Layton Committee

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The Layton Committee was a body of international financial experts that met in Basel from August 8 to 18, 1931 .

The committee had been set up on July 22, 1931 by the London Conference as a special committee of the Bank for International Settlements . His task was to examine how Germany could become creditworthy again after the banking crisis , in which it had become insolvent due to the withdrawal of foreign loans . The following members belonged to it:

Melchior had been commissioned by the Brüning government to prevent Germany from being blamed for its financial collapse and, if possible, to obtain medium-term credit with which the 15% discount rate, which was restricting the economy, could be lowered. Moreau was mandated by his government to avoid long-term solutions. The committee was only allowed to examine developments during the Hoover moratorium , which expired in June 1932. Above all, the French wanted to prevent a long-term loan for Germany, which, for domestic political reasons, they could only grant against a promise of renouncing all revisions of the Versailles Treaty . As the personal negotiations between Prime Minister Pierre Laval and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning on June 18, 1931 had shown, he could not make such a waiver, also for domestic political reasons. The only ones interested in a longer term solution were the British. They hoped to promote the revision of the Young Plan in the negotiations of the committee , because they believed that a resumption of the suspended German reparation payments would disrupt the return of confidence in the international capital markets, since the German Reich would only be able to pay either its private debts or the reparations .

Layton was supported in this line of argument by Rydbeck and Beneduce, while Moreau threatened to leave if they continued to talk about Germany's reparation obligations. Briining in Berlin also said that the time was not yet ripe for a revision of the reparation obligations. Layton was tasked with drafting a report that everyone would agree to. The experienced publicist wrote a text that satisfied all sides. Layton initially quantified the loan outflows from Germany during the last few weeks and came to a value of 3.5 billion Reichsmarks . The “first and fundamental requirement for creditworthiness” for the German economy would be trusting relationships between the German Reich and the other great powers. New bonds or the extension of long-term loans to Germany would be out of the question if the German Reich had to make ongoing payments. He recommended seeking cooperation with Germany, especially since imbalances could also affect the victorious powers' own economies. These encrypted formulations meant in plain language that only a new regulation of reparations (which were not explicitly mentioned in the text) would restore confidence in German solvency to such an extent that a resumption of lending to Germany would make sense.

In December 1931, therefore, most of the experts on the Layton Committee met again, this time as the Special Advisory Committee provided for in the Young Plan. Now they recommended a revision of the German reparation obligations, which were decided in July 1932 at the Lausanne Conference .

literature

  • Philipp Heyde: The end of the reparations. Germany, France and the Young Plan 1929–1932. Schöningh, Paderborn 1998, ISBN 3-506-77507-3
  • Bruce Kent: The Spoils of War. The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations 1918–1932. Clarendon, Oxford 1989, ISBN 0-19-822738-8

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ International: Nothing Resounding , in: Time, August 24, 1931 ( online , accessed April 29, 2011)
  2. ^ Tilman Koops: Introduction , in: Files of the Reich Chancellery . The Cabinets Brüning I and II (1930–1932) , edited by the same, Vol. 1, Boldt, Boppard 1982, p. LII ( online , accessed April 29, 2011)