NEW YORK (Dec. 16)
European peace depends upon settlement of Germany’s colonial demands, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Reichs Economic Minister, declares in an article to be published tomorrow in the January issue of Foreign Affairs.
Aimed to enlist the sympathy and understanding of America for those demands, the article cites economic and moral reasons why the United States cannot be indifferent to them.
Dr. Schacht names two conditions which he regards as essential to the solution of Germany’s raw material problem.
“First,” he declares, “Germany must produce her raw materials on territory under her own management: Second, this colonial territory must form part of her own monetary system.”
Concluding, Dr. Schacht states the German colonial problem is “simply and solely a problem of economic existence. Precisely for that reason the future of European peace depends upon it.”
Midway in the article, Dr. Schacht in discussing the moral aspects of the problem affecting the United States, digresses to make what is interpreted as a cautious apologetic for persecution of minorities in Germany.
“I know very well,” he declares, “and I wish here to confess it openly that many things that are happening in Germany today are not approved of by a large section of the American people. But may I, just as frankly, ask Americans this question: What would they themselves do, after having lost a war which they fought in the conviction that it was for their existence, if they then were oppressed for twenty long years by an unjust peace imposed by the victors, and on top of that were deprived by their opponents of the necessities of life.”