Yesterday, October 3, 2010, Germany paid the last instalment of the reparations demanded by the victors at Versailles in 1919, ninety-one years ago. These amounted to 269 billions Goldmark to be paid over forty-five years – a sum later reduced in various steps by negotiations. German revenues in 1921 were expected to be a hundredth of that sum.
By the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 Germany had paid 23 billion Reichsmark. At a London conference in 1952 new arrangements were made, easing the burden on the new federal republic.
Germany is now schuldenfrei, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung last weekend, but not frei von Schuld. In German, Schuld means both debt and guilt. Germany is now free of debt but not free of guilt.
After Rome defeated Carthage in 202 B.C. at the Battle of Zama in Africa at the end of the second Punic War, the Carthaginians had to pay the equivalent of three hundred thousand tons of silver, which financed Rome’s rise to world power. That made sense.
In 1872, after the Franco-Prussian war, Bismarck imposed a bill on the defeated French, a bill of five billion Goldmark, unheard of until that time. Surely, had Bismarck been magnanimous towards the new French republic German-French relations might have been reasonably amicable in the following four decades and 1914 could have been avoided.
Vindictive reparations are a bad idea. John Maynard Keynes saw this clearly in 1919. If the allies had listened to him Hitler would have remained a talkative, failed, art student.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I have noticed that it has become official recently that Afghanistan holds vast untapped mineral wealth, and Iraq has equally vast untapped oil reserves. I think it was reported this past week that Iraq is now number 3 in the world as an oil producer given the ‘discovery’ of new potential oil reserves there. Will the United States expect ‘reparations’ in the form of access to minerals and oil rather than money for the trouble it has gone too in conquering these countries? (The British of course will get a piece of this action, thereby explaining their strange willingness to continue to ally themselves with the US in these doubtful causes) Of course, western governments do seem to have learned from Keynes and Versailles at least to the extent that they recognize that they should be more subtle in the way that they extract ‘vindictive’ payments. I suspect that rather than demand an identifiable sum in payment, thereby incurring public resentment, they now impose intricate legal trade regimes, and secret, so-called private, corporate contractual arrangements that guarantee their ‘booty’ without social repurcussions. As an afterthought, maybe its not so strange that the English and Americans ie., the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, have continued their partnership. Once a viking, always a viking…
You deserve good marks for advising future aggressors, if they read this blog, to demand reparations from their victims for the damage they will inflict.
Bismarck started it, though he would have denied he was the aggressor. (I vagely remember his concocting a casus belli with the so-called Ems telegram.)