ABSTRACT
The German Federation of Labor, the Social Democratic Party, and the already disintegrating Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany offered a series of bills in the Reichstag aiming at a juster distribution of the reparations burden. As early as November 21, 1922, the French cabinet had completed detailed plans to occupy certain parts of the Rhine-Ruhr area and had assembled a French administrative staff to insure the transfer of reparations coal. The extreme nationalists demanded an immediate break of diplomatic relations with France and the expulsion of the Reparation Commission from German territory. In the main, the theory of Germany’s transformation into an industrial colony of the West was fabricated to implement the Treaty of Rapallo. The theorists of “the industrial colony, Germany,” tried to direct the German labor movement in all its wings—Right, Left, and Center, trade-unionist and Communist—into new channels.
