Germany officially made its final financial reparations payment for World War One in the incredibly recent year of 2010, nearly a full century after the conflict ended.

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Germany officially made its final financial reparations payment for World War One in the incredibly recent year of 2010, nearly a full century after the conflict ended. The original Treaty of Versailles demanded such an astronomically high amount of gold and resources that it completely crushed the German economy, directly fueling the rise of fascism and ironically leading right into a second world war. The payments were paused, restructured, and delayed multiple times through various historical disasters, meaning the debt somehow survived the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Cold War. It is absolutely staggering to realize that modern German taxpayers were still quietly paying off an invoice for a war fought by guys in trenches with bayonets while the iPad was being released. It just proves that empires will rise and fall, maps will be redrawn, but international debt collectors will literally outlive human civilization itself