The German economy really struggled to cope following the war. In 1921, it was agreed that Germany was to pay £6.6 billion (£284 billion in modern money!) in war reparations to the Allies. Along with this the Treaty of Versailles peace settlement also resulted in Germany losing the arable land of West Prussia and Posen to Poland, the industrial land of Upper Silesia to Czechoslovakia and the coal producing region of the Saarland to the League of Nations. This meant that Germany lost a lot of it's most productive areas, forcing them to import previously producible goods, such as steel. Along with this, the newly democratic Germany was being governed by various coalitions, normally led by the SPD (Socialist party), who wanted to maintain a welfare state but keep taxation low enough to prevent the more affluent from rebelling. They decided against increased taxation as they believed that more money in society would allow the economy to begin to grow. In reality, this just added to the inflation crisis which was growing. The final straw for the German economy was the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923 following the failure of the German Government to pay their reparations installments in late 1922. To combat this, the German Chancellor, Heinrich Cuno, ordered workers in the Ruhr to go on strike and prevent the French from taking away any goods that they produced in a policy known as 'passive resistance'. The one major problem of this was that the Government had to continue to pay the workers, factory owners, and compensate buyers who were losing out during the strike. To do this, the Government began to print huge amounts of money and put them into circulation. By Autumn 1923 it cost more to print a bank note than the note was actually worth and 1kg of bread (which had cost 0.29 marks in 1914) now cost 428,000,000,000 marks. This period is know as the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, as people saw their life savings melt away, old peoples pensions were reduced to nothing, and those working for a salary saw their incomes virtually disappear as they failed to keep pace with the hyperinflation. It was not uncommon for factory workers to re-negotiate their wages at least 4 times a day during the crisis. The crisis was resolved eventually with the introduction of the Rentenmark in late November 1923. The main consequence of this? Democracy (which was a new phenomenon for Germany) had done nothing but wipe out the life savings and incomes of millions of people, who less ten years later, began to turn their support towards a man promising to bring democracy in Germany, and the troubles it had caused, to a close.