Why did Von Havenstein submit without any apparent effort to resist? Two very conflicting pictures have been drawn of his motives: that he deliberately engineered the whole monetary explosion as a way of destroying the financial fabric of Germany, a collective self-immolation designed to prove to the Allies that reparations were uncollectible, or alternatively, that his conduct reflects nothing subtler than sheer economic ignorance. Trained as a lawyer, he had learned the banking business during the gold standard era, when the rules of monetary policy were dictated by the requirement that the
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