The Ruhr, Reparations and the Mark's Collapse

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In December 1922 the Allied Reparations Commission ruled that Germany had fallen behind on its reparations payments. On 11 January 1923, French and Belgian troops crossed into the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, to enforce collection directly. Berlin's response was passive resistance: officials, railwaymen and miners refused to cooperate with the occupying authorities, and the government kept paying their wages, and its own bills, by running the printing press. The mark, already weakened by wartime and postwar deficit spending, went into freefall. Passive resistance became unsustainably expensive and was called off by Chancellor Gustav Stresemann's government in September 1923, but the currency did not stabilize until the Rentenmark's introduction that November. The episode left a durable political lesson inside Germany about the fragility of the peace settlement's financial terms, a lesson the Nazi party would spend the following decade repeating on the campaign trail, and it fell, not coincidentally, in the same November as Hitler's first, failed attempt to seize power in Munich.