Brüning resigned. He was succeeded as chancellor by Franz von Papen, who implored the Allies, given Germany’s economic crisis in the Great Depression, to wipe the slate clean of war reparations. But the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, refused, and demanded another four billion marks. In negotiations, Chamberlain magnanimously settled for three, to the cheers of Parliament. When the German negotiators returned home they were “met at the railway station by a shower of bad eggs and rotten apples.”7 Papen warned the Allies that if German democrats “were not granted a single
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