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FIRE IN THE EARTH
Brazil. About the same time Antwerp letters were received by New York jewelers offering to sell cut stones. Payment was to be in American dollars to the account of the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft A. G. Berlin. Presumably, the diamond merchant was paid in paper marks. Germany also has another source of cut: a good many millions of dollars worth of cut diamonds fell into her hands "requisitioned" largely from her non-Aryan citizens. While in jewelry, this could easily be broken up.
That story by Mr. Ball, told with the calm objectivity of the engineer, may give some suggestion as to what has hap­pened to all "captured" industries in the Nazi-conquered lands. Some may say it is strange that Germany should en­courage the sale of diamonds "outside," since diamonds are necessary in industry. But Germany, from all we have been able to gather from reliable sources (as the Washington columnists glibly say), had two reasons: First, it needed the money, based on international exchange; second, it banked heavily on getting all the rough or so-called "indus­trial" diamonds it wanted from Brazil. Only, as we shall see in a chapter devoted to "industrials," her big dream exploded in her face.
But all that contributed to the sudden importance of the diamond-cutting business and fraternity in the United States. For years this country imported more than 75 per cent of the world's cut diamonds, and four-fifths of them had been cut in Amsterdam and Antwerp. The United States, of course, had a few cutters, dating back to the Civil War when a Boston jewel merchant, Henry Morse, set up in 1865 a cutting plant and taught his workmen how to polish diamonds on the Old World pattern. Other jewelers followed suit and by 1890 a half-dozen houses in Boston and New York were employing a few score of men to cut the rough stones. An old firm dealing in jewels, RandalL
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