Sally Marks , an American historian , also thought that Germany could pay the reparations . She said that the Germans paid the reparations in full and on time as long as the French occupied DÃ 1\/4 sseldorf in 1921 , but stopped after the French were no longer stationed there in 1922 . The American historian Sally Marks commented the figure of 132 billion marks of reparations imposed by the London Conference of May 1921 was a highly misleading one Reparations were divided into A , B , and C bonds The bulk of the reparations were assigned to the C bonds , which were as Marks called `` chimerical '' as the Allies did not intend to collect the C bonds , which only existed to give the impression to French public opinion that substantial sums were going to be collected The Allies intended to collect only the A and B bonds , which totaled 50 billion marks , which was an amount that was slightly smaller than the 51 billion marks that the Germans had offered to pay Marks noted that as long as the French occupied the DÃ 1\/4 sseldorf area in 1921 as an incentive to pay , the Germans paid all of their reparations in full and on time , and it was only after the French pulled out of DÃ 1\/4 sseldorf in 1922 , that the Germans started to default on a regular basis .