It’s one of those little things that irks me so much. I remember reading something about how the reparations germany had to pay were not at all excessive (especially when compared to other wars at the time).
Someone brought it up, so naturally, I’d like to counter it.
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Why thank you! This is actually quite useful :)!
I never knew that the debt was actually mostly purchased. That alone really puts the whole waah waah unfair reparations myth
to restin perspective.deleted by creator
Superimperialism talks a lot about this as well. The actions of the Americans in the interwar period were really strange from an international finance perspective, but shaped the playing field of WWII and set the stage for the American hegemony to come.
Weirdly enough, even though France and Britain had no chance to pay their war debts to the US without first receiving German reparations, the Americans refused to connect these two debts in principle. The investment of private American capital in Germany came right back to the US treasury as well, as that was the only means the Germans had of paying reparations, and reparations payments were the only way the Allies had to pay the war debts.