Wall St. and the Rise of Hitler by
Antony C. Sutton from reformation.org
CHAPTER SEVEN
Who Financed Adolf Hitler?
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
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 coal
owners' 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
Nuremberg 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 detail. 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 Hanfstaengl, 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 Patriot 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.
Fritz Thyssen and W.A. Harriman Company of New York
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.
|
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. Harriman& 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.
Financing Hitler in the March 1933 General Election
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 committed 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 Nuremberg 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 Nuremberg, 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 Nazism 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 Nuremberg 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
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.
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:
by Order:
(Signed) SELCK
(Signed) BANGERT
By special
delivery.26
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 Nazism is unexplained.
Emil Kirdorf,
who died in 1937, was always proud of his association with the rise of Nazism.
The attempt to limit Hitler financing to Thyssen and Kirdorf extended into the
Nuremberg 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 Nuremberg,
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 office of Bosch or Schmitz for payment of IG's share in the election 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:
2Ibid, fn. (2).
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,
6See p. 116.
7Glyn Roberts, The Most Powerful Man in the World, (New
York: Covicl, Friede, 1938), p. 305.
8Ibid., p. 313.
9Ibid., p. 322.
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.
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.
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.
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.
22See Chapter Ten.
24Josiah E.
Dubois, Jr., Generals in Grey Suits op.
cit., p. 323.
25Original
reproduced on page 64.
27Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, (New York: Toronto:
Farrat & Rinehart, Inc., 1941).
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