After the Ruhr Crisis erupted, local residents took to the streets to protest the occupying forces, only to be brutally suppressed. The occupiers arrested the leaders of the demonstration and shot eighteen protesters dead on the spot.
On April 15, five hundred thousand German citizens appeared at the victims' funeral. This panicked the occupying forces, who forcibly dispersed the crowd.
They also enacted strict population-movement laws: no gathering could exceed thirty people, and German citizens needed travel permits issued by the occupying forces whenever they went out, or else they would be breaking the law.
The occupiers' atrocities stirred the Germans' resentment, and the German public soon launched a "passive resistance movement."
That was, they refused to cooperate with any action by the British and French occupying forces. Workers went on strike, merchants closed their shops, and hospitals, schools, and government departments shut down en masse.
To win the voters' support, the German government backed this passive resistance movement and ordered all government employees not to cooperate with any activities of the occupying forces.
The passive resistance movement soon erupted across all of Germany. The German government consequently halted all reparations payments. In its later stages, Germans even took the initiative to blow up local railways, canals, factories...
Yet these passive acts of resistance did not frighten the occupying forces. The joint British, French, and Belgian forces sealed off all of Germany's major transport routes and banned the movement of all supplies, forcing the local inhabitants to compromise.
On July 12, under the pressure of severe material shortages, the German central government had no choice but to announce an end to the passive resistance movement. Before that, many factories in the Ruhr District had in fact already resumed work.
No matter how long they held out, people still had to