Göring in charge of the Four-Year Plan

On 18 October 1936 Adolf Hitler signed the decree on the implementation of the Four-Year Plan, which made Hermann Göring Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. He was given the right to issue decrees and binding instructions to all Reich authorities, including the highest, and to party organisations. The man who was already Minister of Aviation, commander of the Luftwaffe, Prime Minister of Prussia and President of the Reichstag became the de facto dictator of the German economy. Officially, the plan was meant to free Germany from dependence on imported raw materials and food. Its real purpose Hitler had set down a few weeks earlier in a secret memorandum, which ended: “I. The German army must be ready for action within four years. II. The German economy must be fit for war within four years.”

Guns or butter

Since the seizure of power in 1933 the regime had been rearming at a rapid pace. Rearmament was financed by Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and, from 1934, Minister of Economics, partly by means of the so-called Mefo bills, which made it possible to hide military spending off the budget. His “New Plan” of 1934 placed foreign trade under strict state control and steered imports to wherever rearmament required them. After the crash of 1929 unemployment had fallen and the economy had grown, but in 1935–1936 it ran into serious difficulties. The country lacked the foreign currency to pay for ore, oil, rubber, non-ferrous metals and food. After the poor harvest of 1935 fats were in short supply, and queues for butter formed outside shops. The army, industry and agriculture fought over every mark of foreign exchange.

The dispute was fought out within the leadership of the state itself. Schacht, together with the Price Commissioner Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, believed that the pace of rearmament had to slow, exports had to rise and Germany had to return to world trade. Others, led by Göring, demanded faster rearmament and self-sufficiency – autarky – whatever the cost. In April 1936 Hitler appointed Göring Commissioner for Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange. Schacht and the War Minister Werner von Blomberg expected that this politician, who knew nothing of economics, would be a convenient arbiter whom they could easily steer. They were wrong.

The Obersalzberg memorandum

In August 1936, at his mountain residence on the Obersalzberg, Hitler wrote or dictated a memorandum on the tasks of the Four-Year Plan. It was one of the few documents he wrote himself. According to Albert Speer, who received a copy in 1944, only three copies existed, and Hitler gave them to, among others, Göring and Blomberg. Schacht did not receive the memorandum. The text was remarkably candid. Hitler wrote that since the French Revolution the world had been moving towards a conflict with Bolshevism, behind which, in his view, stood “world Jewry”, and that a victory of Bolshevism would mean not a new Versailles but the annihilation of the German people. Germany was overpopulated and could not feed itself from its own resources. The “final solution” of this problem lay, he wrote, in extending the nation’s living space – its base of raw materials and food – and preparing for this was the task of the political leadership.

Until then, the economy was to serve one aim. If the Wehrmacht could not be made “the first army in the world” in the shortest possible time, Germany would be lost, and every other need had to be ruthlessly subordinated to this. Fuel production was to be expanded within 18 months, mass production of synthetic rubber organised immediately, and Germany’s poor iron ore, with an iron content of 26 per cent against 45 per cent in Swedish ore, smelted. Costs did not matter. Hitler mocked the Ministry of Economics, which had spent four years establishing what could not be done, and announced that if private industry did not carry out the tasks, the state would do so itself. He also demanded two laws: one providing for the death penalty for economic sabotage, and another making “all of Jewry” liable for any damage done to the economy by individual Jews. After the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 this was a further sign that the expropriation of the Jews would become part of the preparations for war.

On 4 September 1936 Göring read the memorandum out at a meeting of ministers, saying that it started from the assumption that a clash with Russia was inevitable. A few days later, at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler publicly announced the new Four-Year Plan – now without a word about war – as a struggle for Germany’s economic independence and a defence against Bolshevism. In those same weeks Joseph Stalin and Hitler clashed indirectly in Spain, where a civil war had been raging since July and Germany had been helping General Franco from its first days. Göring was one of the main advocates of this aid, and the German trading companies set up at the time took Spanish ore and other raw materials in return for German rearmament.

The economy under Göring’s command

The decree of 18 October 1936 created a new authority alongside the ministries. Göring ran it from the Prussian State Ministry, and his closest associate was State Secretary Paul Körner. Over the following days he organised the Four-Year Plan office, with working groups for raw materials, foreign exchange, labour, agriculture and prices, among others, and on 28 October he presented the programme at the Berlin Sportpalast, explaining that it was above all about feeding the nation. To industrialists he spoke differently. On 17 December 1936, according to a surviving record of the meeting, he told the owners and managers of large firms assembled in Berlin that Germany was already in a state of mobilisation and war; only the shooting had not yet started. Profit was not to count against the demands of the state.

The plan meant enormous investment in substitute industries. The IG Farben concern, whose specialist Carl Krauch became one of the key men in Göring’s office, built plants producing synthetic petrol from coal and factories making Buna synthetic rubber, the first of them at Schkopau. When the Ruhr steel concerns refused to smelt the unprofitable ore, Göring founded the state-owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring in July 1937, with steelworks in the Salzgitter area. The state froze prices, controlled the allocation of raw materials and increasingly directed the labour market, and by 1938 it could already assign workers to jobs deemed important to the state.

Schacht lost. In the summer of 1937, at odds with Göring, he asked to be relieved of his post as Minister of Economics, and his resignation was accepted on 26 November. At the beginning of 1938 the compliant Walther Funk became minister, and control of the economy passed in practice to Göring. Schacht remained President of the Reichsbank until January 1939.

Did the plan succeed?

Historians agree that the goal of self-sufficiency was not achieved. According to the British historian Richard Evans, production of synthetic petrol grew quickly, but in 1938 Buna rubber covered only about 5 per cent of German rubber consumption, while iron ore imports rose from 4.5 million tonnes in 1933 to 21 million in 1938. Germany still depended on supplies from abroad, especially of oil, high-grade ore and non-ferrous metals, and arms production in 1939 was lower than planned. The plan nevertheless accelerated rearmament and turned a large part of the economy over to the needs of war. Historians disagree on whether economic strains and shortages of raw materials and labour drove Hitler to war in 1939, before Germany’s advantage melted away, or whether the war broke out earlier than the plan foresaw and caught the economy halfway through its preparations. Both sides of the debate agree that the plan was a preparation for a war of conquest, not an economic programme in the ordinary sense.

The road to war

The deadline set in the 1936 memorandum, the year 1940, recurred in Hitler’s later decisions. On 5 November 1937, at a meeting with the military commanders and the Foreign Minister, with Göring present, Hitler declared that by 1943–1945 at the latest Germany must solve the problem of living space by force, and before that take Austria and Czechoslovakia. The record of this meeting has gone down in history as the Hossbach Memorandum. The annexation of Austria in 1938 and the occupation of the Czech lands in 1939 gave Göring’s Reichswerke the mines, steelworks and arms factories of both countries.

The Four-Year Plan office also became an instrument of persecution. The demand in the memorandum was fulfilled after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass: on 12 November 1938 Göring chaired a meeting at which a “contribution” of one billion marks was imposed on German Jews and it was decided to exclude them from economic life. During the war his office directed the plunder of occupied Europe, including the property of the Polish state and Polish citizens through the Main Trustee Office East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost), prepared the Hunger Plan for the occupied Soviet territories and was responsible for the deportation of millions of forced labourers. On 31 July 1941 Göring, as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, authorised Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question”. The plan that in October 1936 had been proclaimed as a programme to feed the nation led from the outset to war and to the crimes that war brought.