interesting institution,” Göring beamed.
“I have never been a businessman,” he avowed nostalgically.
“And this was something completely new to me. My job was to
organize the German economy, and my energy was harnessed to
get things started. Over the years I learned a lot. My main task
was to safeguard the food supply... and to make Germany self-
sufficient. The most important items were iron, petroleum, and
rubber.”
He was innocent of any formal training in economics, but
he soon got the hang of things and shortly bragged to Hitler
that Dr. Schacht’s preserve was not the holy mystery he had
made out. Schacht found his sacred economic theories overrid-
den and ignored, and a wall of hostility arose between the two
men. In the first of a series of “foreign-exchange” conferences
called during May and June of , Göring pushed and invei-
gled. Schacht, his vanity affronted, refused even to attend the
first one, held on the morning of May , and forbade any of his
departments to help the new “dictator.” Schacht, however,
found few allies, and he condescended to put in an appearance
that afternoon at Göring’s “Little Cabinet” as the Prussian
Council of Ministers was becoming known where he bran-
dished a new Führer directive, which, he claimed, superseded
Göring’s. But Schacht had to listen impassively (and silently) as
his rival preached his new economic gospel putting exports
first to earn foreign currency, then projects designed to meet
the Reich’s raw-materials needs from its own native resources.
The implication was obvious. Göring was hatching a siege econ-
omy for a future war, and Schacht did not like it.
The raw-materials bottlenecks would have to be tackled
now. On May , Göring harangued the biggest names in in-
dustry Flick, Thyssen, and Vögler among them about the
raw materials likely to prove scarce in wartime. He listed flax,