Who set Hitler against Stalin?. Nikolay Starikov

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

34

Fest, I. Hitler. P. 271–272.

35

Nezavisimaya Gazeta, of April 29, 2005.

36

Bullock, A. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel lives. 1994. V.1. P. 111.