There were competing factions in the Third Reich’s government
There were competing factions in the Third Reich’s government
Even after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, factionalism remained phenomenal in the Third Reich. Quoting Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pages 193–5:
[I]ntense competition once again erupted over [the Third Reich’s] import priorities, opening fault lines between Schacht’s Reichsbank, the [NSDAP], the military, and agriculture. As in 1934 these factions struggled over three alternative paths out of the foreign currency quandary. At one extreme, [NSDAP] hardliners advocated total autarchy and militarization of the economy. They wanted to develop synthetic raw materials and meet [the Fascist bourgeoisie’s] need for oil, rubber, and other materials with ersatz domestic production.
At the other extreme lay market‐oriented business élites like Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig and Germany’s former price commissioner. In July, 1936 Goerdeler suggested that [Berlin] terminate the New Plan and devalue its currency. Bringing [Reich] prices in line with Britain and America, countries that had already devalued, would allow [the Reich] to rid itself of Schacht’s complicated trade apparatus and reenter the world market.
By 1936 a substantial portion of [the Reich’s] business community would have welcomed a return to international trade, since by many estimates America, Britain, Japan, and much of South America and Scandinavia seemed poised for economic recovery.³⁸
In between these two sides stood Schacht. Yet whereas in 1934 he had sided with advocates of rearmament, in 1936 he now insisted on increasing exports within the framework of the New Plan. By now he believed that rearmament at the pace demanded by Hitler was unsustainable. Instead, he wanted to maintain the clearing accounts and bilateral treaties, wrest control of agriculture from the Party and restrict its imports, and at the same time place strict limits on military expenditure.
Schacht hoped these measures would allow him to allocate more foreign currency to export industries. The capstone to his agenda was expanding the scope of operation for exporters by building an economic bloc in Europe and, in his more fanciful musings, by regaining Germany’s former overseas colonies.³⁹
In the summer of 1936 Hitler turned his attention to [the Reich’s] looming economic crisis, issuing the Four‐Year Memorandum. In this document, which he confidentially presented that August to Hermann Göring and War Minister Werner von Blomberg, Hitler rejected Goerdeler’s call to return to the global market. In the memorandum he grappled with [the Reich’s] perennial dependence on foreign countries for food and raw materials. He wanted a total solution, which he believed reliance on foreign trade could never provide.
Instead, [Berlin] demanded that [the Reich] be ready for war by 1940, and that foreign trade be placed fully in the service of rearmament. “The nation does not live for the economy, for economic leaders, or for financial theories; on the contrary, it is finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories, which all owe unqualified service in this struggle for the self‐assertion of our nation.”
Lebensraum in Eastern Europe was to be [the Fascist bourgeoisie’s] long‐term solution. Military conquest was the only way to make [the Third Reich] fully self‐sufficient.⁴⁰ Here Hitler echoed ideas expressed in his earlier writings: “the view is held that one can conquer the world by purely economic means, but that is one of the greatest and most terrible illusions.”⁴¹
(Emphasis added.)