The Ruhr Crisis 1923 1924 Key Background Factors

The Ruhr Crisis, 1923 -1924

Key Background Factors • Suspension by the Weimar Republic of reparations payments to France in November 1922. • Germany hyperinflation and economic collapse. But also, broader factors: • Disastrous relations between France and Germany. Eg: – Aims of French politicians such as Poincare and Tardieu to create a separate Rhineland Republic as a buffer against Germany. – Germany signing a military cooperation Treaty with Bolshevik Russia at Rapallo, 1922.

The occupation 1921: reparations commission decides that Germany is to pay 132 billion marks. 1922: Nov. Germany suspends payment. 1923: 11 Jan. French troops enter the Ruhr. Strikes: 67 out of 70 iron-smelting furnaces closed. Coal production fell from 7. 5 million tonnes per month to 2. 5 million tonnes per month. Weimar Government advocated passive resistance. 130 German resisters were shot by French soldiers.

French soldiers in Cologne, 1923

French soldiers in Essen

Albert Schlageter • Freikorps and Nazi Party member. • Executed by the French on 26 May 1923 for leading a resistance group.

Consequences of the crisis inside Germany • The greatest single effect of the crisis was massive hyperinflation inside Germany. • By August 1 US Dollar = 1. 23 trillion Reichsmarks.

German Currency 1924 50 Marks, 1919 5, 000 Marks, 1922 100 Billion Marks, 1924 1 Rentenmark, 1924

Money and Hyperinflation

Fall of Chancellor Cuno’s government • In August 1923 Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno resigned. • Gustav Stresemann, leader of the DVP, formed a new government. • Passive resistance was ended in the Ruhr. • Stresemann introduced a new temporary currency, the Rentenmark. • Negotiations opened with the Americans for a massive loan to re-float Germany’s finances. (The Dawes Plan, 1924). • Reparations payments were renewed (“The fulfilment strategy”) – and French soldiers withdrew from the Ruhr in Autumn 1924.

Criticism of Stresemann’s Fulfilment Strategy • From the extreme right: – Radical nationalists declared Stresemann a traitor. – The extreme right tried to seize power in Munich in November 1923 (“The Munich Putsch”). • From the extreme left: – The German Communists saw this as the final collapse of capitalism. – There was an attempted Communist revolutions in Saxony and Hamburg in late October • From both the right and the left: – Both claimed that the Dawes Plan made Germany slaves of American capital.

Opposition to Stresemann KPD and Nazi election posters of 1925, both Attacking the Dawes Plan