Inter allied war debts

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Inter- allied war debts were intergovernmental payment obligations that had accrued between the Allies and Associated Powers during the First World War . The main creditors were the United States (USA) and the United Kingdom (Great Britain), which in turn had borrowed a large part of the money loaned from the US federal government . Overall, they amounted to one to interest-bearing principal amount of approximately 26.5 billion US dollars , that is 5.5 billion pounds sterling .

After the end of the World War, debt servicing on the inter-allied war debts took off slowly. The Soviet government refused to service the debts of the loans taken out by the tsarist empire . The European victorious powers only wanted to pay if they received at least the same amount as reparations from the German Reich . The British Lord President of the Council Arthur Balfour had made this point of view clear in a note to the debtor states of Great Britain on August 1, 1922 : According to this, His Majesty's government wanted to demand only as much reparations from Germany and war debts from its former allies as it did Service of their own war debts to the United States was necessary. It was only after Germany began to regularly pay reparations to the European victorious powers with the Dawes Plan in 1924 that they began to service their inter-allied war debts. In total, the United States received almost 2.7 billion US dollars back under the title of the inter-allied war debt, which corresponds to 12.25% of the required amount.

The American Senate rejected the ratification of the Versailles Treaty on March 19, 1920. Therefore, the USA made no reparation claims against the German Reich and long rejected any connection between reparations and inter-allied war debts. On 20 June 1931, the proposed US President Herbert Hoover , the Hoover moratorium before: To the world economic crisis to restore confidence in the capital markets, both debt service should reparations be postponed and the inter-Allied war debts for one year. A little more than a year later, at the Lausanne Conference, the reparations obligations of the insolvent German Reich were canceled except for a final sum of three billion Reichsmarks, which was never claimed. Thereupon Great Britain, France and the other inter-allied war debtors refused to service the debt. Since then they have been in debtor default . The still unresolved question of war debts put a strain on relations between the USA and the Western European powers in the years before the Second World War and made it difficult to jointly defend against the growing claims to power of National Socialist Germany . Even after the Second World War , the problem remained unsolved. An American world almanac listed the inter-allied war debts that the European powers had with the USA until the end of the 1970s; default in interest and compound interest payments had doubled their nominal debt by 1980.

literature

  • Denise Artaud: La question des dettes interalliées et la reconstruction de l'Europe (1917–1929) , 2 vols., Champion honore, Paris 1978.
  • Bruce Kent: The Spoils of War. The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations 1918–1932 , Clarendon, Oxford 1989.
  • Robert Self: Britain and the inter-Allied was debt settlements. The Economic Diplomacy of an Unspecial Relationship, 1917–1945 , Routledge, London 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philipp Heyde: The end of the reparations. Germany, France and the Young Plan 1929–1932. Schöningh, Paderborn 1998, p. 453.

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