The Four-Year Plan revolutionized Nazi Germany’s economy.
Resisting the temptation to set up a special ministry, Göring had
used instead his own Prussian Ministry staff as a kind of matrix,
to which he appointed extra civil servants one thousand of
them and co-opted the Staatssekretär (roughly, deputy min-
ister) from each Reich ministry to attend plan meetings. Iron
ore was crucial to the plan’s success.
Göring’s seminal interest in iron ore probably originated in
a meeting with local ironmaster Hermann Röchling in Saar-
brücken in November . Röchling had warned him not to
rely on Swedish ores in any future war and had startled
Göring with the remark that there was enough iron ore, admit-
tedly of low grade, in Germany to cover any wartime needs:
They could produce around fourteen million tons of pig iron
every year. Göring was skeptical, and the Ruhr steelmakers
scornful. They pointed out that the German ores contained
only percent iron, compared with percent in the Swedish
and Lorraine ores; besides, the German ores were acidic and di-
fficult to smelt.
For a year Göring had done nothing. At the Berlin confer-
ence on May , , he had casually asked, “Is there anything
to be said for increasing the output of iron ores from our own
ore fields?” Put in charge of the Four-Year Plan, Göring had the
authority to answer that question himself. Encouraged by coal-
baron Paul Pleiger who called the biggest steelmakers “scrap-
metal merchants” and by his own distant American cousin,
Hermann Alexander Brassert (of H. G. Brassert & Company,
Chicago), who undertook to design for the new Hermann
Göring Works blast furnaces capable of reducing these difficult
native ores, Göring decided on a confrontation with the Ruhr
steel industry. “I gave them one year in which to exploit the
ores,” he recalled. The Ruhr metallurgists scoffed at the idea; in