The Meeting of 20 February

16 Feb 1933

The invitation. On 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler Chancellor, and Göring took one of the two Nazi cabinet seats. On 16 February Göring, signing as President of the Reichstag, telegraphed Gustav Krupp, who chaired the Reich Association of German Industry, and other industrialists. They were to come to his house in Berlin on Monday the 20th at six. Georg von Schnitzler of IG Farben, who was also asked, later swore that the purpose of the meeting “was not given”.

20 Feb 1933

Who was in the room. The accounts differ on how many came: Schnitzler swore to about 20, Krupp’s memo says about 25, and one of Turner’s sources named 18. Schnitzler believed they were “mostly leading industrialists from the Ruhr”, and Schacht said “almost nobody had been left out”. Turner and Tooze say otherwise: Turner that most “proved, under examination, considerably less than major figures in German industry”, Tooze that there were “a number of decidedly second-tier figures”. Hitler arrived late and, Turner writes, spoke for roughly an hour and a half.

20 Feb 1933

The speech. The record used at Nuremberg is an unsigned report found in Krupp’s private file. In it Hitler tells the guests that “Now we stand before the last election.” If it did not decide, he says, “the decision simply will have to be brought about by other means”: a threat of force, not a promise. Göring then tells them the vote on 5 March would be “the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years”, and that business should pay. Tooze notes “no mention either of anti-Jewish policy or a campaign of foreign conquest”, and Turner finds no eyewitness who has Hitler mention suppressing the trade unions.

22 Feb 1933

Krupp says thanks. Krupp had come with notes on trade policy, and put them away; Turner writes that he “improvised polite words of thanks”. His memo says all present agreed it was “high time to clarify finally” the questions of domestic politics. Schacht told his interrogators in 1945 that Krupp “expressed the unanimous feeling of the industrialists to support Hitler”, but Turner rates testimony given years later as less reliable than the notes of the day. Carl Friedrich von Siemens declined to come, Tooze notes, though Turner’s list of those present includes, presumably, “a director of Siemens & Halske”.

20 Feb 1933

The cashbox. When Hitler and Göring had gone, Schacht took the floor. Schnitzler swore that Schacht proposed a fund of “RM 3,000,000” to be split between the Nazis and their partners. Schacht told his interrogators the sum he collected was 3 million, but that he “had nothing to do with that account” and placed the meeting in “some hotel room I think” (the telegram names Göring’s house). The interrogator put to him a figure of “approximately 7, 8, 9, or 10 million marks”, which he had been told Funk gave.

1 Mar 1933

The ledger. Records of Delbrück, Schickler and Co. show an account headed “National Trusteeship” in Schacht’s name, with entries from 23 February. It closes at “Balance carried over 2,021,404.50” on 5 April, so about 2 million Reichsmarks went in against the 3 million pledged, though this account need not be the whole fund; it also shows transfers to an account for Rudolf Hess. Tooze calls IG Farben’s 400,000 among the largest single payments, and Karl Heinz Roth writes that IG paid 500,000 in all, 400,000 to the Nazi leadership and 100,000 to Papen. Schnitzler swore that Bosch and Schmitz “had reserved exclusively for themselves the handling of distribution of money to political parties” and that he never knew what IG paid; Turner rates such later testimony low.

20 Feb 1933

A shakedown. Turner argued in 1985 that big business mattered less before 1933 than often said. For 20 February he makes an exception: those who paid “assumed a share of responsibility for the consolidation of Hitler’s regime, if not for its creation”, and the money “unquestionably helped the Nazis to tighten their grip on power”. He then says the responsibility is “somewhat mitigated”: some payers still thought Hitler led a coalition and had a quarter sent to the alliance of Papen, the Stahlhelm and the German National People’s Party, and the gathering “amounted to a shakedown”.

Aug 1930

Dues and stamps. Where did the party get its money before 1933? Turner argues mostly from its own members, through dues, levies and entry fees to rallies. Only one branch’s books survive; he offers rough estimates from them but admits it is “problematic to expect accurate results from extrapolations”. A Foreign Affairs review gives his verdict as that business “eased Hitler’s path, but not so much by money”, and adds: “Some of them gave funds, often to individual Nazis, as protection money.”

