Transcription
[Music] 21st of July 1944, 1:00 in the morning. Adolf Hitler is delivering a radio broadcast. The Führer has just escaped a bloody attack. The bomb, which exploded a few hours previously in his headquarters at the Rastenburg, known to the Nazis as the Wolf's Lair, missed its target. From amidst the bodies in the rubble, Hitler emerged unscathed. His revenge on the conspirators was merciless. 7,000 of his opponents were arrested over the following hours and either put to death or sent to the camps. Among them was an unassuming man, brilliant yet obstinate, Banker Hjalmar Schacht. One of his biographers called him a supreme egotist, which I think is a fitting description. One of Schacht's talents was negotiation. He was capable of winning people over, and he very quickly became indispensable. The man who left that morning in July 1944 with the Nazi police had, in fact, sacrificed everything to bring Hitler to power. He set aside his own beliefs and ideas to work for the Führer, to help put Germany back on its feet, rearm the country, and build camps. Before the war broke out, Schacht thought that somehow he'd be able to use Hitler to carry out his own plans. Who was Hjalmar Schacht? This man who was so close to the Nazis, but whom history has forgotten. How did this unknown banker manage to help Hitler take the helm of a dictatorship before turning on him and plotting against him? What strategy did he use to rearm Germany right under the noses of the Allies of the Treaty of Versailles? He frequently talked to Hitler, and so he was well aware about what was going to happen. This is the incredible story of a man who escaped everything, even avoiding death on several occasions, until it caught up with him in 1970. This is the story of Hjalmar Schacht, the banker of the Third Reich.
Nuremberg, October 1946. Books were recorded. The main heads of the Nazi regime, who were still alive, were tried over a period of 10 months in a unique trial held in southern Germany: the Nuremberg Trials. The defendants included Hjalmar Schacht. He was among the leaders of the Third Reich who were tried at Nuremberg, tried for having been the providential man of a Germany under reconstruction. Schacht had accompanied Hitler's rise to power. Worse still, he was manipulated by the Führer to help the Third Reich become a bloodthirsty killing machine. He helped Hitler establish a certain reputation, and in a way that made him guilty. Schacht was acquitted by the Nuremberg court because he couldn't be proven guilty of having prepared World War II, and he was, of course, not committed in any crimes against humanity.
To explore this unusual story, we've obtained exceptional authorization to examine the state military archives in Russia. These archives, where no cameras have ever previously been allowed, hold the traces of the destiny of Hjalmar Schacht. A destiny that was perfectly calculated, because the devil's banker had planned everything. The only hitch was his encounter with a man who was even more determined than he.
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January 1877. Hjalmar Schacht was born in the village of Tingleve in Prussia, 12 years before the man who would change his life forever. But at that point, nothing indicated that Adolf Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht would one day cross paths. Schacht was a brilliant student and already extremely ambitious. He started his studies in a kind of random way. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He even spent a semester in Paris during the Dreyfus Affair, and then he ended up studying economics. Schacht took advantage of his time at the Sorbonne to learn French. When he returned to Germany, he did a PhD in economics and started working with great success. One of Schacht's talents was negotiation. He was capable of winning people over, and he very quickly became indispensable. He was fairly young, and very early, he became one of the leading finance directors in the country. But Schacht's career plans were abruptly put on hold in the summer of 1914. The Great War broke out and then spread across Europe and the whole world. However, the war, with its 10 million dead, triggered a turning point in Schacht's career, setting him on the path to become the banker to the devil.
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October 1914. In the early days of the war, Hjalmar Schacht was sent to Belgium, but not as a soldier. The Belgian economy had ground to a halt. Schacht came to get the economy working normally again, and that was his first stroke of genius. Belgium had to pay for its own occupation, and Schacht was one of the guys to organize that and tried to avoid inflation. So it was a kind of laboratory for his later politics. In the German Reichsbank, he was already known for his talents as a banker, and he devised the strategy to kickstart the Belgian economy. It worked. Occupied Belgium was pulled out of its decline. Back in Germany, Schacht accepted a post at the national bank and began moving in political circles. Before, during, and after the war, he had connections with the political sphere. But these contacts didn't put him on the extreme right. He was an opportunist, someone ambitious who created a network for that reason. When the war was over, Germany became the Weimar Republic, and it was at that moment that Hjalmar Schacht participated in the creation of a left-wing party, the DDP. He was co-founder of the DDP, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei, which was a left-wing liberalist movement. Within the DDP, he shared his ideas, discussed, and made some important connections in Britain and the USA. But how did Schacht's opinions change so much that he would join forces with the author of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler? To understand him, one must get to grips with Schacht's true character. He was a combination of excessive ambition and certitude, a kind of mini-dictator for the economy.
