One of the problems that weighed most heavily on the Weimar Republic's domestic politics was the reparations that the German Reich had to pay under Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles as a result of its defeat in World War I.

At two government-level international conferences in The Hague in August 1929 and January 1930,[2] the amount of German reparation debt was reduced to the equivalent of 36 billion Reichsmarks.

It was nevertheless to Germany's advantage that the reparations commission and all international economic controls were eliminated, giving the country back a large share of its sovereignty.

[4] The Young Plan is considered the last success of the policy of rapprochement of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann of the German People's Party (DVP), who died before its final adoption on 3 October 1929.

The Association for the Protection of Common Economic Interests in the Rhineland and Westphalia passed a resolution claiming that the Young Plan would impose "unbearable burdens" on the German economy.

At the same time he was leading an intra-party conflict to bring the German nationalist Reichstag faction under Kuno von Westarp under his control.

[9] Hugenberg controlled a large number of newspapers and news services, including Germany's most important film company, UFA.

In June 1929 Hugenberg put together a "Reich Committee for the German People's Initiative against the Young Plan and the War Guilt Lie".

[14] In addition they wished to topple the government led by Hermann Müller of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and to hold new elections.

Hugenberg and the Agricultural League found the passage embarrassing and wanted to dispense with it altogether, but the NSDAP made its continued participation conditional on retaining it.

While Joseph Goebbels and other National Socialists would have had no objection to including Hindenburg, the conservative members of the Reich Committee saw things differently.

Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, former leader of the violent Organisation Consul, called the action "a nonsensical prank" which would ultimately prove counterproductive for the nationalist camp.

[11] The political situation of Hermann Müller's 5-party coalition was difficult, and it left the field open to the agitation of opponents of the Young Plan.

[37] Total costs of 400,000 Reichsmarks were expected, some of which came out of the budgets of the Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery, but most of the money came unbudgeted from the Ministry of Finance under Rudolf Hilferding (SPD).

[51] The appeal was signed by influential public figures, among them the economist and banker Hjalmar Schacht, industrialist Robert Bosch, physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck, and the writers Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann.

[42] By the end of the registration period on 29 October, 10.02% of eligible voters had entered their names on the lists, 0.02 percentage points more than was needed for the initiative to succeed.

Curtius accused the originators of the initiative of "throwing the constitutional order and separation of the Reich's political powers into complete disarray".

[22] During the debate a representative of the NSDAP made it clear that the party's participation in the initiative was a matter of the "abolition of the system by legal means".

"It creates the illusion that Germany can, by mere protest, throw off the burden of war reparations and all at once completely liberate the Rhineland and the Saar region.

Hugenberg's intra-party critics around chairman Kuno von Westarp accused him of pushing a policy that exacerbated antagonisms and made cooperation with other middle-class parties impossible.

The threat of punishment in paragraph 4 of the Freedom Act hitched the party "to the wagon of the National Socialists", whose methods of agitation they rejected just as much as they did their social and economic policy demands.

The Reich government deliberately set the date for it on 22 December, the last Sunday before Christmas, in order to keep the number of people voting low.

They were able to exploit statements critical of the government made by Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht as well as the state court ruling that allowed civil servants to participate in the vote.

[58] Just how unstable the Republic was became apparent only a few months later with the onset of the Great Depression, the subsequent rise of the NSDAP and the final erosion of parliamentary democracy.

During the campaign and afterwards, the NSDAP received large amounts of money from industry, and that, the research says, played a significant role in the party's success in the Reichstag elections of 1930.

That made it possible for them, in the midst of the anti-Young Plan campaign, to organize the largest party congress to date with 200,000 participants and to uniform 20,000 SA men in September 1929.

[64] Historian Gerhard Schulz early on emphasized that Hitler had succeeded in shaping his cooperation in such a way that he did not come across as an opportunist and could continue to be seen as a revolutionary radical.

[65] In light of the campaign against the Young Plan, Josef Stalin demanded in September 1929 that the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) take a fundamentally different position on the reparations issue.

In August of that year, the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne published a "Program Declaration for National and Social Liberation" in which the party used strongly nationalist language.

Sie hat ferner darauf hinzuwirken, daß die besetzten Gebiete nunmehr unverzüglich und bedingungslos, sowie unter Ausschluß jeder Kontrolle über deutsches Gebiet geräumt werden, unabhängig von Annahme oder Ablehnung der Beschlüsse der Haager Konferenz.