World war 1 ends on october 3rd 2010

                       THE FREEMEN

Dear Brethren,

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Isn't it amazing that 90 years after the end of world war 1, Germany is paying money to Americans / French towards its "Guilt" over the war which war was fought by all the countries at their cost or was it foretold to Germany that America or France is conducting the War at cost of Germany.

Will America pay billions of dollars to Iraq or Afghanistan where its trigger happy contractors have killed millions of innocent children, women and men. A war which was thrust on Iraq on false premises by George Bush. What type of freedom do Iraqis have today if they do not receive billions of American funds over America's War Guilt or do we still live in Jungle where powerful rules at the cost of freedom of the weak.

World War I ended over the weekend. Germany made its final reparations-related payment for the Great War on Oct. 3, 2010 nearly 92 years after the country's defeat by the Allies. The payment has been made under the Treaty of Versailles. Why should Germany honor its commitment under Treaty of Versailles when French have made mockery of it. In the beginning of 1923 the French invaded Germany, occupied the Ruhr district and seized several German towns in the Rhineland. This was a flagrant breach of international law and was protested against by every section of British political opinion at that time. The Germans could not effectively defend themselves, as they had been already disarmed under the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. To make the situation more fraught with disaster for Germany, and therefore more appalling in its prospect, French carried on an intensive propaganda for the separation of the Rhineland from the German Republic and the establishment of an independent Rhenania. Money was poured out lavishly to bribe agitators to carry on this work, and some of the most insidious elements of the German population became active in the pay of the invader. At the same time a vigorous movement was being carried on in Bavaria for the secession of that country and the establishment of an independent Catholic monarchy there, under vassalage to France, as Napoleon had done when he made Maximilian the first King of Bavaria in 1805.

The separatist movement in the Rhineland went so far that some leading German politicians came out in favour of it, suggesting that if the Rhineland were thus ceded it might be possible for the German Republic to strike a bargain with the French in regard to Reparations. But in Bavaria the movement went even farther. And it was more far-reaching in its implications; for, if an independent Catholic monarchy couldbe set up in Bavaria, the next move would have been a union with Catholic German-Austria. possibly under a Habsburg King. Thus a Catholic BLOC would have been created which would extend from the Rhineland through Bavaria and Austria into the Danube Valley and would have been at least under the moral and military, if not the full political, hegemony of France. The dream seems fantastic now, but it was considered quite a practical thing in those fantastic times. The effect of putting such a plan into action would have meant the complete dismemberment of Germany; and that is what French diplomacy wanted.

By the autumn of 1923 the separatist movement in Bavaria was on the point of becoming an accomplished fact. General von Lossow, the Bavarian chief of the REICHSWEHR no longer took orders from Berlin. The flag of the German Republic was rarely to be seen, Finally, the Bavarian Prime Minister decided to proclaim an independent Bavaria and its secession from the German Republic. This was to have taken place on the eve of the Fifth Anniversary of the establishment of the German Republic (November 9th, 1918.)

Hitler staged a counter-stroke. For several days he had been mobilizing his storm battalions in the neighbourhood of Munich, intending to make a national demonstration and hoping that the REICHSWEHR would stand by him to prevent secession. Ludendorff was with him. And he thought that the prestige of the great German Commander in the World War would be sufficient to win the allegiance of the professional army.

A meeting had been announced to take place in the Bürgerbräu Keller on the night of November 8th. The Bavarian patriotic societies were gathered there, and the Prime Minister, Dr. von Kahr, started to read his official PRONUNCIAMENTO, \which practically amounted to a proclamation of Bavarian independence and secession from the Republic. While von Kahr was speaking Hitler entered the hall, followed by Ludendorff. And the meeting was broken up.

Next day the Nazi battalions took the street for the purpose of making a mass demonstration in favour of national union. They marched in massed formation, led by Hitler and Ludendorff. As they reached one of the central squares of the city the army opened fire on them. Sixteen of the marchers were instantly killed, and two died of their wounds in the local barracks of the REICHSWEHR. Several others were wounded also. Hitler fell on the pavement and broke a collar-bone. Ludendorff marched straight up to the soldiers who were firing from the barricade, but not a man dared draw a trigger on his old Commander.
 

Germany's last $94 million payment issued on Sunday isn't a direct reparations settlement but rather the final sum owed on bonds that were issued between 1924 and 1930 and sold to foreign (mostly American) investors but then never paid. The story of German reparations involves several payment plans, years of inflation, broken promises, canceled debts and a man named Adolf Hitler who flat out refused to give anyone anything.

Signed at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Treaty of Versailles - the formal agreement that ended World War I - stripped Germany of its colonies overseas and the region of Alsace-Lorraine (now part of France), placed restrictions on its military and levied punitive damages for supposedly starting what was, at the time, the most destructive war the world had ever seen. "Large parts of Belgium and France were so destroyed by trench warfare that they looked desolate, like moonscapes, just huge areas of land where nothing remained," explains Stephen Schuker, professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of American "Reparations" to Germany, 1919-33. "They needed money to help rebuild the area."

But how do you put a price on war? Is it the property value of destroyed buildings? Rounds of ammunition shot? The cost in human life? It took two years for the international Reparations Commission to assess damages in relation to Germany's national wealth - after all, the payment plan needed to be affordable - and decide how much the government owed. The first reparation demands were 266 gold marks, which amounted to roughly $63 billion then (close to $768 billion today), although this was later reduced to $33 billion (about $402 billion today).

That's a lot of money. So much money, in fact, that British economist John Maynard Keynes famously stormed out of the Paris Peace Conference and penned The Economic Consequences of Peace, arguing that reparations would cripple Germany's economy. At the time, Keynes' opinion was largely supported, though many historians today believe that while burdensome, the fines could have been paid.

When it came time for Germany to make its first payment of $500 million in August 1921, it "just literally printed the paper money," says Schuker. "They gave it to the Reparations Commission saying essentially, 'O.K., here you go.'" In fact, Germany began printing money for everything. They printed so much money, knowingly devaluing their currency, that within a few years it "literally took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread," as Shucker puts it.

In 1924, an American banker named Charles Dawes outlined what came to be known as the Dawes Plan - a new reparations agreement under which U.S. banks such as J.P. Morgan issued bonds to private investors on behalf of Germany, which agreed to pay them back when the money became due. Dawes won the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on this plan. But when the first batch of bonds came due in 1928, Germany again defaulted. So in June 1929, a new plan was enacted, floating more U.S.-backed bonds and reducing Germany's payments to $28 billion paid out over 59 years.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, he cancelled all reparations. "So there are all these bonds out there, held by private individuals, that instantly become worthless," says Schuker. "American citizens lost a lot of money." But as David Andelman, World Policy Journal editor and author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, points out, "refusing to pay doesn't make an agreement null and void. The bonds, the agreement, still existed."

In June 1953, at an international meeting that came to be known as the London Agreement, a fractured West Germany offered to slowly pay back some of the bonds on which it had defaulted back in the 1920s, but said that it wouldn't pay everything until the country was one day reunified. In 1995, no longer divided, Germany took up the task of settling all its debts. "The Germans just agreed to do the right thing, as it were," says Andelman, although he is quick to point out that the interest on the unpaid bonds is now so high that it has been adjusted downward many times. On Oct. 3, Germany paid off the last installment of interest, finally settling its World War I accounts.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20101004/wl_time/08599202314000

Kaps