The French Invasion of the Ruhr region began on the 9th of January 1923. 60,000 French and Belgian took control of every mine, factory, steelworks and railway in the region. They took all food and supplies from the shops and they set up machine gun posts in the street.

Because of the Government telling the Ruhr workers not to work, they had to pay them the wages they lost. Soon enough the German government was paying out "trillions of marks every week". And because the Ruhr coalmines weren't producing coal they had to buy tons of coal from overseas. Prices rose so fast that 1923 became a year of hyperinflation.

Hyper inflation effected everyone in Germany. It made the Government have to increase the price of essential food and goods:

Because hyper inflation was so rapid workers were paid daily instead of weekly but even this had difficulties. 

One worker described being paid as being threw the money and running to the store to buy whatever you could, didn't matter what as long as you had belongings. Once you had these things you could trade these for things you needed, and eventually you ended up with what you wanted.

Because the German military was weakened severely by the Treaty of Versailles, they couldn't take military action to protect themselves against the French and the Belgians. Instead they ordered that the people of the Ruhr to use passive resistance against the French and Belgians. 

Basically what this meant was for the people not to comply to the French or Belgians in anyway whatsoever. Nobody would do anything for them, they wouldn't send their letters, or run the railway lines for them, and German officers of all ranks just ignored the presence of the French altogether.

This worked extremely well. Canals and harbors were blocked with vessels unable and unwilling to move, railway traffic didn't exist and motor cars didn't circulate. The Ruhr production rate then sunk to one fifth of pre-occupation rate.

The French soldiers responded to this by expelling 150,000 people from the region and killing 132 people. One was a seven year old boy. The French army said that this was an accident, but the German newspapers printed a different story. This story consisted of French soldiers shooting at children playing in an out of bounds field. When the child was killed (shot through the temples according to the All German Times) the soldier pounced on the dead child to check whether he was alive and to "eat the boy's brains".

Also something else interesting in 1923 happened. One of the groups that opposed the Weimar Republic was the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party, or the Nazi Party. It's leader Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the government in this year. He failed and was sent to prison. The party lived on and in his prison cell he plotted new tactics for overthrowing the Weimar Republic. Using these tactics he thought up in prison he would destroy the Weimar Republic ten years later.