28 Billion Bill

Not until last week--more than ten years after the War--was Germany presented at Paris with a definite bill for reparations. The Dawes Plan fixed the maximum annual charge which Germany may be called upon to pay, but not the total sum. Last week at a plenary session of the Second Dawes Committee (TIME, Feb. 18, et seq.) the creditor powers presented Germany with a grand total reparations bill of $28,000,000,000, payable over 58 years.* Since the people of Germany roughly number 60,000,000, each man, woman, child and babe in the Reich is faced with a reparations debt of $466. Even in the U. S. there are babes to whom $466 is quite a pot of money. Still, to a really potent babe (born yesterday and with 58 years in which to grow up paying on the installment plan), even $466 or 1,957 gold marks may not seem onerous. Certainly nothing plaintive was said last week by Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and chief of the German delegation at Paris. Emerging from the secret session at which the $28,000,000,000 bill was presented, Dr. Schacht merely roared at correspondents: "Neither the figures nor the conditions are acceptable to Germany! We would rather--far rather--remain under the Dawes Plan!" Later Germany's testy '"Iron Man" said that the allied proposals had struck him with "surprise and shock." Whereas the annual reparations payments under the Dawes Plan are $395,999,999, and whereas Dr. Schacht has been contending that Germany can pay no more than $332,000,000 yearly, the $28,000,000,000 bill works out at an average annual payment of some $500,000,000. The creditor powers further sought to impose as a condition--fiercely opposed by Dr. Schacht--that Germany would waive the "transfer claim" of the Dawes Plan, under which she now enjoys protection of the stabilized value of the mark at 23 cents. Despite the attitude of Dr. Schacht, most U. S. correspondents thought that Chairman Owen D. Young of the Second Dawes Committee would not fail to guide his peers toward a solution. When the committee convened, France was asking twice as much for the repair of her devastated regions as she asked last week, and Mr. Young is credited with having persuaded the Allies to scale down the bill they would otherwise have presented by more than one-sixth. Ominous Predictions. Several mem bers of the Japanese delegation, previously closemouthed and ostentatiously "neutral," expressed to correspondents their private belief as individuals that the Second Dawes Committee would soon be on the rocks.

* As an academic gesture the allies indicated that they would settle for $10,000,000 spot cash --an impossible sum, twice as great as the total value of all U. S. Banknotes now in circulation.