Reparations and the Legacy of War

Reparations became a divisive issue among the Allies since the time of the Armistice (11 November 1918). It continued to exercise a jinx-like influence on Allied deliberations throughout the Peace Conference itself — ‘reparations were the curse of Versailles’, says Antony Lentin (1990, p. 273) — something which carried over to the succession of inter-Allied conferences after 1919 concerned with various aspects of treaty execution and enforcement. The peace talks wrangling over what should be Germany’s reparation liability meant that the conference ended without reaching agreement on the total bill to be presented to Germany. The task of settling on a final figure by May 1921 was left to the Reparations Commission set up under the Treaty. In the meantime, Germany was to pay an interim amount of $5 billion (or 20 billion GM) by 1 May 1921. It therefore took the victorious Allies two years to prepare and reach agreement on the sum owed by Germany and how the debt was to be discharged. That agreement, however, did little to settle Allied differences over reparations. A new confrontational twist was given to Allied disagreements as a result of the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles by the US Senate (19 March 1920) and the consequent withdrawal of official American representatives from all Allied Treaty institutions, in particular, the Reparations Commission, whose chairman was expected to be an American.