In Part 1, we saw how the British and German central bankers, Sir Monty Norman and Hjamar Schacht, set up the Bank of International Settlements, BIS in Switzerland, in 1930, together with J.P. Morgan’s agent Young, and that BIS went on to aid the Nazi war effort. Now we turn to German-American partnerships which played a significant role in funding Hitler’s rise to power, together with creating his war machine.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, only German industrialists were held to account for war crimes, but, there is clear evidence that the Nazis would never have been able to build up their war machine and become the threat they were, without the backing of American financiers and industrialists.
One of Hitler’s earliest American backers was Henry Ford, the car maker. The New York Times reported from Berlin in December 1922:
A rumour is currently here that Henry Ford, the American automobile manufacturer, is financing Hitler’s nationalist and antisemitic movement in Munich. Indeed, the Berlin Tageblatt has made an appeal to the American ambassador in Berlin, to investigate and interfere.
The meticulous work of academic Antony Sutton provides evidence of funds passing from Henry Ford to Hitler in 1923, the year of Hitler’s failed coup in Munich. It would be wrong to assume anyone financing Hitler shared all his views, but with Henry Ford, it’s clear both men were united in their hatred of Jews.
The New York Times article noted:
The wall behind his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford.
Ford’s personal newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, started publishing weekly stories, reflecting his own opinions about ‘the evil Jew’, from May 1920. The most aggressive stories were republished into four book volumes, making up the International Jew, which was translated into sixteen languages, including German.
It was copies of Ford’s International Jew that Hitler kept on display. He considered Ford an inspiration, quoting sections from Ford verbatim in his own book, Mein Kampf, where he refers to Ford as ‘a single great man.’ Of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford, Hitler told a Detroit News reporter at the time, that he was a great admirer of Ford’s writing.
When Hitler moved to large new premises in 1931, he still kept a life-size portrait of Henry Ford on the wall next to his desk. It is surprising that in Germany’s heavy economic depression, after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the relatively new Nazi party were able to afford grand new headquarters in Munich.
This was made possible by the funds of Germany’s top steel industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who paid for the renovation and repurposing of the building, which they called Brown House.
Below, Brown House after it opened in January 1931, providing offices for Hitler and other senior Nazis, and apparently named after the shirt colour of Hitler’s early troops.
Thyssen was impressed when he heard Hitler speak in 1923, and became his sponsor, at a time when most German industrialists were reluctant to do so.
Documents released from US archives in 2003, confirm that an American bank acted as a base for Thyssen’s funds - Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) on Wall Street, the bank that Sir Monty Norman had worked for, prior to becoming Bank of England Governor. Of course, one cannot assume BBH were aware that Thyssen was supporting Hitler.
BBH is today the oldest and largest private bank in the USA, founded by Alexander Brown, one of America’s first millionaires. Today, it manages a trillion dollars of assets.
In 1931, Brown Brothers merged with Harriman’s bank, becoming Brown Brothers Harriman. At this point in time, eleven of its board were Yale graduates, with eight from Yale’s influential Skull and Bones secret society.
Amongst them was Prescot Bush, grandfather of George. The documents reveal that Prescot Bush was, in addition, Director of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), which also represented Thyssen’s financial interests in America, and was under the control of Thyssen’s bank in Holland. Bush continued to work for the bank after America entered the war. None of this suggests Bush sympathised with the Nazi’s aims. However, Thyssen, owning Germany’s largest steel and coal industry, profited immensely from Hitler’s build up of arms before WW2.
By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.
There was nothing illegal in doing business with Thyssen throughout the 1930s, however, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH and UBC were within their rights continuing business relations with Thyssen until the end of 1941, as the US was technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The trouble began on July 30, 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.
UBC was caught red-handed operating an American shell company for the Thyssen family, eight months after America had entered the war. A network of companies spread out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and money from Thyssen’s bank in Holland travelled to these companies via UBC.
The company’s assets were seized in 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, with the recommendation that the assets be liquidated to benefit the government, but instead UBC was kept intact, eventually returning to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentation to support this. No more action or further investigation occurred, despite UBC being caught red-handed.
Unlike Thyssen, German industrialists financing Hitler were mostly in cartels with Americans. These multi-nationals, like IG Farben, were built up by American loans from the 1920’s, and in the 1930’s had American directors.
IG Farben was put together by its President Hermann Schmitz, with the help of Wall Street. Schmitz, also a director of BIS, was a supporter of Hitler. IG Farben was the largest doner to Hitler’s election campaign, contributing 45% of its funds, and became an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Their American board of directors included Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, and Walter Teagle from the New York Federal Reserve, and President Roosevelt’s Georgia Warm Spring’s Foundation.
The American directors of IG Farben employed the use of a PR firm, Ivy Lee, to spread Nazi propaganda in the USA (Sutton, p42), to put Farben in a positive light.
On the eve of WW2, IG Farben was the world’s largest chemical manufacturing enterprise, wielding a lot of power in Nazi Germany. Antony Sutton (1976) states that without capital from Wall Street, there would have been no IG Farben, no Hitler and no WW2.
One of the horrific aspects of the IG Farben cartel, was the invention, production and distribution of the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi concentration camps. Enough gas was made to kill 200 million people. The Kilgore Committee report makes it clear that in 1942, IG Farben directors had precise knowledge of the camps and the use of their chemicals.
After the war, the role of American industrialists was hidden. Only German industrialists were held to account at Nuremberg, in 1946, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hermann Schmitz was put on trial after the war but IG Farben’s American associates and directors were quietly forgotten.
In addition, there was documentation that Ford Motor Company worked on both sides of WW2, but Washington concealed the Ford story along with the other American industrialists who should have been on trial with the German ones in Nuremberg.
After WW2, while much of Europe stood in ruins, Wall Street and certain American industrialists had done rather well, it would appear.
Bibliography
Antony C Sutton Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976). Clairview
Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Penguin Modern Classics
Another wonderfully informative article, Laureen. Thank you for writing it. I've read that David Rockefeller was also a big funder of German arms and IG Farben and yet you don't mention it. Have I been misinformed?
https://www.gbnews.uk/news/treasure-hunters-claim-to-find-4-ton-haul-of-nazi-gold-buried-under-ss-brothel/291965