By the end of May, the choices facing Germany had become starkly obvious. In a remarkably frank article, the Wirtschaftsdienst demanded that if the Reich government had decided definitively not to devalue, it should draw the necessary conclusions.48 In the journal’s view, the choice against devaluation marked a fundamental divide between the liberal economic policies of countries such as Britain and a newly emerging system of National Socialist economic management. If devaluation was ruled out, then there was no alternative but to begin as soon as possible with the establishment of a new and
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