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failing to deliver to France the agreed volume of wood for telegraph poles, as well as a minor shortfall in coal deliveries.6 THE REAL ORIGINS OF WEIMAR HYPERINFLATION Following the murder of Rathenau, the gold mark rate by July 1922 plunged internationally to 493 Marks to the U.S. dollar, as confidence in political stability in Germany sank to a new post-Versailles low. The Reichsbank began dramatically expanding the money supply, in a frantic attempt to meet unpayable London reparations demands, while maintaining employment and a strong export industry domestically to service the reparations requirements imposed. By December, the mark had fallen to the alarming level of 7,592 to the dollar. Then, on January 9, 1923, the Reparations Committee voted 3 to 1 (with Britain formally on record as opposing France, Belgium and the newly installed Mussolini government of Italy) that Germany was in default of her reparations payments. On January 11, Poincaré ordered the military forces of France, with token participation from Belgium and Italy, to march into Essen and other cities of the German industrial Ruhr to occupy it by force. England hypocritically denounced the occupation, though she had threatened precisely the same action in 1921. In reaction, the German government called on its citizens to engage in universal passive resistence to the occupation. The government ordered all German officials, including Reichsbahn personnel, to refuse to take orders from the occupying authorities. Workers refused to work the steel mills and factories of the Ruhr. To support the families of striking miners and other workers, the government resorted to expanded printing of money. The area occupied was merely 100 kilometers long and some 50 kilometers wide, yet it contained 10 per cent of the entire German population, produced 80 per cent of Germany’s coal, iron and steel and accounted for fully 70 per cent of its freight traffic. The French occupation brought the industrial activity of Germany almost to a grinding halt. It took until the end of 1923 for French troops and engineers to bring production in the Ruhr to even a third of the former level of 1922. More than 150,000 Germans were deported from the Ruhr occupation zone, some 400 were killed and more than 2,000 wounded. The economic strain of the German resistance was incalculable. The French occupation forces had cut off the Ruhr economically
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