216 J.-A. PEMBERTON
is contained in the pages of Mein Kamph. What he desires is Grund and
Boden or, in other words, territorial and economic acquisitions in Central
and South-Eastern Europe. Such acquisitions might lead him into con-
flict with Russia. If he is to win in that conflict he must assure that he is
protected in the rear, that he has the necessary Rückentdeckung against
France. In order to sterilise France he must sterilise England. Yet what
does he possess wherewith to purchase...[England’s] neutrality? He has
no real assets at all. Therefore he creates an artificial asset, the Colonial
Propaganda. He can now offer the abandonment of his claim for the col-
onies in return for a free-hand in the East. If we take his colonial demands
at face value, then he at least obtains some colonies, which will please
his people. If we refuse his demands, then he can claim as compensation
our neutrality in his European ambitions. It was for this reason so impor-
tant that we should not surrender one inch of colonial territory without
obtaining in return precise assurances in regard to Germany’s European
ambitions.^455Writing not long before the outbreak of the war and having noted
that many years earlier Alfred Rosenberg had mused that Britain might
‘very well be sympathetic toward a German conquest in the northeast, if
Germany should consider this a substitute for overseas colonies,’ Wood
(who as we saw had argued for the granting of some concessions at the
1937 Paris conference as a means of preventing war), observed that the
German lack of colonies had served as a ‘handy bargaining weapon’.^456
This weapon had proved so effective, he added, that one was entitled
to suspect that some Germans ‘might not have liked to part with their
(^455) Ibid., 38–1. The French minister of the colonies, Marius Moutet, in a statement
to the Echo de Paris in January 1937, declared the following: ‘I do not think the colo-
nial question figures amongst the fundamental concerns of Germany, or even of Hitler.
Germany is using it as a means to her political ends and her claims appear or disappear
according to the needs of her general, and, above all, European policy’. Moutet, 1937,
quoted in Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 56n.
(^456) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 82. In 1927, in The Future of a
German Foreign Policy (Der Zukunftsweg enter Deutsche Aussenpolitik), Alfred Rosenberg
stated that the German people needed land if they were to survive. However, he added that
the plan of future German foreign policy must be based on the following consideration:
‘This land can no longer be obtained in Africa, but must be secured in Europe, especially in
the East,’ Alfred Rosenberg, 1927, quoted in Franz Theodor Hart, Alfred Rosenberg: Der
Mann und sein Werk (München: J.F. Lehmanns, 1933), 56, 59.