Four Days in Hitler's Germany by Robert Teigrob

Author:Robert Teigrob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

12.3 Machismo unbound: Hermann Göring unloads at a shooting range before enthralled minions in this undated photograph. Despite widely divergent backgrounds, tastes, and sensibilities, King and Göring appeared to hit it off. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-190-05A)

For Göring, on the other hand, commercial interactions were of the highest priority. The massive Nazi rearmament program, now four years in, was threatening to ruin the German economy and give the lie to the “Nazi miracle.” Decreasing living standards could abrade the sheen from the Fuhrer cult and threaten the very existence of the regime; short of reigning in military spending (anathema to a leader set on war), a reinvigoration of the economy was essential. By the summer of 1936 the fiscal crisis had progressed to the point where Hitler reluctantly pivoted from his fixation on German expansion and the elimination of its enemies to issue an economic memorandum that outlined a rather vague but ominously worded “programme for the final solution of our vital need.” Hitler then dumped the file onto Göring’s lap, anointing him “Reich Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan” (it was one of eleven major military and civil offices that Göring headed concurrently by the early 1940s).16

Plenipotentiary Göring pushed in several directions at once in order to prime the fiscal pump, intimidating private corporations into increasing production and thereby enhancing the nation’s autarky, establishing a vast bureaucracy to intensify Gleichschaltung among the various sectors of the economy, and bolstering the program of “aryanization,” which amounted to seizing Jewish businesses and assets and turning them over to Nazi-friendly interests. Ultimately, however, German officials concluded that their economy would be sustainable only through the raw materials and productive capacity gained via territorial expansion. A sizeable increase in exports could provide a short-term buffer against financial collapse until the Wehrmacht was fully equipped to initiate the next phase of economic growth.17

The dilemma here lay in the fact that Germany’s trade with the world’s largest economies was in serious remission. In 1935, the United States placed Germany on its trade blacklist, removing previous tariff concessions from German imports as punishment for what the Americans considered unfair trading practices (although a vocal “Boycott Germany” movement continued throughout the 1930s, only a few American companies refused trade with the Reich on moral grounds). While Germany’s capacity to produce goods for export and buy foreign products increased substantially between 1929 and 1939, the volume of American-German trade fell by 50 per cent over the same period. And at the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference, hosted in Ottawa, members of the British Empire agreed to lower tariffs between themselves and raise tariffs on all other nations. While King’s Liberal government, under pressure from the United States, had by 1935 abandoned this practice of “imperial preference,” the British variant was still in effect when King visited Germany. The German-Canadian trade deal ratified in the spring of 1937 was thus an important component of the wider war-preparation scheme, one that also sought to expand Germany’s commercial ties with Latin America and southeastern Europe.

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