1923-1-11: French Occupation of the Ruhr

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By 1923 the German government was bankrupt, having spent all its gold reserves in WW1. In addition, the Treaty of Versailles had eliminated government revenues from previously lucrative areas, such as the coalfields in Silesia. Reparations to the allies exacerbated the German government's fiscal woes.

On 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops marched into Germany and occupied the industrial Ruhr area.

France and Belgium had grown increasingly frustrated by Germany frequently defaulting on the reparations that had been agreed in the Treaty of Versailles. The occupation was met with passive resistance, which was only called off on 26 September as rampant hyperinflation crippled the German economy.

Although the French leader Raymond Poincaré was initially reluctant to occupy the Ruhr, he had grown increasingly exasperated by Germany’s regular defaults and the lack of international support for sanctions as a way to persuade the government to pay. He argued that the reparations themselves were not the issue, but rather that allowing Germany to defy this part of the Treaty of Versailles could lead to further attempts to undermine the Treaty at a later date.

It was Germany’s failure to provide the full quota of coal and timber in December 1922 that provided France and Belgium with the excuse to occupy the Ruhr on 11 January 1923. They established the Inter-Allied Mission for Control of Factories and Mines to ensure that goods payments were made, but the Germans responded with a campaign of passive resistance that stopped production. Tensions were high between the occupiers and Ruhr locals and, by the time Gustav Stresemann’s new government called off the strikes in September, approximately 130 German civilians had been killed by the occupying armies.

The occupation enabled France and Belgium to extract reparations, but it was Germany that won international sympathy. The last occupying French troops finally left the Ruhr on 25 August 1925.

The Occupation of the Ruhr (Ruhrbesetzung) was a period of military occupation of the Ruhr region of Germany by France and Belgium between 11 January 1923 and 25 August 1925.

France and Belgium occupied the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley in response to Germany defaulting on reparation payments dictated by the victorious powers after World War I in the Treaty of Versailles. Occupation of the Ruhr worsened the economic crisis in Germany, and German civilians engaged in acts of passive resistance and civil disobedience, during which 130 were killed. France and Belgium, facing economic and international pressure, accepted the Dawes Plan to restructure Germany's payment of war reparations in 1924 and withdrew their troops from the Ruhr by August 1925.

The Occupation of the Ruhr contributed to German re-armament and the growth of radical right-wing movements in Germany.

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The Ruhr region had been occupied by Allied troops in the aftermath of the First World War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which formally ended the war with the Allies as the victors, Germany was forced to accept responsibility for the damages caused in the war and was obliged to pay war reparations to the various Allies. Since the war was fought predominately on French soil, these reparations were paid primarily to France. The total sum of reparations demanded from Germany—around 226 billion gold marks (US $917 billion in 2020)—was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission. In 1921, the amount was reduced to 132 billion (at that time, $31.4 billion (US $442 billion in 2020), or £6.6 billion (UK£284 billion in 2020)). Even with the reduction, the debt was huge. As some of the payments were in raw materials, which were exported, German factories were unable to function, and the German economy suffered, further damaging the country's ability to pay.

By late 1922, the German defaults on payments had grown so regular that a crisis engulfed the Reparations Commission; the French and Belgian delegates urged occupying the Ruhr as a way of forcing Germany to pay more, while the British delegate urged a lowering of the payments. As a consequence of a German default on timber deliveries in December 1922, the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, which led to the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923. Particularly galling to the French was that the timber quota the Germans defaulted on was based on an assessment of their capacity the Germans made themselves and subsequently lowered. The Allies believed that the government of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno had defaulted on the timber deliveries deliberately as a way of testing the will of the Allies to enforce the treaty. The entire conflict was further exacerbated by a German default on coal deliveries in early January 1923, which was the thirty-fourth coal default in the previous thirty-six months. Frustrated at Germany not paying reparations, Raymond Poincaré, the French Prime Minister, hoped for joint Anglo-French economic sanctions against Germany in 1922 and opposed military action. However, by December 1922 he saw coal for French steel production and payments in money as laid out in the Treaty of Versailles draining away.