The funding of Hitler and the Nazi movement has yet to be explored in
exhaustive depth. The only published examination of Hitler's personal finances
is an article by Oron James Hale, "Adolph Hitler: Taxpayer,1 which
records Adolph's brushes with the German tax authorities before he became Reichskanzler,
In the 1920s Hitler presented himself to the German tax man as merely an
impoverished writer living on bank loans, with an automobile .bought on
credit. Unfortunately, the original records used by Hale do not yield the
source of Hitler's income, loans, or credit, and German law "did not
require self-employed or professional persons to disclose in detail the
sources of income or the nature of services rendered."2 Obviously the
funds for the automobiles, private secretary Rudolf Hess, another assistant, a
chauffeur, and expenses incurred by political activity, came from somewhere.
But, like Leon Trotsky's 1917 stay in New York, it is hard to reconcile
Hitler's known expenditures with the precise source of his income.
We do know that prominent
European and American industrialists were sponsoring all manner of
totalitarian political groups at that time, including Communists and various
Nazi groups. The U.S. Kilgore Committee records that:
By 1919 Krupp was already
giving financial aid to one of the reactionary political groups which sowed
the seed of the present Nazi ideology. Hugo Stinnes was an early contributor
to the Nazi Party (National
Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei). By 1924 other prominent
industrialists and financiers, among them Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler,
Adolph [sic] Kirdorf, and Kurt
von Schroder, were secretly giving substantial sums to the Nazis. In 1931
members of the coalowners' association which Kirdorf headed pledged
themselves to pay 50 pfennigs for each ton of' coal sold, the money to go to
the organization which Hitler was building.3
Hitler's 1924 Munich trial
yielded evidence that the Nazi Party received $20,000 from Nuremburg
industrialists. The most interesting name from this period is that of Emil
Kirdorf, who had earlier acted as conduit for financing German involvement in
the Bolshevik Revolution.4 Kirdorfs role in financing Hitler was, in his own
words:
In 1923 I came into contact
for the first time with the National-Socialist movement .... I first heard
the Fuehrer in the Essen Exhibition Hall. His clear exposition completely
convinced and overwhelmed me. In 1927 I first met the Fuehrer personally.
I travelled to Munich and there had a conversation with the Fuehrer in the
Bruckmann home. During four and a half hours Adolf Hitler explained to me
his programme in de tail. I then begged the Fuehrer to put together the
lecture he had given me in the form of a pamphlet. I then distributed this
pamphlet in my name in business and manufacturing circles.
Since then I have placed
myself completely at the disposition of his movement, Shortly after our
Munich conversation, and as a result of the pamphlet which the Fuehrer
composed and I distributed, a number of meetings took place between the
Fuehrer and leading personalities in the field of indus. try. For the last
time before the taking over of power, the leaders of industry met in my
house together with Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering and other
leading personalities of the party.5
In 1925 the Hugo Stinnes
family contributed funds to convert the Nazi weekly Volkischer Beobachter to
a daily publication. Putzi Hanf-staengl, Franklin D. Roosevelt's friend and
protegé, provided the remaining funds.6 Table 7-1 summarizes presently known
financial contributions and the business associations of contributors from the
United States. Putzi is not listed in Table 7-1 as he was neither
industrialist nor financier.
In the early 1930s financial
assistance to Hitler began to flow more readily. There took place in Germany a
series of meetings, irrefutably documented in several sources, between German
industrialists, Hitler himself, and more often Hitler's representatives
Hjalmar Sehaeht and Rudolf Hess. The critical point is that the German
industrialists financing Hitler were predominantly directors of cartels with
American associations, ownership, participation, or some form of subsidiary
connection. The Hitler backers were not, by and large, firms of purely German
origin, or representative of German family business. Except for Thyssen and
Kirdoff, in most cases they were the German multi-national firms — i.e.,
I.G.
Farben, A.E.G., DAPAG, etc. These multi-nationals had been built up
by American loans in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s had American directors
and heavy American financial participation.
