Four Year Plan
In September 1936, Hitler launched the Four-Year Plan that called for a dramatic increase in military spending and to make Germany as autarkic as possible with the aim of having the "Reich" ready to fight a world war by 1940. The Four Year Plan required huge investments in the "Reichswerke" steel works, a programme for developing synthetic oil that soon went wildly over budget, and programmes for producing more chemicals and aluminium; the plan called for a policy of substituting imports and rationalizing industry to achieve its goals that failed completely. As the Four Year Plan fell further and further behind its targets, Hermann Göring, the chief of the Four Year Plan office, began to press for an "Anschluss" as a way of securing Austria's iron and other raw materials as a solution to the problems with the Four Year Plan. The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw wrote: ...above all, it was Hermann Göring, at this time close to the pinnacle of his power, who far more than Hitler, throughout 1937 made the running and pushed the hardest for an early and radical solution to the 'Austrian Question'. Göring was not simply operating as Hitler's agent in matters relating to the 'Austrian Question'. His approach differed in emphasis in significant respects...But Göring's broad notions of foreign policy, which he pushed to a great extent on his own initiative in the mid-1930s drew more on traditional pan-German concepts of nationalist power-politics to attain hegemony in Europe than on the racial dogmatism central to Hitler's ideology. Göring was far more interested in the return of the former German colonies in Africa than was Hitler, believed up to 1939 in the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance (an idea that Hitler had abandoned by late 1937), and wanted all Eastern Europe in the German economic sphere of influence. Göring did not share Hitler's interest in "Lebensraum" ("living space") as for him, merely having Eastern Europe in the German economic sphere of influence was sufficient. In this context, having Austria annexed to Germany was the key towards bringing Eastern Europe into Göring's desired "Grossraumwirtschaft" ("greater economic space").