1932

What Turner grants. Turner does not say that no business money reached the Nazis before 1933. His own curve of the relationship rises from 1930 to a peak in spring or early summer 1932, then falls. He reports Ruhr money passed to Gregor Strasser, “about 10,000 marks a month”, and smaller sums to Walther Funk, on the word of the go-between Heinrichsbauer. Thyssen, he writes, “also became a source of subsidies”.

Jul 1927

The coal baron. In July 1927 Emil Kirdorf, then 80 and a leader in forming the Ruhr coal cartel, met Hitler for four and a half hours and joined the Nazi Party. Turner writes that “no evidence has ever come to light to prove that he marked his entry into the party with a financial contribution”, though “in all likelihood he did”; more important, he says, was Kirdorf’s recruiting among Ruhr industrialists. Kirdorf resigned in August 1928 over a Nazi attack on his cartel, but Hitler kept courting him, “bringing him to the party congress as an honored guest” in 1929, and he re-entered the party after 1933.

11 Oct 1931

Bad Harzburg. On 11 October 1931 Hugenberg, Hitler and other right-wing leaders met in this spa town, in what was called the Harzburg Front. The popular version has the leaders of industry standing beside them. Turner traces that picture to one attendance list issued by Hugenberg’s own wire service. Schacht, who spoke, wrote to a Ruhr industrialist days later: “Too bad industry was absent at Harzburg.”

26 Jan 1932

Düsseldorf. Hitler spoke to about 650 members of the Industry Club on 26 January 1932 (many accounts say the 27th, the date in Otto Dietrich’s party book of 1934). He told them what they wanted to hear and left out what they would not: the German Historical Institute notes that he “largely refrained from antisemitic attacks” at such events. Dietrich, a Nazi who later became Reich press chief, wrote in 1934 that the effect on businessmen “was profound”; in his memoir of 1955 he says a collection at the door “produced some well-meaning but insignificant sums”. Turner cites two eyewitnesses who said the applause came “mainly from the young and the obscure”.

1941

One million, or 400,000? The best-known claim comes from the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen’s book of 1941, which he later denied writing. After the war a denazification court at Königstein could trace only about 400,000 marks of direct payments to the party, some 250,000 of them not wholly voluntary, and Turner puts the most it could have been at 500,000 to 600,000. Turner calls the million an estimate out of the air. Other figures: about 150,000 marks to Göring, and a loan he guaranteed to the party that he later put at 200,000 to 400,000.

1940

Who wrote it. Thyssen left Germany in September 1939 and in spring 1940, in Monte Carlo, dictated to the publisher Emery Reves’s team; by the end of May, the foreword says, “More than half the book was completed, corrected, and approved” by him. At Nuremberg in 1945 Thyssen denied he was its author. Reves swore that 11 of its 19 chapters and the foreword were reviewed and 8 were not, and the Königstein court (Turner 1971) held the book to be evidence only where it was corroborated. Turner calls it “ghostwritten”, but notes that Thyssen confirmed many of its statements when he was questioned in 1945, and that the Vichy authorities later handed Thyssen to the Nazis.

2006

Willing partners. On the years before 1933 Tooze does not part from Turner: he notes that in January 1933 the Thyssen-Schacht-Papen-Hitler line “had little support, even on the right wing of industrial politics”. Where the two part is the spring of 1933. Turner sees a shakedown that some payers did not fully understand; Tooze writes that “The evidence cannot be dodged”, that Hitler promised the end of democracy and of the left, and that “for this most of German big business was willing to make a substantial down-payment”. He adds that the speech made the violence to come “should not have come as any surprise”.

2025

Hayes. Peter Hayes, the historian of IG Farben, is summarised by his reviewer Timothy Guinnane. After Hitler became Chancellor, Guinnane writes, “influential Nazis (including Hitler) sometimes threatened nationalization of recalcitrant firms” and firms competed to take over the businesses of the persecuted. Hayes argues that business leaders “worried more about other threats: to career status and progress”. On the pre-1933 question the overlay is the reviewer’s own judgment, not a quotation from Hayes.

2 Aug 1935

Finance capital. Marxist accounts put big business at the centre. This one is a political statement of 1935, not later research: Dimitrov, for the Communist International, described fascism in power as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”. Yet he warned it must not be pictured as though “some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship”. Turner describes one persistent school of interpretation as holding that Germany’s capitalists “played the decisive role in bringing it about”.

