So I'm trying to understand the revisionist (in the non-perjorative sense) narrative of Germany WWI inflation and reparations. If I understand correctly, the reparations were not at all crippling and the cause of hyperinflation, but Germany just refused to pay. There are two things about this I am tryign to understand:
Posts say that Germany deliberately hyperinflated their currency in order to renege on reparations. Why did they do this? Does this mean hyperinflation wasn't a result of stumbling into a cycle via bad management, but a deliberate policy choice? Also, if germany could pay the reparations, why did they inflict hyperinflation just to get out of them?
Was not getting reparations payments substantially harmful to French and UK recovery from WWI? That idea seems to run counter to the idea that the reparations weren't as large as headline numbers and were relatively within german power to pay off.
The Treaty of Versailles set the level of reparations at about 50 billion gold marks, which at the time was worth about 35 billion dollars. Inflation results in the devaluation of the currency in terms of other currencies, so that same 50 billion gold marks was soon worth 35 million dollars, then 35 dollars. So the debt could be very easily repaid. That is the basic theory behind why the Germans might have initiated hyperinflation.
Recent historians have argued that the reparations constituted a single-digit percentage of German GDP – not tiny but also not completely unmanageable. Just because it wasn’t unmanageable, however, doesn’t mean it wasn’t unpalatable. Don’t forget that the fact that Germans were being asked to pay reparations in the first place was because they were seen as being 100% responsible for the war (as per Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, the ‘War Guilt’ clause), which Germans increasingly thought was unfair in the 1920s and 30s. So as well as the question of whether the Germans were able to pay the reparations was also the question of whether they ought to be paying them in the first place.
In terms of what the reparations meant to the UK and France, in neither case was getting money from the Germans the primary objective of the Treaty of Versailles. The British wanted to destroy Germany’s military capacity and dismantle her nascent overseas Empire (which they did), while France wanted to mantain territorial security by setting up a kind of buffer zone between them and Germany in the Rhineland. Demilitarisation and territorial changes were arguably more important to the British and French than the payment of reparations.