Jennifer’s Reviews > Weimar Germany: The Death of a Democracy > Status Update

The day after Christmas 1922, the Reparations Commission registered insufficient deliveries of German timber and telegraph poles…Two weeks later, on 9 January, the Commission censured the Germans for non-delivery of the agreed amounts of coal…Two days later the French and Belgians sent in their troops…

Making money and being a success in business are not necessarily skills that always transfer elsewhere, particularly in a political crisis.

It was reparations that brought down the government of the well-meaning Joseph Wirth as Chancellor, two months before the French invasion of the Ruhr.

On the day the French army marched into the Ruhr, the mark was valued at 48,000 to the British pound. By the end of January, in just twenty days, it had fallen to 227,000.

Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister in August 1914, a prominent Liberal powerbroker, was visiting Berlin the month after the occupation began. She said the invasion was 'dangerous insanity... morally unjust and politically mad'.

01/11/2023 the French invaded the Ruhr region.

On 1 July 1922…one US dollar was worth 402 German marks. A fortnight later the exchange rate was
670.

most of the financial press saw no connection between printing money and its depreciation…The financial paper Berliner Börsen declared authoritatively on 12 Novem-ber: 'It has long been realized that the printing of notes is the result and not the cause of depreciation... A point has now been reached where the lack of money has a worse effect than the deprivation itself.'

the 'hyper prefix to inflation, but in the twenty-first century the general consensus has been the definition proposed by Phillip Cagan, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, who wrote extensively on the subject in the 1950s and 1960s. Hyperinflation, he argued, begins in the month at which price rises first exceed 50 per cent (an annual rise of 600 per cent). This was happening from mid-1922 in Germany.