2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 155In 1933, the German Colonial League was established under the pres-
idency of Schnee with the purpose of grouping together various colonial
organisations and charging them with the task of organising propa-
ganda.^235 In December of that year, a large mass-meeting was held in
Berlin under the auspices of the Nazi Party at which orators, Schnee
among them, insisted on ‘a policy of colonial recovery for Germany.’^236
Hitler himself had already publicly raised in the issue, stating in October
1933 in an interview with Daily Mail’s Price the following: ‘Germany
contains too many people for her size...and it is to the interest of the
world that a great nation should not be deprived of the conditions for
existence, but we shall never go to war to get colonies. We are convinced
that we are as capable as any other nation in administering and develop-
ing colonial territories, but we regard this as a matter of negotiation.’^237
The qualification that Germany would not got to war to obtain colonies
was repeated on later occasions, notably in 1938 at Munich where Hitler
told Neville Chamberlain in a private conversation the following accord-
ing to Chamberlain:
In the first place he repeated to me with great earnestness what he had
already said at Berchtesgaden, namely, that this was the last of his terri-
torial ambitions in Europe and that he had no wish to include in the
Reich people of other races than Germans. In the second place he said,
again very earnestly, that he wanted to be friends with England and that if
only this Sudeten question could be got out of the way in peace he would
gladly resume conversations....He said, “There is one awkward question,(^235) Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33. The
colonial organisations that Heinrich Schnee mobilised for the purpose of propaganda
included the following: the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft),
founded in 1882); the League of Former German Combatants (Deutscher
Kiolonialkriegerbund), founded in 1922; the German Red-Cross and the Women’s
Association for Overseas Germans, founded in 1888; the Women’s League of the German
Colonial Society (Frauensbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), founded in 1907; the
Colonial Economic Committee, founded in 1896; and the Academic Colonial League,
founded in 1925.
(^236) ‘Nazi Orators Stress Colonial Recovery: Quote Theodore Roosevelt to Deny Charge
That Germans are Bad Colonizers,’ New York Times, December 11, 1933.
(^237) G. Ward Price, ‘Reich Shuns War, Hitler Declares,’ New York Times, October 22,
- See also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 84. Note that in Peaceful
Change and the Colonial Problem the date of George Ward Price’s interview with Hitler is
mistakenly given as October 22, 1934.