2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 167‘People for whom there is not enough room’ given at Frankfurt on
December 9, 1936, on the occasion of the centenary of the Association
of Geography and Statistics, Schacht described Germany as ‘a coun-
try that has too large a population and too small a space’ and declared
that this reality ‘weighs on us like a nightmare.’^278 Despite saying this,
Schacht nowhere suggested in his speech that colonies were required as
zones for the placement of Germany’s surplus population. Responding
to Amery’s recent claim that the return of Germany’s colonies would
bring Germany ‘little advantage,’ Schacht stated in the speech that the
only solution to Germany’s difficulties, namely, a scarcity of foodstuffs
and raw materials, was ‘the assignment to her of colonial space.’^279
Schacht warned that ‘[p]eace in Europe—and thus in the rest of the
world,’ depended on ‘whether the possibility of existence,’ by which
he meant access to resources, ‘is or is not given to the densely packed
masses of Central Europe.’^280
Although he concluded his Foreign Affairs article with a similar warn-
ing, that is, he concluded it in stating that the future of European peace
depended on a resolution of the colonial problem in so far as it con-
cerned Germany’s economic existence, Schacht refrained therein from
‘endorsing the notion so widely held in other countries’ that Germany’s
‘claims are seriously put forward in part as springing from a problem of
“My Struggle,” in which he criticises the foreign and colonial policy of the Kaiser Wilhelm
era, has been separated from the context and used to show that national socialism is not
interested in colonies. Although the Fuehrer rightly censures the half-heartedness of the
former German colonial policy because it neither strengthened the Reich nor provided
the opportunity for settlement, that does not mean that he thereby renounces all colonial
activity for our people. That can only be maintained by malicious opponents. The Fuehrer
gives his fundamental assent to the colonial idea and Germany’s colonial necessities.’
H. W. Bauer, 1936, quoted in Straits Times, (Singapore), June 11, 1936. In a report on
this booklet, the following was noted: ‘The encouragement of colonial policy...does not
mean that opportunities should be neglected for “colonisation at home and in the east.”
No explanation is given of this phrase, but it appears to refer to Eastern Europe.’. Straits
Times, (Singapore), June 11, 1936.
(^278) ‘“Not Enough Room”: Why Germany Wants Colonies—Dr. Schacht on a
“Nightmare”,’ Straits Times (Singapore), December 28, 1936. See also Maroger, La ques-
tion des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33; Maroger, L’Europe et la ques-
tion coloniale, 443, 446, and Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 48, 145, 358.
(^279) Straits Times (Singapore), December 28, 1936.
(^280) Ibid. See also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 49.