jute, copper, metal scrap, and manganese among them, but
identified particularly oil and rubber. “When war comes,” he
hammered into them, “we won’t get a drop of oil from abroad.”
The same held true for rubber, so they had to expand synthetic-
production capacity now. Using arguments of unmistakable bel-
licosity at a conference on the last day of June, he referred to
two major tasks facing them, one being to feed the nation and
the other to arm it for when it would be forced to “sally forth
for freedom’s last fight.”
It must have been a novel, even distasteful, experience to be
lectured by former Air Force Captain Hermann Göring on basic
economics. But these industrialists had no choice. “The special
powers given me by the Führer,” he importantly explained,
“have coerced me into this totally new field of endeavor. It has
only recently dawned on me that this is vastly more important
than those that the Führer has entrusted to me hitherto.”
There were those in later years who called him lazy, and he
hated the epithet. His diary would meticulously record the
hours at which he rose, worked, relaxed, and retired to bed.
While Schacht’s civil servants went on summer furlough,
Göring stayed in Berlin, called top-level conferences, and sur-
rounded himself with his own hand-picked economic specialists.
He was unobtrusively usurping broad areas of Hitler’s govern-
mental functions. The Reich Cabinet now rarely met when it
did, on June , , Martin Bormann specifically remarked on
it in his diary. Göring was using his own Prussian Cabinet in its
place, co-opting Himmler, Lammers, and other Reich ministers
to meetings as he saw fit.
By July his staff was complete, hand-picked from I.G.
Farben, the Air Ministry, and his Prussian Ministry, or filched
from existing government agencies regardless of party connec-