Books: The Man Who Was Wrong

I PAID HITLER — Fr!tz Thyssen — Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

“If human civilization is not to perish, everything that is possible must be done to make war impossible in Europe. But the violent solution dreamed of by Hitler, a primitive person obsessed by ill-digested historical memories, is a romantic folly and a barbarous and bloody anachronism.”

So, in the foreword to this book, says Fritz Thyssen, onetime rich and powerful head of the German steel trust, onetime National Socialist party member, onetime financial backer of Adolf Hitler, now probably a corpse or a haggard prisoner of the Gestapo. I Paid Hitler reveals Thyssen as one of history’s rankest examples of The Man Who Was Wrong.

In April 1940 a tired refugee and his wife got off a train at the Gare du Nord in Paris and proceeded to the sumptuous Hotel Crillon. They were Herr and Frau Thyssen. Emery Reves, president of Co-operation Publication Co. (international newspaper syndicate), persuaded him to write and publish his memoirs. Reves, Thyssen, a collaborator and a secretary went to Monte Carlo. Thyssen, says Reves, dictated three solid hours every day, then revised and approved the copy.

Reves found Thyssen “a charming old gentleman, unusually witty, with a perfect sense of humor. He loved good food and the best wines, and our luncheons rarely took less than three hours. . . .” Thyssen told some juicy tales of the private lives of Nazi bigshots, but when he remembered how they had hoodwinked him, he would pound his head and mutter, “Ein Dummkopf war ich!” (“What a dumbhead I was!”).

In late May Reves took the almost-final manuscript to Paris to check some names and dates. At the approach of the German steamroller, he fled to Bordeaux, sailed thence on a British destroyer with the manuscript. He never saw or heard from Thyssen again. After more than a year, it seemed obvious that Thyssen was a captive; for if he were free, he would have communicated with his family in South America. Alive or dead, he was, Reves decided, beyond the power of the book to hurt or help. So Reves decided to publish.

“Victim of Sharpers.” Fritz Thyssen calls himself “a man of good will.” Looking back, he decided that in 1930 he had really been a liberal—and adds naively, “I should have been astonished if anyone had called me a liberal.” He claims that all his troubles and all the damage he did to the world grew out of his endless capacity for being fooled by political sharpers. History’s verdict is likely to be harsher.

In 1918 he had seen naval mutiny, strikes, riots, revolution, chaos—during which he was imprisoned for a few days by radical upstarts. In the 19205 he saw a crucifying inflation. In 1931 he saw six or seven million restless unemployed. And he saw in Hitler a potential guarantor of order and prosperity, a holder of the dike against Bolshevist Russia.

Says Thyssen: “I have personally given altogether one million marks to the National Socialist party. Not more.” He estimates that other contributors from “heavy industry” gave the movement two million marks annually in the last years before Hitler became chancellor.

Thyssen’s first contribution was indirect —about 100,000 gold marks to Ludendorff for a Hitler-Ludendorff coup against the Communist Government of Saxony. (It did not come off, but turned into the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.) In 1928 Rudolf Hess went to Thyssen and told him the Nazis were hard put to pay for the Brown House they had bought in Munich. Thyssen arranged a loan through the banks. Only a small part of it was ever paid by the Nazis; Thyssen paid the rest himself. Hermann Goring wanted to enlarge his apartment “to cut a better figure,” so Thyssen footed up for that too. “Goring seemed a most agreeable person. In political matters he was very sensible.”

Thyssen became well acquainted with Hitler, but not intimate. Once Hitler, Hess and the malodorous Captain Roehm slept at Thyssen’s father’s house. In 1932 Thyssen brought Hitler to address the Industry Club of Dusseldorf. The assembled magnates were impressed when Hitler pontificated: “The economic parallel of political democracy is Communism.”

Hitler convinced Thyssen that he was simply the “pacemaker” for the coming restoration of the monarchy. Goring showed him the smoking ruins of the Reichstag, told him it was a Communist crime, and Thyssen believed that also. But after two years of the dictatorship, Thyssen took down the swastika from his house and communicated no further with the Nazi leaders, except for periodic protests. He resigned as a state councillor of Prussia, demanded that his councillor’s salary be stopped. The Nazis kept on sending it.

Like many people who fool easily, Thyssen was capable of huge indignation when he found he had been fooled. He protested the Blood Purge of 1934, the persecution of Catholic and Protestant clergymen, the Jewish pogrom of 1938. The Nazis got tired of his protests. Thyssen was wise enough to leave Austria for Switzerland when Germany invaded Poland. He protested the invasion, the “illegal” confiscation of his property in Germany, the fact that no cause had been assigned for the death of his sister’s son-in-law in the concentration camp of Dachau. He finally wrote a letter of categorical denunciation to Adolf Hitler in which he stated, with magnificent naïveté, his “assumption that this letter shall not be withheld from the German people.”

It has often been rumored that Hitler is partly Jewish. Thyssen gives plausible reasons for believing that, if Hitler does have Jewish blood, it comes from a distinguished family: “According to the published records, Hitler’s grandmother had an illegitimate son, and this son was to become the father of Germany’s present leader. But an inquiry once ordered by the late Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, disclosed that the Fuhrer’s grandmother became pregnant during her employment as a servant in a Viennese family. . . . And the family . . . was none other than that of Baron Rothschild.”

Of course, no matter where she was employed, any plowboy might have fathered Hitler’s grandmother’s son. But Thyssen says that Hitler’s spies told him of the existence of the document, that it was probably a factor in Dollfuss’ assassination, that Hitler later wrested it from Schuschnigg. Thyssen also heard that a copy of it was “in the hands of the British Secret Service.”