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Enter Goring. Since General Goring took control of the entire German economy in 1936, the Nazis have made some progress towards their goal of Wartime self-sufficiency in Central and Eastern Europe. Low-grade iron ores are being worked by the State-owned Hermann Goring Iron Works; by 1940 the Nazis expect that perhaps 35% of the iron consumption of Great Germany will be supplied from domestic sources. Aluminum from bauxite imported from Hungary and the Balkans is supplementing heavier metals, such as copper and nickel. Artificial rubber sufficient for 25 to 30% of the peacetime rubber requirements is being conjured out of limestone and coal.
Welfare & Warfare. Yet, though Reich chemists are working night and day, Germany is less able today to support a long war than she was in 1914. With Lorraine gone the iron ore supply is not enough. The available soil, even including the Bohemian and what could be seized in Poland, Hungary and Rumania, is not sufficient to produce both fodder crops for the cattle and breadstuffs, sugar beets, potatoes, vegetables, flax and hemp for the 152,300,000 population of a Middle European empire. Intensive grain cultivation operations are now being set up in East Prussia, but most of the acres available for agricultural production are even now under intensive cultivation.
On the whole Germany's agricultural situation is no better and no worse than it was in 1914. But one thing has changed very much for the worse: the fuel oil needs for a modern mechanized army and air service. In the event of a major war Germany will need 15 to 20 million tons of oil a year. The entire annual yield of the nearby Rumanian fields, assuming Germany could and would quickly take Rumania through Hungary, is short of 7,000,-ooo tons and synthetic production in Germany can hardly exceed a million tons. Furthermore, number one truism of writers on military problems is that the next long war will be won by the nation with the greatest industrial potential behind the lines. The ability to mass-produce and to service guns, tanks, planes, ships and motors will, so the military theoreticians predict, be the crucial factor. Her lack of home metallurgical supplies would indicate that here, too, a warring Germany would be behind the eightball.
In deliberately abandoning an economy of welfare—in which, as in the richer democracies, a variety of goods is produced for universal consumption and the productive machinery is merely tapped, not regimented, for the use or revenue of the State—for an economy of warfare, Germany has developed out of her eco-nomic past a new and unique type of economy. The Italians have to a lesser extent followed the same method and the eagerly imitative Japanese have copied Nazi procedure since their Chinese adventure.