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 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.

Some Early Hitler Backers

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The 1933 Political Contributions

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

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 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.

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,

⁵Preussiche Zettung, January 3, 1937.

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.

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.

²²See Chapter Ten.

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.

BACK