What happened to the German economy after WW1 and why?

Question

What happened to the German economy after WW1 and why?

Answer 1

Oter countries mde germany to pay for the damages

Answer 2

gremany compleatlly collapsed. forced to loose land, and pay 33 million dollars to France and the allies. Following that the weimar republic (the first and new democratic government in germany) decided to print money and give ie out. this caused high inflation.

Answer 3

It collapsed. The Peace Treaty Of Versailles was step one. It restricted the army to 100,000, took a lot of land from Germany (less food and population), demanded £600 million (I think, it's probably best to check the figure) in reparations. There had been the blockades against Germany in the war.

The Occupation Of The Ruhr was a big losing point for the Germans. They had missed a reparations payment, and the French occupied the Ruhr. The Germans didn't want to work, so started Passive Resistance, which lost them a lot of money.

This was fixed by Stresemann, who made the Dawes Plan. This was a way for Germany to pay their debts off, and gave them a new currency too. Half of the problem had been the Government printing too much money, causing hyper-inflation.

The Dawes Plan basically had Germany borrowing money from America, then paying reparations to the allies, then the allies would pay their debt to America, like a big circle.

Then there was the wall street crash, which affected the world. This caused a depression, as all of the shares in wall street were worth nothing. Germany was struck by poverty, and a lot of Germans were unemployed. This gave Adolf Hitler something to use in his Promise-propaganda. He promised to make Germany strong again.

And he did. He created jobs for people, with societies like Beauty Of Labour having people build motorways. The innovative way of getting people into jobs helped to bring the economy up.

Obviously during the war, things became a bit tighter. More money was being put into war, and towards the end of WW2, the strain was really showing.

I'm assuming you only want up until then :)

Some of the things I've mentioned go into more detail here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_o...

Answer 4

The country was completely devastated. They were forced to pay for WWI in the Treaty of Versailles. It eventually came back to fruition during the late 20's-early 30's with the country moving towards a Socialist, industrial driven economy.