Germany During The Great Depression Essay

By mid 1930, just before the wall Street crash the Great Depression in Germany just started. The economic situation in Germany briefly improved between 1924-1929. However, Germany in the 1920s remained politically and economically unstable. The Weimar democracy could not withstand the disastrous Great Depression of 1929. The disaster began in the United States of America, the leading economy in the world. The impact on Weimar Germany was even more dire. Germans were not so much reliant on exports as they were on American loans, which had been propping up the Weimar economy since 1924. No further loans were issued from late 1929, while American financiers began to call in existing loans. Despite its rapid growth, the German economy was not equipped for this retraction of cash and capital. Banks struggled to provide money and credit; …show more content…
The children suffered worst, thousands dying from malnutrition and hunger-related diseases. Millions of industrial workers – who in 1928 had become the best-paid blue-collar workers in Europe – spent a year or more in idleness. But the Great Depression affected all classes in Germany, not just the factory workers. Unemployment was high among white-collar workers and the professional classes. A Chicago news correspondent in Berlin reported that “60 per cent of each new university graduating class was out of work”. British novelist Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin during the worst of the depression, described its scenes: "Morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day, to be spent as they could best contrive: selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labor Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the market, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette ends picked up in the