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On September 12, 1919, a meeting of a tiny political party held in the Sterneckerbräu, a Munich beer hall, was joined by an unknown war veteran. His name was Adolf Hitler. Millions of people were just starting to recover from the First World War, when human history had insensibly taken a path that lead to still more dreadful battles, still more harrowing crimes – to the hideous ovens of Majdanek and Treblinka, to the Siege of Leningrad, to the Battle of Stalingrad and the Kursk Salient.

The date when that meagre sprig that was eventually to grow into the Cyclopean tree of the German national socialism can be established with some accuracy. On March 7, 1918, one Anton Drexler founded a society under the poetic title Freien Arbeiterausschuss für einen guten Frieden (Free Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace) that totalled some forty workers as the members. At their quite harmless meetings during the World War, that set of lotus-eaters would sit around there with their beer mugs, theorizing on the pleasures and benefits of universal peace.

There are but three ways to reach peace in any war – to win it, to lose it, or to end it in a tie by parley. While Drexler’s followers were jabbering it in the beer hall, events in Germany went along the first possible scenario – the Kaiser’s Empire, subverted by external revolutionary propaganda and the “live” example of the Russian Revolution, went all to pieces. Peace did settle in, but not the one Drexler and his ilk had been dreaming of. It was the treaty of Versailles. It was that town near Paris where, on June 28, 1919, the well-known Treaty was signed, to give rise, in the long run, to the Nazi Party and a new, more terrible, war. But why should we consider this peace treaty as a forerunner of a new war? The fact is, this “treaty” was daylight robbery in the guise of a harmless – and important – international document, which, nonetheless, didn’t change its true face. What may be most surprising, the Treaty was thus condemned not only by Lenin and not only by German politicians, but by members of the Triple Entente! For example, Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies from 1918, is famous for saying that the Treaty was “not a peace, [but] an armistice for twenty years” – the words that would prove a prophecy. Other statements also went down in history, though less widely known. “The economic clauses of the treaty [of Versailles] were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile [condemning] Germany to pay reparations on a fabulous scale”, – these are the words pronounced not by Adolf Hitler (who rode the wave of the Treaty’s critique), but by Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom[13].

As it is, the Germans were simply robbed. Germany lost about 73 thousand square kilometres of its territory (ca. 13.5 %), with over 6.5 million people living there (ca. 10 %). What is more, the “truncated” country forfeited its overseas colonies, and was to repair all the damage entailed by the conflict to the victorious parties. As to the indemnity, its total sum at first remained undetermined; it was named only later. The sum was fantastic. And it was altered several times. The final version of the calculation would have Germany make their last payment as late as in 1988![14]

It was as if a hurricane had swept over the once prospering land. Large amounts of state property were seized in compensation of the damage, including, for example, 140,000 dairy cows. But before being bled dry, Germany must first be hog-tied to have no chance of rebelling against the “victorious” looters. “Germany was disarmed. All her artillery and weapons were destroyed. Her fleet had already sunk itself in Scapa Flow. Her vast army was disbanded. <…> No military force of any kind was allowed. Submarines were forbidden <…>”, Churchill would testify in his book[15].

The German army was limited to one hundred thousand men; the country was not allowed to produce military aircraft, or tanks, or men-of-war. Chaos and anarchy ensued in the defeated and bled country, multiplied by an economic collapse.

It was against this catastrophic backdrop that Anton Drexler made up his mind to turn his club-like society into something more serious, when on January 5, 1919, he formed the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Remarkably endowed with oratory skill, young Adolf Hitler quickly became the Party’s new leader, outshining its founder. Eventually he was the one and only Leader – the Führer of the new political force. He changed not only the philosophy of the Workers’ Party, but its name, prefixing it with the word “national-socialist”, so it went down in history as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP).

A great mass of various literature is devoted to the history of the Nazi Party and its leader. You can go to any book market, and will be surely faced with the half-insane eyes of Adolf Hitler staring at you from a couple of front covers, or the heavy-set outlines of his troopers. You may think all questions have long been answered. And yet, as soon as you take a more disinterested look at the history of the Third Reich, every new book you read will bring in more and more obscurity and ambiguity. Very soon you will learn that even the most “authoritative” researchers refer in their books to facts that are strangely at variance with each other. Figures will differ grossly even where they have never been called in question – for example, the membership of Hitler’s party. What can be easier, it seems, than to look up the Nazi literature in the archives for the key figures of the party’s development? We know that the Nazi spoke and wrote much about their “years of struggle” and “fallen comrades”; we should naturally expect the growing number of the Nazi Party to be well documented… Nothing of the kind!

“As of November 1923, the Party numbered 15,000”, writes Konrad Heiden in his Hitler’s Rise to Power, a book he published in 1936, while the party was in its heyday[16].

“The party was rapidly growing. At the end of 1922, it had some 22,000 members. At the time of the putsch [it] numbered some 55,000”, writes the British historian Ian Kershaw in his 1990 book Hitler[17].

Recalling that Hitler’s failed putsch took place exactly in November 1923, we have a tremendous disproportion in the two quoted figures – within the 55 years between the appearance of the two books the Nazi Party membership was estimated four times as large! Keeping that kind of pace, the “historians” of some three hundred years later will subscribe the entire population of Germany to the Nazi Party.

For reassurance, let’s take down a third book for reference – that written by Alan Bullock, another influential “expert” on the Nazi Germany. And once more, we bump into quite different figures. “The membership rose from about 1,100 in June 1920 to 6,000 in early 1922, and about 20,000 in early 1923”[18].

We might suppose that the historians of the Nazi Party each use their own, separate source – a separate archive or documentary, which should explain the discrepancies. But the archives and documents are always the same – it is the quotations that differ! Where on earth are all these figures taken from? – this secret is worse than all the secrets of the Nazi Germany.

