GERMAN FATS DEFICIENCY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23618, 30 March 1940, Page 10

GERMAN FATS DEFICIENCY

A smile is raised at the German official exhortations to housewives to economise in the use of soap. For German women it is no laughing matter, however. The shortage and finally the famine of soap in the last war was one of the deprivations most keenly felt in Central Europe. A cake of common yellow soap became, if not more precious than rubies, at least more esteemed than a tin of caviare. From the beginning of the present war soap has been strictly rationed in the Reich, the allowance per head for all purposes being ridiculously small. Goering made a joke of it in the early weeks by asking munition workers how he was to cleanse his elephantine bulk with the weekly morsel of soap. Even at that, the ration is of poor quality, being manufactured mainly from fatty acids, especially synthetic acids, and white clay. The necessity arises out of one of Germany's gravest deficiencies—vegetable and animal fats and oils. Normally she imports 625,000 tons a year of vegetable oils alone, apart from enormous quantities of whale oil, lard and tallow. The British blockade has closed most of h6r sources of supply, posing her with an economic problem on the largest scale. First call on fats is for feeding soldiers and workers, and the second for the manufacture of explosives. Housewives must do the best the}' can about soap. Goering is well aware of this weakness in the German war economy and is striving to correct it by encouraging the growth of oil seed crops like linseed and soya bean within the Reich and in. Pol and and the Balkans. Such efforts use up vast areas of land that might be raising other crops, but cannot compensate for the vast quantities of oil seeds no longer obtainable from tropical Africa, India and the Far East.