The Great Depression - Social Studies

 We began learning about a new topic for the past few lessons that we had in Social Studies. The topic that we started is about Wars. The first project that we had for the topic was to research the Great Depression and how it affected Germany and New Zealand. 

Why was Germany hit the hardest during the great depression?

In October 1929, the Wall Street stock market in New York City crashed, causing the Great Depression to occur. The Great Depression was an extreme worldwide economic depression which happened in the early 1930’s. The timing of it was different for every country though. In some countries, the Great Depression started in the late 1920’s and ended in the late 1930’s. The Great Depression affected the country of Germany the most. The crash of Wall Street caused the US to pull out their loans, including in Germany. This also resulted in the growth of unemployment in the country and rise of poverty which made the Germans desperate. With all of these hardships happening, it led to a chain of events as a result of the demolition of German democracy. The amount of people who got unemployed in Germany during the Great Depression rose to 24%. Compare that to America which only had a 20% rise of unemployment. Now  comparing that to each other, Germany is a smaller country than America yet it has more unemployment.  

Why did Germany have to agree to signing the Treaty of Versailles?

The German Government and the allies agreed to sign the Treaty of Versailles to make peace. They were required to sign the treaty since it was their country who started the war, therefore it’s their responsibility to pay the expenses. They signed the treaty in 1919, a year after World War 1 ended. Though the Germans signed the treaty, they did not participate in anything related to it because they believed that they weren’t the ones who started the war. The territories that were owned by the Germans were being claimed from them by other countries one by one.  The number of their troops went down from it being 6 million to only being 100 thousand. Now this is clearly unfair for the Germans. 

How was New Zealand affected by the Great Depression? 

The effect of the Great Depression on New Zealand was pretty major and affected the country really badly. The agriculture export lowered to 45% in the country in just a time span of two years. The national income of the country was also affected, falling to 40% in just three years. The amount of people who got unemployment during the Great Depression rose to 12% .