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Hjalmar Schacht was a man who was extremely sure of himself and extremely sure of his intellectual superiority to many people. He came across as fairly arrogant. He was a very intelligent man. He knew that he was intelligent. He knew he was superior to others, so he let everyone know it, and that didn't go down too well. A hard man with no doubt about his own ideas, Schacht believed he was always right. But he was a brilliant man, and people admired how cultured he was. He was a frequent dinner guest of the American ambassador in Berlin in the 1930s, for instance, because he was such a good conversationalist and so forth. Other people found him duplicitous, canny, disloyal. He once wittily said, "L'éclat, c'est moi," which means, you know, an uproar, that's me. One of his biographers called him a supreme egotist, which I think is a fitting description. His audacity earned him a lot of money in a short space of time. He soon saved up enough to buy a huge house near Berlin, a place to relax, but also a place that would hold some of the biggest secrets in Schacht's story. He bought a huge estate in Gulden, some 80 km to the north of Berlin. It was a very big house with forests all around. There were some very important meetings held there where a lot of information would have been shared. In the secrecy of his farm, he could meet anybody, and that he could be safe, that nobody would spy upon him. But at the start of the 1920s, with Germany in ruins, Hjalmar Schacht was seeking to accelerate his social rise, whatever the cost. Schacht wasn't the kind of man who was looking to get rich. He was already rich. He'd earned a lot of money in the banking world. He was interested in power, having economic power, and being able to set Germany back on its feet again. And one man would soon give him the opportunity to realize his dream: Adolf Hitler.
In July 1923, Germany was in a desperate situation. We're less than 8 years away from a dinner party that would change Schacht's life, introducing him to Adolf Hitler. At the end of the First World War, Germany was defeated, in ruins. The economy had been destroyed, and the victorious Allies were forcing Germany to pay huge reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had to pay war reparations to the Allies, which left the country in huge debt. Unemployment was rising, and wages were slashed by 25%. Germany had embarked on a massive spending program after World War I, partly to take care of widows and orphans of injured or killed veterans, partly to pay for the reparations burden that the Allies had imposed. And by the middle of 1923, the German Mark was exchanging at the rate of 4.2 trillion to the dollar. It was literally not worth the paper it was printed on. During this period, when prices shot up and the currency lost all its value, Germany was suffering what is known as hyperinflation. The Deutsch Mark lost approximately 5 million times its value between 1918 and 1923. This extraordinary inflation led to those famous images of people taking their money around in wheelbarrows to do their shopping. Somebody had to stop it. The Reichsbank was unable to, and in 1923, the government went to Schacht, who was by then a very famous banker. He was very well known, and they asked him to stop the runaway inflation. It was make or break. If Schacht succeeded in his mission, if it didn't break, he would make it to the next level. A special job was created for Hjalmar Schacht: currency commissioner for the government. He had no office and no budget. It was a suicide mission, but Schacht got to work in his own way. He considered what to do for several days. He sat up in a dark corner of the finance ministry, he smoked cigars all day while he considered the options, and eventually developed a plan to bring a halt to things, to stop this inflation. Schacht was gambling his career, and he knew it.
In the Russian archives in Moscow, the first mention of Schacht dates back to that time. He rose from being a small-time banker to a public figure.
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At the same time, another man was trying to establish himself in Germany, profiting from the anger that was growing amongst the population. Adolf Hitler was a marginal political figure in 1923. He headed a political party that was centered in Bavaria, in the southern part of the country. It had about 50,000 members at the time. He dreamed of imitating what Mussolini had done in Italy, which was by having his followers conduct a so-called march on Rome. He would persuade the government to appoint him to a high position. Schacht applied his ideas to turn around the failing economy. It was his first masterstroke and his first determined mission to stop these events, a mission that nobody else had managed to do in the previous four years. And in a few weeks, inflation came down from more than 1,000% per month to something more like 15%. What would have happened if Schacht wouldn't have taken this decision? So one can't say that. So, of course, the decision to end inflation was a key point in the history of the Weimar Republic, and so he became a somewhat popular guy as well.
