Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- 2 The Company, the Party, and the Regime
- 3 Aryanization
- 4 Autarky and Armament
- 5 Precious Metals for the Reich
- 6 War Production and Spoliation
- 7 Forced Labor
- 8 Degesch and Zyklon B
- 9 War's End and Aftermath
- Appendices
- Index
4 - Autarky and Armament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction and Overview
- 2 The Company, the Party, and the Regime
- 3 Aryanization
- 4 Autarky and Armament
- 5 Precious Metals for the Reich
- 6 War Production and Spoliation
- 7 Forced Labor
- 8 Degesch and Zyklon B
- 9 War's End and Aftermath
- Appendices
- Index
Summary
On January 9, 1934, Degussa's managing board reported to its stockholders on the first business year completed under National Socialism. Calling sales “normal” and “fairly satisfactory” in the period from October 1932 through September 1933, since “in the course of the year worsening export difficulties were somewhat offset by a certain improvement in the domestic market mentioned already in the last report,” the directors nevertheless sounded a cautionary note:
We cannot conceal that the export conditions for most of our fields [of production] are continuously and considerably worsening. In this, the boycott movement abroad plays a much smaller role than the great and in the most recent past growing drive in almost all countries to produce as much as possible of some of our products at home. We consider it our duty to note that we see in this movement a danger for the future profitability of the Scheideanstalt.
Almost four years later, as Ernst Busemann began drafting the final report on the business year 1936/37, the air had long since gone out of “the boycott movement abroad” in reaction to the brutalities that followed the Nazi takeover. Yet, the foreign trade situation remained troubling, and he planned to emphasize once more that “we place the greatest weight on the cultivation of exports (foreign business).”
The similar preoccupation of these comments was – and is – profoundly misleading. To be sure, they reflected a constant concern that went with doing business in a relatively resource-poor country such as Germany.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Cooperation to ComplicityDegussa in the Third Reich, pp. 111 - 147Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004