After the Great Patriotic War, according to economists, Germany compensated less than five percent of the damage caused to the economy of the Soviet Union. It would be interesting to see the figures of compensation results in other countries.
Here are the details in numbers, first on the basis of the First World War …
Germany finished paying reparations for the First World War, having paid the last tranche of 70 million euros only on October 3, 2010.
As a result of the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty was concluded, according to which the amount of reparations was determined: 269 billion gold marks - the equivalent of about 100,000 (!) Tons of gold. Destroyed and weakened first by the economic crisis of the 1920s, and then by the Great Depression, the country was unable to pay colossal reparations and was forced to borrow from other states in order to fulfill the terms of the treaty. The Reparation Commission reduced the amount to 132 billion (then it corresponded to 22 billion pounds sterling).
In 1932, the moratorium of US President Herbert Hoover canceled all reparations - for the sake of Hitler's coming to power, but Germany still had to return all the funds previously borrowed from other countries. Hitler, who came to power, stopped payments, but the cooperation of American banks with him only intensified.
Note that back in April 1924, the American banker Charles Dawes (the "Morgan group" behind which the Rothschilds stood) put forward a number of proposals to resolve the problem of reparation payments in Germany. These proposals were brought up for discussion at an international conference in London in July-August 1924. The conference ended on August 16, 1924 with the adoption of the so-called "Dawes Plan".
The first point of this plan was the decision to withdraw the French troops from Germany, which was to be completed on July 31, 1925. This decision alone meant the complete defeat of France in the struggle for hegemony in Europe in 1918-1923. But the main element of the "Dawes Plan" was the provision of financial assistance to Germany from the United States and England in the form of loans, supposedly to pay reparations to France. In 1924-1929. Germany received under the "Dawes Plan" from the United States - $ 2.5 billion, from England - $ 1.5 billion (approximately $ 400 billion at the 1999 exchange rate). This made it possible for German industry to completely re-equip its material base, practically completely update production equipment and create a base for the future restoration of military production. At the same time, all the technologies that ensure military production were sold to Germany,and American industrialists owned most of the businesses …
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But at the very beginning of the 1930s, these loans were abruptly suspended and Germany found itself in a socio-economic crisis. American loans began to flow again only after the coming to power of "Adolf Aloizovich"
After World War II, in 1950, at a conference, the heads of the foreign ministries of the United States, Britain and France ordered Germany to return to paying debts under the Treaty of Versailles. In 1953, according to the London Treaty, Germany, which had lost part of its territory, was allowed not to pay interest until unification.
On October 3, 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, interest payments were resumed - Germany was given 20 years to pay off debts, for which the country had to take a twenty-year loan of 239.4 million marks. As for the reparations themselves, they were repaid in full back in 1983, as noted by the Ministry of Finance in a communique. According to the representative of the German Financial Agency Boris Knapp, "from 1990 to 2010, almost 200 million euros of interest was paid."
On October 3, 2010 the Federal Bank of Germany transferred the last tranche of EUR 69.9 million to London. The German government does not specify how the funds will reach their recipients, but the Daily Mail reports that the money will be transferred to an account in a British bank, and only then to private bondholders and creditors. The British edition of the Daily Telegraph clarifies that most of the funds will be directed to pension funds.
According to the Versailles Treaty, Russia was also among the recipients of reparations, but in 1922 Moscow refused German money in exchange for recognizing the legitimacy of the nationalization of German property in Russia.
I wonder if the nationalized "property of Germany" in Russia corresponded to the amounts of reparations? And what kind of "property of Germany" after the world war could one speak of? This is about the connection between the Bolsheviks and the German General Staff and the Foreign Ministry …
At the same time, it is quite obvious that the enslaving conditions of the Versailles Peace and exorbitant amounts of reparations provoked the outbreak of World War II: the humiliated Germans willingly went under the wing of a party that promoted national superiority.
And now with regard to the Second World War and the damage to the USSR.
Damage
Direct material damage to the USSR, according to estimates by the Extraordinary State Commission, amounted to $ 128 billion in currency equivalent. The total damage is $ 357 billion. To imagine how much this is, suffice it to say that in 1944 the US gross national product (according to official figures from the US Department of Commerce) was 361.3 billion.
