English Translation

47 A 25 has not been reduced today. However, it is not a criticism which would be fundamentally directed against the regime or even against its foreign policy, but only against so-called excesses of the regime, which one hopes to eliminate over time. On the other hand, this criticism is based precisely on the circles which in the beginning supported Hitler the most and in their own right only lifted into the saddle. Of these circles, which basically wanted to achieve only a subsidization and a reprivatization of the then under state power by the Hitler regime, the accusation of "brown Bolshevism" is more often raised. But these circles too are already too faint to be able to become somehow dangerous to the regime. For other and powerful industrial circles, such as Krupp in particular, the IG and the electrical industry, too great advantages are attached to the regime and its military policy, so that they could form a serious fraternity against the regime, just because the interventions of the state economic bureaucracy are often perceived as very unpleasant and disturbing. First of all, there is no way - and that was the strength of the regime from the beginning - to eliminate these unpleasant sides of Nazi rule without losing the pleasant sides at the same time. Of course, the economic circles do not indulge themselves in any illusions about the actual economic weakness of Germany. They believe, however, that it is possible, with the help of Russia and South-East Europe, to maintain war-related supplies with the greatest restrictions on consumption, to a large extent that it will be sufficient to deal with the West, as long as it is actually located on the Western front. It is admitted, however, that no one in Germany has any precise idea of how the actual consumption of war material will develop if the war is waged on both sides with the full commitment of all forces. All calculations that are available about this are more or less regarded as sta- tistical gimmicks, which have, above all, the one mistake that is not known with which material the opponent will be using. It is comforted with vague hopes that, as in the last war, it will also succeed this time, that the difficulties that arise in each case will always be mastered by any substitute methods and restrictions elsewhere.