When the Allied and Associated Powers gathered in Paris in January 1919 for what proved to be the battle of the Seine, one of the most bitter, crucial, and long-lasting conflicts facing them would be that over reparations. “To the victors belong the spoils” is the oldest rule of international law. However, in response to Socialist and Bolshevik propaganda in favor of “no indemnities,” Woodrow Wilson had ruled out this conventional approach to a financial settlement. Hence the concept of repairing the civilian damage done, which was written into the Pre-Armistice Agreement with Germany, provided a new method of providing financial relief for debt-burdened victors.

The case for reparations rested primarily on the military verdict of 1918, which was not in dispute at the time among governments, though increasingly forgotten by the German people as time passed, and secondarily on the fact that the absence of reparations would largely reverse that verdict. Initially, until German diplomats made a fateful connection, reparations were not linked to responsibility for the outbreak of the war. At heart, reparations were about two fundamental and closely related questions: who won the war and who would pay for it, or at least for part of the cost of undoing the damage. The war had been fought on the soil of the victors; they were devastated, and Germany was not. Most European belligerents had large domestic war debts; the victors had vast foreign ones as well2 but Germany did not.