen points, reperations twenty times those (adjusted for inflation) of the Brest-Litvosk Treaty were not expected by any means. Even Stephen Schuker, who believes the reperations were economically feasible, wrote at length that they were not diplomatically advisable and had very significant phsychological repercussions. There is a very large difference between reperations which are theoretically economically practical and reperations in line with what the German people had expected, based upon previous rhetoric comming from the allies.

Secondly, I disagree and agree with Stephen Schuker's assertion that the reperations were payable. Yes, they were payable in theory, but the gross volume of exports required to actually meet reperations payments would have been totally unacceptable to industries in the allied countries. They would have been swamped by cheap German exports and governements would have either levied steep taxes on German imports or revised the payment plan. As it stands there is also a major logical problem with his theory: Hyperinflation vastly de-valued German currency, so why didn't exports pick up enough then? German products would have been very cheap. Germany was a capitalist economy so it's not as if the Weimar Government could "direct" production to gear it all for export. The only easy thing for them to do was print money, and this they did! For Schukers theory to hold weight he should have explained with greater depth why the devaluation of German currency didn't result in a more significant uptake in German exports.Hvatum 06:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you think this article is salvageable? Aside from the issue around the economic feasibility of the reparations, what other changes would you make? --Richard 15:58, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Check the article, I just made them :). Please feel free to offer any advice or critiques you please Hvatum 04:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I question the math

RE: In January 1921, the total sum due was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission and was set at 269 billion gold marks (2790 gold marks equalled 1 kilogram of pure gold), about £23.6 Billion, about $32 billion (roughly equivalent to $393.6 Billion US Dollars as of 2005[1]).

269 billion or 269,000,000,000 / 2790 = 96,415,770 kilos of pure gold. 96,415,770 kilos of pure gold x 1000 grams/kilo = 96,415,770,000 grams. 96,415,770,000 grams / 31.1 grams/oz. = 3,100,185,530 ounces of gold.

But according to the World Gold Council, there have been about 155,000 tonnes of gold mined in all of human history, up to 2007. 155,000 tonnes x 32150 oz./tonne = 4,983,560,000 ounces of gold in all the world.

I assume that the world had much less gold than 5 billion ounces in 1920, perhaps less than 1/2 of what it has today.

Therefore, my question is, did Germany really have to pay the equivalent of more than all the gold in the world, ever mined in all of human history, up to 1920?

That's a good question. Working out the exact conversion of marks to gold at the time the new reparations were set would be difficult. I believe it is roughly correct actually; Given that the volume of trade between the US and China in two years today also exceeds the total value of all the gold in the world (1,950 billion dollars, vs. 1,250 billion worth of gold currently existent). I would guess that the total output of the German economy in the 1920s would have matched the value of all the gold if you summed up seven or eight years of production (this is very conservative estimate).

Remember, Gold is a precious and very limited commodity. That's why it's worth so much! Germany wasn't expected to actually pay in gold, that comparison is only their for reference. Hvatum 06:24, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Factual accuracy

I'm looking at my A-level history textbook right now (Farmer, Alan (2006). Britain: Foreign Affairs. p. 25. ISBN 0-340-90703-7.) which says pretty inequivocally that the reparations were eventually set in 1921 at "£6600 million", or £6.6 billion. I also note that the 'source' provided for the relevant sentence in the article is actually to the currency converter used to calculated the 2005 inflation-adjusted value. I am therefore led to tag this article with a factual accuracy dispute. Unfortunatley I've misplaced my old GCSE History textbook which I'm sure would also have a figure. Can anyone else find a reliable source for the £23.6 billion figure? If not I am going to change it. Happy-melon 15:04, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

This is a rough estimate, because I do not know the value of the pound sterling with respect to gold after the war. But let's assume it's £5.07 for one ounce. The reparations demanded from Germany were roughly equal to...

3,100,185,530 ounces of gold

Which means...

3.1B ounces * 5.07 = £15 billion

So assuming my calculations are somewhere close to correct the 21B figure would seem too high, while the 6.6B is too low. The real figure may be somewhere in between. I'd also be wary of the currency converter. Textbooks are long and usually very accurate, but the exactness of every figure is not certain. A book entirely devoted to early 20th century economics with detailed exchange rate tables would be more satisfying for me then a history textbook covering a much wider range of topics. Anyway, 6.6B seems very low to me, just based on the value of gold alone. I've posted a link below to a JSTOR article which analyzes the value of the pound during the 1920s. Hopefully you don't need to be going through a college library to access it, I think it's public but I don't use JSTOR much so I'm not totally sure. Hvatum 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

http://www.jstor.org/view/00359238/di992924/99p0679e/2?frame=noframe&userID=82476013@stolaf.edu/01c054501000502d0f&dpi=3&config=jstor

Text that has been deleted recently

I noticed that the following text has been deleted recently. Would someone comment on why this text should or should not be included in the article?

Deletion 1

- In 1921, Carl Melchior, a World War I soldier and German financier with M. M. Warburg & Co who became part of the German negotiating team, thought it advisable to accept an impossible reparations burden. Melchior said: "We can get through the first two or three years with the aid of foreign loans. By the end of that time foreign nations will have realized that these large payments can only be made by huge German exports and these exports will ruin the trade in England and America so that creditors themselves will come to us to request modification."

Deletion 2

These ideas are countered by A. J. P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War, in which he claims that the settlement had been too indecisive: it was harsh enough to be seen as punitive, without being crippling enough to prevent Germany regaining its superpower status, and can thus be blamed for the rise of the Reich under Hitler within decades.

Fallacy with Keynes Reference

The article mentions Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" as saying that the reparations played a role in the rise of Hitler. The problem is, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" was written in 1919, and therefore couldn't possibly say anything at all about Hitler. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.101.254.154 (talk) 08:56, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Good point. I've updated it. Whoever last cleaned the article up probably just missed that, that goes back to very old versions of the article. Too bad, the sentence was well written :)130.71.241.182 (talk) 12:32, 22 January 2008 (UTC)