The foreign policy of the Weimar Republic was to a large extent preoccupied with the problem of reparations, a controversial issue for contemporaries as well as for later historians. What the Allies considered just compensation for damages and losses caused by German aggression, the Germans viewed as tribute imposed by relentless victors, which was designed to weaken their country permanently. Moreover, reparations involved more than money. In many ways, the issue raised the crucial question of enforcement or revision of the Treaty of Versailles. If the Germans successfully denounced Allied claims as unjust and absurd, they could hope to shatter the treaty as a whole. And if the Allies allowed Germany to default on reparations, who could guarantee that the Reich would still observe the treaty's other stipulations? The underlying challenge of who had won and who had lost World War I accounts for much of the intransigence on both sides.

Historians and economists have fought over reparations almost as fiercely as did the politicians of the 1920s. After World War II, reparations were generally blamed for the ruin of the Weimar Republic; but more recently, scholars have asserted that Germany's reparations policies, with only a few tactical modifications, actually consisted of continuous and successful obstruction. To be sure, it is not surprising that neither the German people nor their governments ever accepted reparation payments as a moral obligation.