GERMAN INDUSTRY.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20256, 27 July 1937, Page 6

GERMAN INDUSTRY.

By a Nazi decree the iron and steel industry of Germany is to be nationalised, and the great works of Krupps and others will become State enterprises. The news regarding the change is scant, but the announcement probably has not surprised the foreign correspondents in Germany. For some time they have been placing emphasis on a growing conflict in the Reich between the Nazi headquarters and the leaders of industry. It is said to have commenced when Herr Hitler, speaking at Nuremberg, announced the Four-Year Plan, and gave the direction of it to General Goering. At once the industrial leaders commenced to complain of the general’s methods of regimenting work, distributing raw materials and ordering the manufacture of supplies. They were a strong group, but Goering bad the support of the more aggressive military leaders, and also the rank and flle of the Nazis who had long wanted to see the party deal with “big business.” The chief signs of discontent in the National Socialist Party, it has been stated, were caused by the fact that, in the opinion of many members, there was plenty of nationalism but very little socialism in the programme. General Goering is one of those who believe that Germany can be made self-supporting in the matter of essential foodstuffs and war materials. The industrialists, on the other hand, are said to have protested that the manufacture of the many substitutes was costly, and unsatisfactory, and that, in any case, its full application would break the financial system. The general would have none of it. “He has,” wrote one of the leading foreign correspondents from Berlin recently, “ been pushing the country into intensive production of what he considers to be necessary for an early conflict, and, with Herr Hitler behind him, has been trying to force industry and business to back his plans to the limit.” But the most weighty reason for the opposition to the Goering scheme, he added, “the hardest fact of all,” was the conviction of the business leaders and the army moderates that “Germany cannot keep pace with the great rearmament programme on which Britain is embarking. The prospects are that within a year or two the British will be as superior in the air as on the sea.” It is possible that the steel magnates have come into conflict with the director of the Four-year Plan, and that the reply has been a decree nationalising the entire industry, the first drastic step of this kind yet taken by the Nazi Government.