"Damage finance oligarchies did: pulled the plug on Germany on the thirties. Germany could no longer pay reparations. You know the result." [emphasis added]
"In consequence, in June, 1931, President Hoover succeeded in putting through a one-year moratorium for [German] reparations payments, and this was followed in July, 1932, by the Lausanne Agreement, as a result of which reparations were practically abolished. … The Lausanne Agreement between Germany and the reparations powers provided for the complete abolition of all reparations obligations with the exception of a reserved sum of three milliard marks. When one considers that Germany's reparations obligations under the Versailles Treaty amounted to 120 milliard marks annually for more than a generation, one can estimate the great progress represented by the Lausanne Agreement towards a solution of the reparations problem. Even the final sum of three milliard marks existed only on paper and there was no likelihood of its ever being translated into reality, since a condition of payment was that the international money market should be prepared to grant Germany a loan of the same amount. No one in Lausanne supposed there would ever be any prospect of this. … In any case, the fact which must be place on record is that the reparations problem was settled before Hitler came to power. It was the first diplomatic success of a German government before Hitler, but it came too late. The writ for new Reichstag elections had already been issued and shortly after the signing of the Lausanne Agreement the General Election resulted in a decisive victory for Hitler, giving him 230 seats in the new Reichstag."
Hjalmar Schacht, "Account Settled," 1948, pp24-25.
Dr. Schacht was President of the Reichsbank in the 1920s and again in the 1930s. He helped resolve the Weimar Republic's financial mess and created a non-traditional, non-Anglo-Dutch type (money-as-debt) currency to bring Germany out of the Depression in the 1930s. He was fired by Hitler as President of the Reichsbank in 1939 when he refused to run the monetary printing presses. |
