one report to Göring an expert described the native ores as
“trash” whereupon Göring compulsorily purchased the
mining rights from Vögler’s United Steel Works, paying a price
that they could hardly refuse for “trash.”
Throughout the spring of , while his top secret plans
for his own steelmaking empire were being laid, Göring fought a
rearguard action against Hjalmar Schacht, the economics min-
ister, who still put profitability before the nation’s long-term
strategic interests. Neither Schacht nor the steel industry had
any inkling of Göring’s plan to erect a steelworks until it was
publicly announced on July , . On the next day he issued
the contract to H. G. Brassert & Company. He broke the news
to the leading men of the steel industry at a meeting in Berlin
one evening a week later, saying, “We’re going to put up the
biggest steelworks the world has ever known at Salzgitter.”
Talking of the steel bottleneck that was the limiting factor in all
the rival nations’ rearmament programs, Göring added, “I am
going to show people that the Third Reich is better able to get
around it than all these countries with their parliamentary gov-
ernments.”
The “Reichswerke AG für Erzbergbau und Eisenhütten
Hermann Göring” (Incorporated Reich Works for Ore Mining
and Iron Smelting, “Hermann Göring”) or the Hermann
Göring Works, H.G.W., as it formally became one year later
rapidly developed into one of Europe’s biggest industrial com-
bines. The Ruhr industrialists who had partly financed the Nazi
rise were now confronted by a powerful outsider who cheerfully
threatened confiscation if need be to lay hands on the ore fields
he required; the nine biggest steelmakers, united under the
leadership of Krupp von Bohlen in the Steel Association
(Stahlverein) of Düsseldorf, declared war on Göring; encour-
aged by Schacht, they signed a protest to the government.