far we have found no good ground for German magnates to finance the Nazi. There were, of course, some of them who did give money to the Nazi, but this is by way of exception. Those who did so had evidently been ignorant of the Nazi political programme, or had failed to see in it a heavy socialistic bias. But even putting aside the programme, the very name of Hitler’s party – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – would suffice to rule out the question of being favoured by large capital owners. Have you known a tycoon sponsor a socialist workers’ party, while there are others out there, and more respectable too?
There is another point to mention. Let’s ask when those “German industry magnates” could have been actually financing the Nazi. It took Adolf Hitler fifteen years to rise to power, from 1919 to 1933. When reading literature on the road of the Nazi leaders to the very top of German political Olympus, one can but observe one striking fact – the closer is Hitler to victory, the more information on his sponsors is given by historians. True, when Hitler had already been made Chancellor, only the silly or the lazy wouldn’t contribute to the budget of the NSDAP. As the Nazi took another long stride to power, still more were willing to support them. The party’s leader could now negotiate financing affairs on a par with any German magnate. Hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and regular party members stood at his back, as well as the sympathy of millions of voters. It was at that moment that Hitler could really address “German industry magnates” and receive their material help. However, historians would rather overlook one very important detail. Almost all the evidence of such financial support refers to the last two years preceding the power grab by the Nazi. The well-known German industrialist August Thyssen declares in his book I Paid Hitler that the accumulated financing Hitler received from industrial companies totalled two million Deutschemarks[26]. The North Rhine-Westphalia group of industrialists also gave Hitler over one million Deutschemarks during 1931–1932, as testified by Funk at the Nuremberg Trials[27].
But the winners of the Second World War somehow closed their eyes on that. None of Germany’s industrial élite was ever tried for having financed the party who had the blood of millions of people on their hands. For example, in 1947, Alfried Krupp (Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach) was convicted to twelve years imprisonment with confiscation of property – but not on the charge of having extended financial support to the Nazi, but for having practiced slave work at his factories, exploiting innocent people brought by force from Eastern Europe. The industrial magnate Kirdorf from the Ruhr region went so far as to pay the tithe of five Pfennigs to the NSDAP from every ton of coal sold. This amounted to a stunning six million Deutschemarks per year. Some money! But he was never charged or tried for that. If that same coal had been mined by concentration camp prisoners who had been dying by thousands from sheer emaciation, the “sponsor” would certainly have been punished. Once there are no exploited prisoners, there’s no charge – that’s how it was.
Indeed, no one was brought to book for paying Hitler! And not because those industrialists were thought to be beyond the reach of law, but because their donations were grossly dwarfed by the expenses of Hitler’s party. Their help was of importance, but not of key importance, for even in the roaring 1930-ies, the Golden Age of Hitler and his party, the Nazi’s expenses did not tally with their income!
According to some estimations, the expenses of the NSDAP spent on political propaganda, the wages of the storm troops, and the endless election campaigns must have totalled from 70 to 90 million Deutschemarks!
And now hear them talking about donations of one to three million Deutschemarks! Even the six million from the coal industry is quite disproportionate to what they really spent. Adding party membership fees and miscellaneous donations by German citizens, we still end up with 30 to 40 million Deutschemarks unaccounted-for. Is this possible that the industrialists might be lying to conceal their real contribution to Hitler’s budget? Hardly so. Who was it then, who gave him those millions? He couldn’t have made them out of nothing, could he?
This question still remains without an acceptable reply. Precisely speaking, there have been replies readily given by some, but only to lull the readers out of asking unwanted questions. The fact that almost 90 % of the NSDAP financial documents vanished during the last days of the party may give some colour to this matter. In the spring of 1945 the Nazi made haste to destroy evidence. Only the archives of the Gestapo and the correspondence between the top commanders of the SS and the party leadership (for example, between Kaltenbrunner and Bormann) survived to be seized by the winners in the war. Still, the surviving documents sufficed to confine many leaders and top officials of the Third Reich either to the hangman or to decades behind bars. Why on earth had the Nazi not taken care of those documents as well? The answer is readily given – they were too occupied with destroying their financial history. It was that which they had been making every effort to get rid of in the first place. And only after that, they had proceeded to burn the less “grave” papers, like mass execution and deportation warrants, in order of significance. But why, among the smoking ruins of Berlin and Munich and on the brink of total annihilation, why should anyone take such pains to prevent the world from knowing the source of money used by the Führer to come to his power? What difference would it make to Göring or Himmler if everyone knew the “heroes” of the financial backstage dealings? They would stand trial in any case, and be condemned to at least many years in prison. Why would they think of burning folders with bills and receipts instead of those with warrants and reports of executions?
Göring and Himmler had no reason to do that whatsoever. Their crimes were too grave to bother about petty things like that. But there were those smaller fry in the Nazi hierarchy who had plans to live on. One example is the unchallenged treasurer of the NSDAP and SS Obergruppenführer Franz Xavier Schwarz. It was he who destroyed the bulk of the party’s financial documents in the Munich “brown house”. Herr Schwarz was privy to all the monetary transactions of the party, and of course its financing. Hitler himself would often remonstrate that Schwarz wouldn’t give him a Pfennig, with “his arse glued to the gold chests”, and that he (Hitler) would sooner get something “begging on the church porch”. So raging and fuming with indignation, Hitler still never thought of firing or even punishing Schwarz. Because Schwarz was exactly what a Minister of Finance is supposed to be.
Now why did Xavier Schwarz burn the financial documents? And still more interestingly, why didn’t he burn all the documents, but left some untouched? That was all because he had plans for further life, to fulfil which he must make certain steps. He must destroy all the compromising materials and leave only the most harmless ones. On that condition only could he hope to be spared by those who had his life and well-being in their hands.
But who were they? German industrialists like the Krupps and the Borsigs? Of course not. They were those who defeated the Nazi Germany – the leaders of the Antihitlerite nations. Which occupation zone did the Nazi bigwigs try so desperately to get into after the defeat? Not hard to guess – that controlled by the United States and the United Kingdom. So it happened that Franz Xavier Schwarz was arrested in Munich by the allied forces who had entered the city not long after he had destroyed everything “unfit” in his archive. It is those remaining documents that have enabled latter-day historians to judge that Hitler was financed by German industrialists.
Here comes the miraculous conclusion: once the 10 % of the documents that have actually been preserved state that financing was made by German capitalists, the lost 90 % must have been to the same effect! This kind of inference was drawn by both Western and Soviet historians and scholars, and has never changed up to the present day. The layman can’t see beyond this conclusion to notice the logical fallacy. But why would one burn documents, saving some of them, if the preserved part could later be used to restore the content of the destroyed ones? It is evident that the destroyed documents must be radically different from those preserved. To destroy that which no scholar will ever find – that is logical enough! To destroy that which would compromise the leadership of the victorious parties in the war – their secret services
Ibid.
