This is not to say that the reparations were a good idea.

A few days later the club revoked the contract and refunded the advance.

Paddy Power first offered odds of 2-to-1 against a recall, meaning a bet on a recall would pay $2 plus the initial $1 ifsuch an event occurred.

In the end, it has been calculated, Germany paid less in real terms than France did after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to ' 71 (and France paid off those obligations in just a few years).

The final sum for reparations was not mentioned in the treaty - itself a humiliation in German eyes - but was eventually set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about $442 billion in today' s terms).