ITALY: Pulmotor Squads

Into Rome all last week poured platoons of German economic troubleshooters. First delegation was led by Adolf Hitler’s top economist, Minister of Economics Dr. Walther Funk. After him came Trade Expert Dr. Karl Clodius and another brigade of graph-&-slide-rule underlings. When both the Doctors had finished talking to Benito Mussolini and his financial experts the Axis “had reached full agreement on all the most important economic questions connected with the war.”

What the agreement was, no one knew, but it was obvious that some changes were going to be made in Italy.

The people of Italy would be glad enough to see some changes, since their limping economy has for a year showed typical symptoms of wartime inflation. The only staple food of which they can get anything like a normal supply is sugar. Clothes and consumer products are scarce. But these were not the kind of changes that Germany contemplated. Said Dr. Funk: “In this war it is trifling … if one folk must suffer privation in this or that way. It is decisive only that we make the British blockade unworkable. . . .” It looked as if “economic cooperation” spelled hard times for Italy.

> The Germans announced that they would not boost the price of the coal, which Italy’s industries must have. This may indicate that Germany has somehow figured a way to get enough rolling stock to resume coal shipments to her partner. Since June, Germany’s normal shipments of some 1,000,000 tons a month have tapered off almost to nothing.

> Two days after Dr. Funk left Rome, Mussolini announced the most drastic housecleaning that Italy’s economic administration has ever had. Twenty-two Fascist guilds oversee the whole industrial and agricultural life of II Duce’s Corporative State. Last week Mussolini fired or shifted the top executives of 19.

> Another German mission came to Rome, for no announced purpose. Its leader was Germany’s Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, director of Nazi activities outside of Germany.

It seemed that the pulmotor squad of Nazi economists was trying to blow a little life into the moribund Italian economy.