A Blunted Sickle - Thread II
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Those are all valid reasons from the viewpoint of today, with the benefit of what is essentially 80 years of hindsight. From the viewpoint of 1942, I'm not so sure. Fundamentally it's a different way of doing reparations, and setting it at a relatively low level means that it'll be seen by the Entente as perfectly reasonable. There will be a few like Keynes who are likely to realise the problems, but I'm not at all convinced they'd actually be listened to.
One thing I'm being careful to try and do is not to always take decisions which work out well in the long term, support the right future technologies, etc. That's borderline ASB - people make wrong decisions all the time, for reasons which appear (and indeed often are) valid to them at the time. ITTL they aren't anticipating some sort of Wirtschaftswunder - indeed I'm not convinced the economic conditions would be there for anything as extreme as in OTL.
That means the costs will roughly match the cost of keeping large forces in Germany which needs to be paid by the occupying powers in local currency for food, fuel, accommodation, pay, etc. Massively different story in 10 years time - at which point they're going to have to seriously revisit this agreement - but right now it doesn't seem that unreasonable to the decision-makers in London and Paris.
Fair enough, thanks for the clarification, I'll wait and see how it turns out. I will just mention that 3% implies higher reparations than after WW1 and so the British are likely to consider it impossibly high (they were always opposed reparations in WW2), and that while this figure may roughly reflect German cold war defence spending, it is also higher than the share Germany generally spent on defence before the Nazis (the exception being war time spending and the period immediately before WW1) and so may have appeared at the time to be unpayable over any prolonged period. This doesn't mean it is unpayable though, just as the WW1 reparations may well have been payable if the allies had been united and determined.
I'd say it's significantly more payable than the WW1 reparations - the initial sum from Versailles seems to have been about ~600% of GDP (no really good figures seem to be available for what GDP actually was), later revised to ~350% in the early 1920s. This is talking about 300% of GDP, but biased much further into the future and critically payable in fiat money rather than gold.
From the point of view of the Entente, that makes it seem fairly reasonable - and for comparison Germany went from spending 5% of GDP on defence when Hitler came to power to hitting 15% in 1939. Now you can make lots of good arguments about this level of military spending screwing up the German economy and forcing them to go to war, but I don't think that any non-German economists are going to be making them for a very long time.
Fixing the repayments in Marks also makes it more palatable to the British - it means they can spend the money in Germany rather than taking it out of the economy, essentially using it to support the rebuilding of the economy to turn Germany into a trading partner.
Every nation has the right to defend it self and if Germany is not allowed then the occupying powers are responsible for it.
The ban of having Germany of having some sort of defense forces will probably last only a couple of years until Great Britain and France realize that it is cheaper for Germany to have a modest size defense force then to provide the bulk of protection against a theoretical Soviet invasion.
There will still be British and French forces station in Germany after any occupation is ended and that should be sufficient enough to deter Germany to try for a Round 3.
The main deference between IOTL and ITTL is that in this timeline the German people will be held more directly responsible for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis because "They voted them in to power" and in OTL the sheer scale of the mass murder in an industrial manner so overwhelmed the world that a deliberate separation of the German people and the Nazis was made in order to bring Germany back to the "Community of Nations ".
The ban of having Germany of having some sort of defense forces will probably last only a couple of years until Great Britain and France realize that it is cheaper for Germany to have a modest size defense force then to provide the bulk of protection against a theoretical Soviet invasion.
There will still be British and French forces station in Germany after any occupation is ended and that should be sufficient enough to deter Germany to try for a Round 3.
The main deference between IOTL and ITTL is that in this timeline the German people will be held more directly responsible for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis because "They voted them in to power" and in OTL the sheer scale of the mass murder in an industrial manner so overwhelmed the world that a deliberate separation of the German people and the Nazis was made in order to bring Germany back to the "Community of Nations ".
Think you are forgetting ITTL Poland is the Front line not Germany, the forces in Germany are just going to be occupation/line of communication. The Army of the Rhine is going to be the Army of the Vistula. ITTL the Germans have still overwhelmed everyone with their actions , that its less than OTL is meaningless. Without them being on the frontline, the need to rehabilitate, ie lie about what the Heer/German people did and blame it all on a minority will be far less.
I think the biggest consideration would be if there's a Korean war analogue to shake up plans for Europe. After all, the plan had been to occupy a completely demilitarized Japan forever -and then America needed to use the garrisoning forces elsewhere.