5 Mar 1933

The vote. The money paid for the election of 5 March 1933, and Turner records that the Nazis still won no majority. But the cabinet already held emergency powers granted “after the Reichstag fire in late February”. On 23 March the new Reichstag, with scores of Communist and Social Democratic members absent, gave Hitler dictatorial powers for four years through an enabling act. The industrialists had been told that this vote would be the last for a long time.

Apr 1933

April 1933. The Nuremberg Judgment says the Nazi government “found the German armament industry quite willing to cooperate”. In April 1933 Krupp sent Hitler, for the Reich Association, a plan for reorganising industry that said “the turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time”; the Judgment reads this, with Krupp’s 1944 draft above, as a sign of secret rearmament work since 1919. Turner shows the same weeks differently: on 1 April a Nazi squad took over the Association’s Berlin offices, Krupp’s talks with its leader ended in “a capitulation to that Nazi’s plans”, and the Association dissolved itself in May.

2 May 1933

The unions. The Judgment records that in April 1933 Hitler ordered Robert Ley “to take over the trade unions”, and that on 2 May SA and SS men occupied union property. What business knew is disputed. Turner points out that in March Krupp and other industrialists had been in talks with union leaders, which he says refutes the claim that they “knew of and endorsed from the outset the new regime’s intention to destroy the trade unions”. Tooze notes that Hitler’s regime promised firms freedom “from the oversight of independent trade unions”.

1933

The money after 1933. After the election the payments went on and grew. The Harvard Nuremberg Trials Project says Gustav Krupp set up the Adolf Hitler Spende in 1933, “the largest private source of funds for the NSDAP”; Tooze describes it as a regular contribution to Hitler’s personal expenses. Roth, writing for the Wollheim Memorial from IG Farben’s own card index, counts “a total of 4.5 million RM already in 1933” and 12.7 million to the Hitler fund by the end of the war. Tooze concludes that the regime “found active collaborators in German business”.

30 Sep 1946

What the regime did. The Tribunal found that the Nazi government set out to murder the Jews of Europe: the “final solution” “meant the extermination of the Jews”. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum states that “The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people.” The Tribunal found that concentration camps were “first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power”, and called the waging of aggressive war “the supreme international crime”. It convicted Göring on all four counts of the indictment.

1942

Essen. The Judgment found that the German authorities deported “at least 5,000,000 persons to Germany to serve German industry and agriculture”. The defendant Fritz Sauckel, who ran the labour programme, was quoted: “Out of the five million workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily”. Gustav Krupp was indicted at Nuremberg but never tried, because of “incapacity to stand trial (due to illness)”. His son Alfried, who ran the firm from December 1943, was indicted in his stead.

29 Jul 1948

Monowitz and Zyklon B. IG Farben built a buna plant at Auschwitz with its own camp; the Tribunal found that “The evidence does not show that the choice of the Auschwitz site and the erection of a buna and fuels plant thereon were matters of compulsion”, that camp labour was used with knowledge of the SS’s abuse of the inmates, and that Duerrfeld, Ambros and Buetefisch were directly responsible. Farben also owned 42.5 percent of Degesch, which supplied Zyklon B: “The proof is quite convincing” that it was used in the mass extermination of camp inmates, including at Auschwitz. But the Tribunal found “the evidence falls short of establishing the guilt of any of the defendants on this aspect of count three”, because their knowledge of the gas’s use was not proved.

30 Jul 1948

The industrialists tried. In U.S. trials at Nuremberg, Friedrich Flick got seven years in December 1947 and Alfried Krupp twelve years and loss of property in July 1948. Of the Farben men the Tribunal named at Auschwitz, Duerrfeld and Ambros got eight years and Buetefisch six; Schnitzler got five for plunder, and was “released after one year”. Their convictions were for plunder, slave labour and, for Flick, links with the SS; “No one was found guilty on counts 1, 4, or 5” in the Farben case. On 31 January 1951 “U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy pardoned those convicted in the Krupp trial”.

1 Oct 1946

What stays open. The Tribunal said Schacht supported the Nazis before 1933, yet found him not guilty: the inference that he knew of the plans for aggressive war “has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt”; the Soviet member dissented. The meeting of 20 February is on the record, and Turner and Tooze agree that business paid then; they differ on how willing the payers were. How much big business paid for Hitler’s rise before it is still argued, and the archive debate over the Reich Association of German Industry, including Reinhard Neebe’s study, is not covered here.