One flow of foreign political
funds not considered here is that reported from the European-based Royal Dutch
Shell, Standard Oil's great competitor in the 20s and 30s, and the giant
brainchild of Anglo-Dutch businessman Sir Henri Deterding. It has been widely
asserted that Henri Deterding personally financed Hitler. This argument is
made, for instance, by biographer Glyn Roberts in The Most Powerful Man in
the World. Roberts notes that Deterding was impressed with Hitler as early
as 1921:
...and the Dutch press
reported that, through the agent Georg Bell, he [Deterding] had placed at
Hitler's disposal, while the party was "still in long clothes," no
less than four million guilders.7
It was reported (by Roberts)
that in 1931 Georg Bell, Deterding's agent, attended meetings of Ukrainian
Patriots in Paris "as joint delegate of Hitler and Deterding."8
Roberts also reports:
Deterding was accused, as
Edgar Ansell Mowrer testifies in his Germany
Puts the Clock Back, of putting up a
large sum of money for the Nazis on the understanding that success would
give him a more favored position in the German oil market. On other
occasions, figures as high as £55,000,000 were mentioned.9
Biographer Roberts really
found Deterding's strong anti-Bolshevism distasteful, and rather than present
hard evidence of funding he is inclined to assume rather than prove that
Deterding was pro-Hitler. But pro-Hitlerism is not a necessary consequence of
anti-Bolshevism; in any event Roberts offers no proof of finance, and hard
evidence of Deterding's involvement was not found by this author.
Mowrer's book contains neither
index nor footnotes as to the source of his information and Roberts has no
specific evidence for his accusations. There is circumstantial evidence that
Deterding was pro-Nazi. He later went to live in Hitler's Germany and
increased his share of the German petroleum market. So there may have been
some contributions, but these have not been proven.
Similarly, in France (on
January 11, 1932), Paul Faure, a member of the Chambre des Députés, accused
the French industrial firm of Schneider-Creuzot of financing Hitler — and
incidentally implicated Wall Street in other financing channels.10
The Schneider group is a
famous firm of French armaments manufacturers. After recalling the Schneider
influence in establishment of Fascism in Hungary and its extensive
international armaments operations, Paul Fauré turns to Hitler, and quotes
from the French paper LeJournal, "that Hitler had received 300,000
Swiss gold francs" from subscriptions opened in Holland under the case of
a university professor named von Bissing. The Skoda plant at Pilsen, stated
Paul Fauré, was controlled by the French Schneider family, and it was the
Skoda directors von Duschnitz and von Arthaber who made the subscriptions to
Hitler. Fauré concluded:
. . . I am disturbed to see the
directors of Skoda, controlled by Schneider, subsidizing the electoral
campaign of M. Hitler; I am disturbed to see your firms, your financiers,
your industrial cartels unite themselves with the most nationalistic of
Germans ....
Again, no hard evidence was
found for this alleged flow of Hitler funds.
Another elusive case of
reported financing of Hitler is that of Fritz Thyssen, the German steel
magnate who associated himself with the Nazi movement in the early 20s. When
interrogated in 1945 under Project Dustbin,11 Thyssen recalled that he was
approached in 1923 by General Ludendorf at the time of French evacuation of
the Ruhr. Shortly after this meeting Thyssen was introduced to Hitler and
provided funds for the Nazis through General Ludendorf. In 1930-1931 Emil
Kirdorf approached Thyssen and subsequently sent Rudolf Hess to negotiate
further funding for the Nazi Party. This time Thyssen arranged a credit of
250,000 marks at the Bank Voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. at 18 Zuidblaak in
Rotterdam, Holland, founded in 1918 with H.J. Kouwenhoven and D.C. Schutte as
managing partners.12 This bank was a subsidiary of the August Thyssen Bank of
Germany (formerly von der Heydt's Bank A.G.). It was Thyssen's personal
banking operation, and it was affiliated with the W. A. Harriman financial
interests in New York. Thyssen reported to his Project Dustbin interrogators
that:
I chose a Dutch bank because
I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because
I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I
would have the Nazis a little more in my hands.13
Thyssen's book I Paid
Hitler, published in 1941, was purported to be written by Fritz Thyssen
himself, although Thyssen denies authorship. The book claims that funds for
Hitler — about one million marks — came mainly from Thyssen himself. I
Paid Hitler has other unsupported assertions, for example that Hitler was
actually descended from an illegitimate child of the Rothschild family.
