by Jim Marrs
Hitler’s work in the party was initially supported both by funds from Captain Mayr’s army intelligence unit and the dedicated anticommunists and occultists of the Thule Society. Funding was passed through the publisher of occult literature, Dietrich Eckart, whom Hitler called the “spiritual founder of National Socialism.” Eckart was soon introducing the new member to the right social circles in Munich and his intellectual friends in the Thule Society. The editors of Time-Life Books noted, “Dietrich Eckart took over as editor of the Volkischer Beobachter, the renamed Munchener Beobachter, which the party had purchased from the Thule Society with money supplied partly by Mayr’s secret army account.”
Author Joseph P. Farrell stated that the covert connections of Eckart and future deputy fuehrer Martin Bormann support the idea “that Hitler was deliberately manipulated and placed into power, and secretly manipulated behind the scenes by more powerful forces than even he wielded, and, when he had served his purpose, was deliberately sabotaged and cast aside.” The forceful Hitler, armed with adequate funds, quickly gained control of the German Workers Party, which soon claimed three thousand members. In April 1920, Hitler changed the party’s name to the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party, abbreviated to Nazi.
Following an ill-fated attempt to take control of the government in 1923, known as the Beer-hall Putsch, Hitler and his lieutenants were imprisoned and the Nazi Party languished. Upon his release after only nine months, Hitler began to direct the Nazi Party into more effective, and legal, activities, which resulted in the Nazis becoming the largest political party in Germany by July 1932.
It was, in fact, wealthy businessmen in Western industrial and banking circles who guaranteed Hitler’s success. After Hitler lost a popular election to Hindenburg in 1932, thirty-nine business leaders, with familiar names like Krupp, Siemens, Thyssen, and Bosch, signed a petition urging the aged president Paul von Hindenburg to name Hitler chancellor. In January 1933, through a compromise with German aristocrats, industrialists, and army officers, brokered by banker Baron Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. The deal to name Hitler chancellor of Germany was cut at von Schroeder’s home on January 4, 1933. On hand were prominent industrialists, at least one director of the giant Deutsche Bank as well as I. G. Farben’s Hermann Schmitz and Dr. Georg von Schnitzler representing Farben’s board of directors. According to author Eustace Mullins, also attending this meeting were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Schroeder bank. This claim has been disputed by other researchers.
At that time, Germany was a free republic with one of the most educated and cultured populations in the world. The country was at peace and enjoying a blossoming of democratic freedom under a coalition government of the Weimar Republic.
Oddly, Hitler went against tradition by choosing not to work out of an office in the German Reichstag, or parliament building, and on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was gutted by fire. In those slower, gentler times, this act was as great a shock to the German people as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was to Americans in 2001. Hitler blamed the destruction on communist terrorists. Inside the building, police arrested an incoherent, half-naked retarded Dutch youth named Marinus van der Lubbe. They said he was carrying a Dutch Communist Party card. After some time in custody, the youth confessed to being the arsonist. However, later investigation found that one person could not have started the mammoth blaze and that incendiary devices had been carried into the building through a tunnel that led to the offices of Hitler’s closest partner, Hermann Goering.
Despite misgivings in many quarters about the official explanation of the fire, it was announced that “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists.” Law enforcement agencies quickly moved against not only the communists but also pacifists, liberals, and democrats. Less than a month later, on March 24, 1933, at Hitler’s urging, a panicky German Parliament voted 441 to 94 to pass an “Enabling Act,” which became the starting point for Hitler’s dictatorship.
As a result of the Enabling Act, the Nazi government required national identity cards, racial profiling, the equivalent of a national homeland security chief (SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler), gun confiscation, and, later, mass murders and incarcerations in concentration camps. “When Germany awoke,” wrote British reporter Douglas Reed, “a man’s home was no longer his castle. He could be seized by private individuals, could claim no protection from the police, could be indefinitely detained without preferment of charge; his property could be seized, his verbal and written communications overheard and perused; he no longer had the right to foregather with his fellow countrymen, and his newspapers might no longer freely express their opinions.”
Hitler’s financiers and especially Prussian military officers were becoming alarmed over Hitler’s growing power, especially with some three million Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Detachment Brown Shirts under the command of Hitler’s SA chief Ernst Roehm awaiting orders. The army proposed a deal—if the power of the SA was broken, the military would pledge loyalty to Hitler. Hitler agreed, and on June 30, 1934, trumped-up charges of plotting a revolution caused Roehm and hundreds of Brown Shirts to be fatally purged and the SA quietly faded away. The German military began pledging their allegiance not to their nation but to Hitler. With the German population firmly under control due to massive propaganda and fear of government retaliation, Hitler was free to launch invasions into former German territories as well as Poland.
