Hitler and His Secret Partners - Softcover

Pool, James

 
9780671760823: Hitler and His Secret Partners
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0671760823 ISBN 13: 9780671760823
Verlag: Atria, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

James Pool's powerful exposé, Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power, 1919-1933, was praised by The New Yorker as "one of the most useful and illuminating studies of Nazism" ever published. Now, James Pool discloses the shocking and often bizarre financial strategies and relationships that enabled Hitler to consolidate his power and perpetuate his reign of terror. Hitler and His Secret Partners at last tells the full, fascinating story of an amassed legacy that continues to make headlines with the recent emergence of Nazi accounts in Swiss banks. Included are these startling revelations:

  • Top German industrialists and financiers funded Hitler's regime -- and were rewarded with multibillion-dollar returns on their investments.
  • Hitler's foreign supporters included King Edward VIII; his companion, Wallis Simpson, who may have been a Nazi collaborator; and Joseph Kennedy, who gave tacit approval to Hitler's "Jewish policy."
  • Many of Germany's largest companies profited from the Holocaust. There is evidence that the concentration camps themselves were designed as sources of slave labor for German industry.
  • Adolf Hitler's private life was one of extravagance -- in which no expense was spared in the indulgence of his every whim, from the architectural to the sexual.

A thoroughly documented account of a controversial subject, Hitler and His Secret Partners is the definitive study of the calculation, exploitation and greed at the heart of the Third Reich.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Pool has been investigating the financial and psychological reasons behind Hitler's crimes for the past twenty-five years. He is the author of Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power, 1919-1933, a Simon & Schuster book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Financing the 1933 Elections
On the cold winter weekend of January 28, 1933, Germany was officially without a government. Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his cabinet had resigned on Saturday afternoon, and eighty-six-year-old President von Hindenburg had not yet appointed a new chancellor. A nervous tension spread over Berlin. Everyone waited for news; most felt Germany was at an historic turning point.
Who would be the next chancellor? Hitler -- the leader of the largest party, the Nazis, who pledged to destroy democracy? Papen -- the aristocratic horseman who had been chancellor before Schleicher, but who had no popular following? Perhaps Schleicher again, if he could persuade the Social Democrats, the second largest political party in the country, to join him in a coalition? Governing Germany in the middle of an economic depression with nine million unemployed was not an enviable task. The country had just had three different chancellors in rapid succession. By tradition, the leader of the largest party was usually appointed chancellor. But the Nazis had been the largest party for over a year, and so far intrigues and political maneuvering had succeeded in keeping Hitler out of power. Everyone guessed what a Hitler government would mean. He had not kept his militarism, anti-Semitism, and dictatorial ambitions a secret.
Political intrigues were so numerous that weekend that no one really knew what was going on. Sensational rumors were being spread throughout the city. Some said an army coup was imminent, that Schleicher and the generals were about to abduct President von Hindenburg and declare martial law. There were also rumors of an armed Nazi uprising and a general strike by the socialist workers.
Hitler and Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in the Nazi party, stayed up all night on Sunday, January 29, trying to figure out what Hindenburg might do. It was not until after 10 A.M. on Monday that Hitler received a summons to the president's office. Even at that point, the Nazis were not certain whether Hitler would be appointed chancellor or Hindenburg would ask him to serve as vice-chancellor.
Across the street from the Chancellery, in the Kaiserhof Hotel, Hitler's lieutenants were waiting, unsure of what was going on. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, said:
In the street the crowd stands waiting between the Kaiserhof and the Chancellery. We are torn between doubt, hope, joy and despair. We have been deceived too often to be able, wholeheartedly, to believe in the great miracle. [S.A.] Chief of Staff Roehm stands at the window (with binoculars) watching the door of the Chancellery from which the Fuehrer [the leader, Hitler] must emerge. We shall be able to judge by his face if the interview was a success. Torturing hours of waiting. At last, a car draws up in front of the entrance. The crowd cheers. They seem to feel that a great change is taking place....