Supposedly Hitler's grandmother, Frau Schickelgruber, had been a servant in
the Rothschild household and while there became pregnant:
... an inquiry once ordered
by the late Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, yielded some
interesting results, owing to the fact that the dossiers of the police
department of the Austro-Hungarian monarch were remarkably complete.14
This assertion concerning
Hitler's illegitimacy is refuted entirely in a more solidly based book by
Eugene Davidson, which implicates the Frankenberger family, not the Rothschild
family.
In any event, and more
relevant from our viewpoint, the August Thyssen front bank in Holland — i.e.,
the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. — controlled the Union Banking
Corporation in New York. The Harrimans had a financial interest in, and E.
Roland Harriman (Averell's brother) was a director of, this Union Banking
Corporation. The Union Banking Corporation of New York City was a joint
Thyssen-Harriman operation with the following directors in 1932:15
| E. Roland HARRIMAN |
Vice president of W. A.
Harriman & Co., New
York |
| H.J. KOUWENHOVEN |
Nazi banker, managing partner
of August Thyssen Bank and Bank voor Handel Scheepvaart N.V.
(the transfer bank for Thyssen's funds) |
| J. G. GROENINGEN |
Vereinigte Stahlwerke (the steel
cartel which also funded Hitler) |
| C. LIEVENSE |
President, Union Banking Corp.,
New York City |
| E. S. JAMES |
Partner Brown Brothers, later
Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co. |
TABLE 7-1: FINANCIAL LINKS
BETWEEN U.S. INDUSTRIALISTS AND ADOLF HITLER
Thyssen arranged a credit of
250,000 marks for Hitler, through this Dutch bank affiliated with the
Harrimans. Thyssen's book, later repudiated, states that as much as one
million marks came from Thyssen.
Thyssen's U.S. partners were,
of course, prominent members of the Wall Street financial establishment.
Edward Henry Harriman, the nineteenth-century railroad magnate, had two sons,
W. Averell Harriman (born in 1891), and E. Roland Harriman (born in 1895). In
1917 W. Averell Harriman was a director of Guaranty Trust Company and he was
involved in the Bolshevik Revolution.16 According to his biographer, Averell
started at the bottom of the career ladder as a clerk and section hand after
leaving Yale in 1913, then "he moved steadily forward to positions
of increasing responsibility in the fields of transportation and finance.17 In
addition to his directorship in Guaranty Trust, Harriman formed the Merchant
Shipbuilding Corporation in 1917, which soon became the largest merchant fleet
under American flag. This fleet was disposed of in 1925 and Harriman entered
the lucrative Russian market.18
In winding up these Russian
deals in 1929, Averell Harriman received a windfall profit of $1 million from
the usually hard-headed Soviets, who have a reputation of giving nothing away
without some present or later quid pro quo. Concurrently with these
successful moves in international finance, Averell Harriman has always been
attracted by so-called "public" service. In 1913 Harriman's
"public" service began with an appointment to the Palisades Park
Commission. In 1933 Harriman was appointed chairman of the New York State
Committee of Employment, and in 1934 became Administrative Officer of
Roosevelt's NRA — the Mussolini-like brainchild of General Electric's Gerard
Swope.19 There followed a stream of "public" offices, first the Lend
Lease program, then as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, later as Secretary of
Commerce.
By contrast, E. Roland
Harriman confined his activities to private business in international finance
without venturing, as did brother Averell, into "public" service.
In 1922 Roland and Averell formed W. A. Harri-man & Company. Still later
Roland became chairman of the board of Union Pacific Railroad and a director
of Newsweek magazine, Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, a
member of the board of governors of the American Red Cross, and a member of
the American Museum of Natural History.
Nazi financier Hendrik Jozef
Kouwenhoven, Roland Harriman's fellow-director at Union Banking Corporation in
New York, was managing director of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. (BHS)
of Rotterdam. In 1940 the BHS held approximately $2.2 million assets in the
Union Banking Corporation, which in turn did most of its business with BHS.20
In the 1930s Kouwenhoven was also a director of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke
A.G., the steel cartel founded with Wall Street funds in the mid-1920s. Like
Baron Schroder, he was a prominent Hitler supporter.
