Can someone explain in laypeople terms how did West Germany manage to recover so efficiently after WWII and achieve such exceptional economic growth? I read the article on Wikipedia but it mostly seems to list the factors which should hinder this growth, rather than explaining how it happened. The short parts where they actually seem to explain something are not really understandable to me.
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A lot of people will point to the Marshall plan as a major reason, but that was actually fairly limited in scope and offset by the fact that Germany had to pay the Allies for the costs of the occupation. Germany actually paid significantly more than it received, so that was obviously not the reason.
The recovery was mainly driven by the resumption of trade with other European countries. Germany already had a developed economy and skilled workers before the war, and a lot of production equipment was still functional, so when export markets re-opened, companies could ramp up their production fairly quickly.
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