As the SS did their dirty work, Britain and Germany, the two largest economies in Europe, moved perilously close to an all-out trade war. Such a confrontation would have had incalculable effects on Hitler’s economic recovery. Britain was not only Germany’s main export market and hence its main source of hard currency; the British Empire was also the chief source of many of Germany’s imported raw materials. To make matters worse, the City of London was the chief provider of short-term finance for German foreign trade. Even if German imports were not British in origin, they were, more often than
...more
