Money for the World of Tomorrow

In June 1939 — with the world war not yet started — the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, sent a rather anxious message to the ministries of foreign affairs and of foreign trade in Rome. He reported his meeting with Walther Funk. Funk had started by saying that the two countries — even though not yet at war — were by then ‘war economies’, and observed that Italian trade policy towards the Reich was not in line with Italy’s real economic interest: Italy, Funk had remarked, was developing new factories, not only for war purposes, but also to produce goods that would have been more convenient to purchase from ‘fellow countries’ (paesi amici). The debate that had characterized the trade relations between the two countries (described in Chapter 7), continued unabated. According to Funk, Italy wanted commodities from Germany that were badly needed by Germany itself, and also wanted a reduction in the import of merchandise that ‘has always represented normal German exports to Italy’. Funk essentially meant buy less German coal, which serves our needs, and more German cars: a strong Nazi suggestion of a division of labour between the two countries. This imposed geographical specialization was certainly a central feature of Nazi plans for a new Europe. Germany should be the engine of industrial production, while Italy should use coal and other commodities for its war effort only, not to develop its own engineering industry.