Material damage (according to the ChGK reports presented at the Nuremberg Trials) amounted to about 30% of the national wealth of the USSR; in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union - about 67%. The national economy suffered 679 billion rubles of damage (in 1941 state prices).
Generous Stalin
The principles and conditions for the payment of reparations by Germany and its allies were determined at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945. The transcripts of the Yalta talks have been preserved. They show that the Soviet leader showed unprecedented generosity.
He proposed to set a total amount of reparations for Germany in the amount of 20 billion dollars, half of this amount was to be received by the Soviet Union as the state that made the greatest contribution to the Victory and suffered the most from the war. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed with the Stalinist proposal with minor reservations, which is not surprising - $ 10 billion is the approximate amount of US assistance to the USSR under the Lend-Lease program. With the help of such reparations, it was possible to cover only 8% of direct damage from the war, 2.7% of the total damage.
Why half?
Why did Stalin in Yalta say about "halving" the reparations? The fact that he took such a division "not from the ceiling" is confirmed by modern calculations. West German economist B. Endrux and French economist A. Claude did a great job assessing the budget expenditures of the countries participating in the Second World War and the direct economic losses of the belligerent countries.
According to their estimates, military budget expenditures and direct economic damage to the main warring countries during the Second World War amounted to (in 1938 prices) $ 968.3 billion. The USSR accounted for 30% of the total military expenditures of the budgets of the 7 main participants in the war. In the total amount of direct damage to the economies of the five main member countries, the USSR accounted for 57%. In the total total of the total losses of the four countries, the Soviet Union accounted for exactly 50%.
Main trophies
In the 1990s, Russian scientists Boris Knyshevsky and Mikhail Semiryaga published documents from the Main Trophy Directorate. According to them, about 400 thousand railway cars were exported to the Soviet Union from Germany (of which 72 thousand cars of construction materials), 2885 factories, 96 power plants, 340 thousand machine tools, 200 thousand electric motors, 1 million 335 thousand head of cattle, 2, 3 million tons of grain, a million tons of potatoes and vegetables, half a million tons of fats and sugar, 20 million liters of alcohol, 16 tons of tobacco.
According to historian Mikhail Semiryaga, in one year after March 1945, the highest authorities of the Soviet Union adopted about a thousand decisions related to the dismantling of 4,389 enterprises from Germany, Austria, Hungary and other European countries. Also, about a thousand factories were transported to the USSR from Manchuria and Korea. However, all this cannot be compared with the number of destroyed factories during the war. The number of German enterprises dismantled by the USSR was less than 14% of the pre-war number of factories. According to Nikolai Voznesensky, the then chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee, deliveries of captured equipment from Germany covered only 0.6% of the direct damage to the USSR.
Soviet joint stock companies
The Soviet trade and joint-stock companies created on the territory of East Germany were an effective instrument for making reparation payments to the Soviet Union. These were joint ventures, often headed by general directors from the USSR. This was beneficial for two reasons: firstly, the CAO allowed the timely transfer of reparation funds, and secondly, the CAO provided the inhabitants of East Germany with work, solving the acute problem of employment.
According to Mikhail Semiryaga's calculations, in 1950 the share of Soviet joint-stock companies in the industrial production of the German Democratic Republic averaged 22%. In some areas, such as electronics, chemical industry and energy, this share was even higher.
Telephones of the Reich Chancellery in the USSR
From Germany to the Soviet Union, equipment, including sophisticated ones, was transported in wagons; cruise liners and train cars of the Berlin metro were also delivered to the USSR. Telescopes were removed from the Humboldt University Astronomical Observatory. The confiscated equipment was used to equip Soviet factories, such as the Krasnodar Compressor Plant, which was fully equipped with German equipment.
At the Kemerovo enterprise of KAO "Azot", trophy compressors manufactured in 1947 by the "Schwarzkopf" company still operate. At the Moscow central telephone exchange (numbers began with "222" - the station served the Central Committee of the CPSU) until the 1980s, the equipment of the telephone exchange of the Reich Chancellery was used. Even the special equipment for wiretapping used after the war by the MGB and KGB was of German production.
Troy Gold
Many researchers admit that the most important Soviet trophy in the field of art was the so-called "Priam's Treasure" or "Troy's Gold" (9 thousand items found by Heinrich Schliemann during the excavations of Troy). The "Trojan Treasures" were hidden by the Germans in one of the towers of the air defense system on the territory of the Berlin Zoo. The tower was miraculously not damaged.