To be short, each author has his own version. These versions are then blindly copied by smaller-scale authors, to result in a total mess in literature.

How then can we study the history of the Second World War, where it is essential to know the real numbers of artillery, tanks, and troops involved in battles, once we can’t depend on historians for such an easy question as the number of “members” of the Nazi Party?

But why ask about the number of the Nazi? Why do we need it at all? There is one good reason – to show by a very simple example the amount of sheer ignorance of facts on the part of the Nazi leader’s biographers. This is to warn you against taking for granted all that fudge written about the Second World War – not without checking and double-checking it with your own mind. No fewer cock-and-bull stories are written about the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people. I conceived this book as an attempt to put in some order the tons of motley information concerning this period in history; to extract that grain of truth that would help us realise the real causes of Russia’s worst tragedy that began on June 22, 1941.

History has its stereotypes. These stereotypes, or clichés, are well known to anyone, though no one can tell who and when created them. Go ask who gave money to Hitler, and you will hear the same reply – German manufacturers. This stereotype has variants, including “major capitalists”, “the Krupp group”, “German corporations” and so on and so forth.

But let us get down to brass tacks. All the political activity of any party is financed by those who take sides with it. This is a naïve point of view. The correct one is as follows: the political activity of a party is financed by those who expect to achieve something by it. This phrase is far more sinister. For example, a party that calls for support of national industry can be sponsored by the owners of textile and footwear factories. The idea is, if this party comes to power, is will raise import fees on shoes and clothing, which will bear a direct benefit to domestic manufacturers. Is this bad for people? Probably not – unless all business competition is destroyed in the country under the banner of boosting “national industry”. Likewise, a party oriented for national defence will be aided and abetted by the military lobby expecting the blabbering of the politicians to be followed by new orders on missiles, radars, tanks, and aircraft. Again, is this bad for the country? Not unless the military expenses go beyond the reasonable. To put it in a nutshell, financial support of political forces by tycoons has always been there, and will always be. This is not something invented in Russia, but a common phenomenon in every country where the supreme authority is elected by the nation. Democracy as the ultimate form of people’s rule leads any politician to one sad conclusion – the largest electorate is won by money, not by nice slogans. Money is needed not to bribe the voting public, but just to get your ideas across – to bring them home to people from television and newspapers – to say and be heard! You will have to pay through the nose for all that, bearing in mind the simple rule: the larger the country, the larger the target electorate, the more money you need.

After the fall of monarchy in 1918, the same kind of democracy was established in Germany. Even the country itself between its defeat in the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power is known as the Weimar Republic, after the name of the city where the new German Constitution was enacted. Admitting that Germany was a republic, everything said above holds true for the country of that time. Any political activity must be fed by money, just as the furnace of an engine must be fed by coal. You won’t get anywhere without that “fuel”. Both the success and the duration of your future political “trip” wholly depend on the amount of banknotes to be spent. Here we come to the question for which we have undertaken this brief foray into the theory of politics.

What was the source of financial “coal” for Adolf Hitler, who only fifteen years after his “seminal” appearance in the Munich beer hall came to the top power in Germany?

The question is no sooner asked, than a ready reply given. The same old stereotype: he was sponsored by German industrial magnates. A good reply it is – and a very convenient one, too. Convenient for everybody. Soviet-time historiography did with that explanation alone. In the West, another ready reply is common, thanks to Suvorov-Rezun. They say that it was Stalin who guided and helped Hitler to his power, seeing him as a new “icebreaker of revolution”. This should mean, according to that judgment, that the Bolshevik communists gave money to the Nazi – a statement that has zero logic in it. One might as well blame the Yeltsin Russia, too poor even to print currency, for financing international terrorism on a large scale. Accusing the Soviet Union under Stalin of fostering the Nazi is similarly absurd. The Russian Civil War had not yet ended, when Hitler’s party was already toddling to its might. How could the Russian communists possibly have financed the German anti-communist movement? One might as well name Lenin the benefactor of Kolchak and Wrangel! Why concoct such obvious apple-sauce? That is to accuse Russia of the whole bag of tricks. There is a second reason as well – to avert suspicions from the true forces that stood behind that cannibal party…

German industrial magnates did go down in history as Hitler’s sponsors. But we will ask again: Did they have any reason for sponsoring the National-Socialists?

Why, you will say, the Nazi were all fiercely anti-communist; by sponsoring them, the bourgeoisie sought to prevent the risk of a Red revolution. This is another common bag of lies that has nothing to do with reality. Small wonder that no figures or dates are cited in books that use this kind of argument. We will yet take pains to compare things.

In November 1918, immediately after the monarchical regime came to ruin, Germany was teetering on the brink of a Bolshevik revolution. What is more, this Socialist revolution did take place in the country – a long time before the appearance of the obsessed Führer on the political stage. The period of chaos and anarchy caused by the fall of the Kaiser was followed by the emergence of two main political forces – a social democrat government and communists who sought to deepen the revolutionary movement. The situation came to a head in 1919, with mass skirmishes in Berlin, and the arrest and execution of the German Communist Party leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (the so-called “Spartacist uprising”).

The struggle did not end there, though. The Bremen communists proved quicker on the draw, and on January 10, 1919, the Bremen Soviet Republic was declared. To back up the new-born Red republic, a detachment commanded by Ernst Thälmann set out for Bremen from Hamburg. But no backup could help the rebels – the German army was firmly on the side of the current government. As early as on February 4, the Red Bremen was seized by a division commanded by General Gerstenberg. The Bremen Soviet Republic bit the dust so quickly that all the children in the USSR knew that city only by the wonderful Grimm brothers fairy-tale and the still more wonderful Soviet animation film.

