Weimar Republic Hyperinflation

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

By November 1923 a single US dollar bought several trillion German marks, and children in Berlin built towers out of banknotes or flew kites made from them, worth less by the day than the paper of the kite itself. The collapse followed France and Belgium's occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, a response to German default on reparations, and the Weimar government's decision to fund passive resistance by printing money rather than raising taxes. Historian Richard J. Evans has described the culture the crisis produced as one preoccupied with criminals, embezzlers and profiteers, in which the democratic government itself became the public's preferred scapegoat, an association it never shook. Historian Martin Geyer has traced how the inflation left farmers and small savers feeling estranged from the established parties altogether, pushing some toward agrarian radical movements that further destabilized the young republic. The currency reform of November 1923, a new note called the Rentenmark backed by land and industrial assets rather than gold, stopped the collapse within weeks. It could not undo what the crisis had already done to public confidence in the Republic's competence, a wound reopened six years later by the Depression.

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.