Q. How was this indemnity fixed?
A. In the armistice agreement which Pétain so trustfully signed, it was stipulated that the French would pay for the cost of maintaining the German Army in France. No sum was named. You can imagine the astonishment of the French when, after they had laid down their arms and there was no possibility of refusing, they learned they had to pay the Germans 400,000,000 francs, or roughly $10,000,000 a day. It will give you some notion of the difference between the old-fashioned German conqueror and the new-fashioned Nazi to recollect that after the Franco-German War of 1870 Bismarck exacted a total indemnity of $1,250,000,000, or one-third of what the French of today are forced to pay yearly.
Q. How does this French payment compare with the total amounts Germany paid for reparation after the last war?
A. The maximum estimate of German reparations payments in cash and kind is about $5,000,000,000, which is almost precisely the amount of money Americans lent Germany and never got back. It is the literal truth that Germany paid no reparations. The United States paid them. I was a correspondent in Germany during all those crucial years from the French occupation of the Ruhr onward, and most of us who were on the spot agree that despite the dislocation of wealth in Germany the country as a whole had not lost wealth through payment of reparations, since for every dollar that went to France or England, an American dollar came in.
All critics of the Versailles treaty insist that its worst feature was the reparations, but if you keep in mind the fundamental fact that the Germans borrowed (and never repaid) every cent they used to meet the reparations claims, the Versailles treaty and the German complaints about it take on a very different aspect. This is so important that it cannot be overemphasized, because one of the principal reasons why the United States withdrew from the peace and why England and eventually France relaxed their vigilance and permitted Germany to arm and grow into the terrible power she is today, was the feeling that the Germans after all had been treated unjustly.
You could make a case for the argument that our own “guilt complex” about Versailles allowed Hitler to tear up the treaty and finally attack the world. Paul Birdsall has pointed out that this “guilt complex” received powerful encouragement from John Maynard Keynes, who correctly analyzed the economic impossibility of the reparations clauses, but went on from there to condemn the whole treaty as a Carthaginian peace. It has taken Hitler, who climbed to power on his denunciation of Versailles, to show us how lenient a peace it was.
Remembering that the Germans actually paid no reparations, it is instructive to examine what they formally paid in comparison with what they are now extorting from the French. The Allies at the London conference in April 1921 fixed their demands on Germany for “damage done to civilians” at $33,000,000,000—which at the time was considered insanely high, but incidentally is $11,000,000,000 less than the $44,000,000,000 the United States has now appropriated and recommended for national defense. Isn’t this a startling confirmation of the mistake the American Congress made in repudiating the League of Nations and refusing to ratify the security treaty with England and France?
It is fantastic to realize that we could have paid the entire bill for the last war and if by so doing we could have prevented this war, we would still have saved money. We will eventually learn that the isolationists’ or appeasers’ program for America is not only the most dangerous but infinitely the most costly. France has certainly learned how true this is.
At the rate they are now paying, the French will have paid the Germans in about seventeen months an amount equivalent to all the reparations payments ($5,000,000,000) made by the Germans with American money in the twelve years during which the Germans pretended to pay. They stopped even the pretense of payment you remember after the Lausanne Conference in 1932, even before Hitler came to power. This immense indemnity the French are paying now is merely an interim payment for the alleged cost of maintaining the German Army. Actually the cost of maintaining the army is estimated to be not 400,000,000 but 125,000,000 francs, so that the Germans have a surplus of 275,000,000 francs or around $7,000,000 for their daily “purchases.”
Q. Why did the Germans select the figure 400,000,000 francs daily?