Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!
Lausanne Conference, (June–July 1932), conference that was held to liquidate the payment of reparations by Germany to the former Allied and Associated powers of World War I. Attended by representatives of the creditor powers (Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy) and of Germany, the conference resulted in agreement on July 9, 1932, that the conditions of world economic crisis made the continued reparation payments impossible. Germany, however, was to deliver to the Bank for International Settlements, established in 1930, 5 percent redeemable bonds to the value of three billion Reichsmarks. The creditor governments canceled war debts as between themselves but made a “gentleman’s agreement” that the Lausanne Protocol would not be ratified until they had reached a satisfactory agreement with respect to their own war debts to the United States. Although the agreement was never ratified, the Lausanne Protocol in effect put an end to attempts to exact reparations from Germany.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
20th-century international relations: Political consequences of the DepressionThe Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932 took up the question of what should be done after the Hoover Moratorium. Even the French granted the impossibility of further German payments and agreed to make an end of reparations in return for a final German transfer of 3,000,000,000…
Weimar Republic: Papen and SchleicherAt the Lausanne Conference in June–July 1932, reparations were virtually abolished in return for a payment of three billion Reichsmarks into a fund for European reconstruction. On July 20, 1932, Papen turned out the Braun-Severing government in Prussia and appointed himself Reich commissioner for Prussia. The Social…
Young PlanIn 1932 the Lausanne Conference proposed to reduce reparations to the token sum of 3,000,000,000 marks, but the proposal was never ratified. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and within a few years all important obligations under the Treaty of Versailles—political as well as economic—were repudiated.…