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:
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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