German Industry Is Coming Back

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 87, 27 August 1948, Page 5

German Industry Is Coming Back

NEW CURRENCY IS INCENTIVE TO WORK (By Reece Smith, New* Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Dusseldorf, July 24. German industry is staggering groggily back to its feet. Coal and steel are once again coming from the Ruhr, industrial heart of Western Europe. With coal and /steel. , assured, Germans are buckling down to drag themselves from the ruins of defeat. Sharing the credit with coal and steel is the new currency, the Deutschemark, issued three weeks ago. The former currency, the 'Reichsmark, had. become completely valueless, and men were not prepared to work for an envelope of Reichsmarks when, with barter and cigarettes, they could bring home more food and goods. With the issue of the sound Deutschemark men are now working for their pay envelope, and prepared to work harder and longer in the knowledge that their envelope will be so much the heavier with good currency. .An unsuspected range of goods has emerged from black market cellars into shop windows which had stood bare since the collapse. The only sour note came from the Russians, who proclaimed that, by issuing new currency in their zones, the Western Powers yvere splitting Germany permanently. The Russians have always appealed to the Germans by declaring themselves in favour of a united Germany. The one small proviso, so far not surmounted, is that it should be united in the Russian way. Officials of the Joint Export/Import Agency. (U.S./U.K.), the organisation which controls all German external trade, hope that the Deutschemark w.yll have, sufficiently proved itself within a year to become once more valid currency in international trade. The more optimistic feel it could do so now.

But for the present all German external trade is reckoned in dollars, a result of the U.S. contributing 92 per cent to Britain’s 8 per cent of the finance for the Bizone, the economic merger of the American and British zones, which the French have just joined. Trade figures for the first four months of 1948, a period of comparative lethargy in German industry, because of the Reichsmark being such a poor incentive to work, show that the bizonal area of Germany exported to 56’countries, ranging from Leichenstein to the U.S.A., goods worth 142,142,900 dollars. In this same period imports financed by funds supplied by the U.S. and U.K. Governments amounted to 283,500,000 dollars, and imports through trading to 40,409,400 dollars. •The export figure is rising all the time. Zealand is shown in the figures for "the period as having sold Germany 32,200 dollars worth of goods, and having bought 16,600 dollars worth. To question as to how the economic revival of Germany would be looked on in Britain and the U.S. by those who had not forgotten the war, and those who would be competing with German goods, I, received the answer: “The choice is whether German goods will be allowed to sell on world markets in fair competition, or the British and American taxpayer will continue indefinitely to maintain a ruined Germany. Of several trade officials I asked whether anti-German was hamepring the selling of German goods anywhere in the world today. The answer: “No.” Their return has been accepted much more quickly than after the World War I.