Goering's Grip on Europe
If ever the German "New Order" came into being it would be on the basis of loot organised on a scale never dreamed of before. Nazi Germany has been seizing the ownership and control of vast industries wherever her power has extended. A report published by the United States Office of War Information shows the un- scrupulous rapacity with which the Nazis have expropriated the owners of great key industries and transferred shares and control to themselves. The main organisation that appears to have been used for this purpose has been the Reichswerke Hermann Goering A.G., founded in 1937 to develop German iron ore resources, the Government holding more than 50 per cent, of its stock. It has annexed the financial control of vast manufacturing concerns in Austria and Czechoslovakia, has expropriated owners in Poland, Russia and Yugoslavia, and has even asserted itself in nominally free countries such as Rumania, where it shares with the Rumanian Government great iron and steel businesses. Many of these manipulations have been effected without any show of legal pro- cedure. Other big German business concerns have fastened them- selves voraciously on other fields found ripe for exploitation. The German industrialists have followed in the wake of the conquering armies, and conquest has carried with it the sacred right to loot. When the time comes to sort out the tangled remains of Europe it will sometimes be no easy matter to decide who are the rightful owners of interests absorbed by the Germans. If they were capable of winning the war the key industries of the whole Continent would be in their hands.
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