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. In 1938, Romania produced 6.6 million tons of crude oil, 284,000 tons of crude steel, 133,000 tons of pig iron, 510,000 tons of cement and 289,000 tons of rolled steel. Hence Wohlthat demanded during his talks with the Romanian Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu that Romania nationalize their entire oil industry which was henceforward to controlled by a new corporation owned jointly by the German and Romanian governments while demanding Romania "respect German export interests" by only selling their oil to Germany. In addition, Wohlthat demanded a host of other measures that to all practical purposes would have converted Romania into a German economic colony. As Carol had no intention of giving in to these demands, the talks in Bucharest went very badly. It was at this point that Carol began what become known as the "Tilea affair" when on 17 March 1939 Virgil Tilea, the Romanian minister in London burst unexpectedly into the office of the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in an agitated state to announce that his country was faced with an imminent German invasion, and asked Halifax for British support. At same time, Carol mobilized five infantry corps on the Hungarian border to guard the supposed invasion. The British "economic offensive" in the Balkans was causing Germany very real economic pain as the British bought up Romanian oil that the Germans badly needed, hence their demands for control of the Romanian oil industry that so offended Carol. As the British believed in Tilea's claims, the "Tilea affair" had an immense impact of British foreign policy and led to the Chamberlain government doing a volta-face from appeasement of Germany to a policy of "containing" the Reich.Watt, Donald Cameron How War Came, New York: Pantheon Books, 1989 pages 176-178. Carol denied, unconvincingly, knowing anything about what Tilea was up to in London, but the British warnings to Germany against invading Romania in March 1939 led to the Germans to relax their demands and the latest German-Romanian economic treaty signed on 23 March 1939 was in the words of Watt 'very vague". Despite the "Tilea affair", Carol had decided that he would refuse to become involved in any diplomacy that would force him to decisively choose