Another director of the New
York Union Banking Corporation was Johann Groeninger, a German subject with
numerous industrial and financial affiliations involving Vereinigte Stahlwerke,
the August Thyssen group, and a directorship of August Thyssen Hutte A.G.21
This affiliation and mutual
business interest between Harriman and the Thyssen interests does not suggest
that the Harrimans directly financed Hitler. On the other hand, it does show
that the Harrimans were intimately connected with prominent Nazis Kouwenhoven
and Groeninger and a Nazi front bank, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart.
There is every reason to believe that the Harrimans knew of Thyssen's support
for the Nazis. In the case of the Harrimans, it is important to bear in mind
their long-lasting and intimate relationship with the Soviet Union and the
Harriman's position at the center of Roosevelt's New Deal and the Democratic
Party. The evidence suggests that some members of the Wall Street elite are
connected with, and certainly have influence with, all significant
political groupings in the contemporary world socialist spectrum — Soviet
socialism, Hitler's national socialism, and Roosevelt's New Deal socialism.
Putting the Georg Bell-Deterding
and the Thyssen-Harriman cases to one side, we now examine the core of
Hitler's backing. In May 1932 the so-called "Kaiserhof Meeting" took
place between Schmitz of I.G. Farben, Max Ilgner of American I.G. Farben, Kiep
of Hamburg-America Line, and Diem of the German Potash Trust. More than
500,000 marks was raised at this meeting and deposited to the credit of Rudolf
Hess in the Deutsche Bank. It is noteworthy, in light of the "Warburg
myth" described in Chapter Ten that Max Ilgner of the American I.G.
Farben contributed 100,000 RM, or one-fifth of the total. The "Sidney
Warburg" book claims Warburg involvement in the funding of Hitler, and
Paul Warburg was a director of American I.G. Farben22 while Max Warburg was a
director of I.G. Farben.
There exists irrefutable
documentary evidence of a further role of. international bankers and
industrialists in the financing of the Nazi Party and the Volkspartie for
the March 1933 German election. A total of three million Reichmarks was
subscribed by prominent firms and businessmen, suitably "washed"
through an account at the Delbruck Schickler Bank, and then passed into the
hands of Rudolf Hess for use by Hitler and the NSDAP. This transfer of funds
was followed by the Reichstag fire, abrogation of constitutional rights, and
consolidation of Nazi power. Access to the Reichstag by the arsonists was
obtained through a tunnel from a house where Putzi Hanfstaengel was staying;
the Reichstag fire itself was used by Hitler as a pretext to abolish
constitutional rights. In brief, within a few weeks of the major funding of
Hitler there was a linked sequence of major events: the financial contribution
from prominent bankers and industrialists to the 1933 election, burning of the
Reichstag, abrogation of constitutional rights, and subsequent seizure of
power by the Nazi Party.
The fund-raising meeting was
held February 20, 1933 in the home of Goering, who was then president of the
Reichstag, with Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht acting as host. Among those
present, according to I.G. Farben's von Schnitzler, were:
Krupp von Bohlen, who, in
the beginning of 1933, was president of the Reichsverband der Deutschen
Industrie Reich Association of German Industry; Dr. Albert Voegler, the
leading man of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke; Von Loewenfeld; Dr, Stein, head of
the Gewerkschaft Auguste-Victoria, a mine which belongs to the IG.23
Hitler expounded his political
views to the assembled businessmen in a lengthy two-and-one-half hour speech,
using the threat of Communism and a Communist take-over to great effect:
It is not enough to say we
do not want Communism in our economy. If we continue on our old political
course, then we shall perish .... It is the noblest task of the leader to
find ideals that are stronger than the factors that pull the people
together. I recognized even while in the hospital that one had to search for
new ideals conducive to reconstruction. I found them in nationalism, in the
value of personality, and in the denial of reconciliation between nations
....
Now we stand before the last
election. Regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat, even if the
coming election does not bring about decision, one way or another. If the
election does not decide, the decision must be brought about by other means.
