GERMAN STRATEGY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 93, 17 October 1939, Page 10

GERMAN STRATEGY

If, as begins to appear possible, the Germans mean to launch an offensive on the Western Front they v/ill be departing from their previously-express-ed intentions. As long as the Polish campaign was in progress the Nazi strategy apparently was to hold fast in the West while the mopping up in the East was progressing. This was a sensible enough plan from the Nazi point of view, for it was based on the belief that after the- Polish conquest, particularly after the Russian intervention, the democracies would be open to conquest by Hitler's "peace offensive." So the Nazi intentions were plainly stated by Marshal Goering in his Templehof speech on September 9: "We want nothing from the French. We shall defend our frontiers like iron, but we shall not attack. If we are attacked we shall hit back. But we shall not attack." Linked with this military strategy, it seems, was the design to develop German industries and outlast the democracies in a "waiting war." A great deal of Goering's speech was devoted to telling the people that, while there were shortages and that they "would limit themselves still more, my British gentlemen," they would be able to organise their exports so as to hold, out against the blockade. This blockade, it was declared, "reached from Basle to Denmark," but not to the north, where neutrality agreements extended, or the east, "where we have no enemy," or the south where the nations remained neutral "because they are sensible." The Nazis would seek to build a new trade structure, based on supplies of Russian raw maerials, it appeared from the speech. This "trend is to be discerned in the trade figures for the first six months of this year. Germany has been progressively shifting her foreign trade from the old overseas markets to allied markets in the domain of her "Lebensraum." The first really accurate survey of German trade published this year revealed that the south-eastern States—Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Greece, and Turkey—supplied 15 per cent, of German exports from January to June compared with 11.2 per cent, last year, and that European trade in general rose from 53.7 per cent, of the imports of Old Germany to 49.6 per cent, of the imports of Greater Germany. German exports to Europe rose from 69.6 per cent, to 71 per cent.