Early March 1919 saw a new wave of conflicts in Berlin. A national walkout organised by the communists took the form of an all-out revolt that was eventually crushed down, with some 1,200 casualties. The volunteer paramilitary units formed by regular and non-commissioned officers (the so-called Freikorps, literally “Free Corps”) and the police suppressed the uprisings with firmness and savagery. There are confirmed cases when a group of striking workers was mowed down by machine-gun fire just for flying a single red banner.

Who was it who made such a blood bath of the revolting communists? It was Gustav Noske, a German member of the Council of the People’s Deputies (Rat der Volksbeauftragten) during the November Revolution. This “glorious son of the German nation” went down in history as “the Bloodhound[19]”. The connection between this alias and the blood of those massacred by his command is but incidental, characteristic as it is. It was Noske’s own words about himself in the days of the revolt – “Someone has to be the bloodhound; I shall not shirk the responsibility”[20].

Still, April had new waves of chaos in store for Germany. On April 13, 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Munich. It was not to live long, however, and already on May 5 it collapsed. But in the beginning, everything looked not unlike the Bolshevik power grab in Russia. The short-lived republic had its own Council of Actions to represent the supreme authority, as well as an Executive Council headed by communists but comprising at first also independent social democrats. The young Red republic’s strategy would be easy to understand for everyone who is acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The immediate programme included disarmament of the police and the “bourgeoisie”; confiscation of private property and nationalisation of banks; holding of hostages; workers’ control of enterprises; and even a German version of the Cheka[21] (a Committee for Combatting Counter-Revolution)[22]. The German “comrades” had yet some inventions of their own, for instance, the prohibition of history as a school subject, or the emission of banknotes with an expiration date[23].

Even a German Red Army was formed, which at once carried out a number of successful operations. At first, it routed the governmental forces north of Munich, taking over control of Karlsfeld and Freising. The German Red Army’s subsequent operations were also attended by success, markedly the battles for Dachau, the Bavarian town that was yet to gain its notoriety during the Second World War. But there the winning streak for the Munich communists ended – a 60-thousand-strong army commanded by Gustav “the Bloodhound” Noske pushed forward, surrounding the rebelling region. The army which consisted of regular units and volunteer veterans went down on the Bavarian Republic, destroying the rebels with as much atrocity as did the communists. House-to-house fighting in Munich lasted for five days, ending up in firing squad executions in a prison yard…

Notably, the counter-revolution actions in Bavaria were bloodier than the revolution itself. The Reds were guilty of shooting eight hostages (all members of the Thule occultist society). At the same time, the White volunteer units destroyed a Red medical convoy; shot 21 members of the Catholic Apprentice Society; 12 workers from Perlach; 50 recovered Russian prisoners of war; as well as the leaders of the Bavarian Soviet Republic – Rudolf Egelhofer, Gustav Landauer, and Eugen Leviné. Both Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Hess took part in the recapture of Munich. However, Adolf Hitler, who at the time was in the city, was oddly inert and did not take any active steps to help the struggle against communism. The Nazi historiography took pains to leave this page in the Führer’s biography in the dark.

The Red revolution in Germany was suppressed, but that was no merit of the Nazi. Simply because at that time no “national socialists” even existed; instead, there were some twenty or thirty beer-drinking gossips sitting around at their leisure in Munich struck by the Civil War. As to Adolf Hitler, he was a young self-conscious ex-serviceman and had nothing to do with big politics.

Did the communist do anything further to seize the reins? They did. But all such attempts were suppressed by the army and the police, and never by Hitler’s storm-troopers. A new wave of violence caused by the “struggle of the proletariat” surged across Germany in 1923. In October 23 to 25, riots struck Hamburg, spearheaded by that same Ernst Thälmann. For three days and three nights the rebels fought behind barricades in the city and on its outskirts. Neither did national socialists participate in these fights. Adolf Hitler had his own “number one” problems to take care of – the planning of his takeover operation, later known as the Beer Hall Putsch, had entered the homestretch.

On the 8th and 9th of November, the Nazi attempted a takeover in Munich. Hitler himself was heading the demonstration, pistol in hand and helmet on head. The police opened fire, and the Führer had a very narrow escape. His party comrade, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who was marching by his side, was killed by a shot, and in falling, he clutched at Hitler and pulled him down on the ground, dislocating his collar bone. Hermann Göring was badly wounded about his groin – that injure would prove so intolerable as to force him to take to analgesic drugs forever after, and eventually reduce the future Reichsmarschall to an inveterate drug addict. In total, some fourteen Nazi and three policemen remained were left dead and prostrate on the ground.

We can see that all the attempts by the communists at a military takeover were always brought down by the government in power. Not only did the Nazi fail to offer any assistance, but they actually made things worse. See for yourselves – only a fortnight after the Red Putsch in Hamburg, the Brown, or Beer Putsch struck Munich!

Now, if you were in Krupp’s or Thyssen’s shoes, who would you give money to? The ruling social-democratic party that could beget some outstanding “bloodhounds”, if need be, or someone else? Why would you pay the radicals? Why would you burn your house if it became infested with rats, once there are other good ways to get rid of them? Hitler with his radical party may be indeed compared to burning the house to rid it of vermin. Why would the German industrial elite sponsor the Nazi – the radicals – the mad heads? The Nazi were evidently not a protection against the “Red menace”; what is more, they even tried to take over the reins.

It seems more probable that the capitalists of that time would have thought that it’s as broad as it’s long. And it is not the similar colours of the Communist and Nazi banners, or their similar ways of propaganda that matter. It’s another thing: both Communism and National Socialism, albeit antagonistic, are revolutionary doctrines!

We demand that profits not earned by labour and the slavery of interest rates be made away with.

