Germany paid the last bill of the Great War in 2010

On 3 October 2010, 69.9 million euros left a German public account, on the twentieth anniversary of reunification to the day. It was the final instalment of a debt that had begun with the First World War. Almost ninety-two years after the armistice, Germany finished paying the paper of 1914.

The opening figure was set by the Reparation Commission in May 1921, in what came to be called the London Schedule of Payments: 132 billion gold marks. The gold mark was struck at 2,790 marks to the kilo of fine gold. The invoice, turned into metal, weighed some 47,000 tonnes. Of those 132 billion, only 50 billion — the A and B bonds — were ever considered genuinely collectable. The rest, the C bonds, carried no interest and no timetable, hanging on Germany one day being able to pay.

Germany could not pay, and borrowed in order to pay. The Dawes Plan of 1924 placed German bonds with private investors, above all American ones. The Young Plan of 1929 issued more paper and stretched the instalments across fifty-nine years. Through the 1920s, the money for reparations came out of the pockets of American savers who had bought German bonds because they paid well.

In 1931 the Depression arrived and Germany stopped paying. In 1932 the Lausanne conference buried reparations. The bonds fell later: the 1933 moratorium specifically excluded the Dawes and Young loans, and Germany suspended payment on them on 1 July 1934. For twenty years nobody spoke of the matter again.

The debt came back because Bonn wanted credit. The Federal Republic of the 1950s wanted to return to the international markets, and for that it had to settle the unpaid paper still sitting in drawers across half the world. In 1953, in the London Agreement on German External Debts, the creditors wrote off part of the principal and Bonn agreed to repay the rest in instalments. The principal was fully repaid in 1980, with Germany still split in two. With one condition everybody signed convinced it would never arrive: the accumulated interest on those bonds was parked until Germany became a single country again.

It became one again on 3 October 1990.

The interest parked by the 1953 agreement was turned into twenty-year bonds at 3% with five years free of amortisation: the coupon ran from 1990, repayment began in 1995 and the final maturity fell on 3 October 2010, twenty years to the day after the country became one.

It was a transfer of 69.9 million euros, the interest on the Young Plan bonds. No ceremony, no signature and nobody present. The file that closed that morning had been open since 28 June 1919, the day of the signature at Versailles: ninety-one years and ninety-seven days.