"As a result of experiences during four months of war . . . Marshal Goring is taking over the direct management of war economy through the Economic General Staff. . . . The Ministries, with their respective Cabinet Ministers, are being reduced to purely routine administrative functions. ... A more substantial war loan is expected to be floated soon, presumably next month. . . . The attempt at the start of the war to introduce a deflationary policy by lowering wages and prices and extending working hours met such resistance in practice that it had to be largely abandoned. . . . The eight-hour day had to be restored. . . . Furthermore, while the slogan at the beginning of the war was to concentrate essential production in the most efficient plants and shut down the others, this principle is now being reversed and production is being scattered as widely as possible to keep up employment. . . . Under Field Marshal Hermann Göring as head of the Cabinet Council for the Defense of the Reich . . . German war economy seems to be return ing to more orthodox methods not much different from those used by the other side."
Thus cabled the New York Times's able Otto D. Tolischus from Berlin last week in a year-end review of Reich economics.
Same day in London the Laborite Dally Herald had No. 2 Nazi Göring in disgrace and on the skids: "For more than eight weeks Hitler and Göring have not ex changed more than a few words. . . . The last time Göring visited Hitler's Chancel lery at Berlin was Nov. 24. ... Neutral diplomats who prefer to see Goring rather than Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop must travel to Schoríheide [Göring's hunting chalet]. They have brought back reports of angry outbursts by Göring against Hitler's policy." Hardly was the Herald's ink dry on this story when Berlin correspondents found No. 2 Nazi Göring in conference at the Chancellery with Nazi No. 1 and other party bigwigs, as they drafted their usual New Year proclamations to the German people. "Leader, command," keynoted Marshal Göring's proclamation this week. "We follow."
"Soldiers!" keynoted the Führer in his proclamation to the Army. "In the coming year we ask the Almighty Who, in the last year, took us under His protection, to give us His. blessing again and to strengthen us in the performance of our duty, for before us lies the hardest battle for existence of the German people. . . . Soldiers, Germany must be victorious." In a separate proclamation to the Nazi Party, A. Hitler eschewed any stress on Almighty God, affirmed that in 1939 "Jewish international capitalism, working with social reactionaries in western States, succeeded in setting the democratic world against Germany. . . . We fight, therefore, not only against the injustice of Versailles, but to prevent the even greater injustice intended to replace it."