A unique operation was responsible for New Zealand’s one big item of Great War booty, Sāmoa’s Reparation Estates. It was made up of the cocoa and coconut plantations owned by Germans but seized during the war. Over 18,000 New Zealanders had died in the Great War, engendering political sensitivity around the prize. It had cost New Zealand £380,914 to occupy Deutsch-Sāmoa (around $205 million in 2019). At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, New Zealand was allocated £26 million ($2.6 billion in 2018) in reparations from a defeated Germany.
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