156 J.-A. PEMBERTON
the Colonies, but that is not a matter for war,” and, alluding to the mobi-
lisation of the Czechoslovakian Army, which had been announced to us in
the middle of our conversations and had given rise to some disturbance, he
said, about the Colonies, “There will be no mobilisation about that.”^238It was left to other figures in the regime to add a touch of menace to
the German colonial propaganda. As noted in a paper issued by the RIIA
in May 1938 on Germany’s claims to colonies, the German government
had not ‘up to this point, put forward. officially and publicly any pre-
cisely formulated requests to the Colonial Powers concerning its colo-
nial aspirations.’^239 Nonetheless, from about the mid-1930s, semi-official
demands for colonial revision began to be heard with increasing fre-
quency against the background of a ‘strong pro-campaign,’ the probable.
effect of which was to render the German people in 1939 ‘more colony-
conscious than at any other time since the War.’^240 Taken as a whole,
the German colonial propaganda after 1933 was based on the following
contentions: that Germany was lacking in living space; that Germany was
in dire need of raw materials and foodstuffs; that due to a lack of foreign
exchange Germany needed zones of exploitation in which investments
and exchange could take place under the cover of a German monetary
system; that German honour demanded that Germany resume its place
among the colonial powers; that colonial retrocession was a matter of
justice and legal right.^241
Addressing the question of under what form were presented the psy-
chological and moral arguments insisting on colonial revision, Maroger
noted that there were a great number of declarations issued in the period
(^238) 339 Parl. Deb, H.C. (5th series), September 28, 1938, 22. See also Wood, Peaceful
Change and the Colonial Problem, 119.
(^239) Royal Institute of International Affairs, Germany’s Claims to Colonies, Information
Department Papers, no. 23 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1938), 28.
See also Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem, 81.
(^240) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 84–5.
(^241) Ibid., 84, and Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications colo-
niales, 36. See also ‘Dr. Schacht Joins in Colonies Demand: “Impossible to Withhold
Them,”’ Straits Times (Singapore), June 11, 1936. Heinrich Rogge stated that ‘Germany’s
demand for colonial revision...is based on the vital necessities of the German people—over-
population, lack of raw materials, exclusion from foreign markets through tariff barriers,
lack of foreign exchange—and on a complex of legal and ethical arguments.’ Heinrich
Rogge, 1937, quoted in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49.