In February 1939, Göring dispatched his deputy Helmuth Wohlthat of the Four-Year Plan organization to Bucharest with instructions to sign yet another German-Romanian economic treaty that would allow Germany total economic domination of Romania, especially its oil industry.Weinberg, Gerhard The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II 1937-1939, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 page 494. That Wohlthat, the number two man in the Four-Year Plan organization was sent to Bucharest indicated the importance of the German-Romanian talks. Carol had resisted German demands for more oil in the December 1938 agreement, and instead had succeeded by early 1939 placing Romania to a certain extent within the British economic sphere of influence. To counterbalance the increasingly powerful German influence in the Balkans, Carol wanted closer ties with Britain. At the same time, the Four Year Plan was running into major difficulties by early 1939 and in particular, Göring's plans to have synthetic oil plants which would make oil from coal were well behind schedule. The new technology of making synthetic oil from lignite coal had run into major technical problems and cost overruns, and Göring had been informed in early 1939 that the synthetic oil plants whose construction had started in 1936 would not be operative by 1940 as planned. It was not until the summer of 1942 that Germany's first synthetic oil plants finally start operating. It was making painfully obvious to Göring in the first months of 1939 that the German economy would not be ready to support a total war by 1940 as the Four-Year Plan of 1936 had envisioned while at the same time his economic experts were telling him the Reich needed to import 400,000 tons of oil per month while Germany had in fact imported only 61,000 tons of oil per month in the last four months of 1938.
