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Paul Von Hindenburg
"Now that we have become accustomed to paying a large share of our incomes to support a permanent war economy, it seems hard to believe that wars were ever financed in other ways, but the incredible fact is that Imperial Germany's conservative finance officials never levied a single mark in extra taxes to pay the gigantic costs of World War I. The total cost had been 164 billion marks (the mark was then worth 4.20 to the dollar). Of this, 93 billion had been raised by war loans, and 29 billion by Treasury bills. The government had produced the rest simply by printing more money on the government printing presses. (The other great powers were scarcely more prudent. "Lenin is said to have declared the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch its currency," John Maynard Keynes observed, "In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practiced, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design".
Before the Deluge, A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, HarperPerennial, New York, NY, 1995, pg. 60.
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