152 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Austen Chamberlain contended in early 1932, were ‘used as pretexts for
demanding more.’^226
tHe germAn coloniAl ProPAgAndA After 1933
The victory of the Hitlerite movement might at first have been thought
to herald an end to colonial agitation, given that the National Socialist
Party showed itself to be indifferent and even hostile to colonial pol-
icy.^227 In Mein Kampf, Hitler denounced pre-war Germany’s ‘inane
colonial policy’ as an onerous luxury and declared that from here on
Germany should look to the East in the quest for living space. The book
stated:
However much we may all recognize the necessity for a reckoning with
France this would yet remain ineffective if it were to become the only goal
of foreign policy. It can only have sense if it acts as a cover for an enlarge-
ment of the living room of our people in Europe. It is not to colonial
acquisition that we must look for a solution of this question but exclusively
to the acquisition of territory for settlement which will increase the area of
the Motherland...We finally part with the colonial and trade policy of the
period before the War and pass over to the land policy of the future. When
we speak today in Europe of new land, we can think in the first place only
of Russia and the border states under her subjection.^228In order to successfully carry out this policy, conflict with Britain had
to be avoided. Noting that Germany’s pre-war colonial and trade had
(^226) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 79. Wood stated the following in
explaining the reluctance of Great Britain to make colonial concessions to Germany during
the last couple of years of the Weimar Republic: ‘Not only was confidence in the potential
German use of colonies at a low point, but the growth of economic nationalism during the
depression had enhanced the value of colonial territory’ (ibid., 80–1).
(^227) Ibid., 81, and Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloni-
ales, 26.
(^228) Mein Kamph, quoted in Harold Nicholson, ‘The Colonial Problem,’ International
Affairs 18, no. 1 (1938): 32–50, 44. Emphasis in original. See also Wood, Peaceful Change
and the Colonial Problem, 81. Gilbert Maroger pointed to the clear opposition drawn in
Hitler’s book between Germany’s world politics and commercial policy before the war, of
which the colonial policy was one aspect, and ‘the policy of the “union of men with their
soil” which must be the one of the National-Socialist Party.’ Maroger, La question des mat-
ières premières et les revendications coloniales, 27.