Hague conference on reparations
The Hague conference on reparations of 1929-30 was an international conference on World War I reparations that reviewed and adopted the Young Plan, the final attempt during the Weimar Republic to settle the reparations issue. The conference was held in The Hague, Netherlands in two parts, from 6 to 31 August 1929 and from 3 to 31 January 1930.
The first session centred around British demands for better terms and a larger share of the reparations payments for itself. Compromises, mostly on Germany's side, eventually resolved the issues. Outside of the formal Young Plan discussions, France agreed to an early withdrawal of the troops occupying the Rhineland in exchange for German concessions on reparations. The second session, which took place after the Wall Street crash of October 1929, set up the Bank for International Settlements to handle the transfer of payments between countries and settled the remaining Young Plan issues despite sometimes furious objections from Germany's Hjalmar Schacht. The Young Plan and the separate agreement on evacuation of the Rhineland were signed on 20 January 1930.
Aftermath[edit]
The occupation of the Rhineland formally ended on 30 June 1930, five years earlier than required by the Treaty of Versailles.
The world-wide financial crisis that followed the Wall Street crash made it impossible for Germany to meet the reparations payments set up in the Young Plan.[13] In 1931 President Herbert Hoover of the United States convinced 15 other nations to participate in a one year moratorium on reparations and war debt payments.[14] The agreement reached in the 1932 Lausanne Conference for a final German payment of 3 billion gold marks was never ratified and was the last attempt during the Weimar Republic to regulate German reparations.[15] Nothing more was paid until after the 1953 London Agreement on German External Debts. Germany paid off the last of its First World War debts in 2010.[16]