Read The Downfall of Money: Germanys Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Online
Authors: Frederick Taylor
Tags: #Business & Money, #Economics, #Inflation, #Money & Monetary Policy, #Finance, #History, #Europe, #Germany, #Professional & Technical, #Accounting & Finance
| The President approves emergency legislation to ensure that all major taxes and government obligations are carried out in Rentenmarks. | |
| On 22 December, some weeks after the sudden death of Reichsbank President Havenstein, Schacht is finally appointed to his post, while also remaining Reich Currency Commissar. There will be struggles ahead, but the end of the hyperinflation is now in sight. | 4,200,000,000,000 |
Chapter 1: Finding the Money for the End of the World
1
See Hew Strachan,
The First World War: A New Illustrated History
,
vol. 1:
‘To Arms’
, Oxford, 2003,
p. 833f.
2
Gerald D. Feldman,
The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation 1914-1924,
New York and Oxford, 1996, p. 32.
3
See Leonard Gomes,
German Reparations, 1919-1932: A Historical Survey
, Basingstoke and New York, 2010, p. 10f. And also Niall Ferguson,
The Pity of War 1914-1918
, London, 1999, p. 250f.
4
See Helen McPhail,
The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914-1918
, London, 2000, p. 36n.
5
Feldman,
The Great Disorder
, p. 34.
6
Ibid., p. 5f for the details and for the protests.
Chapter 2: Loser Pays All
1
Quoted in Ferguson,
The Pity of War
,
p. 252.
2
For the declaration and its consequences see Alexander B. Downes, ‘Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimization in War’, in
International Security
, vol. 30, no. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 185
-
8. He argues that the blockade was not actually caused by the German U-boat declaration, but that the latter provided a justification in the face of neutral opinion, which at that time included the USA, for the British and their allies to do something they had already been planning for some time.
3
Downes, ibid., p. 186.
4
Martin Gilbert,
First World War
,
London, 1995,
p. 256, cites the figures for 1915 and 1916, and on p. 256n the total for the entire war. As Prof. Gilbert points out, this was roughly equal to the numbers of German civilians killed by the Allied bombing offensive in the Second World War – a campaign undertaken for very similar reasons to the blockade thirty years earlier, and with an equally dubious justification so far as the accepted laws of war were concerned.
5
Elizabeth H. Tobin, ‘War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf 1914
-
1918’, in
Central European History
, vol. 18, no. 3/4 (Sept.
-
Dec. 1985), p. 281.
6
Ibid., p. 283.
7
Ferguson,
The Pity of War
, p. 253.
8
Ibid., p. 253f. And for the sales of foreign securities.
9
See T. Balderston, ‘War Finance and Inflation in Britain and Germany, 1914
-
1918’, in
The Economic History Review
, New Series, vol. 42, no. 2 (May 1989), p. 240.
10
Helfferich’s speech to the Reichstag on the Reich Budget, 20 August 1915, in
Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages
, Stenographische Berichte XII. Legislaturperiode II. Sitzung Bd. 306, p. 224 (available online at http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de).
11
Gomes,
German Reparations
, p. 11.
12
Ibid., p. 21.
13
For the full text see Fritz Fischer,
Germany’s Aims in the First World War
, trans. Hajo Holborn, with an introduction by James Joll, New York, 1967, p. 105.
14
See Gilbert,
First World War
, p. 155, for the plans of the group led by the chair of the supervisory board of Krupp and Pan-German extremist Alfred Hugenberg (1865-1951). Hugenberg was, as we shall see, later a major press and media magnate, one of Hitler’s chief helpers and in 1933 Economics Minister in the first Nazi-dominated cabinet.
15
Quoted in ibid., p. 309.
16
Gilbert,
First World War
,
p. 398f.
17
Gerald D. Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour in Germany 1914
-
1918
, Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1992, p. 457f.
18
See Strachan,
The First World War
, p. 281f.
Chapter 3: From Triumph to Disaster
1
Gilbert,
First World War
, p. 399.
2
Quoted in chapter 18, Charles B. MacDonald, ‘World War One: The U.S. Army Overseas’ in
American Military History
,
p. 392 (available online as http://www.history.army.mil/books/AMH/amh-toc.htm).
