The Uncooked Octopus

U.S. Senator Harley M. Kilgore, sweating and aggressive, paraded official witnesses before his subcommittee on war mobilization. His aim was to compile information for anti-cartel legislation. What emerged was proof that industrial Germany had been neither defeated nor destroyed, and that only a strong Allied policy could keep down the German will to war.

The most disturbing facts were those of Foreign Economic Administrator Leo T. Crowley. Their substance:

In 1944, despite bombings and manpower shortages, the German economic and industrial machine achieved its highest production level in history. An uncontrolled Germany would have the wherewithal to stage another war in five years. Among Germany's surviving assets: P:Four million tons of machine tools and capacity to produce much more. P:A dye and chemical industry virtually untouched by war.

P:Equipment and resources to produce annually 25 million tons of iron and steel, far in excess of peacetime needs, and a capacity to make 250,000 tons of aluminum a year.

P:Nitrogen-producing equipment only slightly damaged. P:Similar capacity for producing petroleum products, rubber, bearings, electric power, electrical and electronic equipment, wood products, precision and optical instruments.

The New Krupps. In addition to these tangible assets German industry has a will to survive, and a wiliness to match. Other testimony presented before the subcommittee disclosed that when defeat became certain the Nazis took three steps, in an effort to insure postwar operation of the Krupp industries: 1) Government control was eliminated, so that Krupp became technically a "private industry"; 2) Nazis were expelled from Krupp personnel; and 3) the Krupps were accused of (but not prosecuted for) defeatist and anti-Nazi sentiments.

Other tactics were more obscure. Records of technological and research advancements were destroyed or carefully hidden. Nazi laws forbidding export of capital were eased to permit German industries to build up assets abroad. German industrialists hoped to strengthen themselves through international borrowing and cartel agreements, weakening the will of the Allies to take punitive measures.

In Argentina, said Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton, there were 104 German "spearhead" firms. Not one had been completely eliminated.

The Darkened Path. The subcommittee was told that U.S. and Allied policy still fell far short of meeting the problem. Said a Crowley statement: "We have still to agree on and to begin to apply a detailed, specific, unified economic and industrial disarmament program which will eliminate the German war potential as a part of a unified occupation program."

Said the War Department's lean, hardbitten Major General John H. Hilldring: "We are still feeling our way along a path which lies more in darkness than in light."

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