The German professor Wilhelm Unferzagt handed Priam's treasure along with other works of ancient art to the Soviet commandant's office. On July 12, 1945, the entire collection arrived in Moscow. Some of the exhibits remained in the capital, while others were transferred to the Hermitage. For a long time, the location of the "Trojan gold" was unknown, but in 1996 the Pushkin Museum organized an exhibition of these rare treasures. "Priam's Treasure" has not been returned to Germany until now. However, Russia has no less rights to him, since Schliemann, who married the daughter of a Moscow merchant, was a Russian citizen.
Discussions
For the Soviet Union, the topic of German reparations was closed in 1953, when Moscow completely abandoned reparation deliveries of goods from the German Democratic Republic, switching to payment for them at CMEA prices. On January 1, 1954, a joint agreement between the USSR and the People's Republic of Poland was issued to end the collection of reparations from the USSR. However, this topic is still debatable.
Moreover, not only State Duma deputies, but also Western scholars speak of historical injustice. According to the American professor Sutton (book Sutton A. Western technology), the reparations of Germany and its allies allowed only 40% to compensate for the industrial potential lost by the USSR in the war.
After the Yalta Conference, the exact number of reparations imposed on Germany following the results of World War II was not mentioned anywhere else. This question still remains quite obscure. Germany's general reparation obligations were not documented. It was not possible to create an effective centralized mechanism for collecting reparations and accounting for the fulfillment of reparation obligations by Germany. The victorious countries satisfied their reparation claims at the expense of Germany unilaterally.
Germany itself, judging by the statements of its officials, does not know exactly how much reparations it paid. The Soviet Union preferred to receive reparations not in cash, but in kind. According to the Russian historian Mikhail Semiryaga, since March 1945, within one year, the highest authorities of the USSR have taken almost a thousand decisions related to the dismantling of 4,389 enterprises from Germany, Austria, Hungary and other European countries. Plus, about a thousand more factories were transported to the Union from Manchuria and even Korea. The numbers are impressive. However, everything is judged by comparison. The German fascist invaders destroyed 32,000 industrial enterprises in the USSR. That is, the number of enterprises dismantled by the Soviet Union in Germany, Austria and Hungary did not exceed 14% of what was destroyed in the USSR. According to the then chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee Nikolai Voznesensky, only 0.6% of the direct damage to the Soviet Union was covered by the supply of captured equipment from Germany.
Some data are contained in German documents. Thus, according to the Ministry of Finance of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal Ministry of Internal German Relations, the withdrawals from the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR until 1953 amounted to 66.4 billion marks, or 15.8 billion dollars. According to German experts, this is equivalent to 400 billion modern dollars. The seizures were made both in kind and in cash. The main items of reparation movements from Germany to the USSR were the following (billion marks): deliveries of products of the current production of German enterprises - 34.70; cash payments in various currencies (including occupation marks) - 15.0.
1945-1946 Such a form of reparations as dismantling the equipment of German enterprises and sending it to the USSR was widely used. In March 1945, a Special Committee (OK) of the USSR State Defense Committee was created in Moscow, which coordinated all activities to dismantle military-industrial enterprises in the Soviet zone of German occupation. From March 1945 to March 1946, decisions were made to dismantle more than 4,000 industrial enterprises: 2885 from Germany, 1137 from German enterprises in Poland, 206 from Austria, 11 from Hungary, 54 from Czechoslovakia. Dismantling of the main equipment was carried out at 3474 objects, 1,118,000 pieces of equipment were withdrawn: 339,000 metal-cutting machines, 44,000 presses and hammers, and 202,000 electric motors. Of the purely military factories in the Soviet zone, 67 were dismantled, 170 were destroyed,converted for the production of peaceful products 8.
However, the dismantling of equipment led to the termination of production in the eastern part of Germany and an increase in unemployment, therefore, by the beginning of 1947, this form of reparations was curtailed. Instead, 31 joint-stock companies with Soviet participation were created on the basis of 119 large enterprises in the eastern sector of the occupation. In 1950, they accounted for 22% of the industrial production of the GDR. In 1954, all joint stock companies with Soviet participation were transferred to the German Democratic Republic free of charge. On this, a line was drawn under the history of reparations of the Second World War.