It is instructive that Hitler did not invade Poland without pretext. A “false-flag” operation was accomplished first. SS men dressed in Polish uniforms fabricated an attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, which allowed Hitler to announce that a counterattack had been launched against Polish soldiers who had invaded German territory. Germany was simply making the world safe for National Socialism. World War II ensued.
WITH THE DEATH of the eighty-seven-year-old Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor and proclaimed himself commander in chief of the armed forces, the absolute leader—fuehrer—of all Germany.
He found a huge and powerful industrial base geared for war production already in place and awaiting his command. It had been put in place at the end of World War I thanks to an influx of Western capital investment. “This build-up for European war both before and after 1933 was in great part due to Wall Street financial assistance in the 1920s to create the German cartel system and to technical assistance from well-known American firms…to build the German Wehrmacht,” noted financial investigator and author Antony C. Sutton, who added, “The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal.” (For example, in 1934 Germany produced only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and synthetic gasoline. In 1944, thanks to the transfer of hydrogenation technology from Standard Oil of New Jersey to I. G. Farben, Germany produced 6,500,000 tons of oil, 85 percent of which was synthetic.)
The intertwining of American capitalism with German corporations began following World War I, with two programs: the Dawes Plan (1924) and the Young Plan (1928). Both plans, engineered in America, virtually guaranteed success for the fledgling Nazi Party. The Dawes Plan, designed to restructure German war reparations, was named for chairman of the Allied Reparations Committee Charles G. Dawes and described by historian Carroll Quigley as “largely a J. P. Morgan production.” This plan used American loans to create and consolidate the German steel and chemical giants, Vereinigte Stahlwerke and I. G. Farben, both major supporters of Hitler. It caused anger and frustration among the Germans, because it meant foreign control of Germany’s finances—a fact constantly pointed out by Hitler in his speeches—and appeared open-ended, as no final reparation amount was ever announced. Its successor, the Young Plan, named for J. P. M
organ agent Owen D. Young, required burdensome monetary payments from Germany. It, too, led to support within Germany for Hitler and his Nazis.
Financing the rearmament of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty proved as profitable as it was dangerous to European peace. German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, a major financial contributor to Hitler, stated, “I turned to the National Socialist Party only after I became convinced that the fight against the Young Plan was unavoidable if complete collapse of Germany was to be prevented.”
Finance between Germany and the Allied nations was controlled by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. It was the brainchild of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, president of the Reichsbank (in 1930, he resigned in protest to the Young Plan but was reappointed by Hitler in 1933) and the financial genius behind Germany’s economic revival. Although his father was an American citizen, Hjalmar was born in Germany during his mother’s return there and named after the famous American editor and politician. It was Schacht who provided an ongoing link between Hitler and Germany’s industrialists.
The BIS was administered by a multinational staff, which historian Quigley called the “apex of the system” of bankers, to secretly exchange information and plan for the coming war. One of the corporate giants created in post–World War I Germany with assistance from American capital was Internationale Gesellschaft Farbenindustrie A. G., better known in its shortened version as I. G. Farben. Created in 1926 by combining six existing chemical companies, it was the brainchild of Hermann Schmitz, who became the firm’s president. Under his guidance, I. G. Farben became the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world. It was so powerful during the Nazi regime that the firm became known as a “state within a state.”
Farben had subsidiaries, offices, and representatives in ninety-three countries, including the United States. Paul Manning, a CBS news correspondent in Europe during World War II, explained Schmitz’s connections by pointing out that the Farben chief once “held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as did the Rockefellers.” By the time war began in 1939, I. G. Farben had doubled in size, gaining participation and managerial control over 380 other German companies as well as more than 500 foreign firms. This growth was made possible by bond sales in America, including one for $30 million offered by National City Bank, a forerunner of today’s Citibank.
It was I. G. Farben’s patented Zyklon-B, a prussic acid poison gas, that was used to kill victims in the “shower baths” of Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka. Previously, the firm had received a contract to produce carbon monoxide, used to gas the sick and mentally deficient under Germany’s euthanasia program.
One example of the close business ties between the United States and Nazi Germany was Walter C. Teagle, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which was owned by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. Teagle also was a director of American I. G. Chemical Corporation, one of the subsidiaries of I. G. Farben, which changed its name to General Aniline and Film (GAF) in an effort to distance itself from its German owners.
Teagle, through Rockefeller banking and oil interests, made his superiors a handsome profit just prior to the war. “[Teagle] remained in partnership with Farben in the matter of tetraethyl lead, an additive used in aviation gasoline,” wrote author Charles Higham. “[German Luftwaffe chief Hermann] Goering’s air force couldn’t fly without it. Only Standard, Du Pont and General Motors had the rights to it. Teagle helped organize a sale of the precious substance to [Farben president] Schmitz, who in 1938 traveled to London and ‘borrowed’ 500 tons from Ethyl, the British Standard subsidiary. Next year, Schmitz and his partners returned to London and obtained $15 million worth. The result was that Hitler’s air force was rendered capable of bombing London, the city that had provided the supplies. Also, by supplying Japan with tetraethyl, Teagle helped make it possible for the Japanese to wage World War II.”
