But what Germany did not need was to spend 200 million Reichsmarks on a new steelworks complete with foundries and rolling mills. It would lumber Germany with excess capacity, drive up costs and cause chaos in the complex network of international cartels that regulated the European steel trade.113 Pleiger and Goering, however, were now deploying the full apparatus of the police state. They had informants both inside the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs and the steel cartel and this, together with Goering’s personal wire-tapping service, gave them advanced warning of Poensgen and Schacht’s
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