THE FINANCING OF THE NAZIS
„Profit rules the world”
Aristophanes (some time between 450 and 444 B.C. – 380 B.C.)
When it comes to dealing with one’s own past, Germany is not a contender for first place. In the last ten years you were able to witness that not one day has passed where the media did not in one form or another were talking about the time between 1933 and 1945. One could easily get the impression that the whole of German history took place in those 12 years alone.
It is interesting to note that even the smallest details are reported, but not about how Hitler rose to power and Germany’s arms build-up was financed at the time. The names that we hear in the media are usually limited to German companies like Thyssen, Krupp, Flick, etc. Was the Nazi economic miracle between 1933 and 1939 even possible? In other words the surface is treated to a high gloss polish, but the core of the issue is never ever discussed. In any case it should be obvious that no indebted nation in the world is in the financial position to continue a path of war for very long. Any country intending to go to war needs to turn to international bankers in order to obtain the funds required for such undertakings. This was no less true back then than it is at present.
Due to the Treaty of Versailles and the associated terms imposed on Germany, it was highly indebted and had to pay enormous sums in reparations to its neighbors. In the end this led to the collapse of the German currency and in its last consequence to the chronic inflation in the year 1923. The international bankers fell over themselves to help out by implementing the DAWES Plan[63] and the YOUNG Plan[64] and transferring huge amounts of money to Germany in 1924. Without these loans it would have been impossible for Germany to build up a war machine of such gigantic proportions. Professor Carroll Quigley, historian at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. reported:
„It is notable that this system (The Daves and Young Plans) were implemented by the international bankers and that the lending of these funds to Germany has been extremely profitable.”
In the year 1929 three large corporations on Wall Street took hold of some of the key positions in the German economy. General Motors Corp. bought up German car manufacturer Opel (also known as Vauxhall) in Rüsselsheim, International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. (ITT) bought the German telephone network and General Electrics, which had already made an agreement with AEG in 1922, intensified its activities.
Des Griffin wrote in his book[65]: The highest diplomatic US representative in Hitler Germany after 1933 was ambassador Dodd. On August 15th, 1936, more than three and a half years after Hitler’s power grab, Dodd reported to US president Roosevelt: “we currently have more than 100 US companies, subsidiaries or co-operation agreements.”
These companies were directly involved in the build-up of the German war machine. In fact, the German subsidiaries Ford and Opel supported Hitler’s war effort with full knowledge and support of their American parent companies and profited from it significantly.[66]
Shortly before the beginning of the war for example, Opel which is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, built a new factory in Brandenburg at the Havel river which manufactured the best truck in the world at the time. Without the “Opel-Blitz” the invasions into the East and into Africa would not have been possible. The profits were diverted to their parent company via Switzerland, Portugal and Turkey in the form of foreign currencies, precious metals. During this time the Allied Forces had spared that particular factory.
„When, after landing in Normandy in 1944, American soldiers started to move forward towards the Rhine River, they were astonished to see that the German forces were using the same type of trucks and military vehicles as they did themselves.“[67]
This model of co-operation only lasted up to the point where it became obvious in Jalta that the location would be in the soon to be Soviet-occupied zone. The manufacturing plant was taken out with a very exact targeted air strike.[68]
The well-documented evidence of the fact that American banking and industrial circles played a major role in the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich are not accessible to the public.
One name is inseparably linked to the business activities of the Nazi time – I.G. Farben. It is a corporation that controlled the entire world of chemistry and pharmaceuticals. It was operating in 93 countries. In late 1929 it came to a merger between Standard Oil (Rockefeller’s corporation) and I.G. Farben. Standard Oil signed over 546,000 of his shares to I.G. Farben.
I.G. Farben soon became the largest industrial corporation of Europe and the largest chemical company in the world. Its international connections were quite obvious when taking a look at its board members. There were Max and Paul Warburg[69], who owned large banks in Germany and the USA.
Also on the board was C.E. Mitchell, who became chairman of the ‘Federal Reserve Bank’ and of ‘National City Bank’ as well as H.A. Metz from ‘Bank of Manhattan’. Hermann Schmitz, president of I.G. Farben, at the same time was on the board of Deutsche Bank as well as the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), which was founded in 1930 by Hjalmar Schacht and could be viewed as the central bank of central banks.
Represented at the BIS were mostly eminent Wall Street institutions, among them Rockefeller’s investment bank Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan’s investment bank JP Morgan & Co., Clarence Lapowski’s investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. which were united by one thing, a strong interest in dealing with Germany.
The Air Force would not have been able to fly their planes without certain chemical products (e.g. tetraethyl lead) that were only produced by Standard Oil, General Motors and DuPont before then being sold to I.G. Farben.[70]
It was the same with oil. The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on February 11th, 1999 in its article “Oil for the Führer” that Hitler’s troops could not have been able to occupy France without continuing oil deliveries from America.[71]
As can be seen in the mineral oil statistics of the high command of the Wehrmacht, the US delivered more than a million tonnes of oil to Hitler in 1937, a quarter of Germany’s entire oil imports of during that year alone. How immensely important these deliveries were is revealed by a letter of the Supreme Commander of the German navy Grand Admiral Raeder from June 27th, 1940: “Without these oil imports neither the navy nor the economy would be in possession of the required oil right now.”[72]
One would have thought that the American oil deliveries had been stopped as soon as the war began, but that was not the case.
In the long classified import overviews of the Third Reich’s authority for oil we do not only see single shipments, but rather a detailed list proving that Germany imported a range of urgently required oil products between September 1939 and the summer of 1949, among them regular gasoline, diesel, heating oil, engine lubricating oil and motor oils.
In