Short of the Continuation War happening anyways, I can't think of any Korea-analogue for TTL's Europe. And even that seems rather unlikely.
Short of the Continuation War happening anyways, I can't think of any Korea-analogue for TTL's Europe. And even that seems rather unlikely.
Yes
Germany will be to the Entente what Poland was to the USSR in the Cold War. A supply route to the main defence area (or springboard for assault depending on your POV). And where you have air and naval bases.
Germany doesn't need a large defense force as far the Entente is concerned.
This is roughly true, but 82bn of the 132bn figure of the early 1920s was never expected to be paid (baring a miracle), lowering the actual burden to around 70% of GDP, much less than you're suggesting and then the Dawes and Young plans each lowered it further (https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/44335/1/WP163.pdf has an interesting history and useful data and you can ignore the actual research question). Even then the actual annual charges reached 3% of GDP in only the first year 1921/22 if I remember correctly, when Germany handed over lots of assets rather than having to earn gold. In practice the focus was on what Germany was able to pay annually rather than the headline total figure, and it turned out that Germany wasn't able to generate payments of 3% of GDP on a consistent basis (which was at least in part down to German politics).
In any case, assuming a 5% interest rate, payments of 3% of GDP each year and a 20 year payment period implies an initial debt of less than 40% of GDP, an infinite payment period implies an initial debt of 60% of GDP (with 3% of GDP being paid each period and 5% interest rates), and even lowering the interest rate to 3% only implies a maximum debt of 100% of GDP, even with an infinite payment period (if the interest rate is 3% and debt is 100% of GDP then paying 3% of GDP just covers the interest on the debt).
Of course, economic growth makes things more affordable, but in 1945 nobody was really expecting miracles. And even if the initial debt was higher on the assumption that the German economy would expand, this would mean exploding debt as 3% of GDP wouldn't cover the initial interest payments.
As to payment in marks, you're avoiding the problem of stopping the Germans inflating away the debt by linking it to GDP (Versailles used gold marks for the same reasons). However, this does not solve the transfer problem. To pay the British and the French 3% of GDP each year Germany has to export 3% of GDP more than it imports (in goods or services). Now these may be paid for out of taxes on Germans (so the capital account outflow balances the current account surplus) but this is still Germany running a current account surplus whether or not gold is involved, and policies that would enable this surplus weren't exactly popular in Britain and France. In the 1920s Germany paid reparations essentially by borrowing short term from the US (on private markets not from the government). Germany subsequently defaulted on these debts so this isn't likely to be an option 2nd time around (and only postpones the issue anyway). Of course if the goods never leave Germany then they may not appear in the trade data, but you suggested these transfers would be more than just the occupation costs, implying some portion ends up back in the UK & France.
In other words, payments of 3% of GDP annually may possibly be affordable but will be controversial (for the British & Germans especially) and imply both a significant degree of ongoing compulsion and a total present value of debt much lower than you suggested.
Anyway, sorry for derailing the thread, I'll leave it there and look forward to the next update, whenever it comes. Thanks again
I understand that but how long would a larger modern equipped Polish Army hold out against a theoretical determined massive Soviet invasion?
There is a reason that Poland has been invaded time after time because it is basically flat land with very few natural defenses.
I don't think that a modestly rearmed Germany is going to happen overnight but over the course of years as budgets dictate policy and strategy and as the years go by Great Britain and France will want to save money by having Germany taking more responsibility for their defense.
I also think ITTL that the next generation of German politicians will not have to deal with the "Stabbed in the Back" mythology that the Prussian Officer Corps propagated after WW I and will concentrate on improving the German economy and not go anywhere near about "Restoring Germany to greatness".
Then again nuclear weapons is going to make this debate irrelevant.
After the Franco-Prussian War France paid reparations of 3% of their GDP without making their economy crash and burn.
Because it was started 5 years before the threadmark function ?
I think this is really two separate questions: 1) How well would Poland hold out against a massive Soviet invasion? 2) How well do the decision makers ITTL think Poland would hold out against a massive Soviet invasion?
