Quoting Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pgs. 183 & 191–2:

Trade, as Albert Hirschman pointed out in 1945, can further a nation’s “power of coercion” over other states through two dynamics: the supply effect and the influence effect.⁵ Between 1933 and 1938 [Fascist] Germany employed the former. The bilateral treaties that Schacht and his allies engineered with Southeastern Europe allowed Germany to acquire raw materials that enhanced its military power.

Indeed, Hitler’s rearmament would not have been possible without the grains, minerals, and primary products of the Balkans. Nor would Germany have been able to disengage from the markets of Western Europe and the USA and stabilize the Reichsmark bloc without capturing trade from this region.

The macroeconomic context created by Hitler’s policy of rearmament, in turn, made a closer relationship with the Balkans possible, which the advocates of informal empire in Mitteleuropa worked hard to capitalize on. During these same years Germany created the conditions that would allow it to exercise, later in the decade, the influence effect of trade as well.

Bilateral treaties redirected Southeastern Europe’s trade away from the global market toward the Third Reich, particularly for strategic goods that were highly prized by the region’s leaders. Between 1933 and 1938 [the Kingdoms of] Yugoslavia and Romania began falling into a spiral of economic dependency.

[…]

Germany remained as entangled with foreign economies in 1936 as it was in 1933. The countries supplying it were changing but Germany still depended on imports of oil, iron ore, copper, bauxite, manganese, and rubber.

All told, Germany concluded bilateral treaties with twenty-five countries so that more than half of its foreign trade went to the Reichsmark bloc.³² Although these treaties would prove to be problematic in certain respects, they achieved important successes at first.

Most immediately, the New Plan temporarily stopped Germany’s hemorrhage of foreign currency. Over the next five years these bilateral treaties would redirect German trade away from Britain and America and toward the continent (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2).

Likewise, the New Plan restructured German trade to favor the import of raw materials for rearmament, and the export of finished products. Between 1931 and 1936 raw materials as a percentage of total imports increased from 51 to 61 percent, while the export of finished goods rose from 75 to 83 percent.³³

(Emphasis added. Be careful not to overestimate the Third Reich’s diminishing trade with the Anglosphere during the 1930s; this did not render the phenomenon totally unimportant.)