Reality Behind the Myths

After this small digression on race, let’s get back to the main subject of this article: the financing of National Socialism. As conclusively shown by Henry Ashby Turner, big American or German banks and corporations such as J.P. Morgan, I.G. Farben, Flick, Krupp, and Siemens did not, on the whole, support Hitler and his political rise to power:

If the role of big business in the disintegration of the Republic has been exaggerated, such is even more true of its role in the rise of Hitler. While a significant part of the business community contributed materially — if less than wholly voluntarily — to the consolidation of Hitler’s regime after he had become chancellor, he and his party had previously received relatively little support from that quarter. The early growth of the NSDAP took place without any significant aid from the circles of large-scale enterprise.[22]

Big firms and organizations, notes Turner, bestowed the bulk of their funding upon Hitler’s opponents, the bourgeois parties who supported President Hindenburg, the hard-left faction of the National Socialist Party itself, and the Jewish-led German Communist Party.[23]

Who then Financed Hitler and the National Socialist Rise to Power?

Emil Kirdof and Fritz Thyssen were the only German captains of big industry who supported the NSDAP. Most of the party’s money came from the German masses. The American writer on economics and business, Peter Drucker, who agrees with Turner, is quoted as follows by journalist Ivor Benson:

The really decisive backing came from sections of the lower middle classes, the farmers and working class, who were hardest hit; as far as the Nazi Party is concerned, there is good reason to believe that at least three quarters of its funds, even after 1930, came from the weekly dues and from the entrance fees to the mass meetings from which members of the upper classes were always conspicuously absent.[24]

In the final analysis, Hitler was an honest man who wanted the best for his people.

Notes