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In December 1923, Hjalmar Schacht was named lifetime president of the Reichsbank, the German Bank. He would change the fate of the country and renegotiate the war reparations. He presented himself as a savior, and he put in place the famous Rentenmark, which was the new currency that enabled him to bring inflation to a halt and usher in a period of relative stability and growth for the German economy. Schacht, however, was becoming less and less tolerant of the way the country was being managed by the new Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. And after seven years at the head of the Reichsbank, he resigned. He believed that the German government was not aggressively enough trying to reduce the nation's reparations burden, and his opposition to the government's reparations policy became the basis for his emerging association with Hitler. He despised Chancellor Brüning, whom he considered incapable, and rather than being irritated by him, he chose to leave. It was at that moment that Schacht changed tack. He dropped his left-wing party and transferred his allegiance to a more obscure movement: National Socialism. Schacht was one of those many guys of political interest, industrialists, and bankers who switched from liberal to more or less national liberal, or even fascist parties during the 1920s. So, disappointment of Weimar had achieved at that time. In 1931, he met Göring, which is unsurprising because Göring was a high-ranking Nazi official from the outset, in Hitler's inner circle. He was also someone Schacht, who fancied himself chic, was the one Hitler sent, and we know this to be true, to seduce the traditional elites. Schacht hesitated, but he had to go abroad for a few weeks. The trip would be a decisive one. Schacht was invited to a conference in the United States, and on the boat that took him there, he read Mein Kampf. And the thing I found in my research is that in Mein Kampf, he saw the work of a patriot. He didn't see the work of a racist. In the elections of September 1930, the Nazi party enjoyed its first success at the ballot box. The rapprochement between the two men could then begin.
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January 1931. Hermann Göring had been won over by Hjalmar Schacht's ideas. A few months previously, on the 5th of January, he hosted a dinner party at his house to which Adolf Hitler was also invited. The dinner would change Schacht's life forever. The atmosphere was relaxed. The banker listened religiously to the words of the future dictator. I think Schacht was quite struck by Hitler's personality and by his charisma, and he believed that Hitler might be the leader Germany needed and Germany deserved. Hitler just kept on talking and talking, and as he talked, Schacht listened. Schacht was fascinated by Hitler, and he fell under his spell, a very powerful spell. It was as if he was in fact spellbound. It was as if the banker had been hypnotized. Despite the fact that the Führer's economic policies didn't convince him one bit, Schacht was not at all convinced by this program. But he thought that Hitler was like him in some ways: a very determined man who had certain ideas and who wanted to apply those ideas at any cost. And that is why he gave his support, unfortunately, to Adolf Hitler. Hitler needed Schacht, or someone like him. He needed someone who could stabilize the economy, and let's not forget the terrible situation that the German economy was in with mass unemployment back home. Schacht mulled things over. His wife, Louise, who was fascinated by the future dictator, finally managed to convince him. And so it was decided: Schacht would support the Führer to the very end.
Over the following months, Hjalmar Schacht dedicated himself to Hitler's cause. He brought the big bosses together around the Nazi project and increasingly saw himself in high office. Schacht believed that the future belonged to Hitler, and from that moment on, his fate was irrevocably bound to the Führer's. Schacht thought that somehow he was going to be able to use Hitler to impose his own ideas. In some ways, that was pretty presumptuous, but in others, it was typical Schacht. He never doubted anything for a moment, least of all himself. And the banker was right. Hitler made him his economic mentor. Schacht thought he'd manipulated the future dictator, but the reality was nothing of the sort. Hitler had perfectly understood how he could profit from Hjalmar Schacht's international credibility, and he did everything he could to boost Schacht's ego. Between 1931 and 1933, he was what the Germans call an Anhänger, that means a sort of showpiece, somebody who advertised to economic leaders, particularly corporate chairs and so forth, that Nazi economic policy would not be as radical as they feared it would be. For this party, which was moving inextricably towards power, having Schacht on board was essential because Schacht had a considerable reputation. To finance the party's campaigns, Schacht managed to raise 3 million Reichsmarks from German industrialists, and it paid off. The legislative elections of July 1932 confirmed the growth of the Nazi party, and it became the biggest party in Germany with almost 14 million votes. But the President of the Reich, Field Marshal Hindenburg, refused to hand the Chancellery over to Adolf Hitler. Schacht then collected signatures from German industrialists on a petition to put pressure on Hindenburg. He made sure Hitler came to power. Hindenburg was unable to avoid appointing Hitler as Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933. Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of the Third Reich. For Hjalmar Schacht, the unfailing supporter and strategist in the shadows, a new life was beginning.
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March 1933. Hitler had been leading Germany for a few weeks, but the country was still insolvent. Schacht still had no official post within the Reich, so Hitler offered him one he'd held previously: president of the Central Bank. Schacht accepted. Six weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, Schacht was back at the helm of the Reichsbank, just as he hoped. This was Hitler's gift to him. Schacht reshaped Germany's finances on behalf of the Nazi party. He profited from his former contacts to renegotiate the war reparations. He went to London and then to the USA to sweet-talk President Roosevelt. He inspired confidence in the minds of people who were worried about the potential radicalism of the Nazis. But from the beginning, Schacht and the Nazis were an alliance of convenience. They had overlapping interests, but not identical ones. In June 1934, the German debt was suspended. But the banker had his eye on an even more prestigious job: that of Economy Minister, a post held by Kurt Schmitt. His disagreement with Economy Minister Schmitt, who was in favor of boosting consumption in Germany, came to a head in May and June. Schacht then pulled out all the stops to oust Schmitt and discredit him. Against all expectations, Hitler fired Schmitt and appointed Hjalmar Schacht in his place. Hitler clearly gave him orders: "Schacht, you need to get the German people back to work." Schacht could no longer be unaware of the dictatorship Adolf Hitler was creating, because an event had just sealed Germany's fate.
