The Loan/Gift That Set Up WW II

 From November 1918 (the war ended) until the summer period of 1924....the Weimar Republic was crapped out.  They could not advance.

Debt issues?  Massive.

Because of the war and the reparations....the national treasury of Germany was simply 'nickels and dimes'.

The D-Mark?  Worthless.

The war-ending treating?  It basically contained Germany....they didn't have full control of it's territory, or natural resources.

Germans complained about the status imposed upon them, and it was undermining democracy.

It was slowly reaching the point where stability and chaos would be created.

So in stepped something called the Dawes Plan (a US-UK plan).  Basically, the US was rigging up a $25-billion dollar package.  It wasn't a gift....it was a loan.  Value today?  380-billion dollars.  So you can imagine just how much this mattered, or the risk assigned to it.  

A true solution?  No.  It was a loan, to a weakened country, which was dependent on a number of factors to succeed.  In simple terms, it resolved some issues and created new fresh problems.

The key part of this that the Germans liked?  The French soldiers left the Ruhr Valley.  It gave the Ruhr Valley back to the Germans.  

Added to this, German industry saw a opening for business.  Within two years....the Germans were back to being the 'kingpin' of steel-making in Europe.  Without the loan, this would not have happened.

So this period of prosperity started up (1925 to 1929).  You could truly look around Germany and see commerce booming.  Radios were sold, and stations were providing nightly entertainment.  Cars were sold.  People were taking trips around the country.  The ideal life that existed around 1913-1914....it was back.  They had gone through the war years and seven years of crap....to reach this stage.

Then as Wall Street collapsed (1929)....the crap hit the fan.

Bank failures in the US occurred, and the banks came to Germany....asking for their money back.  Germany?  They weren't prepared for this.

What followed over the next three years was something you'd call disillusionment. Folks had a brief five years of the gravy-train, and simply could not understand how the economy fell that far in a matter of a few weeks.

Understanding over the wild speculation market in the US from 1920 to 1929?  There was zero understanding of the path that had occurred in the US.

Had this bank loan business never occurred?  Well...the debt mess would have triggered a total loss in trust for the Weimar crowd.  If Wall Street hadn't stumbled in 1929?  The wonder years of 1925 to 1929 would have continued on, and there's very little potential for the Nazis to pick up control.  

Lego-like pieces that simply came together to create a path where people lost trust and then found the Nazis as some fake solution?  More or less.  

Very little is discussed about this today.  Added to the burden of this mess in 1929....a great deal of the banking and investment market in Germany was controlled by Jewish enterprises....who got dumped upon but really were just part of a long list of German enterprises who weren't prepared for the banking collapse or the instability that took place in 1932.  

I tried to keep this essay simple enough for a five-minute read, and serve as a basic introduction of this period of 1918 to 1924 on German history.