We demand that military profits be confiscated without pity.

We demand that industrial concerns be nationalised.

We demand that industrial and office workers have their shares in the profits of large commercial enterprises.

We demand that a healthy middle class be brought up and supported; that large commercial stores be immediately withdrawn from private ownership and leased at moderate fees to small entrepreneurs.

We demand that a land reform be enacted that would meet the interests of the German nation; that a law on irrevocable confiscation of land for public needs be adopted; that land lease interests and land speculation be forbidden.

If you thought you were reading an extract from a communistic brochure, you are mistaken. These are all clauses from a Nazi political programme. These are the “protectors of the national capital”. They were even prepared to deprive owners of their land irrevocably. Some Bolsheviks, you would say! So again – would you give money to such radicals whose slogans are so much like those of your hated communists? Or would you instead try to reinforce the existing Weimar Republic? Say, inject money into the police and increase their size, and raise salaries in the army. I imagine you would be more at rest if your life and your private savings and enterprises were protected by government bodies and not Brownshirts, right?

If that be so, then go on with your propaganda and make a hero of Gustav Noske who brought down the communists in 1919. He is a defence minister as one should be, with his heavy hand, iron nerve, and readiness to answer for his actions. But no – already in 1920, the “Bloodhound” is made to retire, never to reappear on the political stage. Why would anyone want an even bloodier ruler in the person of Hitler who would evidently make even the “bloody” Noske look like a blue-eyed boy scout? You would do well to create images of the “true German courage” from the police who have proved so efficient in depleting Thälmann’s gunmen at the Hamburg barricades. Here’s a good replacement to Gustav Noske. These policemen were surely commanded by someone who had guts.

Why would you pay Adolf Hitler? When will he be capable of putting down riots and crush the German Communist Party? How would you know at all if he can do that? As of 1920-ies, Hitler is not even “a bird in the hand”, not to say “two in the bush”; he is a crocodile, so far a little one, but with sharp teeth. And you house is already alive with rats… You could, of course, take up taming the croc, teaching him to catch rats. But this is a dangerous enterprise – someday your new “pet” will devour yourself together with (or instead of) the rats. And so he did. Together with the Communists, all the other parties were disbanded – the Social Democratic party; the Independent Social Democratic party; the Economic party; the German Centre party; the Bavarian People’s party; the German Democratic party; and even the German National People’s party, as well as all the smaller ones – all at the same time[24]. The Nazi packed all these into concentration camps “to think better”. Do you really need this, you German industrial magnates?

Ironically, after their almost synchronic attempts to overthrow the government, the Nazi and the Communists waxed strictly law-abiding, again almost at a time. When out of prison in 1924, where he had been kept but a short time, Hitler took a once-and-for-all pledge to gain power by purely legal means. A clandestine Ninth Convention of the German Communist party held in April 1924 also adopted a completely legal roadmap. From then on, the Communist party made its presence in the Parliament and struggled for power by legal elections, discarding the idea of a coup d’état. Communists were now occupied by propaganda, public demonstrations and meetings, and the manufacturing of red banners and flyleaves. True, they did have their own armed squadrons, just the same as the Nazi, but they never conspired for another coup. At least, there is no dependable historical document to prove the opposite – none at all!

The “Red menace” in Germany had subsided. Communists could hardly come to power, even by parliamentary elections. The best result that these followers of bearded Karl Marx could achieve was on November 6, 1932, when they garnered 5,980,200 votes, or 16.9 % of the electorate. Was that a risk? Not at all. A Communist majority in the Parliament was definitely out of the question. Knowing that, one would wish nothing more than to let them keep their quiet struggle for the rights of the proletariat, sitting, as it were, in the Parliament. Why would one think of fuelling the Nazi who would then ban all the other parties and declare themselves the best protectors of the German working society?

Most ironically, the German “Red menace” was not believed even by its prime antagonist, Adolf Hitler. “Such a danger [Bolshevism in Germany] does not exist, and has never existed”, he told in his conversation with Hermann Rauschning. “I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will”[25].

And so they did. A great many former communists entered the NSDAP. Such immigrant party members were later dubbed “beefsteaks”, being “brown” on the outside, but “red” inside.

Germany would see no other riots from that time – neither from the right wing, nor from the left one, which to us is of special importance. Once there was no fear of poison, there was no need for an antidote. It would have been reasonable to start fortifying the law and its enforcing bodies, cracking down on the left and right radicals. Yet someone did want to see Hitler in power very badly. And that “someone” was surely not a group of German industrialists.

So far we have found no good ground for German magnates to finance the Nazi. There were, of course, some of them who did give money to the Nazi, but this is by way of exception. Those who did so had evidently been ignorant of the Nazi political programme, or had failed to see in it a heavy socialistic bias. But even putting aside the programme, the very name of Hitler’s party – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – would suffice to rule out the question of being favoured by large capital owners. Have you known a tycoon sponsor a socialist workers’ party, while there are others out there, and more respectable too?

There is another point to mention. Let’s ask when those “German industry magnates” could have been actually financing the Nazi. It took Adolf Hitler fifteen years to rise to power, from 1919 to 1933. When reading literature on the road of the Nazi leaders to the very top of German political Olympus, one can but observe one striking fact – the closer is Hitler to victory, the more information on his sponsors is given by historians. True, when Hitler had already been made Chancellor, only the silly or the lazy wouldn’t contribute to the budget of the NSDAP. As the Nazi took another long stride to power, still more were willing to support them. The party’s leader could now negotiate financing affairs on a par with any German magnate. Hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and regular party members stood at his back, as well as the sympathy of millions of voters. It was at that moment that Hitler could really address “German industry magnates” and receive their material help. However, historians would rather overlook one very important detail. Almost all the evidence of such financial support refers to the last two years preceding the power grab by the Nazi. The well-known German industrialist August Thyssen declares in his book I Paid Hitler that the accumulated financing Hitler received from industrial companies totalled two million Deutschemarks[26]. The North Rhine-Westphalia group of industrialists also gave Hitler over one million Deutschemarks during 1931–1932, as testified by Funk at the Nuremberg Trials[27].