I have intervened in order to give the people once more the chance to decide
their fate by themselves ....
There are only two
possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds,
and for this purpose once more this election; or a struggle will be
conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices. I hope
the German people thus recognize the greatness of the hour.24
After Hitler had spoken, Krupp
von Bohlen expressed the support of the assembled industrialists and bankers
in the concrete form of a three-million-mark political fund. It turned out to
be more than enough to acquire power, because 600,000 marks remained
unexpended after the election.
Hjalmar Schacht organized this
historic meeting. We have previously described Schacht's links with the United
States: his father was cashier for the Berlin Branch of Equitable Assurance,
and Hjalmar was intimately involved almost on a monthly basis with Wall
Street.
The largest contributor to the
fund was I.G. Farben, which como mitted itself for 80 percent (or 500,000
marks) of the total. Director A. Steinke, of BUBIAG (Braunkohlen-u.
Brikett-Industrie A.G.), an I.G. Farben subsidiary, personally contributed
another 200,000 marks. In brief, 45 percent of the funds for the 1933 election
came from I.G. Farben. If we look at the directors of American I.G. Farben —
the U.S. subsidiary of I.G. Farben — we get close to the roots of Wall Street
involvement with Hitler. The board of American I.G. Farben at this time
contained some of the most prestigious names among American industrialists:
Edsel B. Ford of the Ford Motor Company, C.E. Mitchell of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, and Walter Teagle, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.
Paul M. Warburg, first
director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and chairman of the Bank of
Manhattan, was a Farben director and in Germany his brother Max Warburg was
also a director of I.G, Farben. H. A. Metz of I.G. Farben was also a director
of the Warburg's Bank of Manhattan. Finally, Carl Bosch of American I.G.
Farben was also a director of Ford Motor Company A-G in Germany.
Three board members of
American I.G. Farben were found guilty at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials: Max
Ilgner, F. Ter Meer, and Hermann Schmitz. As we have noted, the American board
members — Edsel Ford, C. E. Mitchell, Walter Teagle, and Paul Warburg — were
not placed on trial at Nuremburg, and so far as the records are concerned, it
appears that they were not even questioned about their knowledge of the 1933
Hitler fund.
Who were the industrialists
and bankers who placed election funds at the disposal of the Nazi Party in
1933? The list of contributors and the amount of their contribution is as
follows:
FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO
HITLER:
Feb. 23-Mar. 13, 1933:
|
|
(The Hjalmar Schacht account at
Delbruck, Schickler Bank)
|
| Political Contributions by
Firms (with selected
affiliated directors)
|
Amount
Pledged
|
Percent of
Firm Total
|
| Verein fuer die Bergbaulichen
Interessen (Kitdorf) |
$600,000 |
45.8 |
| I.G. Farbenindustrie
(Edsel
Ford, C.E. Mitchell, Walter Teagle, Paul Warburg) |
400,000 |
30.5 |
| Automobile Exhibition, Berlin
(Reichsverbund der
Automobilindustrie S.V.) |
100,000 |
7.6 |
| A.E.G., German General Electric
(Gerard Swope, Owen Young, C.H. Minor, Arthur Baldwin) |
60,000 |
4.6 |
| Demag |
50,000 |
3.8 |
|
Osram G.m.b.H. (Owen Young) |
40,000 |
3.0 |
Telefunken Gesellsehaft ruer
drahtlose Telegraphic |
85,000 |
2.7 |
Accumulatoren-Fabrik A.G.
(Quandt of A.E.G.) |
25,000 |
1.9 |
|
_____________
|
_____________ |
|
Total from industry
|
1,310,000
|
99.9 |
| Plus Political Contributions by
Individual Businessmen:
|
| Karl Hermann |
300,000 |
Director A. Steinke (BUBIAG-
Braunkohlen—u. Brikett —
Industrie A.G.) |
200,000 |
Dir. Karl Lange (Geschaftsfuhrendes
Vostandsmitglied des Vereins
Deutsches Maschinenbau—Anstalten) |
50,000 |
|
Dr. F. Springorum (Chairman: Eisen-und Stahlwerke Hoesch A.G.) |
36,000 |
Source: See
Appendix for translation of original document. |
How can we prove that these
political payments actually took place?
