On this subject curious letters and unceasing polemics appeared in the Alsatian newspapers.
Certain interested persons complained (Strassburger Post for the third of November) that the time was so short that only the inhabitants of the country and their immediate neighbors had any opportunity of profiting by these occasions. They remarked with all justice that to get the highest prices for these sales there ought to be a large number of bidders.
For the farm lands, the neighbors would suffice to bring up the bids to a high enough sum, but when it was a matter of a magnificent château, like that at Osthofen, with a garden and a park, bidders for this luxury would scarcely be found among the peasants. The speculators alone would step in and would acquire for a mere nothing properties of great value. And the plaintiffs added, "Is that desirable?"
The following considerations advanced by one of the plaintiffs are not without interest. "Sufficient means of communication still remain between France and Germany. Do you not see the danger of feigned sales, to third persons, who will buy in the goods at small cost and will hand them over later on to their former proprietors? In this way the French influence over the ownership of the land will be reëstablished in the future."
To these complaints and wrongs the Strassburger Post for the eighth of November replied in detail.
It assured that the list of goods to be disposed of had not only been placed by the authorities in the several states of the empire, to give buyers time to take advantage of possible bargains, but also a catalogue of stationary objects had been published in fifteen hundred copies by Schultz & Co. of Strassburg.
This catalogue was quickly used up and the demand for it continued to come in, which proved that the buyers were informed in time.
The newspaper adds that the things to be sold have been visited by buyers coming from old Germany as well as from Alsace-Lorraine, and sales propositions have been made before the publication of notices in the newspapers.
It seems, furthermore, that if the sales of land and the exploitation of farm lands have ended rapidly, it was because colonization societies, called "black bands," have overtly bought up or had bought up the properties by their agents, in the hope that their plans would be realized after the war. In industrial matters, there was recently founded in Berlin a German syndicate which proposes to buy up the actions.
For the textile industry in particular, it is a question of a veritable trust against which is arrayed "a syndicate of Alsatian manufacturers who have felt the need of defending themselves."