In the spring of 1938 Hitler took Austria. In the fall of 1938 he conquered Czecho-Slovakia at Munich. In the fall of 1939 he took Poland. If Britain and France had not called for a showdown at that time he would not have attended to them until later. His next step would logically have been to carve himself an empire in that part of Europe which is mapped on the two following pages.
For Germany cannot be in prime condition to fight wars of conquest until she is blockade-proof. To be blockade-proof she needs adequate supplies of food for her people and oil for her machines. She did not have those things when World War II began and all her conquests of 1940 have not won them for her. The logic of conquest is that at the first convenient opportunity Hitler must turn to get them, turn southeast into the granary of Europe.
Laced as it is with mountains, this area is larger than it looks. Vienna at the western edge of the map is no farther from the Atlantic Ocean than it is from the Crimea in the eastern half of the map. The Hungarian Plain—the fringes of which are shared by Germany, Yugoslavia and Rumania is roughly as large as the northern half of France. After the Danube escapes from this plain through the Iron Gate it emerges into another plain, the northern part of which belongs to Rumania, the southern part to Bulgaria. But the biggest and most fertile plain of all begins at the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and rolls eastward across the black soils of the Ukraine to the steppes east of the Sea of Azov. The size of this farm belt can be judged by the fact that the Black Sea beside it is about twice as long 25 Lake Superior. It compares in size to the combined area of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.
Besides these major agricultural areas, there are other small but very productive districts, notably the mountain-locked valley of the Maritsa in Bulgaria—famous for its tobacco and its roses—the plains of Macedonia just to the south, the valleys of brace north of Salonika.
In minerals and industry the resources of these regions are small or undeveloped. Even Rumania's oil bulks large only because of the shortage of oil in Europe. (Rumania's production is about equal to that of Ohio, 16th in production of U. S. oil States.) Moreover, wars, repeated invasions since early Roman times, and political oppression have kept the people of southeastern Europe an impoverished peasantry. Yet in their possession are the greatest agricultural riches of the Old World. Today, the permanent ownership of those riches is vital to Europe's big three dictators.