World War I to end on Sunday with final payment

THE First World War finally draws to a close next week when after 92 years of shouldering a crippling debt the Germans will make their final payment of wartime reparations to the Allies.

The €69.1 million payment will end the onerous debt, the price for one world war and a cause of another.

The reparations were set at the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, by the Allied victors – Britain, France and America – as both compensation and punishment for the 1914-’18 war which left up to 10 million people dead.