A Report on Germany
Chapter II of the book is a memorandum of the Johns-Manville economist William C. Bober to Lewis H. Brown entitled The German Situation Today.
[7] Brown sketched the process of the German economic disease as follows: The Iron Curtain separated 20 million non-farm people from the Eastern breadbasket.
Hence the German workers in the Ruhr, which was the industrial heart of Germany and likewise of Europe, got only half the food they had gotten before the war, even with American relief.
The right to return to work should be fully granted to industrial technicians, managers and skilled workers until a denazification court decides to revocate them at a later date.
German Plants manufacturing munitions of war are demolished or dismantled and transferred to the victor nations as reparations.
A small but highly effective inspection and control service, maintained by the Allied Governments will bring to attention any attempt to use materials for a future war.
In the same year West Germany exports 4.8 million tons of coal and this small amount is too large and prevents the restoration of her economy.
Poland took over all of Germany’s Silesian mines which can export ten to fifteen million tons to coal deficit countries.
Thus the Ruhr worker remained too hungry and too weak for effective hard work required in underground mining.
The simplest repair parts, even nails wood and glass are lacking or are above the miners’ income at black market prices.
[18] The reason is the slow rate of repairs resulting from shortage of necessary supplies as lumber, steel, asbestos packing and lagging, cotton waste for journal boxes, oil pads and spare parts of all kind.
[19] Key supply parts and even rolling stock should be shipped from the US, before the winter 1947 may have brought a complete breakdown in the transportation system.
Brown recommended two measures: At first, the former Ruhr miners, who are prisoners of war now working in French mines, where their output is low, should be brought back more rapidly.
[21] So Brown recommends, to give the British workers a special ration coupon for each ton of coal produced on Saturdays.
America could as well allocate the badly needed conveyor belts for the above ground pits and steel billets to British manufacturers of mining machinery.
[22] The United Nations should agree upon a five-year-plan on the fundamental assumption that hard labor in the factory cannot be well done on a meager diet.
But even in 1947 Germany could resume her pre-war role as manufacturer of producer goods, which impressed the visitors of two splendid export exhibitions at Munich and Stuttgart.
[26] Brown recommended, that nations, which would re-establish the trade with Germany, should give parts of their currency to the International Bank for loaning this money to German industrialists.
German goods were desired by Sweden and Italy, but the exchange of products, that both countries needed, was prohibited by the then existing regulations.
Before issuing the new bank notes every effort should be made, to stimulate the production of consumer goods, so that the Germans could buy something with the new currency.
