World Wars of the Twentieth Century 323
suppliers increasingly difficult.^38 The British blockade made it obvious
that if the German army were not to find its supply of shell casings and
gunpowder suddenly cut off, a very careful husbanding of all the
copper and nitrate already on hand would be necessary. These matters
came to the attention of Walther Rathenau, heir apparent to the Ger
man General Electric Company, in the first days of the war. On 8
August 1914 he spoke to the minister of war about the problem and a
week later found himself in charge of the allocation of copper and
nitrate, together with other scarce raw materials needed for military
and industrial production. So was born the Raw Materials Detachment
of the War Ministry—the kernel from which an all-embracing system
of military management of the German economy was to grow in the
next three years.^39
As befitted a great industrialist, Rathenau set up special corpora
tions to allocate critical materials. In effect a national cartel for each
commodity that came into short supply distributed whatever was
available among competing users. These cartels, as in France, were
managed by business executives, subject to official direction from the
War Ministry in matters of general policy. A cat-and-mouse game of
economic warfare soon set in between British and German au
thorities. The Germans sought to purchase needed raw materials
wherever they could find them and arrange for import through neutral
firms and ports, while the British tried to intercept such deliveries and
blacklisted firms known to be trading with the Germans. Little by little
the British drew their net closer, so that overseas imports became
scarcer and scarcer in the German economy.
Yet the importance of the blockade was much exaggerated at the
- Prewar planning had not entirely neglected this problem, but German officials
assumed that Dutch firms would be able to import everything needed on ships flying the
United States flag. Remembering the War of 1812, the Germans assumed that the
British would not dare to intercept American ships on the high seas. Cf. Egmont
Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinettskrieg und Wirtschaftskrieg,” Historische
Zeitschrift 199 (1964): 389–90. In fact, however, Great Britain did persuade the
Americans to acquiesce in a long-range blockade of Germany, though friction on details
of how to implement the blockade continued to trouble Anglo-American relations until
American belligerency turned United States policy around. On the blockade and its
complications see the official British account, A. C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of
Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, 1914–1918 (London, 1961); M. C.
Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914–1916 (Ann Arbor, 1957); Hardach, The
First World War, pp. 11–34.
- Walther Rathenau, Tagebuch, 1907–1922 (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 186–88. Ac
cording to L. Burchardt, “Walther Rathenau und die Anfânge der deutschen Rohstoffs
wirtschaftung im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Tradition 15 (1970): 169–96, an engineer em
ployed by AEG named Wichard von Moellendorf was the real initiator of the Kriegsroh
stoffsabteilung.
