Activité sur All Honorable Men

THE HEAVIES 107 Here, at the end of May 1945, we were getting an answer to some of our questions about the "Rhineland industrialists." From the start we had wondered what it was that distinguished this group in the Ruhr and Rhineland from producers of industrial goods in other parts of the world, who have sometimes been known to transact business for generations without finding it necessary to buy themselves a dictator. The Bruning government had already made a number of concessions to the large...

These operations had to be "made" profitable by whatever bookkeeping arrangements or subsidies might be necessary. One of the first was to prevent competition inside Germany from "unco-operative" firms which had not yet seen the advantages of joining in the new economic system. A steel company experimenting with low-grade domestic iron ores, for example, had to be protected against companies using higher-grade ores from other sources. All of these types of controls, including financial controls,...

’’One definition of "Rhineland industrialists," we decided, is that they are those who combine together to carry out a program of heavy industrial expansion, regardless of economic consequences, and then try to counteract those consequences by looking for a man on horseback. Each time we touched something new, we seemed to be opening up fresh questions faster than our small forces could find answers. With a growing sense that there were other "Rhineland industrialists" in Britain and the United ...