Economic schoolboys love to argue over who is the world's most powerful industrialist. Last week the argument could almost be regarded as settled. The winner: beer-bellied, red-faced, medal-breasted Hermann Göring.
In 1937 the high-living Marshal had run out of pocket change. So his old steel friends in the Ruhr dropped a hint: for a license under the Four-Year Plan to develop Salzgitter's low-grade iron deposits, they would pay off his debts. But Planner Göring had a better plan: he decided to get into the steel business himself, boasted that he would make his company "the greatest industrial enterprise in the world." How good Göring has made his boast was told last week in Social Research by Dr. Kurt Lachmann, ex-London correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, now in Manhattan.
Göring's rise is a study in speed. By decree (July 23, 1937) he took over low-grade iron deposits in Salzgitter. Two days later and with $2,000,000 (at 40¢ to a mark) of the Reichsbank's money he formed the Hermann Göring Works to compete with his steel friends in the Ruhr. With the help of famed U. S. Engineer Herman Alexander Brassert, he built a smelter, a rolling mill, a canal over ten miles long, houses for 150,000 workmen. Then, like a geyser, the Göring Works shot up into a vertical trust, overflowed in every direction: into coal fields in Upper Silesia, gravel pits, quarries, lignite mines east of the Elbe, lime deposits in Bavaria, refractory materials in Upper Palatinate. Aiming at power-in-general rather than any organic industrial shape, the Göring trust next spread into oil fields, commercia houses, shipping companies. In 1938 the capital jumped to $160,000,000. The next year Fritz Thyssen abdicated. Under a decree which permits the State to seize "communistic property," Industrialist Göring took over Thyssen's holdings in the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the anything-but-communistic mills in Mullheim (largest in Germany).
Meanwhile, on foreign fronts Göring's trust followed the troops. From the Austrian National Bank he got control of Louis Rothschild's holdings: Austria's leading automobile and former armament company (Steyr-Daimler-Puch A. G.), .the Danube steamship company, a railroad car factory. After a struggle, the Thyssen group coughed up Alpine Montangesell-schaft A. G., No.1 Austrian steel company. In exchange, the Thyssen group got shares in a synthetic oil plant. In charge of his Austrian properties Göring put Guido Schmidt, who as Austrian Foreign Minister had made reservations for Kurt von Schuschnigg in the Hotel Metropole, his post-Anschluss prison. Other Göring acquisitions:
> In Czecho-Slovakia, one-half the lignite mines, the Vitkovice iron & steel works (once owned jointly by the Rothschilds and the Gutmanns of Vienna). >On the Board of Rumania's largest iron & steel works (Reshitza) Göring put his nephew, Albert Göring, took over the selling outlets of Skoda in Rumania.* > In Norway, the Dunderland iron-ore mines (subsidiary of an English company, capitalized at £700,000).