Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (23 page)

of Franz von Papen, who was a prominent Nazi at the heart of the Hitler movement
since the early days of 1933?

Not only were the German Warburgs persecuted by Hitler in 1938, but millions of
Jews lost their lives to Nazi barbarism. It seems elementary that anyone who has
suffered and was sensitive to the past sufferings of German Jews would avoid Nazis,
Naziism, and neo-Nazi books like the plague. Yet here we have Nazi von Papen acting
as a genial literary host to self-described anti-Nazi James P. Warburg, who apparently
welcomes the opportunity. Moreover, the Warburgs had ample opportunity to release
such an affidavit with wide publicity without utilizing neo-Nazi channels.

The reader will profit from pondering this situation. The only logical explanation is
that some of the facts in the "Sidney Warburg" book are either true, come close to the
truth, or are embarrassing to James P. Warburg. One cannot say that Warburg

intends
to mislead (although this might seem an obvious conclusion), because
businessmen are notoriously illogical writers and reasoners, and there is certainly
nothing to exempt Warburg from this categorization.

Some Conclusions from the "Sidney Warburg" Story

"Sidney Warburg" never existed; in this sense the original 1933 book is a work of
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CHAPTER TEN: The Myth of "Sidney Warburg"

fiction. However, many of the then-little-known facts recorded in the book are curate;
and the James Warburg affidavit is not aimed at the original boo but rather at an
anti-Semitic book circulated over a decade later.

Paul Warburg was a director of American I.G. Farben and thus connected with the
financing of Hitler. Max Warburg, a director of German I.G. Farben, signed — along
with Hitler himself — the document which appointed Hjalmar Schacht to the
Reichsbank. These verifiable connections between the Warburgs and Hitler suggest the

"Sidney Warburg" story cannot be abandoned as a total forgery without close
examination.

Who wrote the 1933 book, and why? I.G. Shoup says the notes were written by a
Warburg in England and given to him to translate. The War-burg motive was alleged
to be genuine remorse at the amoral behavior of Warburgs and their Wall Street
associates. Does this sound like a plausible motive? It has not gone unnoticed that those
same Wall Streeters who plot war and revolution are often in their private lives
genuinely decent citizens; it is not beyond the realm of reason that one of them had a
change of heart or a heavy conscience. But this is not proven.

If the book was a forgery, then by whom was it written? James War-burg admits he
does not know the answer, and he writes: "The original purpose of the forgery remains
somewhat obscure even today.
13

Would any government forge the document? Certainly not the British or U.S.

governments, which are both indirectly implicated by the book. Certainly not the Nazi
government in Germany, although James Warburg appears to suggest this unlikely
possibility. Could it be France, or the Soviet Union, or perhaps Austria? France,
possibly because France feared the rise of Nazi Germany. Austria is a similar
possibility. The Soviet Union is a possibility because the Soviets also had much to fear
from Hitler. So it is plausible that France, Austria, or the Soviet Union had some hand
in the preparation of the book.

Any private citizen who forged such a book without inside government materials
would have to be remarkably well informed. Guaranty Trust is not a particularly
well-known bank outside New York, yet there is an extraordinary degree of
plausibility about the involvement of Guaranty Trust, because it was the Morgan

vehicle used for financing and infiltrating the Bolshevik revolution.14
Whoever named
Guaranty Trust as the vehicle for funding Hitler either knew a great deal more than
the man in the street, or had authentic government information. What would be the
motive behind such a book?

The only motive that seems acceptable is that the unknown author had knowledge a
war was in preparation and hoped for a public reaction against the Wall Street
fanatics and their industrialist friends in Germany — before it was too late. Clearly,

whoever
wrote the book, his motive almost certainly was to warn against Hitlerian
aggression and to point to its Wall Street source, because the technical assistance of
American companies controlled by Wall Street was still needed to build Hitler's war
machine. The Standard Oil hydrogenation patents and financing for the oil from coal
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CHAPTER TEN: The Myth of "Sidney Warburg"

plants, the bomb sights, and the other necessary technology had not been fully
transferred when the "Sidney Warburg" book was written. Consequently, this could
have been a book designed to break the back of Hitler's supporters abroad, to inhibit
the planned transfer of U.S. war-making potential, and to eliminate financial and
diplomatic support of the Nazi state. If this was the goal, it is regrettable that the book
failed to achieve any of these purposes.

Footnotes:

1William E. Dodd,
Ambassador Dodd's Diary, op.
cit., p. 31.

2Ibid., p. 74.

3Franz von Papen,
Memoirs,
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1953), p. 229.

4The English text for this chapter is translated from an authenticated
surviving German translation of a copy of the Dutch edition of
De

Geldbronnen van Het Nationaal-Socialisme (Drie Gesprekken Met Hitler),
or

The Financial Sources of National Socialism (Three conversations with

Hitler.
The original Dutch author is given as "Door Sidney Warburg,
vertaald door I.G. Shoup" (By Sidney Warburg, as told by I.G. Shoup).