3
Richard Bessel,
Germany After the First World War
, Oxford, 1993, p. 37.
4
See Feldman,
The Great Disorder
, p. 58.
5
See Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour
, p. 459.
6
Sebastian Haffner,
Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914-1933
, Stuttgart and Munich, 2000, p. 20.
7
Gilbert,
First World War
, p. 407f.
8
Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour
, p. 493f.
9
Strachan,
The First World War
, p. 289.
10
Feldman
, Army Industry and Labour
, p. 493.
11
See ibid., pp. 429ff.
12
See Heinz Hagenlücke,
Deutsche Vaterlandspartei: Die nationalen Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches
, Düsseldorf, 1997, p. 353f.
13
Figures for textiles and construction in Bessel,
Germany After the First World War
, p. 16.
14
Reproduced from Ferguson,
The Pity of War
,
p. 250.
15
For the Hindenburg Programme see Bessel,
Germany After the First World War
, p. 13, and Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour
, especially p. 154.
16
For figures on tobacco and wine, beer and general agricultural decline, see Ferguson,
The Pity of War
, p. 251.
17
Ibid., p. 254.
18
For these figures see Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour
,
p. 472.
19
Bessel
, Germany After the First World War
, p. 32, table 8.
20
Ibid., p. 33.
21
Ibid., p. 31.
22
Feldman,
Army, Industry and Labour,
p. 464f. And for the quote below.
23
Ibid., p. 506.
24
Sönke Neitzel,
Weltkrieg und Revolution, 1914-1918/19
,
Berlin, 2008,
p. 148.
25
Quoted in Otto Friedrich,
Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the Twenties
, New York, 1995, p. 22.
26
Haffner,
Geschichte eines Deutschen
, p. 31.
27
Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Deutsche
Gesellschaftsgeschichte
, Bd. 4:
Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914-1949
, Munich, 2003, p. 193.
28
Sebastian Haffner,
Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19: Wie war es wirklich?
, Munich, 1979,
p. 83.
29
See figures in Konrad Roessler,
Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches im Ersten Weltkrieg
, Berlin, 1967, p. 79.
Chapter 4: ‘I Hate the Social Revolution Like Sin’
1
Haffner,
Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19
, p. 87.
2
Ibid.
3
Neitzel,
Weltkrieg und Revolution
, p. 153.
4
Seaman Richard Stumpf’s comment on 4 November 1918 in Peter Englund,
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War
, London, 2011, p. 491.
5
See an interview from 1958 with Karl Artelt, a torpedo technician and one of the leaders of the uprising, reproduced in
http://www.kurkuhl.de/de/novrev/stadtrundgang_06.html
.
6
See http://www.kurkuhl.de/de/novrev/artelt_bericht.html
7
Neitzel,
Weltkrieg und Revolution
, p. 156.
8
Heinrich Winkler,
Weimar 1918-1933
, Munich, 1993, p. 32.
9
Haffner,
Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19
, p. 70f. See also Winkler,
Weimar 1918-1933
, p. 29.
10
Text in
Philipp Scheidemann,
Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten
(reprint Severus, 2010), Bd. 2, p. 245f. Translation by the author. There is disagreement about whether this version was a result of some later ‘tidying up’, but the sentiments are unarguable.
11
See
ibid., p. 246.
12
Liebknecht’s proclamation at
http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/liebknecht/index.html
(in German).
13
Friedrich,
Before the Deluge
, p. 25.
14
LeMo
Kollektives
Gedächtnis,
Aufzeichnung aus dem Tagebuch des jüdischen Fabrikanten Oskar Münsterberg (1865-1920) aus Berlin
(DHM-Bestand), online at
http://www.dhm.de/lemo/forum/kollektives_gedaechtnis/weimar.html
.
15
Riess’s account in Rudolf Pörtner (ed.),
Alltag in der Weimarer
Republik: Kindheit und Jugend in unruhiger Zeit
, Munich, 1993, p. 31.
16
Die Weltbühne
Jahrgang XIV Nr. 51, 19 Dezember 1918, p. 591.
Chapter 5: Salaries are Still Being Paid
1
Trans.
and
ed. Charles Kessler
, Diaries of a Cosmopolitan: Count Harry Kessler 1918-1937,
London, 1971, p. 7f.