IOTL the Soviet Union had proven its fighting abilities by 1945, and arguably these may have been somewhat overestimated by the West. ITTL we have the Soviet Union putting on a not very impressive performance against Finland, and that's about it. It might look like a Polish army equipped with modern weapons, supported by allied contingents and able to mass its forces on one front would be sufficient.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people barge into threads where someone is posting a completely free story, written in their own free time, and demand that author uses additional amount of their owm time to add some new functionality (mostly threadmarks, but often maps).
Can't you at least ask nicely?
It was a one word complaint followed by a simple question. There were no demands made.
I admit I was cumulatively annoyed by previous similar posts, so my response was perhaps a bit harsher than your post really deserved. Sorry
One of the headaches with that is Poland: it'll be a very long time indeed before the Poles are willing to accept armed German troops on their soil, even if it's all about keeping the Soviets out. In OTL when the front line was on the Inner German Border, it made a lot of sense to arm the Germans to fight on your side - and even then it was a decade before it actually happened. With Germany ~500km from the likely front line - and the industrial part much further away - it's not at all clear exactly what it adds. It's rather like trying to support a NATO-USSR conflict from the south of France.
I'm initially thinking of "British Army of the Oder" as the TTL equivalent to BAOR. There will be certain political sensitivities about basing large forces in Poland (Poland is a friendly power that has just been occupied by foreign troops, after all), it keeps them out of the initial line of fire in any such war and means that their support costs can largely be paid for in German currency.
Both the UK and France have worldwide responsibilities, and there are plenty of candidate wars around the world coming up. Another European war is improbable though.
Very much so.
The thinking is that after the war the problems of a plain cash transfer out of the German economy will start to become very obvious. To start with the German economy is going to be in a mess and it's likely all to be spent within Germany getting things running again - e.g. the way the British got the VW Beetle line running right after the war in OTL. Once they get past stopping people from starving and freezing to death, the amount of cash is going to be small enough that it's all spent in Germany anyway feeding and housing the occupation forces, and paying them in local currency.
The crunch is going to happen once things start getting better, probably in the early 1950s. That also starts to line up with a number of other problems - for instance, the UK was struggling with full employment causing a shortage of labour and issues with defence spending crowding out other parts of the economy. In OTL a large part of the solution to this was Sandystorm and eventually the withdrawal from East of Suez.
The US alliance which they don't have ITTL was crucial to this - and the ongoing colonial commitments means that they can't go down the purely nuclear weapons route. Manpower is going to be a severe limitation, leaves them with a conundrum which can only be solved by some combination of finding additional manpower and outsourcing a lot of their manufacturing. Using German made B-vehicles, tank engines, etc. is an easy win, as is recruiting Germans into the Foreign Legion. Anything else is a lot harder to get agreement to.
The crunch is going to happen once things start getting better, probably in the early 1950s. That also starts to line up with a number of other problems - for instance, the UK was struggling with full employment causing a shortage of labour and issues with defence spending crowding out other parts of the economy. In OTL a large part of the solution to this was Sandystorm and eventually the withdrawal from East of Suez.
The US alliance which they don't have ITTL was crucial to this - and the ongoing colonial commitments means that they can't go down the purely nuclear weapons route. Manpower is going to be a severe limitation, leaves them with a conundrum which can only be solved by some combination of finding additional manpower and outsourcing a lot of their manufacturing. Using German made B-vehicles, tank engines, etc. is an easy win, as is recruiting Germans into the Foreign Legion. Anything else is a lot harder to get agreement to.
Not at all. Discussions like this are extraordinarily helpful to me when I'm writing this timeline - it's a far more collaborative affair than is generally realised.
More importantly it has two larger and traditionally hostile powers on it's borders. As one of the occupying powers of Germany, Poland is going to feel in a much better position than before.
In any case, the logic of the OTL Cold War is going to come in: everybody has lots of nuclear weapons, and that means the war goes nuclear very fast if they end up being unable to hold a Soviet attack by themselves.
Probably will to start with. However, I suspect after the war it'll become pretty rapidly obvious just how powerful the Soviet Union actually is. If nothing else, First Lightning will be one hell of a wake-up call.
That depends on exactly how much land was lost in the east. For centuries the cornerstone of Polish military thinking against Russia was being able to divide the Russian attack into the northern and southern fronts. In addition, Poland has a tradition of mobile warfare. So, if the marshes are firmly in the Russian territory and Poland has no strategic depth the leaders will be in the state of permament panic. Well... perhaps that's on overstatement, but they certainly won't feel safe at all.