NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 70, 20 September 1939, Page 10

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

One of the objectives of the Nazis in their attack on Poland undoubtedly was the regaining of Upper Silesia, the rich industrial province which was lost to the Poles after the World War, and I the riches of Upper Silesia contribute to the added industrial strength of the Reich as summarised by a New York message yesterday. Before the outbreak of war in 1914, Upper Silesia was shared between Germany and Austria. The whole of Lower Silesia and part of Upper Silesia appeared in the maps as part of Prussia. The Treaty of Versailles took these areas from the Central Powers and apportioned them between the revived State of Poland and the newly-created State of Czecho-Slovakia. After a plebiscite in 1921 the southern half of Upper Silesia, including the most valuable mines of the area, passed to Poland, while the northern half returned to Germany. Lower Silesia went back to Germany with the seizure of Czechoslovakia. • * ■ * • The mining district of Upper Silesia, in the south-west of Poland, is divided into three regions each utterly different from the others. The northern region holds the great coal mines, many deposits of lead, zinc, silver, and limestone, which have provided the basic materials for Polish and European industries, there are great iron works at Chornow, a city of 100,000, inhabitants, near the largest Silesian collieries, while Katowice,, capital of the region, which has 134,000 people, is so important industrially that early in the Germano-Polish War some Poles declared it to be more vital than Warsaw itself. The manufactures produced in the region include steel, iron, machinery, arms, ammonia, compressed fuels, chemicals, and fertilisers. The whole region has been described as one of the most up-to-date industrial centres in Europe. The Polish oil production, in the fields to the south-east, is so small that it is not included in a recent survey of the world's oil production, of which Rumanian oil fields are shown as yielding 2 per cent. (Germany needs about 20,000,000 tons of oil a year, it is estimated, in war time.) • ♦ • • The Skoda works, at which a revolt of Czech workers is reported to have occurred, was one of the major gains of the Nazis by the occupation of that country. Until 1918 Krupp's, the great German arms firm, held a controlling j interest in Skoda, which in those days j was in Austria-Hungary, but after the i Armistice the Germans lost this con-1 trol and Skoda struggled with financial problems. It was rescued by the | French Schneider-Creusot group, which already held managing interests in a number of plants throughout Europe. The French move was a. natural outcome of the interest taken by France in the formation of the new Czech Republic and the other States of the j Little Entente—Yugo-Slavia and Rumania. • • « • Skoda . was the chief source of supply for these States, and after 56 per cent, of shares in the organisation had ,been obtained by Charles Schneider he set about modernising the works. Under his direction it was built up.to the point of being an immense^ concern. It absorbed the United Machine, Works of Prague in 1921, the St. Pancras coal mines, the Komarno shipyards on the Danube, and the iron and steel ; works ofHradekVrail '- in Czecho-Slovakia. In the following years it added to this list nine metallurgical works, as well* as numerous coal, .iron ore, and lignite mines, the Kaurin and Klement automobile works, cable works, and power plants. Its operations reached out into the field of aviation and it virtually controlled the Czech Air Transport Co., of Prague, and the famous Avia works, which have supplied many European countries with aeroplanes, and finally it crossed into Poland to set up the Polskie Zaklady Skcda branch, into Rumania to obtain the metallurgical works at Ploesti, and into Hungary to gain control of several metallurgical firms and to obtain large holdings in the Ungarische Kredit-Anstalt, the I largest Hungarian bank.

At the time of the Munich settlement the capacity of Skoda was estimated at 50 per cent, of German and 75 per cent, of Italian output. In December last the German Press reported that the French had sold their interests to the Czech Government; in the following month it was announced that the Czech Government had sold its interest in the Government-owned works at Brunn to a private group.