Editing John Foster Dulles (section)

===Dawes Plan===
As a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles expanded upon his late grandfather Foster's expertise, specializing in international finance. He played a major role in designing the [[Dawes Plan]], which reduced German reparations payments and temporarily resolved the reparations issue by having American firms lend money to German states and private companies. Under that compromise, the money was invested and the profits sent as reparations to Britain and France, which used the funds to repay their own war loans from the U.S. In the 1920s Dulles was involved in setting up a billion dollars' worth of these loans.<ref>Pruessen, pp 87–108.</ref>

[[File:John Foster Dulles by Sapajou 1938.png|thumb|left|Caricature of Dulles on a 1938 visit to Shanghai]]
After the [[Wall Street Crash of 1929]], Dulles's previous practice brokering and documenting international loans ended. After 1931 Germany stopped making some of its scheduled payments. In 1934 Germany unilaterally stopped payments on private debts of the sort that Dulles was handling. After the [[Nazi Party]] came to power, Dulles expressed sympathies for [[Adolf Hitler]], requiring his legal staff in Berlin to sign "Heil Hitler" on all of Sullivan & Cromwell's outgoing mail; fearful of the optics, Sullivan & Cromwell's junior partners forced Dulles to cut all business ties with Germany in 1935. Nonetheless, Dulles and his wife continued to visit Germany until 1939.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Talbot |first=David |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeE_BgAAQBAJ |title=The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government |date=2015-10-13 |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=978-0-06-227621-6 |language=en}}</ref> He was prominent in the religious peace movement and an isolationist, but the junior partners were led by his brother Allen, so he reluctantly acceded to their wishes.<ref>Peter Grose, ''Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles'' (1994), pp. 91–93, 119–22</ref><ref>Ronald W. Pruessen, ''John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power'' (1982), pp. 115, 123</ref>