A few moments later, he is with us. He says nothing. His eyes are full of tears. It has come! The Fuehrer is appointed Chancellor. He has already been sworn in by the President of the Reich. All of us are dumb with emotion. Everyone clasps the Fuehrer's hand....Outside the Kaiserhof, the masses are in a wild uproar....The thousands soon become tens of thousands. Endless streams of people flood the Wilhelmstrasse. We set to work...at once.
Hitler's victory was not a complete one by any means. He had been appointed chancellor in a coalition government. Papen was to be his vice-chancellor, and all the powerful cabinet posts were held by Papen's conservative allies, rather than the Nazis. But at the moment, Hitler's followers weren't worried about the details; for them the only thing that mattered was that Hitler was chancellor. They had come to power! All day, crowds gathered in the square outside the Kaiserhof Hotel and the Chancellery.
At dusk Nazi storm troopers in their brown uniforms gathered in the Tiergarten park, along with men of the Stahlhelm, an ultranationalistic veterans' organization, for a torchlight victory parade through the center of Berlin. As soon as it was dark, they came marching by the thousands through the Brandenburg Gate, carrying swastika flags and the black, white, and red flags of the German empire. Bands marched between the units, beating their big drums as the men sang old German military songs. But as each band came to the Pariser Platz, where the French embassy was located, they stopped whatever they were playing and, with an introductory roll of drums, broke into the tune of the challenging war song "Victorious We Will Crush the French."
The torches carried by the marchers glowed hypnotically in the darkness. To foreign witnesses, it was a frightening sight. "The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy," Ambassador François-Poncet wrote, "whence, with heavy heart and filled with foreboding, I watched this luminous wake." Liberal Germans found it an "ominous sight." It was, wrote one German reporter, "a night of deadly menace, a nightmare in...blazing torches."
As the marchers came by the Chancellery, there were tumultuous cheers for Hitler, who stood in an open window saluting them. He was so excited that night, he could hardly stand still. He was raising his arm up and down heiling, smiling, and laughing so much, his eyes filled with tears. "It was an extraordinary experience," recalled Papen, who was standing behind Hitler. "The endless repetition of the triumphal cry: 'Heil, Heil, Sieg Heil!' rang in my ears like a tocsin." When Hitler turned to speak with Papen, his voice choked with emotion. "What an immense task we have set for ourselves, Herr von Papen -- we must never part until our work is accomplished." Hitler and Papen were much closer allies than anyone at the time imagined.
It was after midnight when the parade ended. Being too excited to sleep, Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and a few other Nazis sat up talking for hours. They could hardly believe it had actually happened: they were in the Chancellery at last. That evening, Hitler said to Goebbels, "No one gets me out of here alive." It was one of the few promises he kept.
On the morning of January 31, Hitler's storm troopers gave the German people a glimpse of what Nazi rule would be like. All over Germany, thugs in brown shirts took possession of the streets and roughed up Communists, socialists, and Jews; they chased socialist mayors and officials out of government buildings and even broke into the private homes of their political enemies. When people complained to Papen, he laughed. "Let the storm troopers have their fling." Among his friends at the Herrenklub, an exclusive gentlemens club, he boasted: "We've hired Hitler." To a skeptic he replied: "What do you want? I have Hindenburg's confidence. Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far in the corner that he'll squeak."
The facts seemed to support Papen's optimism. Not only did Papen have Hindenburg"s confidence, but in fact the old president had promised never to receive Hitler unless he was accompanied by his vice-chancellor. Papen also held the important post of minister-president of Prussia, Germany's largest and most powerful state. From the composition of the cabinet, it seemed all the real power was in the hands of the conservatives: the aristocratic General von Blomberg was minister of defense, Baron von Neurath, a career diplomat, was foreign minister, and the old archreactionary Hugenberg was both minister of economics and minister of agriculture. The Nazis were outnumbered six to two.
The two Nazis in the cabinet, Wilhelm Frick and Goering, held posts that were thought to be insignificant. Frick was minister of the interior, but he did not control the police, which in Germany was under the jurisdiction of the individual state governments. Goering was made minister without portfolio, but with the promise that he would be minister of...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0671760823
ISBN 13 
9780671760823
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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