Who set Hitler against Stalin?. Nikolay Starikov

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

29

Heiden, K. Hitler’s rise to power. P. 181.

30

Fest, I. Hitler. Perm, 1993. V.1. P. 271.

31

Bullock, A. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel lives. Smolensk, 1994. V.1. P. 102.

32

Fest, I. Hitler. Perm, 1993. V.1. P. 272.

33

Fest, I. Hitler. P. 271.