But the winners of the Second World War somehow closed their eyes on that. None of Germany’s industrial élite was ever tried for having financed the party who had the blood of millions of people on their hands. For example, in 1947, Alfried Krupp (Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach) was convicted to twelve years imprisonment with confiscation of property – but not on the charge of having extended financial support to the Nazi, but for having practiced slave work at his factories, exploiting innocent people brought by force from Eastern Europe. The industrial magnate Kirdorf from the Ruhr region went so far as to pay the tithe of five Pfennigs to the NSDAP from every ton of coal sold. This amounted to a stunning six million Deutschemarks per year. Some money! But he was never charged or tried for that. If that same coal had been mined by concentration camp prisoners who had been dying by thousands from sheer emaciation, the “sponsor” would certainly have been punished. Once there are no exploited prisoners, there’s no charge – that’s how it was.

Indeed, no one was brought to book for paying Hitler! And not because those industrialists were thought to be beyond the reach of law, but because their donations were grossly dwarfed by the expenses of Hitler’s party. Their help was of importance, but not of key importance, for even in the roaring 1930-ies, the Golden Age of Hitler and his party, the Nazi’s expenses did not tally with their income!

According to some estimations, the expenses of the NSDAP spent on political propaganda, the wages of the storm troops, and the endless election campaigns must have totalled from 70 to 90 million Deutschemarks!

And now hear them talking about donations of one to three million Deutschemarks! Even the six million from the coal industry is quite disproportionate to what they really spent. Adding party membership fees and miscellaneous donations by German citizens, we still end up with 30 to 40 million Deutschemarks unaccounted-for. Is this possible that the industrialists might be lying to conceal their real contribution to Hitler’s budget? Hardly so. Who was it then, who gave him those millions? He couldn’t have made them out of nothing, could he?

This question still remains without an acceptable reply. Precisely speaking, there have been replies readily given by some, but only to lull the readers out of asking unwanted questions. The fact that almost 90 % of the NSDAP financial documents vanished during the last days of the party may give some colour to this matter. In the spring of 1945 the Nazi made haste to destroy evidence. Only the archives of the Gestapo and the correspondence between the top commanders of the SS and the party leadership (for example, between Kaltenbrunner and Bormann) survived to be seized by the winners in the war. Still, the surviving documents sufficed to confine many leaders and top officials of the Third Reich either to the hangman or to decades behind bars. Why on earth had the Nazi not taken care of those documents as well? The answer is readily given – they were too occupied with destroying their financial history. It was that which they had been making every effort to get rid of in the first place. And only after that, they had proceeded to burn the less “grave” papers, like mass execution and deportation warrants, in order of significance. But why, among the smoking ruins of Berlin and Munich and on the brink of total annihilation, why should anyone take such pains to prevent the world from knowing the source of money used by the Führer to come to his power? What difference would it make to Göring or Himmler if everyone knew the “heroes” of the financial backstage dealings? They would stand trial in any case, and be condemned to at least many years in prison. Why would they think of burning folders with bills and receipts instead of those with warrants and reports of executions?

Göring and Himmler had no reason to do that whatsoever. Their crimes were too grave to bother about petty things like that. But there were those smaller fry in the Nazi hierarchy who had plans to live on. One example is the unchallenged treasurer of the NSDAP and SS Obergruppenführer Franz Xavier Schwarz. It was he who destroyed the bulk of the party’s financial documents in the Munich “brown house”. Herr Schwarz was privy to all the monetary transactions of the party, and of course its financing. Hitler himself would often remonstrate that Schwarz wouldn’t give him a Pfennig, with “his arse glued to the gold chests”, and that he (Hitler) would sooner get something “begging on the church porch”. So raging and fuming with indignation, Hitler still never thought of firing or even punishing Schwarz. Because Schwarz was exactly what a Minister of Finance is supposed to be.

Now why did Xavier Schwarz burn the financial documents? And still more interestingly, why didn’t he burn all the documents, but left some untouched? That was all because he had plans for further life, to fulfil which he must make certain steps. He must destroy all the compromising materials and leave only the most harmless ones. On that condition only could he hope to be spared by those who had his life and well-being in their hands.

But who were they? German industrialists like the Krupps and the Borsigs? Of course not. They were those who defeated the Nazi Germany – the leaders of the Antihitlerite nations. Which occupation zone did the Nazi bigwigs try so desperately to get into after the defeat? Not hard to guess – that controlled by the United States and the United Kingdom. So it happened that Franz Xavier Schwarz was arrested in Munich by the allied forces who had entered the city not long after he had destroyed everything “unfit” in his archive. It is those remaining documents that have enabled latter-day historians to judge that Hitler was financed by German industrialists.

Here comes the miraculous conclusion: once the 10 % of the documents that have actually been preserved state that financing was made by German capitalists, the lost 90 % must have been to the same effect! This kind of inference was drawn by both Western and Soviet historians and scholars, and has never changed up to the present day. The layman can’t see beyond this conclusion to notice the logical fallacy. But why would one burn documents, saving some of them, if the preserved part could later be used to restore the content of the destroyed ones? It is evident that the destroyed documents must be radically different from those preserved. To destroy that which no scholar will ever find – that is logical enough! To destroy that which would compromise the leadership of the victorious parties in the war – their secret services and intelligence bureaus, and to preserve the sort of things Schwarz did – materials bearing on donations from Krupp, Borsig and others of the kind – those magnates who could now do nothing to alter the situation of the NSDAP ex-treasurer.

