My first contact with Germany was in 1921 when I visited European countries in a party conducted by that indefatigable world traveler Sherwood Eddy. We visited the Ruhr and Rhineland, where Germany was offering "passive resistance" to the efforts of Poincare to extract from a reluctant, vanquished nation the reparations which subsequently were found to be excessive and which were in effect paid by American loans (Dawes plan and Young plan). The French occupation of the Rhineland became ever more oppressive in the heat of the struggle and wrecked the economy of both nations. The British occupied the section of the Rhineland with Cologne as die center and rather ostentatiously disassociated themselves from the French designs.