166 J.-A. PEMBERTON
to colonies as a solution to the putative problem of over-population,
insisting rather that Germany’s surplus population must live ‘on the soil
of Germany’ alone.^275 Following upon this insistence and foreshadow-
ing the argument he would mount in his Foreign Affairs article, Schacht
maintained that care must be taken
in the first place to assure to Germans an adequate supply of foodstuffs,
in the second place and above all to develop the industrialization of the
Reich. It is thus a matter for Germany of having access to raw materials—
raw materials in order to fulfil the first condition, industrial raw materi-
als to fulfil the second. The problem of raw materials is thus the essential
problem: the Kernproblem; the demographic argument is not invoked in
itself, it serves only to introduce and reinforce the argument based on the
poverty of the Reich in respect to basic products. The importation of raw
materials in massive quantities poses the question of currencies; Germany
can only resolve it if the raw materials are produced in the monetary terri-
tory of Germany (Währungsgebiet), from which follows the demand for an
extension of the domain of German monetary circulation.^276In the foreword he penned for a booklet which was published in
Berlin with official approval in the first part of 1936 and which main-
tained that ‘the recovery of Germany’s lost colonies...[was]...an essen-
tial part of the Nazi programme,’ Schacht suggested that in the present
just as in the past Germany needed colonies partly in order to accommo-
date its surplus population, he soon after returned to his earlier approach
to the question of colonies.^277 In an address which had as its subject
(^275) Maroger, La Question des matières premières et les revendications xoloniales, 15–6. See
also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 339.
(^276) Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 15–6. See
also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 50–51n.
(^277) Straits Times (Singapore), June 11, 1936. The booklet for which Schacht penned the
foreword was called Colonies or Not? The Attitude of the Party and the State Towards the
Colonial Question and was authored by H. W. Bauer. Schacht wrote in the booklet’s fore-
word the following: ‘In her old colonies Germany found a valuable expansion of her raw
material resources, her trade and her space for settlement. As recent developments have
shown, these are an absolute necessity for an over-populated country. It is therefore eco-
nomically and politically impossible to withhold from Germany the administration of her
old colonial possessions.’ (Hjalmar Schacht, 1936, quoted ibid.) The booklet sought to
explain away the shift in attitude towards colonies on the part of the National Socialist
Party. In this regard, Bauer stated the following: ‘A certain phrase in the Fuehrer’s book