What happened next to Franz Xavier Schwarz may serve to confirm our conclusions. Having obliterated the papers which could cast a shade on the winners, he was given an almost “baby” term, when considering his important position in the NSDAP and the SS – only two years’ imprisonment. Already in 1947, the ex-treasurer walked free from jail. Everything was as agreed – at least, that’s what he must have thought. Schwarz says his say at the trial, silencing what should be silenced, gets his two years and then goes at large. The one thing he forgot was that “the only good witness is a dead witness”. So right out from jail, Schwarz died – that same year. When in prison, he had been safe and sound.

The people who sponsored Hitler ad his party have been named quite often. But these names are either the same old “Krupps and Borsigs” or peripheral figures. When Hitler was tried for the Beer Putsch, it was elicited that he had received money for the party from the director of the Bavarian Industrial Union, privy councillor Aust, the Union’s lawyer Doctor Kulo, and so on.

These names can go on and on, but they won’t tell us anything. Their donations are too ridiculous to believe that they could have helped Hitler to seize the top power in Germany. But why should history books be so persistent in their moving tales of how Hitler was supported by burghers? One of those tales you will find in nearly all such books narrates about the donations made to the NSDAP by one Helena Bechstein, the wife of the owner of a large piano factory. That old woman, as the story goes, felt a mother-like affection for Adolf who was an orphan. When later he was spending time in prison, she would even call herself his mother to gain a visit. A similar generosity was evinced by a Frau von Seidlitz – according to Hitler’s biographers, she gave all her money to the Nazi party[28]. Does it mean that those overactive old ladies should have been placed into the prisoner’s box? Do we call narrow-minded middle-class dames past their prime responsible for the millions killed by the Nazi?

Those who are so colourful in their descriptions of those old ladies’ affections and sympathies are either totally ignorant of how political parties are financed, or, quite on the opposite, too expert in that field. It is clear that the donations extended by a few tender-hearted women are not enough to support a whole party, not to say storm troops. But there must have been some persons who did give the needed sums to the Nazi, for the storm troops grew by leaps and bounds! And every trooper was fully provided for by the party. Every member of the SA (Strurmabteilung) was paid his wages, not exuberant, but regular, even during the total unemployment that had paralysed Germany. It was money and not Hitler’s famous oratory skills that was the most convincing argument in recruiting new members. You can just put on a brown shirt – and you’ll have something to feed your family with. So the SA was constantly growing in number, as did the party’s expenses to keep it. Where could the Führer take the required sums of money from? Neither can membership fees be an adequate explanation; otherwise, we’ll get into the absurd. Let’s say a would-be storm trooper enlists in the party and pays the due fee. And that fee is then used to equip him and pay him wages? Preposterous!

Strange as it may be, the truth about the real sources of money for the Nazi lies in the same books about Hitler. “Hitler also organised systematic collection of money abroad”, Heiden remembers. “One of his most zealous collectors was a Doctor Hanzer in Switzerland”[29].

I must confess, when I read this, I had to go back and reread it more than once to make sure I had grasped the meaning.

Hitler, just making his first steps in politics, is on a hunt for money abroad!

But the authors of books on Hitler do well to spare our nerves by inserting the word “also”, lest we should by any chance surmise that the young and hungry Nazi party received all its funds from other countries! To make assurance double sure, these “historians” always have a couple of Aryan old women up their sleeve, or some German industrial tycoon who donated a tithe of his earnings to Hitler.

It is quite conceivable that citizen of some country should make donations to their countrymen who are in politics. They may have a fancy for the leader or his programme, or some other thing. One can’t ban donations to political parties, after all, can one? Let them donate. However, any autonomous country does not allow accepting donations or material contributions from abroad: it is well-known that those harmless-looking gifts conceal the work of the secret forces of a rival country whose ultimate goal is to set up its own protégé ruler in power, which is certainly solely to its own benefit. For the same reason, any country that values its independence and liberty should have a keen eye on all sorts of funds, foundations and charity associations bankrolled by foreign “philanthropists”. In Russia, there is a generic word for all such formations – “nongovernmental organisations”. Why do you think they are paid so close an attention in this country? That is to preclude financing internal political struggle from without.

This makes sense. However, this book is not about the problems of young Russian democracy. It is about those of another democracy, also young, but German. That of the Weimar Republic, to be precise. To judge even by the scanty and disjointed sources available to us, things were turned upside down in the Germany of the 1920-ies. And unlike today’s Russian Government, no one among the top authorities of Germany of that time seemed to take any interest in the who’s and why’s of the NSDAP foreign financing scheme. The sad result of the lack of such interest that could have saved the ruling government is known to us – in 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

But what foreign country or countries could have been willing to help that dark horse in German politics with money? Historians propose several different versions, which one can hardly read without a smile.

“The party, which had proved so successful in bringing itself to the foreground, was also supported by Czechoslovak, Scandinavian, but chiefly Swiss financial groups”[30], states Joachim Fest who is widely recognised as one of the best biographers of Hitler.

This comes unexpected. Where are the “German industrialists” we’ve heard so much of? It appears that the more serious investigators of the Nazi history do not trust stereotypes, as would the gullible reader (though they don’t oppose them either).

Why should Czechs sponsor the young, but obviously already fanatical Hitler? He hasn’t got anything in his bag yet but his speeches in beer halls and circuses. And brilliant these speeches are, for sure, he’s got a gift for them, indeed! For that, he is so far but a small figure on the local Bavarian political stage. And it’s not even that! The very Nazi party is yet a tiny society. This will later be confirmed in the writings of the “great connoisseurs” of the Third Reich. “Until 1930 the Nazis remained a minor party on the fringe of German politics”, writes Alan Bullock[31].

