[azernik]

"War-ravaged" is a weird way for that site to describe an economy with its physical infrastructure entirely intact. The only main "drop" in productive capacity was the reparations payments and confiscations, which while harsh, didn't reduce the size of the German economy by a factor of a trillion (the total depreciation of the Mark from 1918 to 1924).

Inflation could have definitely been avoided by harsh taxation of the general population... but again, the government tried to dig itself out of the budgetary hole by printing money instead. (A budgetary hole exacerbated by the government promising to pay the salaries of workers on strike in the Rhineland.)