An answer to your specific question is a bit tricky because the situations after World War I and II are not exactly comparable and the exact sum of payments is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, I will try to shed light on those situations and leave the interpretation of how “hard” the conditions were to you.

After World War I, based on the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was obligated to pay reparations, starting with 20 billion gold marks. The total sum claimed by the Allies in 1920 was 269 billion gold marks, payable in 42 annual rates, not by Germany alone but divided between Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey and Hungary. Also, the sum was to be paid in gold marks and in goods. Right from the beginning the German government was arguing that Germany was not able to pay that kind of money and over the course of the 1920s there were several conferences on the topic, resulting in the total sum of the reparations being reduced step by step. In 1921, the London Schedule of Payments cut the claims to 132 billion gold marks, the Young plan in 1929 reduced the sum to 112 billion gold marks and, finally, at the Lausanne Conference of 1932, it was agreed that all reparation claims would be met if Germany paid a final rate of 3 billion gold marks, which Germany never did but, nevertheless, the matter was off the table. This, very short, assemblage of facts needs context. The first reductions must be seen in the light of German struggles with unemployment and hyperinflation in the early 1920s as well as the very complex problem of interallied war debts. Especially France looked for the German reparations to pay their own debt to the USA, which, in turn, was not willing to abate those debts. In this tense situation, German refusal to meet the claims of London Schedule of Payments led to the Allies occupying the Rhineland in 1921. To remedy the situation, the Dawes plan was passed, which didn’t include a cut of the total sum but agreements on loans to Germany, in order to stabilise its economy and enable it to pay the rates. The Young plan, already mentioned above, involved not only a reduction of payments but also the withdrawal of Allied troops from the Rhineland. Unfortunately, only a few months after the Young plan was agreed upon, the Great Depression began in the USA and spread quickly. The basis for the Young plan was effectively outdated less than a year after its inception and it was eventually annulled by the Lausanne Conference of 1932. As mentioned, Germany never paid the final rate of 3 billion gold marks and they were never claimed by the Allies. The question of World War I reparations or rather the loans taken up to pay the reparations resurfaced after World War II, however.

German financial obligations and payments after World War II can be divided into five categories: reparations, debts, occupation costs and loans (e.g. Marshall plan), settlement with Israel and individual compensation. The issue of German reparations was first addressed in early 1946 in the Paris Agreement on Reparations, which dealt with the distribution between the Allies of payments and goods. Included in this category are matters of restitution to countries occupied by Germany during the war. The Paris Agreement did not, however, set fixed sums or defined exactly the goods which Germany would have to provide as reparations and effectively left that question for the three occupational powers to determine.

One of the main goals, especially from a US viewpoint, was to get the (West)German economy back on track. The enormous debts accumulated by the German Reich were a major obstacle in achieving economic growth and any fixed sum of reparations would have added to that. The Allies did remove equipment and goods from their occupation zones but the final settlement on reparations was only reached as part of the London debt treaty of 1953, where the Paris agreement was interpreted as including a waiver for outstanding claims against Germany, to the disappointment of the smaller Allies.

In the London debt treaty, all debts of the West German state, being the legal successor of the German Reich, were negotiated. Debts accumulated between 1933 and 1945, in the years of Nazi rule that is, were cleared. Moreover, the USA cut their claims by 56%, effectively obligating the other creditors to do the same. Individual compensation claims were only recognized from victims who lived in Germany in the borders of 1937 or had some other attachment to Germany, which reduced the number of people eligible considerably. Finally, any further reparation claims could only be made after a German reunification. The sum of claims made after these reductions was roughly 14 billion Deutsche Mark. Following the London treaty, the last payment was made by Germany in 1988. To complete the picture, one year earlier the German government had already signed a treaty with Israel and agreed to pay 3 billion Deutsche Mark.

In the end, ironically, it took the West German and later reunified German state longer to pay off the debts resulting from World War I than those from World War II. Because the loans originating from the 1920s were subjected to several refinancing measures over the years, the last payment, not for reparations but for loans taken up to pay for reparations, was actually made in 2010.

I highly recommend Adam Tooze’s research on the subject from a socio-economical viewpoint as well as the 2013 paper by Richard Buxbaum for insight in the legal dimensions.

Tooze, Adam: Reassessing the Moral Economy of Post-war reconstruction, in: Past & Present, 6 (2011), p. 47-70. Buxbaum, Richard: From Paris to London. The legal history of European reparation claims, in: Berkeley Journal of International Law, 31 (2013), p. 323-347.