Some theories state that the French aimed to occupy the centre of German coal, iron, and steel production in the Ruhr area valley simply to get the money. General Alphonse Caron's 32nd Infantry Division, under the supervision of General Jean-Marie Degoutte, carried out the operation. Initiated by Poincaré, the invasion took place on 11 January 1923. Finally, Poincaré argued that once the chains that had bound Germany in Versailles were destroyed, it was inevitable that Germany would plunge the world into another world war.
Poincaré often argued to the British that letting the Germans defy Versailles in regards to the reparations would create a precedent that would lead to the Germans dismantling the rest of the Versailles treaty. The real issue during the Ruhrkampf (Ruhr campaign), as the Germans labelled the battle against the French occupation, was not the German defaults on coal and timber deliveries but the sanctity of the Versailles Treaty. 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.Īfter much deliberation, Poincaré decided to occupy the Ruhr on 11 January 1923 to extract the reparations himself. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. īy 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. France increasingly looked towards the prospect of German reparations payments as a way to stabilize its economy. France was also suffering from a high deficit accrued during World War I, which resulted in a depreciation of the French franc. 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. Even with the reduction, the debt was huge. In 1921, the amount was reduced to 132 billion (at that time, $31.4 billion (US $442 billion in 2021), or £6.6 billion (£284 billion in 2021). The total sum of reparations demanded from Germany-around 226 billion gold marks ( US $929 billion in 2021)-was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission. Since the war was fought predominately on French soil, these reparations were paid primarily to France. 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. The Ruhr region had been occupied by Allied troops in the aftermath of the First World War. Map of the occupation of the Rhineland (1923)
The Occupation of the Ruhr contributed to German re-armament and the growth of radical right-wing movements in Germany.
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. 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. The Occupation of the Ruhr (German: 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.įrance 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.