[Transcript]
Strikingly similar remarks to Ilgner’s were made barely four months later by Erich Neumann, the [Fascist] Secretary for the Four‐Year Plan. On 25 January 1941, he drafted a memorandum entitled ‘Towards the Question of Future Economic Policy in the South‐East’.
According to him, the penetration of German capital and industry was only natural. Although Germany overall had an interest in improving the living conditions of its neighbours, any increase in standard of living and purchasing power was not to be allowed in the future if it came at the expense of the surplus exports of the goods on which [the Third Reich] relied.
The only reason why those countries could provide an export surplus of the goods which [the Third Reich] needed was their low average consumer spending, which in Yugoslavia, as he stressed, was seven times lower than in [the Third Reich]. The average consumption of meat and bread in Yugoslavia was one third of that in [the Third Reich] and according to Neumann it should stay that way.
[Fascism’s] task was not to increase the living standard of the region, but to help with technical improvements which could increase production and yield. Any independent economic development of these countries was to be prevented from now on, they should be kept in the status of raw material and foodstuffs suppliers to the Reich and their surplus population used as migrant workers in [the Reich].
Such a policy would ‘keep us [the Germans] from danger […] that the consuming power of the people from the south‐east grows faster than their production abilities, which would leave only smaller and more expensive leftovers for our import needs’.³³
(Emphasis added. Source.)
(I know that this is a short post today, but my other ideas for subject matters looked less interesting and I’m too tired to research something else.)
Click here for events that happened today (September 25).
1934: Helsinki ratified the ‘Exchange of Notes constituting an Agreement modifying the Treaty of Commerce of March 24th, 1934, between the Two Countries’ in Berlin.
1937: Imperial bombers flew ninety‐five sorties over Nanjing between 0930 and 1630 hours, dropping five hundred bombs which caused more than six hundred (mostly civilian) casualties. The National Central Hospital, which had a large red cross painted on the roof, also took damage from these bombs. Coincidentally, sixteen Imperial carrier flightcraft from Kaga sank the Chinese light cruiser Yixian at Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, but the Imperialists lost two flightcraft in the attack.
1939: The Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw heavily as the Third Reich’s head of state arrived to observe the assault, then he returned to Berlin, which reintroduced food rationing throughout the German Reich.
1940: Vichy instituted a court martial body for crimes committed against the state. There was no appeal, and the sentence was to be carried out within two dozen hours. At 1145 hours, meanwhile, twenty‐seven Luftwaffe bombers escorted by thirty fighters attacked the Bristol Aeroplane Company factory at Filton in southwestern England, destroying construction sheds, eight newly‐built aircraft, 132 lives, and wounding 315, but the Luftwaffe lost six aircraft, eight lives, ten men became prisoners. At 1647 hours, two dozen Luftwaffe bombers escorted by 12 Bf 110 fighters attacked Plymouth in southern England, losing one bomber. Overnight, the Luftwaffe bombed London and other cities, while other Luftwaffe bombers laid mines in the Thames Estuary.
1941: Berlin ordered a halt to attacks on Leningrad in northern Russia, instead ordering that the city be starved into submission. Likewise, various Axis troops reached the Perekop Isthmus in Russia and began to cut off the Crimean Peninsula. Lastly, the Axis slaughtered 215 Jewish men, 229 Jewish women, and 131 of their children, all in Jahiuna, Lithuania (for a total of 575 people).
1942: The Axis exterminated 472 Jews in Bogdanovka. (There was only one survivor: a fifteen‐year‐old named Alisa Prizova, whom the Axis spared after she screamed, ‘Don’t kill me. I am not a Jew, I am a Kabardian.’) As well, Axis troops landed on Beru, Gilbert Islands, and the Third Reich’s Chancellor dismissed the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel‐General Halder, and appointed General Zeitzler to succeed him. At the same time, Berlin took away responsibility for the employment of General Staff Corps personnel from the Chief of the General Staff and gave it to the Army Personnel Office, which was directly subordinate to the Chancellor. After sundown, the Luftwaffe attacked Penzance, southwestern England.
1943: The Axis liquidated all Jewish ghetti in Byelorussia, and General Otto Fretter‐Pico became the commanding officer of the Wehrmacht’s 148th Infantry Division in Italy.
1944: The Greater German Reich formed the Volkssturm as Norwegian ministers urged its Teuton occupiers to withdraw from Norway.
1946: Hans Eppinger, Jr., Axis physician who joined the NSDAP (despite his Jewish ancestry) and performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners, took his own life.
1968: Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, the only leading racial theorist to join the NSDAP before 1933, was kind enough to drop dead.
1991: CIA asset and the Butcher of Lyon, Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie, finally kicked the bucket.
2005: Friedrich Peter, active Fascist, finally hit the dirt.
