, and the treaty permitted the Allies to take punitive actions if Germany were to fall behind on its payments.
             Many Germans did not believe that the German army had actually been defeated in 1918 because Germany had not been invaded. Many Germans, including a young Adolf Hitler, came to believe that the army had been "stabbed in the back" by the "November Criminals", the politicians who had signed the armistice which had brought the Great War to an end on the 11th of November in 1918. Also, Germany felt that it had been made a scapegoat by the other countries involved in the war. After all, didn't the war start when a Serbian assassinated an Austrian ruler? In any case, the German people were getting more and more restless with their government. The reparation costs were incredibly high, and Germany felt no obligation to pay them because in their minds the Allies had betrayed them, forced them to sign the treaty once they could not continue fighting. When the subsequent peace-treaty did not reflect United States President Woodrow Wilson's lenient 14 points, the myth arose that Germany had not been defeated in honest battle but by dishonest deceit.
             By 1920, the economy of Germany was rapidly crumbling to an all-time low. As far as natural resources, Germany was only producing three-fourths of it's possible coal production and only one-half of it's steel. Both small and large farms alike began to declare bankruptcy due to the lack of animals available, causing a lack of fertilizer and then, bad crops of food. Between 1913 and 1919 the national debt rose from five to 154 billion gold marks, while paper money in circulation increased from two to 45 billion. "On the occupation of the Rhur in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1, it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1, to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took 4 billion marks to buy a dollar, and therefore the figures became trillions....