The payments to Hitler in this final
step on the road to dictatorial Naziism were made through the private bank of
Delbruck Sehickler. The Delbruck Schickler Bank was a subsidiary of
Metallgesellschaft A.G. ("Metall"), an industrial giant, the largest
non-ferrous metal company in Germany, and the dominant influence in the
world's nonferrous metal 'trading. The principal shareholders of "Metall"
were I.G. Farben and the British Metal Corporation. We might note
incidentally that the British directors on the" Metall" Aufsichsrat
were Walter Gardner (Amalgamated Metal Corporation) and Captain Oliver
Lyttelton (also on the board of Amalgamated Metal and paradoxically later in
World War II to become the British Minister of Production).
There exists among the
Nuremburg Trial papers the original transfer slips from the banking division
of I.G. Farben and other firms listed on page 110 to the Delbruck Schickler
Bank in Berlin, informing the bank of the transfer of funds from Dresdner
Bank, and other banks, to their Nationale Treuhand (National
Trusteeship) account. This account was disbursed by Rudolf Hess for Nazi Party
expenses during the election. Translation of the I.G. Farben transfer slip,
selected as a sample, is as follows:25
Translation of I.G, Farben
letter of February 27, 1933, advising of transfer of 400,000 Reichsmarks to
National Trusteeship account:
I.G. FARBENINDUSTRIE
AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT
Bank Department
Firm: Delbruck Schickler & Co.,
BERLIN W.8
Mauerstrasse 63/65, Frankfurt (Main) 20
Our Ref: (Mention in Reply)
27 February 1933
B./Goe.
We are informing you herewith
that we have authorized the Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt/M., to pay you tomorrow
forenoon: RM 400,000 which you will use in favor of the account "NATIONALE
TREUHAND" (National Trusteeship).
Respectfully,
I.G.
Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft
by Order:
(Signed) SELCK
(Signed) BANGERT
At this juncture we should
take note of the efforts that have been made to direct our attention away from
American financiers (and German financiers connected with American-affiliated
companies) who were, involved with the funding of Hitler. Usually the blame
for financing Hitler has been exclusively placed upon Fritz Thyssen or Emil
Kirdorf. In the case of Thyssen this blame was widely circulated in a book
allegedly authored by Thyssen in the middle of World War II but later
repudiated by him.27 Why Thyssen would want to admit such actions before the
defeat of Naziism is unexplained.
Emil Kirdorf, who died in
1937, was always proud of his association with the rise of Naziism. The
attempt to limit Hitler financing to Thyssen and Kirdorf extended into the
Nuremburg trials in 1946, and was challenged only by the Soviet delegate. Even
the Soviet delegate was unwilling to produce evidence of American
associations; this is not surprising because the Soviet Union depends on the
goodwill of these same financiers to transfer much needed advanced Western
technology to the U.S.S.R.
At Nuremburg, statements were
made and allowed to go unchallenged which were directly contrary to the known
direct evidence presented above. For example, Buecher, Director General of
German General Electric, was absolved from sympathy for Hitler:
Thyssen has confessed his
error like a man and has courageously paid a heavy penalty for it. On the
other side stand men like Reusch of the Gutehoffnungshuette, Karl Bosch, the
late chairman of the I.G. Farben Aufsichtsrat, who would very likely have
come to a sad end, had he not died in time. Their feelings were shared by
the deputy chairman of the Aufsichtsrat of Kalle. The Siemens and AEG
companies which, next to I.G. Farben, were the most powerful German
concerns, and they were determined opponents of national socialism.
I know that this unfriendly
attitude on the part of the Siemens concern to the Nazis resulted in the
firm receiving rather rough treatment. The Director General of the AEG (Allgemeine
Elektrizitats Gesellschaft), Geheimrat Buecher, whom I knew from my stay in
the colonies, was anything but a Nazi. I can assure General Taylor that it
is certainly wrong to assert that the leading industrialists as such favored
Hitler before his seizure of power.28
Yet on page 56 of this book we
reproduce a document originating with General Electric, transferring General
Electric funds to the National Trusteeship account controlled by Rudolf Hess
on behalf of Hitler and used in the 1933 elections.
