Profit and Insurance

Hitler's not-so-secret financiers

By Steve Rodan

Ninety years ago, a rootless foreigner rose to power in Germany. Adolf Hitler had waited nearly 14 years for this day. His life and career contradicted everything in German society, where he was seen, particularly by the elite, as comical, crude and boorish.

Even today, historians have not solved the riddle of Hitler's ascendancy. But there is one aspect that has not been fully explored: this high school dropout and failed artist was financed by extremely rich men -- particularly from abroad. Some of those men came from the United States. Others were Jewish, fully aware of Hitler's agenda.

The motives of Hitler's financiers varied. Some shared Hitler's plan to destroy the Jews. Others saw his agenda for war as the solution to end British and French domination and revive German industry. There were those blackmailed into giving money.

Alfred Hugenberg was an early supporter of Hitler. Hugenberg, a media mogul and political hopeful, was sympathetic although critical of Hitler's failed putsch in 1923. He provided major funding to the Nazi Party in 1929 during the campaign against the Young Plan, in which Britain and France would receive money rather than goods, for reparations from World War I. The elite in Germany saw the plan as a threat to their interests.

Through Hugenberg, Hitler was granted entree to Germany's leading industrialists. This included Albert Vogler, Fritz Thyssen and the most important of all -- Hjalmar Schacht, who became the economic czar throughout the Third Reich. Their common aim was to destroy the Weimar Republic. Hitler also had an ally in Reinhold Quaatz, a half-Jew who pressed Hugenberg to work with the Nazis to form a government coalition in January 1933.

But Hitler's biggest financier in the early and mid-1920s was Henry Ford. Ford was regarded as the most powerful anti-Semite in the United States and was impressed by the Nazi Party chief. The automobile king started with a $40,000 donation. Later, Ford poured another $300,000 into Nazi coffers. In Detroit, Ford hired Nazi agents, including Fritz Kuhn, head of the paramilitary Bund. [1] In return, Hitler kept a portrait of Ford on his desk.

Eventually, other Americans joined. Unlike Ford, their motive was pure profit, determined to cash in on Germany's huge market and export potential. The titans of U.S. industry included J.P Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefellers and General Motors. [2]

Numerous American banks became investors in Germany. One of them was Union Bank, linked to Thyssen. The bank was managed by Prescott Bush, the father of George Bush and his son, both of whom would become president of the United States.

As Hitler grew in popularity he was wooed by superrich Jews. The most prominent was the Warburg family, the leading bankers in Germany and Europe. Paul Warburg was a member of the board of directors at I.G. Farben in the United States while his brother Max was on the company's board in Berlin. Later, Max would sign Hitler's decree that appointed Schacht as head of the Reichsbank. In New York, Felix Warburg, another brother and known as the "happy" one, was a senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., a major investor in Nazi Germany. Felix didn't like banking and preferred philanthropy.

A member of the family, Sidney Warburg, spoke to one of his uncles, an admirer of the Nazi leader.

"He was quite taken in by Hitler," Warburg recalled. "It was hard for me to take his opinion seriously, because he was a Jew. I needed an explanation, so I asked him how it was possible for him, as a Jew to be sympathetic to Hitler's party. He laughed. 'Hitler is a strong man, and that is what Germany needs.'" [3]

How did Jewish supporters of Hitler understand his plans to make Germany free of Jews? They explained that Hitler did not mean them. When Hitler spoke of expelling the Jews, he was referring to immigrants from neighboring Poland. [4]

The more skeptical Jews hoped that their money to Hitler would mark an insurance policy. The Jewish donor would be exempt from the Nazi plan to destroy the Jews.

Baron Eberhard von Oppenheim, a leading banker, was said to have given the Nazi Party 200,000 marks. In return, Hitler agreed to make the Jewish aristocrat an honorary Aryan. [5] Two of his brothers, Friedrich and Waldemar, would eventually serve in German military intelligence during World War II.

Almost all of Hitler's financiers escaped prosecution after the war. Many of the Germans were allowed to reclaim their fortune despite their participation in slave labor and the death camps.

The United States protected its own friends of Hitler. Henry Ford and others were cited by Congress and the military for their help to Germany during World War II. They were never prosecuted.

In 1998, Ford Motor Co. was sued for the use of slave labor by its German subsidiary during the war. Based on documents from German and American archives, Ford's longtime rival, General Motors, was also implicated. A year later, two U.S. federal courts threw out the lawsuits against Ford.

As for Hitler's German Jewish supporters, they lost their empires but were spared the fate of their poorer brethren. Many of them escaped to the United States and became completely assimilated. Some became leading opponents of a Jewish state.

In 1959, James Warburg gave an address in a reform temple in Connecticut that denounced Israel as the product of Nazi ideology. Israel, he said, was "a state based in part on medieval theocratic bigotry and in part upon the Nazi-exploited myth of the existence of a Jewish race.” [6]

Notes

1. Hitler's Secret Bankers. Sidney Warburg. Pages 248-249. 1933

2. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Anthony C. Sutton. Clairview, 2010]

3. Hitler's Secret Bankers. Page 18

4. ibid

5. ibid. Page 86

6. The Warburgs: The 20th Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family. Ron Chernow. Random House

Below: Hitler and German industrialists in 1935