Chimneys in the Jungle

In the world of the future, as mapped by Nazi propaganda, Africa's entire vastitude will come under German control (see p. 23). Last week, by virtue of troops on hand, Germany had a stronger African military position than at any other time in history. And last week Germany again began to bang the colonial drum. In Berlin a Nazi spokesman announced the approaching creation of a German Colonial Ministry, adding: "Germany long and consistently has claimed a right to colonies."

To most colonial experts outside Germany, the Nazis' colonial drum used to sound pretty limp from banging, was not a very compelling instrument. Even Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf loudly disclaimed colonial ambitions, insisted rather on the European expansion of the Reich. He knew perfectly well, for instance, that all the African colonies which the Allies took from Germany after World War I had cost Germany far more than they were worth, had accounted for only one two-hundredth of Germany's trade, had attracted less than 20,000 German colonizers.*

But after Adolf Hitler came to power he wanted colonies for strategy and prestige. And today, when his strategy is simply to take what he wants, when his prestige comes from doing so, he has found that colonial drum pounding helps to drown out German complaints about food shortages and ersatz commodities. Present Nazi talk of gaining not only Germany's lost colonies but all Africa carries a great deal more weight than mere propaganda.

To one particular group of Germans this prospect is intoxicating. They are engineers whose imaginations are as far-flung and generalized as most German engineering minds are focused and specific. Recently three German journals ran an article by Dr. Walter Hagemann. That colonial expert, sarcastically flaying the "chaotic" imperialism of the African past, vaguely blueprinted the Nazi Africa of the future, a sort of New Super-Order with Jules Verne trimmings.

Dr. Hagemann vowed that Nazi Africa would have natural boundaries, a logical communications network, planned economy and a native policy "along uniform lines drawn to fit the intellectual and bodily conditions of the natives." The last-named, he darkly hinted, would prevent "those indications of social and racial decay which so many American lands are now fighting."

Engineers of the German Union for Colonial Technique are preparing a 50-year plan for Africa "on a scientific basis and, for the time being, without regard to the political constellation." Root ideas of the plan are those of Geophysicist Hermann Soergel of Munich. A conservation specialist, Herr Soergel points to the "tragic desiccation" of Africa caused by the fact that many rivers--such as the Orange, Cunene, Zambezi, Limpopo--once watered great interior basins, but have gradually gnawed through mountain ridges and now empty into the sea. Herr Soergel would rehydrate Africa by several giant schemes:

> A mammoth dam across the Congo River--a dam to dwarf the largest now on earth, backing up a Congo lake of 400,000 square miles, furnishing 240,000,000 hydroelectric horsepower--even more phantasmal than the German Engineers' Club's dream. Herr Soergel claims that, in addition to furnishing this power, such a project would temper the surrounding climate, make possible the ending of dangerous tropical diseases, allow central Africa to become in 200 to 300 years a natural living space for the white race.

> Dams on the Shari River, which now fills Lake Chad, just south of the Sahara. At present the Shari threatens to join the Benue River on its seaward course and leave Chad a useless salt basin.

> Tunnels sluicing Mediterranean water into the dry Qattara Depression in the Libyan Desert. Result: 250,000 hydroelectric horsepower, a lake 200 by 60 miles, a raised level of ground water and desert oases, new inland waterways, new fishing and salt industries.

Says one German geophysicist of the African 50-year plan: "There is nothing imperialistic in it. It is a clearly recognized aim of that great conception of the world which, in this war, will remove that old occidental disunion, that senseless squandering of forces and that plutocratic narrow-mindedness wrongly called 'colonial development.' . . . The inventors of this plan do not regard it as a task reserved for the Germans but as a great productive enterprise for the whole white race." Just what the German planners have in mind for Africa's swarming black race has not been made clear.

*Approximately the number of Germans who lived in Paris before 1914.

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