West Germans poured money into making banks. That's it.

Sorry, that's just patently false. Have you even seen what things looked like towards the end of the DDR? Façades were blackened from pollution. Many buildings were falling apart. Many of those buildings have been fixed up. I've seen it myself personally, the difference is night and day, and there is plenty of evidence of that to go around.

Those are not excuses. Those are reasons. I don't like them either, but doesn't make it less true.

To be fair, excuses was an overstatement. My point was that if the commenter first demands citations for what I said (insinuating it to be false) then suddenly has a very detailed explanation for it (correct or not, but making it clear he accepted it's true all along), there's pretty clearly some bad faith there.