As of the spring of 1939, the country which balances Europe's fate on its brown back is Nazi Germany. At the heart of the question of whether Europe will have war or peace lies the riddle not of Germany's military might or expanding totalitarian ideology, but of Germany's internal economy. Deliberately geared for war for the past five years, is it an economy that can withstand peace? Is further territorial expansion a necessity for Germany's economic survival? And if that expansion should bring Germany into armed conflict, could the economy of the Third Reich withstand a prolonged war?
To a large extent the tentative, day-to-day diplomacy of the anti-fascist powers is attributable to the fact that the statesmen of the "Peace Front" have been slow to find conclusive answers to these questions. But facts are known, and the basic facts go back to the days before the last war. The Nazi economy has merely given a new twist to these basic facts of Germany's 70-year-old economic history.
Bismarck to Stinnes. In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm II received from the Association for International Conciliation congratulations on his reign of peace. Within the next 25 years, Germany had fought the greatest war in history, seen its Kaiser flee to Holland, gone through the most harrowing political, social and economic disorders in modern times and emerged the scar-covered bully-boy of the world. The Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm's day differs from the Germany of Adolf Hitler's day in that it had 18,778,491 fewer people and 50,545 fewer square miles in Europe. Aggrandizer Hitler's Germany does not to date possess Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany's African and Asiatic colonies, but since these accounted for less than 5% of pre-War Germany's export and import trade, they are not the major factors in the altered economic picture.
Salient fact about Germany then and now remains that she has few natural resources except her people. In important raw materials Germany has an exportable surplus of only two things: coal and chemicals. With a few industries (such as the electrical and dyestuff industries) the Germans have worked wonders. But ever since Germany ceased after 1871 to be a collection of medieval agrarian principalities she has had to import wool, cotton, rubber, metals, wood, oil and foodstuffs from beyond her territory.