Similarly, von Schnitzler, who
was present at the February 1933 meeting on behalf of I.G. Farben, denied I.G.
Farben's contributions to the 1933 Nationale Treuhand:
I never heard again of the
whole matter [that of financing Hitler], but I believe that either the buro
of Goering or Schacht or the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie had asked
the of fice of Bosch or Schmitz for payment of IG's share in the elec tion
fund. As I did not take the matter up again I not even at that time knew
whether and which amount had been paid by the IG. According to the volume of
the IG, I should estimate IG's share being something like 10 percent of the
election fund, but as far as I know there is no evidence that I.G. Farben
participated in the payments.29
As we have seen, the evidence
is incontrovertible regarding political cash contributions to Hitler at the
crucial point of the takeover of power in Germany — and Hitler's earlier
speech to the industrialists clearly revealed that a coercive takeover was the
premeditated intent.
We know exactly who
contributed, how much, and through what channels. It is notable that the
largest contributors — I.G. Farben, German General Electric (and its
affiliated company Osram), and Thyssen — were affiliated with Wall Street
financiers. These Wall Street financiers were at the heart of the
financial elite and they were prominent in contemporary American politics.
Gerard Swope of General Electric was author of Roosevelt's New Deal, Teagle
was one of NRA's top administrators, Paul Warburg and his associates at
American I.G. Farben were Roosevelt advisors. It is perhaps not an
extraordinary coincidence that Roosevelt's New Deal — called a "fascist
measure" by Herbert Hoover — should have so closely resembled Hitler's
program for Germany, and that both Hitler and Roosevelt took power in the same
month of the same year — March 1933.
Footnotes:
1The American
Historical Review, Volume LC,
NO. 4, July. 1955. p, 830.
3Elimination of
German Resources, p. 648. The
Albert Voegler mentioned in the Kilgore Committee list of early Hitler
supporters was the German representative on the Dawes Plan Commission. Owen
Young of General Electric (see Chapter Three) was a U.S. representative for the
Dawes Plan and formulated its successor, the Young Plan.
4Antony C. Sutton, Wall
Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit,
5Preussiche
Zettung, January
3, 1937.
7Glyn Roberts, The
Most Powerful Man in the World, (New York: Covicl, Friede, 1938), p. 305.
10See Chambre des
Deputes — Debats, February 11, 1932, pp. 496-500.
11U.S. Group Control
Council (Germany0 Office of the Director of Intelligence, Field Information
Agency, Technical). Intelligence Report No. EF/ME/1,4 September 1945.
"Examination of Dr. Fritz Thyssen," p, 13, Hereafter cited as
Examination of Dr. Fritz Thyssen.
12The Bank was known in
Germany as Bank fur Handel und
Schiff.
13Examination of Dr.
Fritz Thyssen.
14Fritz
Thyssen, I
Paid Hitler, (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1941). p. 159.
15Taken from Bankers
Directory, !932 edition, p, 2557 and Poors, Directory of Directors. J.L.
Guinter and Knight Woolley were also directors.
16See Antony C. Sutton, Wall
Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit.
17National
Cyclopaedia, Volume G, page 16.
18For a description
of these ventures, based on State Department files, see An, tony C. Sutton, Western
Technology and Soviet Economic Development, Volume 1, op.
cit.
19See Antony C.
Sutton, Wall Street and FDR. Chapter Nine, "Swope's Plan," op.
cit.
20See Elimination of
German Resources, pp. 728-30.
21For yet other connections between
the Union Banking Corp, and German enterprises, see Ibid., pp. 728-30.
23NMT, Volume
VII, p. 555.
24Josiah E. Dubois, Jr.,
Generals in Grey Suits op. cit., p. 323.
25Original reproduced on
page 64.
26NMT, Volume
VII, p. 565. See p. 64 for photograph of original document.
27Fritz
Thyssen, I
Paid Hitler, (New York: Toronto: Farrat & Rinehart, Inc., 1941).
28NMT, Volume VI,
pp. 1169-1170.
29NMT, Volume
VII, p. 565.
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