The juggernaut

From the ten-billion-dollar budget of the German Republic for 1929, the military budget claims about 700 million marks; 200 millions are for the Navy. If one knows how this defense comes about, then one also knows that without any further investigation, one hundred million could be wiped out in the navy and one hundred in the land army, without the need for a man to be laid off or the value of our military armament.

But these 700 millions are far from our total armaments costs. It would be a job for weeks to put them together and compare them to the total public spending in Germany, which may be estimated at 15 billion. Let's try to give a rough idea of ​​it.

First of all, it should be remembered that the Reichswehr understood how to deport a considerable part of its expenses for barracks, parade grounds and the like to the communities, which are struggling to get a garrison. The "Other Germany" listed in its last number alone from Silesia six cities, which have spent over 6 million marks for barracks.

Secondly, a number of spending items are to be referred to as "invisible" arms expenditure, not included in the budget of the Reich Ministry of Defense, but in other sections of the general budget, especially in the Ministry of Transport budget. This includes subsidies for aviation and aid to firms eligible for war materiel production.

Third, spending on state police, also some 700 million, to which the empire contributes 200 million marks to the countries, is not exactly consistent, but to a large extent military spending. Because the state police is in its present scope and nature also a kind of military, although it is intended only for internal purposes. If she did not feel herself as such, how could she have taken on the honorable task of cultivating the "tradition" of the former German colonial army in her individual departments? (The Wurttemberg Schutzpolizei, for example, is a traditional part of the Südseeschutztruppe, for us natives always a strange, less honorable consciousness.)

If we take all of these armaments costs, which are not in the Reichswehr budget together, to 400 millions, we know that we raise German people over one billion marks annually to prepare for the next war.

The last one is not yet fully paid off, as you know. The supply of war victims and survivors costs in the budget year 1929 about one and a half billion; the war indemnity two and a half billion (of it over the Reichs budget one and a half, another we pay over the industrial and the railroad bonds).

There is a saying: Harm makes you smart, or: Burnt children fear the fire.

Such wisdom applies, however, like the teachings of Christianity, only in private life.

Rather: not even there.

1929, 16 Sch.

See also the article by Michael Berger in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of the 24.08.2014: https://www.nzz.ch/international/europa/ein-geheimplan-fuer-den-zweiten-weltkrieg-1.18368619