Put at its most simple and most cynical, Germany’s strategy consisted of exploiting the protection provided by the Reparations Agent to borrow so much from America that the service on this debt made it impossible to transfer reparations.23 More subtly, what Stresemann and Schacht aimed to do was to make American financial interests into the main force pushing for the revision of Germany’s reparations, allowing Berlin to normalize its relations with London and Paris.
