Years of economic and political stabilization

The financial recovery that began with the restabilization of the German currency in late 1923 received a boost in 1924 when the Allies agreed to end their occupation of the Ruhr and to grant the German government a more realistic payment schedule on reparations. A committee of the Allied Reparations Commission headed by the American financier and soon-to-be vice president Charles Dawes had recommended these changes and urged the Allies to grant sizable loans to Germany to assist its economic recovery. The Dawes Plan marked a significant step in the upswing of the German economy that lasted until the onset of the Great Depression. The 800 million gold marks in foreign loans had by 1927 enabled German industrial production to regain its 1913 prewar high. That same year the Reichstag addressed the vital need for social and class reconciliation by voting for a compulsory unemployment insurance plan. Reconciliation on the political level seemed achieved in 1925 when the 77-year-old Hindenburg was elected to succeed the deceased Ebert as president. Although no democrat, the aged field marshal took seriously his duty to support the constitution and the republic.

The guiding spirit in German foreign policy from 1924 through 1929 was the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who firmly believed that Germany was more likely to gain relief from the harshness of Versailles by trying to fulfill its terms than by stubbornly continuing to resist them. Stresemann’s efforts ushered in what came to be known as “the era of fulfillment.” It began in December 1925 when Germany signed the Pact of Locarno, in which it guaranteed to maintain the new postwar boundaries with France and Belgium and to submit to international arbitration any boundary disputes that might arise in the east with Poland or Czechoslovakia. Germany formally rejoined the family of nations by being granted membership in the League of Nations in September 1926. In 1928 Germany became party to the most dramatic symbolic gesture of postwar reconciliation, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which promised to outlaw aggressive war; this agreement was signed by nearly all the world’s major countries during the next year.

The May 1928 Reichstag elections seemed to reflect the economic and political stabilization of the Weimar Republic. The antirepublican parties of the left and right together received only 13 percent of the total vote, with the Communists receiving 10.6 percent and the Nazis taking only 2.6 percent. Germany’s reintegration into the international political structure advanced with the decision in early 1929 by the Allied Reparations Commission to settle the reparations question. Owen D. Young, an American business executive, headed the committee appointed to make recommendations in this matter. The Young Committee proposed that German reparations be reduced to about 37 billion gold marks, less than one-third of the 1921 total, and that payments be stretched until 1988. It also called for the dissolution of the Reparations Commission and for an immediate end to what remained of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland.

The German government, seeing the obvious advantages in the Young Plan, officially accepted its terms in August 1929. However, right-wing opposition parties saw the plan as nothing less than a renewal of Germany’s humiliation. Led by the German National Peoples’ Party (DNVP) and its leader Alfred Hugenberg, the press and movie-industry lord, the nationalist opposition seized upon the constitutional processes for popular initiative and referendum in order to force the government to reverse its acceptance of the plan. To run the opposition’s anti-Young Plan campaign, Hugenberg engaged Hitler, the leader of the apparently moribund Nazi Party. The objective was to force the German government to repudiate the reparations debt as well as the war guilt clause of Versailles upon which the debt rested. German signatories to the Young Plan, moreover, were to become liable to the charge of treason. The right wing’s initiative did force the Reichstag into reconsidering its approval of the Young Plan but to no avail. The national plebiscite that necessarily followed found only 13.8 percent of the voters favouring the objectives of the right wing. The bitterness of the campaign, however, may have contributed to the illness and death of Stresemann during the campaign.