Indeed, an account in Daily Independent, Volume 1, Number 16, 9 August 1923 relates the experience of passengers on the liner Muenchen sharing news from Germany. They described conditions in Germany as approaching complete chaos. . . . Gustav Van der Loo, a steel merchant . . . said that the price of steel had skyrocketed since the occupation of the Ruhr . "I can’t tell what is going to happen to Germany," he said; "the people don’t know themselves." The landlords who are forbidden by law to raise rents, he added, were in a bad way. In some German cities, he said, tenants are paying the equivalent of ten cents a month in American money for an apartment. This occupation of Germany by French and Belgian forces in 1923 was occasioned by Germany defaulting on reparation payments from the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. While a bit beyond the scope of our short blog format, this description of the worsening conditions in Germany was a foreshadowing ...
Forgotten history fished from the river of forgetfulness