The copy used here was translated from the Dutch by Dr. Walter Nelz,
Wilhelm Peter, and Rene Sonderegger in Zurich, February 11, 1947, and
the German translation bears an affidavit to the effect that: "The
undersigned three witnesses do verify that the accompanying document is
none other than a true and literal translation from Dutch into German of
the book by Sidney Warburg, a copy of which was constantly at their
disposal during the complete process of translation. They testify that they
held this original in their hands, and that to the best of their ability they
read it sentence by sentence, translating it into German, comparing then
the content of the accompanying translation to the original conscientiously
until complete agreement was reached."

5Note that "von Heydt" was the original name for the Dutch Bank voor
Handel en Seheepvaart N.V., a subsidiary of the Thyssen interests and now
known to have been used as a funnel for Nazi funds. See
Elimination of

German Resources.

6Examination of the Index for the
New York Times
confirms the accuracy
of the latter part of this statement. See for example the sudden rush of
interest by the
New York Times,
September 15, 1930 and the feature article
on "Hitler, Driving Force in Germany's Fascism" in the September 21,
1930 issue of the
New York Times.
In 1929 the
New York Times
listed only
one brief item on Adolf Hitler. In 1931 it ran a score of substantial entries,
in-eluding no fewer than three "Portraits."

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CHAPTER TEN: The Myth of "Sidney Warburg"

7

Hoover said he lost the support of Wall Street in 1931 because he would
not go along with its plan for a New Deal: see Antony C. Sutton,
Wall

Street and FDR, op. cit.

8Franz von Papen,
Memoirs,
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1958).

Translated by Brian Connell.

9Werner Zimmerman,
Liebet Eure Feinde,
(Frankhauser Verlag:
Thielle-Neuchatel, 1948), which contains a chapter, "Hitler's geheime
Geldgeber" (Hitler's secret financial supporters) and Rene Sonderegger,

Spanischer Sommer,
(Afroltern, Switzerland: Aehren Verlag, 1948).

10Franz von Papen,
Memoirs, op.
cit., p. 23.

11William E. Dodd,
Ambassador Dodd,s Diary, op. cit.
pp, 593-602.

12The reader should examine the complete Warburg statement and
affidavit; see Franz von Papen,
Memoirs, op. cit.
pp. 593-602,
13Franz von Papen,
Memoirs, op.
cit., p. 594.

14See Antony C. Sutton,
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit,

BACK

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II

Behind the battle fronts in World War II, through intermediaries in Switzerland and North Africa, the New York financial elite collaborated with the Nazi regime, Captured files after the war yielded a mass of evidence demonstrating that for some elements of Big Business, the period 1941-5 was "business as usual." For instance, correspondence between U.S. firms and their French subsidiaries reveals the aid given to the Axis military machine — while the United States was at war with Germany and Italy. Letters between Ford of France and Ford of the U.S. between 1940 and July 1942 were analyzed by the Foreign Funds Control section of the Treasury Department. Their initial report concluded that until mid-1942:
(1) the business of the Ford subsidiaries in France substantially increased; (2)
their production was solely for the benefit of the Germans and the countries
under its occupation; (3) the Germans have "shown clearly their wish to
protect the Ford interests" because of the attitude of strict neutrality
maintained by Henry Ford and the late Edsel Ford; and (4) the increased
activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the

commendation of the Ford family in America.
1

Similarly, the Rockefeller Chase Bank was accused of collaborating with the Nazis in World War II France, while Nelson Rockefeller had a soft job in Washington D.C.:
Substantially the same pattern of behavior was pursued by the Paris office of
the Chase Bank during German occupation, An examination of the
correspondence between Chase, New York, and Chase, France, from the date
of the fall of France to May, 1942 discloses that: (1) the manager of the Paris
office appeased and collaborated with the Germans to place the Chase banks in
a "privileged position;" (2) the Germans held the Chase Bank in a very special
esteem — owing to the international activities of our (Chase) head office and
the pleasant relations which the Paris branch has been maintaining with many
of their (German) banks and their (German) local organizations and higher
officers; (3)the Paris manager was "very vigorous in enforcing restrictions
against Jewish property, even going so far as to refuse to release funds
belonging to Jews in anticipation that a decree with retroactive provisions
prohibiting such release might be published in the near future by the occupying
authorities;" (4)the New York office despite the above information took no
direct steps to remove the undesirable manager from the Paris office since it

"might react against our (Chase) interests as we are dealing, not with a theory
but with a situation."
2

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II
These two situations
[i.e.,
Ford and Chase Bank] convince us that it is
imperative to investigate immediately on the spot the activities of subsidiaries
of at least some of the larger American firms which were operating in France
during German occupation ....
3

Treasury officials urged that an investigation be started with the French subsidiaries of several American banks — that is, Chase, Morgan, National City, Guaranty, Bankers Trust, and American Express. Although Chase and Morgan were the only two banks to maintain French offices throughout the Nazi occupation, in September 1944 all the major New York banks were pressing the U.S. Government for permission to re-open pre-war branches.

Subsequent Treasury investigation produced documentary evidence of collaboration between both Chase Bank and J.P. Morgan with the Nazis in World War II. The recommendation for a full investigation is cited in full as follows:
TREASURY DEPARTMENT

INTER-OFFICE COMMUNICATION

Date: December 20, 1944

To: Secretary Morgenthau From: Mr. Saxon

Examination of the records of the Chase Bank, Paris, and of Morgan and Company, France, have progressed only far enough to permit tentative conclusions and the revelation of a few interesting facts: