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PARTISAN REYIEW
clearly the dangers of revolution and economic ruin even a vic–
torious Germany would run in a second world war, and which also
realized the kind of internal economy which the alternative course
would mean. There were appeasers inside as well as outside of
Germany, and, as was also the case in other countries, they repre–
sented primarily the big business forces. In the years of his power,
Schacht was the leading proponent of colonies, trading concessions,
and international collaboration as the key to Germany's economic
problem. The sad case of Dr. Rudolf Brinkmann, Schacht's suc·
cessor at the Reichsbank, may also be cited. Dr. Brinkmann
summed up the businessman's objections to autarky thus: "A well–
planned internal economy depends on exports.... Let us beware
of arrogance.
It
is wrong to proclaim to the rest of the world: 'You
want us, you are dependent on us.' We should rather say: 'We are
all mutually interdependent.' "
It
may be relevant to note that,
within a few weeks of his taking over the presidency of the Reichs–
bank, Dr. Brinkmann went into retirement, suffering from "a ner–
vous breakdown with loss of memory."
The second course, that of autarky, meant, internally, more
State intervention than ever, enormous State expenditures, and, as
Schacht well knew, the replacement of the old capitalist profit
economy by a bureaucratic production-for-use planned economy;
externally, it meant abandonment of the perspective of a peaceful
collaboration of world capitalism, war as soon as the economy was
ready for it, and, in the event of a German victory, the extension
of this new kind of economy to--in the first instance-the whole
European continent. The worst fears of the German business com–
munity have been realized.
Inside Germany, the Nazis' policies won out over those fav–
ored by the business community because they were better adapted
to gearing a highly industrialized society for a supreme
social
effort, namely, war. So too in the field of foreign policy, the Nazi
policies also triumphed over those of the conservatives because
they were based on a more realistic and profound understanding of
the condition of world capitalism in the thirties than the German
big bourgeoisie had. The Nazis realized that the perspective of
international cooperation, of a reconstitution of the world market
and some kind of a 'deal' between the major capitalist powers
(perhaps at the expense of Russia )-that this was a bourgeois
