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The work of a German chemistry professor, Fritz Haber , broke new ground in the synthesis of ammonia, which was important both for the production of nitrogen fertilizer and for ammunitions. The use of nitrogen fertilizer enhanced agricultural productivity. This led, in due course, to enormous growth in the world population. During the war, however, the production of explosives was more important. Haber performed the synthesis in his laboratory in It required high pressure at high temperatures and the availability of suitable catalysts.

Carl Bosch , a director of the leading chemical firm BASF and a mechanical engineer who had also studied chemistry, then pioneered the industrial production of ammonia. The process of synthesis was consequently named the Haber-Bosch process. Only a few months after the outbreak of the war, Germany faced an ammunitions crisis. The import of Chilean saltpeter for the production of gunpowder was stopped by the Allied blockade.

At this point, the ammonia produced by BASF solved this problem. Without it, Germany would have had to sue for peace very early. Even as a " neutral " country, it had already contributed to the Allied war effort. The USA, which had earlier been a debtor, thus became a major creditor even before entering the war.

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While the American economy profited immensely from participating in the war effort, the European economies experienced a severe setback. The German economy , in particular, was not able to regain its pre-war dynamism for a long time. This was the title of a book published in by the great British economist John Maynard Keynes , who had worked for the Treasury on financing the British war effort.

He therefore knew the enormous problems facing Europe after the war as an "insider" and hoped for a reasonable solution to the problem of interlocking war debts. The USA was the great creditor. President Woodrow Wilson had raised high hopes with his Fourteen Points for a just peace.

Unfortunately, he did not waive the war debts, and thus forced the Allies to rely on German reparations for raising the money they owed to the USA. He left the Treasury and the peace conference, and dashed off the book that made him famous. Against this, E. Fuller and R. Whitten have argued recently that Keynes was mainly concerned with the debts owed by the British to the Americans, which the latter could not be persuaded to cancel.

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Keynes stated:. It contributed to American reluctance to join the League of Nations President Wilson had proposed, and which lost its effectiveness when the USA did not join it. The war had been financed to a large extent by means of credit, both domestic and foreign. War bonds had been taken up by the people and in addition, foreign loans, mostly American, had also been raised.

The debt service due on those credits was a crushing burden. The British had resorted to tax increases, particularly to a wealth tax, during the war, but they had also issued war bonds held by British citizens. Most of these were redeemed only decades later. The German government had trusted that it could pay for the war by imposing reparations on the vanquished; in the meantime, it had resorted to printing money.

The Germans had additionally signed up for a total of nine issues of war bonds during the course of the war. They had a yield of 5 percent and were therefore very attractive.


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By the end of the war, the German Reich was indebted to the tune of billion Reichsmark. Inflation was tolerated even after the war.

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This led to a brief post-war boom in Germany, even as other nations experienced a recession in However, Germany then experienced a hyperinflation in , the memory of which has haunted the nation ever since. At the worst point, prices doubled every two days. In restaurants, people would pay for their meals in advance, because the bill would be much higher after dinner. Though the government was able to wipe out its internal war debt with this inflation, [11] the social and political consequences were devastating.

The people no longer trusted the government. Many of them lost their lifetime savings. Only the owners of real estate and factories benefited from this radical cut. The ruin of the liberal and conservative middle class contributed to the rise of left- and right-wing parties, which challenged the political order of the Weimar Republic. The specter of reparations and war debts was not the only one haunting the nations after the war. The more immediate curse was that the war did not end in , but lingered on in many local armed conflicts.

Robert Gerwarth has recently analyzed this post-war war, which continued until Bulgaria suffered at the hands of the victors: in proportion to its size, it had to pay more reparations than any other country. Hungary was plunged into misery. It lost 73 percent of its population and two-thirds of its territory. Poland gained its independence after more than a century under foreign rule. The new state of Czechoslovakia contained a large German minority.

Customs barriers cut off all these states from one another, which did not encourage post-war economic growth. Whereas many clashes occurred after the formal end of the war in various European countries, one peculiar conflict troubled the very heart of Europe: the Ruhrkampf of i. They were particularly interested in German coal.

The German government did not react militarily to this invasion, but put up passive resistance.

The economies of both sides suffered, and the French gained hardly anything by this move. Germany, however, had to support its people who were passively resisting and unemployed. The terrible inflation mentioned earlier was due to this predicament. It soon became obvious that the stalemate could not continue, and both sides had to make compromises. Gustav Stresemann , the German chancellor, terminated the passive resistance efforts and opened negotiations with the French.

His government fell over this, but he returned as Foreign Minister in the next cabinet and continued his talks with France. The French had to be assured of their reparation payments. This could be done if the Americans granted the Germans loans, which they could use to pay reparations to the French, who could then pay their war debts to the Americans. This could have become a virtuous circle had it not been interrupted by the Great Depression.

Stresemann died in , and his policy died with him. Two important American negotiators were active in this context: Charles Dawes and Owen Young Dawes, who served as a general in the First World War, became vice president of the United States in In , he was sent to Germany to regularize the payment of reparations in the wake of the devastating hyperinflation. He saw to it that Germany became creditworthy again by inaugurating a flow of American capital.


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The Dawes Plan subjected Germany to a deflationary policy. In addition, an American banker acted as a watchdog in Berlin in order to monitor the execution of the Dawes Plan.

Empire and Democracy (1837-1913) (Hardcover)

This was a blow to German sovereignty, but Dr. Hjalmar Schacht , the head of the Reichsbank, did not see it that way. On the contrary, he welcomed the American presence, which shielded the Reichsbank from German political pressures. The Dawes Plan had several mutually reinforcing elements: the official credits, the reconstruction of the currency and of the central bank, and the easing of private credit, which flooded Germany with dollars. The French could now get their reparations easily. While European borrowers had previously come to the USA asking for credit, now the agents of American banks swarmed all over Europe, offering bonds.

German bonds yielded high interests, [18] and the American public was eager to invest in them. In , this flow was reduced, though the American stock market still attracted an enormous amount of funds until the crash stopped it.