Schacht himself sent a twelve-page letter to Göring protesting
the cost of the new steelworks. “In a totalitarian state,” he ar-
gued, “it is wholly impossible to conduct a split-level economic
policy.” He appealed to Hitler, but the economically illiterate
Führer left it to Göring to fight this battle. On August ,
Göring sent a stinging twenty-four-page reply to the minister,
full of rhetoric but totally ignoring the arguments. He had
brute force on his side, and was well aware of it. Replying to the
Steel Association’s protest in a telegram two days later, he ac-
cused them of barefaced “egotism,” and of sabotaging the inter-
ests of the Reich. He hinted at prosecution. Schacht went on
leave with his tail between his legs and eventually resigned.
The H.G.W. remained solely Göring’s concern. It was not
state controlled, no ministry supervised its rambling affairs. He
appointed his stooge Pili Körner chairman of the board. As late
as July , the Ministry of Economics would complain that no
agency could tell who was on H.G.W.’s board or how it ran its
affairs. The answer was one word: autocratically. H.G.W. spread
stealthy tentacles across Germany and Austria into the Balkans
and southeastern Europe, swallowing strategically interesting
companies in interlocking financial deals behind a veil of mili-
tary secrecy, deals that would have made Göring a hard man to
beat on Wall Street. H.G.W. took over iron-ore mines in the
Palatinate belonging to Flick; bought up Austria’s iron-ore fields
in Styria, and eventually built a new steelworks at Linz to process
these ores; erected entire cities at Salzgitter and Linz to house
the workers; secured basic limestone and coal requirements by
swallowing the Walhalla Kaliwerke AG at Regensburg and the
Deutsche Kohlenzeche and by forcing Ruhr coal mining com-
panies to sign long-term contracts for supplies. (H.G.W. would
eventually control ten major coal mines.)
In Germany, H.G.W. then purchased percent of the