Hitler’s Four Year Plan speech answered the strategic question posed in the summer of 1936. But it in no way addressed the immediate practical question of how to conduct an enormous rearmament drive in the face of a severe balance of payments problem. In the short run, by adding to booming domestic demand Goering’s investment programme could only make matters worse, diverting exportable goods for domestic uses, whilst sucking in more foreign raw materials for the production of large industrial facilities. What Germany needed was the precise opposite. To ensure an adequate inflow of hard
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