INVASION OF AUSTRIA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4639, 13 May 1938, Page 3

INVASION OF AUSTRIA

WHAT GERMANY HAS GAINED.

A week or so ago Austria was flippantly described as a capital without a State —because more than a quarter of its population of 7,000,000 lived in gay Vienna. This morning it is part of the German Reich, which has grown in siz« overnight, as it were, to something bigger than it was before the Great War started 24 years ago, said F. W. Memory, in an English paper recently. To-day, with the acquisition of Austria, the area of the German Reich is more than 5000 square miles greater than in pre-war days. And it includes some thousands of acres of the most fertile and valuable land in Europe.

Here are the figures: In 1913 the area of the old German Empire was 208,780 square miles. A short time ago the area of the Third Reich was 181,699 square miles, but now to that must be added the 32,369 square miles that were Austria, giving Herr Hitler dominion over a total of 214,068 square miles of the heart of Europe.

But what has been added to Germany cannot be gauged entirely in terms of acreage.

Apart from what the Nazis describe as the reuniting of a sundered race, Herr Hitler, by his march into Austria, has given to his people a vast storehouse of natural wealth. This includes minerals, and, above all, timber of that kind which provides the pulp for the production of those synthetic materials which the Germans are so skilful in employing. The northern portion of Upper Austria —Hiler's native country—is almost an extension of the Bohemian Forest. Timber has always been regarded as an appreciable asset of Austria. Just what timber means to Austria, or, rather, now, to Germany, can be realised from the fact that more than 700,000 acres, or over 37 per cent, of the productive land, is afforested. The wood pulp industry and its ancillary trades of paper, cardboard, cellulose, and plastic manufactures, with a total annual consumption of about 2,000,000 cubic metres of wood— besides 5740 saw mills employing 23,000 workmen—are directly interested in the prosperity of the timber industry.

According to British trade reports, the Austrian timber exports jumped to 132,460 wagon loads during the first ten months of 1937, compared with 94,843 during the corresponding period of 1936, and a very great deal of the output went to Germany. The whole world is crying out for wood of that special kind which the Austrian forests produce; hitherto every country has. been able to> share in its production, but now Germany will have first claim for her plastic manufactures.

While agriculture forms the main occupation of the country, with approximately 5,000,000 acres under cultivation, there are, according to a recent census, no fewer than 367,652 industrial establishments in the country, the principal manufactures being woollens, cottons, steel, woodwork and machinery. The most important mineral productions are iron ore, magnesite, and. salt, but there are also produced l»ad : zinc, copper and graphite. Of Austria's 7,000,000 population nine-tenths are German by descent and speak the German language; more than 6,000,000 are Catholics, about 300,000 Protestants, and 200,000 Jews.