The young politician Adolf Hitler bore no marks or makings of the great leader he was eventually to become

But what business could Czechs have had with the Nazi? What reason could Scandinavians have had to finance Hitler? What could Switzerland have had to do with the national socialists? No good reply to these questions is given by historians and scholars, simply because no good reasons can possibly be found for such conjectures. As a rule, you will come across some kind of general phrase; for example, “The motivating reasons for supporting the party were as diverse as the funding sources”[32].

What we need is answers, not run-arounds! It may be good to write books and publish them in millions of copies to secure a comfortable life for yourself, without ever really getting your head round the things you write about. I am not saying anything against authors and investigators living in comfort. But I would certainly want them to respect their readers at least!

In 1938 to 1939, Czechoslovakia would be torn apart and devoured by Hitler. Was it that which these mysterious Czech “friends” on the NSDAP gave their precious money for? They would have been blind to do that.

The neutral “Scandinavians” were also said to have helped Hitler. But who were these Scandinavians? Were they Norwegians whose territory would be occupied in 1940 by the one they sponsored? Could it have been the King of Norway who had been bored enough to start a game of political roulette, granting a lump sum to the would-be Führer and later fleeing from his country aboard a British man-of-war? You must admit, there are simpler ways to set on a sea voyage. Or, maybe, the word “Scandinavians” meant Danish who would be occupied with no resistance on their part? Or Swedish who miraculously preserved neutrality throughout the war?

I have already said that any act of funding a political party has a definite goal to achieve. Especially so, if the funding is made from another country. In that case, the goal must be very serious and on a global scale, and the benefit must be not only economical, but primarily geopolitical and strategic.

Well, for the life of me, I can see no reason for any of Hitler’s “donors” to pay him. What could be their gain? What geopolitical advantage? What profit to Czechoslovakia or Norway, or Switzerland from the revival of a strong Germany? Zero profit. Or were all they secret Nazi adherents? But have you heard of any in Denmark, Czechoslovakia, or, most of all, in Switzerland? True, there were a few hundred fanatics who were enlisted into SS divisions and later found their rest in common graves. But money donors and cannon fodder are completely different things!

According to Fest, “in the autumn of 1923, Hitler went to Zurich and was said to bring back with him “a coffer full of Swiss francs and American dollar banknotes”[33]. To put it simply, someone granted the future leader of Germany a substantial sum in foreign currency, on the very eve of his attempted coup. Hear them talking about Swiss themselves who did it!

Let me explain something. In April 1917, Vladimir Lenin returned to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) from Switzerland, having travelled across Germany in a sealed armoured carriage. Why then do they so often write that the money the Bolsheviks so suddenly procured had been provided by the German General Staff? What absolute nonsense! Lenin had been staying in Switzerland – in fact, in that very city of Zurich that was only six years later visited by Adolf Hitler, for his own motives. So, if use the logic proposed by the books on Hitler, we must conclude that Lenin had accepted money from Swiss! The Swiss intelligence services organised the October Revolution! It is to be regretted that no one should have gone so far in their speculations. That idea would really have taken the cake. As with the Nazi, Switzerland had no conceivable reason to back either a Russian revolution, or a German left-wing society. We might as well suggest that they did it to boost demand on Swiss chocolate and wrist-watches in a war-torn Europe.

We won’t get anywhere trying to analyse Hitler’s rise to power and his role in the outbreak of the Second World War without ruling out the notion of Czechs and Swiss as the Nazi’s principal benefactors. But why on earth do Hitler’s biographers stick to that downright rubbish? Could they indeed be so naïve to suggest in in full earnest?

No, they can’t, and that is why they resort to prevarication. But faithful to their labour, these authors can’t but mention the fact, having abundant evidence that Hitler’s gold streams ran through Czechoslovakia, Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland. And though mentioned but in a few lines, this brief testimonial speaks louder of the causes and effects of world wars than volumes of historical treatises.

The financing of shady dealings and obscure occurrences in world politics is always effected via banks and personalities that belong to neutral countries! Should such an affair surface up, the blame can at any moment be laid on the neutrals to avert suspicions from the superpowers. And it is only the neutral countries that Hitler’s historians put the blame on. Swiss bankers only did their job, as it appears. They had been “told” to give money to Herr Hitler, and so they did it.

There is another question of importance – why these “kind-hearted” neutrals sponsored Hitler’s party, out of all out there. Or maybe they sponsored all the German parties, hoping for a good “roll of the dice”? No, they didn’t. They only gave money to the most promising ones. And not only Adolf Hitler. “Kurt W. Lüdecke, who was regarded as a “dark horse”, also obtained considerable funds from some sources, unknown to the present day, but most likely, foreign ones, which enabled him, for example, to run a payroll of his “own” SA detachment of over fifty troopers”[34].

Who was that Kurt Lüdecke? A Nazi panjandrum? Not at all. You will see books describe him as “one of the earliest supporters of the movement”, “one of the comrades”, or even “an agent of Hitler’s”. And now we have this quite inconspicuous “comrade” digging some unknown, but on all presumption foreign, sources for money to finance Hitler’s yet budding endeavour. Then we see the same “dark horse” as a reporter for the Völkischer Beobachter, a newspaper controlled by the NSDAP central body. Why wasn’t this valuable provider of funds and a “comrade” of Hitler’s appointed as Gauleiter, or SS Gruppenführer, or even as editor-in-chief, but only a humble reporter? An old friend in need could be a friend indeed for the newly appointed Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler, especially so astute a man as was Lüdecke, who instead is sent off to write reports for a periodical.

