The thing about the treaty of Versailles people forget is that Germany got more in foreign loans by 1932 than what they had paid of their war indemnities. It’s hard to calculate ,what with inflation from 100 and 150 years ago, but that amount they paid was roughly similar to what France had to pay after the Franco-Prussian war, except France had to do it in two years at gun point while the German army was occupying a third of the country.
Meanwhile France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 because Germany had paid next to nothing and suddenly it causes an international crisis.
Wasn’t the Ruhr inflation intentional on the Germans part?
Sort of ? Germany didn’t lose its infrastructure during the war since it was busy shelling ours to shit before acting like a victim, but it still had incurred a huge debt paying for the war that could only be repayed by winning it. Instead of raising taxes like France did in 1871-73, Germany decided to borrow a shit ton of money and to get off the gold standard, which was incredibly short sighted but also a swift kick in the nuts when the London payment plan was announced shortly after. Germany would have to pay their debt in either gold or foreign currencies (i.e. dollars), which is a problem when you consider it had just devalued its own currency from 4,2Reichsmark/$1 pre-war to 90Papermarks/$1 in 1921.
Until then the inflation had been pretty manageable, but this sent Germany frantically exchanging its Papermarks for any foreign currency they could grab to pay their initial 50.000.000.000 Reichsmark payment, which devalued it further. The situation worsened dramatically in 1922 when an international convention found no solution to the crisis, with the Papermark going from 320/$1 in January to 7400/$1 in December. The Papermark was now useless to pay for the war reparations (which would have amounted to dozens of trillions of this glorified German state-issued toilet paper/currency), which led to Germany defaulting on its payment and being forced to pay with resources instead, namely coal from the Ruhr, leading to the Franco-Belgian occupation of 1923. To add insult to injury, Germany decided to encourage a passive resistance movement, essentially a general strike of coal workers in the occupied regions, as a sign of protest. They kept paying the striking workers by printing more Papermarks, which if you’re keeping up meant they were literally giving away their money for nothing. By November of the same year the exchange rate was at 4.210.500.000,000Papermarks/$1.
So I wouldn’t say ‘intentional’ so much as ‘the result of a series of incredibly dumb and unfortunate decisions’.
The Germans used American loans to finance the Deutschland class Panzerschiffe, that was supposed to go into infrastructure.