Following negative publicity regarding these tetraethyl transactions in 1938, Teagle resigned from the board of GAF, to be replaced by future Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. Curiously, it was this same Walter Teagle who helped create the National Recovery Administration, one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies designed to regulate American business. This was an odd choice if the captains of American industry were as opposed to socialism as they publicly claimed.
By the mid-1930s, with the government, military, and the German cartels now firmly in hand, Hitler knew it was time to strengthen his influence over international bankers and businessmen. Despite his declared intentions to nationalize German businesses and curtail the power of international business and finance, Hitler initially had little trouble getting funds from corporate sponsors who saw his National Socialism as a necessary alternative to worldwide communism.
“[H]is appeal to the common people offered a chance to win the working class away from communism,” noted James Pool, author of Who Financed Hitler.
In America, efforts were under way to market Nazism to the public while concurrently practicing economic espionage. Teagle, together with Farben chief Schmitz, hired famed New York publicist Ivy Lee to pass proprietary information on American companies to Germany and to spin news stories so as to gloss over the darker side of Nazism. By the late 1930s, Lee was being paid $25,000 a year for disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda in America. Payments to Lee came from a Farben U.S. subsidiary, American I. G., and moved through Lee’s company account with Chase Bank and his personal account at New York Trust Company. “They were American funds earned in the U.S. and under control of American directors, although used for Nazi propaganda in the United States,” stated author Sutton.
Another solid conduit for Nazi propaganda and intelligence activities was the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line. Max Warburg, a leader of Deutsche Bank, sat on the board of Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line along with Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two future U.S. presidents. Max Warburg was the brother of Paul Warburg, America’s first chairman of the Federal Reserve System and the man in charge of U.S. finances in World War I.
American I. G. Chemical Corporation was more than just a source of funds. It provided important intelligence to the Nazis throughout the war as noted by I. G. Farben director Max Ilgner, the nephew of Farben’s chairman Schmitz. He wrote, “Extensive information which we receive continuously from [American I. G.] is indispensable for our observations of American conditions…[and] is, since the beginning of the war, an important source of information for governmental, economic and military offices.”
“The full story of I. G. Farben and its worldwide activities before World War II can never be known,” noted author Sutton, “as key German records were destroyed in 1945 in anticipation of Allied victory.”
The banking industry, including foreign financial houses, provided Hitler and his Nazis with the funds to both consolidate and spread their National Socialist doctrine. Throughout World War II, the bank of Baron von Schroeder acted as financial agents for Germany in both Britain and the United States. Antony C. Sutton described how John Foster Dulles handled Schroeder bank loans in the USA. In fact, Dulles, in addition to providing legal services to a joint Rockefeller-Schroeder investment firm, the Schroeder-Rockefeller Company, also sat on the board of directors of General Aniline and Film (GAF) from 1927 to 1934. GAF, as it was known during the war, remained a subsidiary of I. G. Farben. Schroeder, the powerful head of the J. H. Stein & Company banking house of Cologne, had long provided financial support to the Nazis in hopes they would counteract the spread of communism. Hitler had given his word to von Schroeder that “National Socialism would engage in no foolish economic experiments”—in other words, he would not attack banking practices except in rhetoric.
This closeness between Hitler and the banking industry reached back to the earliest days of the Nazi Party. “On New Year’s Day 1924, the financial fate of Germany was settled in London at a meeting between Hjalmar Schacht, the new Reich Commissioner for National Currency, and Montagu Norm
an, governor of the Bank of England,” noted author John Toland. “Schacht, who had already abolished emergency money, began with a frank disclosure of Germany’s desperate financial situation.” He then proposed to open a German credit bank second to the Reichsbank, but one that would issue notes in pound sterling. Schacht asked Norman to provide half the capital for this new bank. “Within 48 hours Norman not only formally approved the loan at the exceptionally low interest of a flat five percent but convinced a group of London bankers to accept bills far exceeding the loan…,” Toland wrote.
A year after the meeting at Schroeder’s home that launched Hitler into power, Nazi official and ideologist Alfred Rosenberg met with Schroeder Bank of London managing director T. C. Tiarks, who also was a director of the Bank of England.
Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, in early 1934 informed a select group of City of London financiers that Hitler’s regime was a system with a good future. With no opposition, it was decided to provide covert financial help to Hitler until Norman could persuade the British government to abandon its pro-French policy to one more favorable to Germany.