Small wonder, though. A “dark horse” reads “agent” or “spy”. A newspaper reporter is the favourite and rather hackneyed story of intelligence officers working under cover. We can infer with reasonable accuracy the source of the financial “Renaissance” of the yet nascent Nazi movement in 1920–1922 from Lüdecke’s itinerary in the 1930-ies. Where does he go? To Bremen, Rostock, or Berlin? To Moscow, Prague, or Geneva? Nothing of the sort. Kurt Lüdecke goes to the United States of America.

A still more curious version exists, suggesting that Hitler was sponsored by the French intelligence service![35]

But we are quite familiar with kind of logic. There is evidence that the Nazi received financial help from the bordering France. One can’t obviate that fact in a book. There must be some explanation for it. So our “investigators” will say that the French financed the Nazi as Bavarian separatists!

True, France had always backed Germany’s disintegration. So the idea of financing those who wished to separate Bavaria from the rest of the country should be a sound one. There is only one point – neither Hitler, nor his followers had ever expressed such intents. What is more, Hitler regarded France as Germany’s number-one enemy. “We must fully realise that the deadliest foe of the German nation is, and will always be, France. No matter who should be in power there – the Bourbons or the Jacobins, Napoleons or bourgeois democrats – the ultimate objective of French external politics will always be that of seizing the Rhine. And to keep this great river in their hands, France will always invariably seek to see Germany a weak and disintegrated state”, Hitler would write some time later in his notorious Mein Kampf. Could the French intelligence be headed by sheer idiots?

At the time of these “French” money transactions Hitler’s book had not yet seen light, which fact may, in the eyes of “hitlerologists”, account for this oddity. It is true that Hitler hadn’t yet published his “landmark” work; but the NSDAP certainly had a programme, which one would certainly have done well to browse through at least, before giving money the party. Just to be able to tell between separatists and radical nationalists.

The French, however, appeared to be totally unacquainted with the NSDAP political programme. We can only suppose that the French intelligence service was so rich that they didn’t bother to read the official documents of those organisations it was about to finance. They simply drew the budget earmarked by Paris for the special purpose of sponsoring German extremist organisations.

Why do we come to this funny conclusion? Simply because anyone who has ever seen the programme of Hitler’s party knows that it has nothing whatever to do with separatism! Likewise, any “capitalist” could clearly see in it points which hardly breathed capitalism; say, those about the “irrevocable confiscation of land” and “nationalising industrial concerns”. As it is, the NSDAP stood fast for a solid and integral Germany. The very first clause in the programme can suffice to clear all doubts:

We demand the integration of all the Germans, based on the right of national self-identification, into Great Germany.

Let us suppose that the French went the hard way by deciding to read the programme starting from its end. But even in that case it would have been as clear as daylight. The NSDAP programme of April 1, 1920, was known informally as “The Twenty-Five Clauses”, consisting of this many clauses (articles). The last, twenty-fifth, clause reads as follows:

With the view to achieving all the aforesaid, we demand the formation of a strong centralised imperial government. The indisputable authority of a central political parliament over the entire territory of the Empire and all its organisations – [etc.]

One might as well accuse of separatism the Russian White Army General Denikin, with his slogan of a “United and Indivisible Russia”, or Minin and Pozharsky’s militia. Does it mean that the French had indeed been too lazy to read the Nazi’s brief programme? Or maybe it means that they had read it, and fully realised who and why they were financing? Why then should they assist those who only fifteen years later would devastate and occupy their homeland? Such things do happen: a man can breed and train a ferocious brute of a dog as protection against his neighbours, when one day the animal, breaking loose from his chain, goes at his master.

The events that took place in Germany after the First World War require some digression. The payment of the war reparations brought about an unprecedented inflation and pushed the unemployment rate sky-high, which together dropped the living standard to a catastrophic level. Starving war invalids is just one commonly seen picture of the Germany of the 1920-ies. Unheated households, famine-stricken children, a wave of suicides… The weaker ones saw only one way to put an end to the horrors of their life – a gas stove or a well-soaped hemp rope. Sometimes whole families would take that final step.

Picture to yourself comparatively well-dressed people, whose clothes have not yet worn out since the war began, rummaging in rubbish dumps in search of something to eat. Prostitution is rampant. Paupers, beggars, invalid demonstrations crying out for raising subsidies – subsidies enough to buy a glass of milk, nothing more.

Those who remember the Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union are familiar with this image of chaos and poverty. But what happened in Russia after Yegor Gaidar’s notorious reforms in the 1990-ies is like living in Paradise when compared to German post-war reality. Germany walked and crawled through a Purgatory, though all the circles of a Dantean hell. The inflation was unspeakable. In the autumn of 1923 one egg cost the price of 30 million eggs in 1913![36] A young American newspaper reporter whose name was Ernest Hemingway retells a touching story he heard from a German waiter who had saved enough money to purchase a hotel. But now he could buy only four bottles of Champaign for the same price. Herr Ernst Hanfstengel (to whom we will return presently), returning home, can’t get milk for his little son. Milk is dispensed only for ration tickets, and those are nearly unavailable. The only solution for him is to order huge amounts of coffee at a five-star hotel and pour out the tiny portions of cream into a bottle for his son[37].

Those who would like to know more about the life of Germans in the years immediately following the First World War are strongly advised to read the novels of Erich Maria Remark, in particular, The Black Obelisk. This novel has some vivid descriptions of situations when, receiving one’s salary before lunchtime, one would make directly for a nearby shop – there would be another zero added to the price tags after lunch.

But that’s the life of ordinary German citizens. The Nazi met with many financial hardships, too, at first. The first storm troops were not able to hold parades in winter, for they had no warm boots. But little by little things went better. Higher storm troop officers and party functionaries were now paid in foreign currency[38]