WHO PAID?

Grey River Argus, 8 November 1939, Page 8

WHO PAID?

Hitler’s Bills (By a Special Correspondent) (Tins is the second article of a series analysing the assistance given to the Nazis in the pash and still being given, by" powerful forces in and near the Government of Britain.) . We have examined the methods by which British military aero engines wore exported in 1933-34 to build up the nucleus of Georing’s Air Force, each going abroad under Government license. It is desirable to make a concise and rapid study of the intervening years before coming to the gigantic racket now proceeding, x\ hich is completing Hitler’s final war supplies at the cost of depletion of British resources, but with great profit to individual and powerful interests and with the Government's connivance.

In his first Reichstag speech on May 7 1933, Hitler announced: “Germany ’will tread no other path than that laid down in the Treaties, and has no thought of invading any country.” Within three months Germany had left the League and the Disarmament Conference, refused to repay the “standstill credits,” and reduced the interest payable by 2 per cent, bx unilateral action as usual. Did the British Government withdraw its Minister from Berlin, as later it was to do from Mexico? Did it refuse recognition, as for many years it. did to Russia on account of the repudiated Tsarist loans? Oi course not.

Let us examine the "standstill credits.” In the depths of the credit crisis, around 1931, foreign loans advanced to German firms were allowed to remain in Germany to prevent bankruptcy of the national industry. There were likewise huge sums owed on long-term rates, by municipalities and by the State, which came under the Anglo-German Payments Agreement, and were also “frozen.” It has been estimated that taking both classes of debt into account there was a net loss to foreign creditors of 7,300 million RM, or a net gain to the Nazis of £616 millions in sterling value (about equal to the total British arms expenditure of 1937-38). From 1933-35 the world crisis was slowly but surely on the wane and conditions improving. Yet no attempt was made to recover principal or interest from Germany, and these were the years when Nazi rearmament laid its entire foundation.

On March 10, 1935, Hitler's plans had so far succeeded that Goering was able to make the public an nouncement, calculated to swing German opinion behind the regime, that his Air Force was now organised and in being. On March 16 Hitler introduced conscription—his first open step towards the coming war. The action was a deliberate tearing-up of the Treaties—but while the Powers were conferring, the news broke over a startled world that Great Britain had, on those very July days, signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty in defiance of those very Treaties. Meanwhile, although professed to have no information of serious German rearmament, all Europe knew of the frantic efforts being pressed forward by Goering. On May 3, 1935, the “Stock Exchange Gazette” wrote: “The more pertinent question is, ‘who finances Germany?’ Without this country as a clearinghouse for payments and the opportunity to draw on credits under the standstill, Germany could not have pursued her plans. We have been so ready to sell to her that the question ol payment has never been allowed to interfere. . . The provisioning of the opposing force has been financed in London.”

Equally indicative of alarmed patriotic opinion was a similar passage in the influential “Financial News” of May 15, which asked how Germany had financed her now gigantic forces, including even at that time 1,200 tanks, 6,000 big guns, and an army of 400,000: “The more important answer is that practically every country with which Germany maintains trade relations has willingly or unwillingly financed Germany’s war imports. z And Great Britain and France are not among the least ot them.”