How Did The Weimar Republic Recover From 1924-1924

The June 1920 elections to the first Reichstag echoed the complications in which the new democracy found itself. The Weimar coalition parties, the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party, and the Democrats, which in January 1919 had together received more than 75 percent of the vote, this time managed to win only 43.5 percent. Contributing to the hitches that the republic encountered in the early 1920s was the mounting rate of inflation that was eventually to destroy the German mark.

Although the inflation was entrenched in the huge debt that Germany had accumulated in financing its warfare effort, the hyperinflation of 1923 was initiated by the French-

Belgian military occupation in January 1923 of the

German industrial district in the Ruhr

The seeds of German recovery were rooted in the autumn of 1923, when Gustav Stresemann was raised to the chancellorship. Stresemann and his ministers formulated plans to arrest the hyperinflation crisis by announcing a new currency, the Rentenmark, and fixed its worth to gold prices. The government publicized its determination to meet reparations payments and sought international aid to do so.

The US-led Dawes Plan was finalised in April 1924 and executed four months later. Between 1924 and 1929 the dying German economy was injected with more than $25 billion of foreign money. More than half of this money came from American loans; most of the rest was organised by American bankers acting as intermediaries. The American government and US corporations also provided Germany with financial and industrial expertise. All this support contributed to a surge in German production during the mid-1920s. New factories were constructed or converted, many using newly developed mechanisation and assembly line techniques. The restoration of reparation payments saw France and Belgium withdraw from the Ruhr in mid-1925, freeing up Germany’s industrial resources there. German economic growth after 1924 exceeded that of France and Britain. By 1929 Germany was producing

Article 155 of the constitution declared that the state must “strive to secure healthy housing to all German families, especially those with many children”, so the government initiated several visionary programs. It employed architects and planners to devise ways of alleviating housing shortages. Government investment, tax breaks, land grants and low-interest loans were also used to stimulate the building of new houses and apartments. Between 1924 and 1931 more than two million new homes were built, while almost 200,000 more were renovated or expanded. By 1928, homelessness has been reduced by more than 60 per cent. There were also improvements for ordinary German workers, who benefited from increases in the real value of wages in each year after 1924. In 1927 real wages increased by nine per cent and in 1928 they rose by a further 12 per cent, making Germany’s industrial workforce the best paid in