# Was the 'printing' of money during the days of hyperinflation in 1920s Germany quantitative easing or a literal printing of cash/bank notes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 4, 2023, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570 "2023-11-04T04:40:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Octagon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/2acd7d/32.png) [@Octagon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Octagon)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/1 "2023-11-04T04:40:33Z")
I’m sorry if this question sounds simplistic but I’ve never seen any alternative phrasing in any arcticles I’ve read on the Hyperinflation in Germany during the Great Depression. Was the ‘printing’ of money during the days of hyperinflation in 1920s Germany quantitative easing as we understand it today or a a literal printing of cash/bank notes? ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/2 "2023-11-04T05:11:58Z")
I’m pretty sure it was just printing money. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/3 "2023-11-04T05:28:41Z")
That’s what Wikipedia says. I didn’t chase past wiki to the primary sources. > **[Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic)** > > Hyperinflation affected the German Papiermark, the currency of the Weimar Republic, between 1921 and 1923, primarily in 1923. It caused considerable internal political instability in the country, led to the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium after Germany defaulted on its war reparations. > To pay for the large costs of the ongoing First World War, Germany suspended the gold standard (the convertibility of its currency to gold) when the war broke out in 1914. Unlike France, which imposed... > [@](#): > > …Germany lost the war, which left the new Weimar Republic saddled with massive war debts that it could not afford: the national debt stood at 156 billion marks in 1918. **The debt problem was exacerbated by printing money without any economic resources to back it.** … > > The strategy that Havenstein had been using to pay war reparations was the **mass printing of bank notes** to buy foreign currency, which was then used to pay reparations, but this strategy greatly exacerbated the inflation of the paper mark. That makes it sound like real paper money to me. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/4 "2023-11-04T21:47:56Z")
Here’s a five billion mark note from that era [![](https://techstartups.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/HyperInflation-960x571.jpg) ](https://techstartups.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/HyperInflation-960x571.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/5 "2023-11-04T21:53:44Z")
I believe Germany uses the [long scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales), so that banknote is for 5,000,000,000,000 marks, what we would call “five trillion”. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/6 "2023-11-04T22:24:01Z")
Maybe it was an exaggeration, but I recall reading about people loading a wheelbarrow full of money to buy some groceries. Anyway, I am sure it was cash. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/7 "2023-11-04T22:47:20Z")
It didn’t achieve its intended purpose anyway. The French ultimately eliminated the reparations middleman by expanding its zone of occupation into Germany’s industrial sector, sucking away the profits until their war indemnity was satisfied. (Although they poor-mouthed paying their own war debts owed to the US). (Going OT here) unfortunately, even with the occupation of the industrial Ruhr district, the French, British and US zones of occupation were only deep enough into Germany to prevent a resurrected war front (with the weird exception of the [Free State of Bottleneck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_of_Bottleneck). Most of Germany was left to the mismanaged economy of the Weimar Republic, with the fighting between the Communists and the various right-wing factions. People who believe “everyone had to buy bread with bales of Riechmarks, and so the Nazis took power” have it wrong. The economy was put back in shape by a consortium of businessmen in the mid-20s. But when the US blew up the world economy in 1929, the Germans, because of what had happened when the French, British and US had run the occupation on the cheap, assumed there’d be a return to Communist vs Right-wing civil war, and put Hitler in power. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2023, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-printing-of-money-during-the-days-of-hyperinflation-in-1920s-germany-quantitative-easing-or-a-literal-printing-of-cash-bank-notes/992570/8 "2023-11-04T23:04:57Z")
What Slithy\_Tove said, plus: [This Pulitzer Prize winner](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/liaquat-ahamed) has a good explanation of the situation that manages to show why it seemed like a good idea, to some real experts, at the time. As for wheelbarrows of money, a lot of effort was put into daily manufacturing lots of ever-higher-face-value banknotes. So while people had to carry around a lot of paper, it would be rare that they couldn’t fit it into a hand-held bag. While manufacturing all that currency was wasteful, so is gold mining to obtain monetary gold. Part of the context was an attempt to get Germany to pay France, and to a lesser extent the UK and US, for the cost of World War I. This can be made to seem as dumb as Germany continually inflating away debts. The only way for Germany to get the money to pay the allies would have been to export a large portion of its farmed and manufactured goods. They could only export that much by charging artificially low prices, which would make French and British manufacturers unable to sell into their internal markets, while rendering Germany too poor to buy French and British imports. Germany fixed the mess by establishing a new currency promised to be issued in limited quantities to avoid inflation.