It was easy for France and Belgium to send their Armies into Germany’s Ruhr Valley in February of 1923 – not so easy getting them out. Attached are three news articles that reported on the assorted European officials who were applying all their brainpower to the problem. A diplomatic solution was reached during the Summer of 1925 and the two Armies decamped – but not before a lot of nasty remarks were made first:
“Raymond Poincare, speaking at Commercy, said: We have known the Germans for nineteen hundred years, and we have never been able to notice much change in them. Whether they call themselves Germans, Ostrogoths, or Visigoths; whether they enroll themselves beside the Huns in the armies of Attila or put themselves under the leadership of the Prussians; whether they trick us Leipzig; whether they are defeated at Ligny or [are among] the conquerors at Waterloo; whether they surround us at Sedan or are crushed along the Marne; whether they falsify the Ems telegram in 1870 or violate Belgian neutrality in 1914, they are a people for whom war is for all time their national industry and for whom peace is only an armistice between wars… We are in the Ruhr, so long as she (Germany) does not pay us she will not get us out!”
Click here to read an article about the time the occupation began.
