Schacht’s policy of selective uncoupling from the United States, Germany’s traditional supplier of cotton. ‘To strengthen the domestic raw material base as quickly as possible, it is the German rayon factories’ peremptory duty not only to exploit their manufacturing capacity to the full, these must also be expanded with haste.’ The Reich authorities wished to see a doubling in the production of viscose-rayon and a huge increase in the production of so-called staple fibres to at least 100,000 tons per annum.100 The problem, as in the case of oil, was that world prices for wool and cotton were
...more
