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Fritz Thyssen

German steel industrialist; heir of the Thyssen business and an early supporter of the Nazi Party who later broke with it.

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Wikidata
Q62696

Connections 8

funded

  • Nazi Party 1923 Scholarship & press 12

    Historian Henry Ashby Turner writes that the Nazis “probably benefited” from his money in 1923; he doubts the often-cited memoir passage on the sum, because the memoirs were ghostwritten.

  • Nazi Party Scholarship & press 1

    Countersigned a Dutch bank’s loan to the party; Thyssen later put it at 200,000 to 400,000 marks. Turner does not name the bank.

  • Hermann Göring 150,000 RM According to Henry Ashby Turner Scholarship & press 3

    Turner reports the court’s estimate; his book dates the court to 1946, his notes and his 1971 article to 1948. Thyssen’s purpose, he says, was to strengthen Göring against the party’s economic radicals.

involved in

appears in

authored

  • I Paid Hitler 1941 Scholarship & press 345

    The book appeared under his name. At Nuremberg in 1945 Thyssen denied he was its author. Emery Reves swore that Thyssen reviewed 11 of its 19 chapters and the foreword; the other 8 were dictated but never reviewed.

Timeline 2 dates
  1. 1923 Fritz Thyssen funded Nazi Party
  2. 1941 Fritz Thyssen authored I Paid Hitler
Proof 5 sources
  1. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, by Henry Ashby Turner Jr., Oxford University Press (Internet Archive lending copy), 1985. Scholarship & press
    the Nazis probably benefited in 1923 from the largesse of another Ruhr industralist, Fritz Thyssen.
    Thyssen responded by countersigning a loan from a Dutch bank to the NSDAP in an amount he later variously estimated at sums ranging from 200,000 to 400,000 marks.
  2. Documents: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler, Associated Press (as republished by Fox News), 17 Oct 2003. Scholarship & press
    an early financial supporter of Hitler
  3. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1985; page numbers come from the running heads of a scanned copy and may be off by one), Oxford University Press, 1985. Scholarship & press
    sums of money later estimated at about 150,000 marks by the de-nazification court
    Thyssen ended his remarks by directing an incongruous salutation to Hitler: “Heil, Herr Hitler!”
    He fled abroad, denounced the regime publicly, saw his property expropriated, and, when the Vichy authorities turned him over to the Nazis, found himself in one of the Third Reich’s concentration camps.
    Fritz Thyssen also became a source of subsidies.
    That passage is of dubious authenticity, however, since Thyssen’s memoirs were ghostwritten.
  4. Fritz Thyssen und „I paid Hitler“ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19, 1971; in German), Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Jul 1971. Scholarship & press
    FRITZ THYSSEN UND „I PAID HITLER“
    leugnete er, der Autor des Buches zu sein
  5. I Paid Hitler, published under Fritz Thyssen's name (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1941); Thyssen denied writing it, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1941. Scholarship & press
    I PAID HITLER by FRITZ THYSSEN
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