PArtTISAN REVIEW
capitalism. It is also advanced by other critics, according to whom
National Socialism or Hitler himself would have been endangered
by a peace, even a provisional one.
From 1938 on, after the departure of Schacht, the economic
situation changed. What was feared was no longer unemployment
but inflation. Not only had full employment been achieved, but there
was a manpower shortage. An attempt was launched to transform
the small shopkeepers, whose votes had been won by means of
demagogic attacks against the Jews and the department stores, into
industrial workers. At that moment, Schacht advocated a pause. He
wanted to stop issue of workers' bonds or short-term bonds, since they
no longer served to incorporate unemployed men or machines into
the productive process, and since they thus no longer had any basis
of security and constituted only spurious liens. Therefore it seemed
absurd to maintain that the non-resumption of private investment
was threatening the economy of the Third Reich with a collapse
that only the war prevented.
In 1934, the theory of pump priming was refuted: a limited
dosage of supplementary purchasing power, created by means of
public works projects, had proven insufficient to create general pros–
perity. Pump priming had had only limited effects. Private invest–
ments had remained at a standstill. The government had to assume
the task that it had hoped to leave to the initiative of the entre–
preneurs. But in 1938 and in 1939, the situation was quite dif–
ferent: after rearmament, after the four-year plan and the annexa–
tion of Austria and of Czechoslovakia, the Third Reich did not
have to choose between military conquest and a relapse into economic
stagnation.
But, it might be objected, was the threat not from another direc–
tion-namely, was it not caused by the shortage of foreign currency,
needed to buy the foodstuffs that the soil of the Third Reich was not
supplying, and the raw materials that its substratum, even after the
extension of its territory, did not contain? The conquests had ag–
gravated rather than corrected the imbalance. Neither Austria nor
Czechoslovakia was self-sufficient; both imported part of their food–
stuffs, and both were bound to the world economy more than the
Reich was. It is not to be disputed that in March 1939 autarchy was
an ideal as remote, as inaccessible, as it had been at the outset of
