were being overprinted to a thousand times their nominal value and every town produced its own promissory notes; many banks and industrial firms did the same. The value of the Papiermark had declined from 4.2 marks per U.S. dollar in 1914 to one million per dollar by August 1923. This led to further criticism of the Republic. On 15 November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark (RM), was introduced by Stresemann at the rate of one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) Papiermark for one Rentenmark, an action known as redenomination. At that time, one U.S. dollar was equal to RM 4.20. Reparation payments were resumed, and the Ruhr was returned to Germany under the Locarno Treaties, which defined the borders between Germany, France, and Belgium. War guilt question In the wake of the Treaty of Versailles which placed the responsibility for the outbreak of the war entirely on Germany and imposed crushing reparations upon Germany because of it, the question of German war guilt became a central point of debate in Germany both among politicians and historians, and also among the general public. The war guilt question pervaded the entire history of the Weimar Republic. Weimar embodied this debate until its demise, after which it was subsequently taken up as a campaign argument by the Nazi Party. This debate also took place in other countries involved in the conflict, such as in the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom. Entire organizations were formed in Germany chiefly to consider this question, including the War Guilt Section () and the Center for the Study of the Causes of the War (); existing institutions such as the Potsdam Reichsarchiv spent significant resources researching or propagandizing about it. In 1919 the Weimar National Assembly established an inquiry into guilt for the war that met in four subcommittees until the July 1932 election. While the war guilt question made it possible to investigate the deep-rooted causes of the First World War, although not without provoking a great deal of controversy, it also made it possible to identify other aspects of the conflict, such as the role of the masses and the question of Germany's special path to democracy, the Sonderweg. The war guilt debate motivated numerous historians such as Hans Delbrück, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Gerhard Hirschfeld to take part. In 1961, German historian Fritz Fischer published Germany's Aims in the First World War, in which he