Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1937. GERMANY’S ECONOMICS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 57, Issue 112, 22 February 1937, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1937. GERMANY’S ECONOMICS.

Any disturbance of peace at home would endanger Germany s reconstruction work, but a menace to external peace would 'utterly destroy her . gigantic efforts for recovery, Herr Hitler told an international conference of exservicemen at Munich the other day. Realisation of this truth must vitally affect Germany’s foreign policy, whatever the objective may be. The restrictions and regulations that are being imposed on the people sro themselves crushing enough without the added burden of disorders or conflict. Side by side with the organisation of the Four-Year Plan, with its development of home-production of raw materials and its securing or all available foreign cash-exchange in buying war equipment, they are being counselled and taught to dispense with every kind of food that is not producible at home in sufficient quantities or is not procurable by barter abroad. How thoroughly this propaganda is proceeding can be seen from a memorandum, issued by an authority that is virtually official, telling the people what types of food they ought to eat and what types they ought to avoid, in the interests of the nation. A reduced consumption of* all animal products, except rabbits and fish, is emphasised. *To change over to a diet of plant products, such as potatoes, other vegetables and sugar, is strongly urged; animal fats very difficult to produce in adequate quantities —are especially to be avoided, and consumption of vegetable fats is to be kept down to a minimum, because the ingredients have mostly to be imported. Fruit consumption, wherever it creates a demand for imports, is likewise to be decreased. Each hectare of soil, according to this memorandum, can be made to yield a far larger food value if it be devoted to vegetable production than if animals are fed upon it; one hectare under potatoes, so the calculation goes, can yield twenty times as great a caloric value as one used for producing beef, and one under wheat can yield nearly ten times. A point is made of the cheapness of the recommended diet: for this reason margarine is to be preferred to butter, although as both have to be imported the consumption of both must be lessened. There is in this a military aim as well as an economic one. A warning that, in the event of war, Germany’s economic structure must be so strong that it would not collapse, as it did during the last war, was given in a lecture by Colonel Thomas, Chief of the Military Economic Staff of the German War Ministry. Colonel Thomas, whose position makes him one of the most influential officers behind the scenes in German public life, showed the part to be played by the Four-Year Flan for the transformation of German economy into an instrument of the State, which will, in the opinion of the most able military and industrial leaders, render it immune against the errors of organisation which lost the Great War for Germany. “We lost the war because we did not recognise the far-reaching connection between military operations and economic warfare, and because we underestimated our opponents’ economic resources and over-estimated our own,’ said Colonel Thomas. “Indeed, the war was already lost when Germany faced the winter of 1916-17 and turnips became our main food supply. It would be an unforgivable act of negligence if, in a future war, we failed to assess the dependence of strategy upon the nation’s economic situation.” Thus do economic conditions play an important part in the preservation or peace.