The reparation payments, which came in eight installments of $50 million each, were finally completed last week.
How would one even begin to arrive at a sum for the reparation payments?
Germany was able to rejoin the gold standard after the first world war thanks to the confidence-boosting Dawes Plan in 1924 dealing with reparation payments.
Mr. Clinton apologized in 1993 for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the government also gave reparation payments of $20,000 each.
Negotiations between the German and Namibian governments over possible reparation payments are expected to be completed and result in an official apology before next June.
The historical precedent, he noted, was grim: "After the First World War, when the French imposed reparation payments on Germany, then they were sort of the tough taskmasters, they occupied the Saar, and the result was the rise of Hitler.
Then Reverend Daughtry brought the crowd to its feet with a brief summary, based on history, of the reparation payments that the Western nations had forced Haiti to pay to France for winning the Haitian revolution and thus depriving France of its property, which included the previously enslaved Haitians themselves.
Worse still, France entered and occupied Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr and the Rhine, in January 1923, making it even harder for Germany to keep up its reparation payments.Add to that a weak central government, threatened daily by extremists on the left and right, and it is remarkable that the world's second-biggest economy didn't disintegrate.
He supported the thesis of Germany's war guilt implicit in the Versailles Treaty; and when he served again as prime minister and minister for foreign affairs (1922 24), he refused a delay in German reparation payments and in January 1923 ordered French troops into the Ruhr in reaction to the default.
Despite MacGregor's appointment, many still wonder whether the museum and its events programme will truly be a place for free speech – especially given that the German government, in the past, has castigated officials who have publicly addressed Germany's colonial-era atrocities or proposed reparation payments to its former colonies.
