"Complete Standstill"

Radio set is offered in exchange for a fat goose.

Who needs a short fur coat in exchange for a fat goose?

Willing to give five marks ($2) worth of cloth for a fat goose.

With agony-column ads such as these, hungry Germans are pathetically trying to wangle at least one good meal during the Christmas holidays. The blockade of the Reich, already as tight as Great Britain and France are able to make it, is becoming still more drastic due to war in the Baltic, and, if the Balkans blaze up too in a Soviet grab at Bessarabia, German scarcity may soon be back to the bare bones of 1918. Significantly, last week, Vierjahresplan, official magazine of Reich Economic Four-Year Plan Director Hermann Wilhelm Goering, declared: "We must face the facts. They are the same as in 1914-18. England's power has brought German overseas trade to a complete standstill."

The article containing this piece of super-gloom was by Emil Helfferich, onetime "Maritime Adviser to the Fuehrer" who became board chairman of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg American Lines when the Nazis lumped them under the same directorate in 1933. Herr Helfferich urged that the Government aid stagnant German export-import firms by permitting them to discharge superfluous employes (illegal under the Nazi job-protection laws); by letting them use "rent free" the Government warehouses in which German clogged exports are now piling up; and by directly providing "necessary capital to keep them afloat." If all this is done, "then we need not fear for our foreign trade," concluded Economist Helfferich. "The German trader may, with his inherent acumen, find new business possibilities, perhaps new pathways to his old territories overseas."

Since precious little German trade can be sailed, submarined or flown overseas, writing about "new possibilities" or "new pathways" in Vierjahresplan sounded like official whistling in the dark.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.