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June 1934. The SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, had grown too violent and was becoming a problem for Hitler. On the 21st of June, President Hindenburg asked Hitler to restore calm to the country. Eight days later, the Night of the Long Knives took place, a series of murders were carried out in a veritable purge during which more than 200 members of the SA were killed, mainly by the SS, Hitler's security service. One month later, Hindenburg, the President of the Reich, died of lung cancer. Now Hitler alone held the fate of Germany in his hands. To construct the Great Reich of which Adolf Hitler dreamed, the country needed to be rearmed. But this was impossible. Germany didn't have the right to rearm, as it was still held to the drastic conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, the "dictat of Versailles." So any rearmament had to be done extremely discreetly. Hitler had already found the man who would be able to ensure this task: the president of the Central Bank and Minister. Schacht had just joined the tightly closed circle of Nazi executives. But apart from Hitler, he was no fan of the Reich's other dignitaries. The relationship with Hitler was the most interesting one. With Göring and Goebbels, he didn't have much of a relationship at all. They didn't travel in the same circles. With Hitler, the relationship was that Hitler found Schacht very useful, and therefore Hitler protected Schacht. However, Schacht fundamentally misunderstood what Hitler was up to. The real Nazis didn't see him as one of theirs. He was like a caricature of the bourgeois, and you could see that immediately in the clothes he wore. You'd never see Schacht in uniform. The only one to fake any kind of friendship out of self-interest was Hermann Göring. Göring cultivated, rather, he wanted to cultivate an image as Schacht's friend. Göring invited Schacht several times to receptions in his silly little château, but Schacht wasn't all that into it. Göring loved dressing up in colorful uniforms and organizing Roman-style orgies, and it's quite hard to imagine the very upright Schacht, with his straight-cut suit, starched collar, and steel-frame glasses, getting involved in all of that. I think people like Göring and Goebbels and so forth regarded him as useful in the early years of Nazi rule and as a kind of stick-in-the-mud after that.
In his office in Berlin, Schacht was only concerned with one thing: pleasing Hitler by secretly rearming the country. And in a matter of weeks, he found a brilliant solution to finance the army and relaunch the arms industry. Hitler first needed to trick the Allies. The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to 100,000 men. But Hitler had also guessed that over time, the Western democracies' capacity for resistance would ease up. But he also needed money, lots of money, and the coffers were empty. Hitler and the Nazis knew quite well how to rearm Germany. The infrastructure was still alive. So what they did not know at that time was how to finance the rearmament strategy. How could they rearm without any other countries noticing? Well, they tried to mask it using financial and monetary strategies. Schacht helped with this masking, and that's probably the most important role he held under the Third Reich. The devil's banker created an incredibly ingenious system: a kind of parallel currency issued by a private company and guaranteed by the state: Mefo bills. The Mefo bills were issued by a kind of shell company, and these bills, worth around 12 or 13 billion Reichsmarks, were used to pay the manufacturers and companies that participated in the rearmament. That was how they got paid. The Mefo bills attracted investors because they earned interest. Everyone wanted them, and the state's coffers started to fill as a result. The Reich could pay for the manufacture of armored vehicles, weapons, and munitions. The irony of this story is that even the big American industrialists invested in Germany, like General Motors and Prescott Bush, the father of a future American president.
Schacht made sure that this money was used only for rearmament, for industry, and for the purchase of raw materials. Of course, it was about measures that were supposed to make Germany self-sufficient, but the aim was also to make it as independent as possible from imports of raw materials, so it would be ready to go to war. With the success of the Mefo bill scheme, companies started hiring, and Germany was soon back to full employment. Schacht had succeeded once again. But in becoming the key to Germany's rearmament, he could no longer ignore that the country was heading to war. He frequently talked to Hitler, and so he was well aware about what was going to happen. I think Schacht knew from the start that the Nazis planned to massively arm the country. After 1945, Schacht would, however, never deny any involvement, as shown in this never-before-heard archive recording from the 1960s. Lies or just naivety? One thing is sure: in the middle of the 1930s, Schacht was involved in a deadly chain of events that led to war and the massacre of most of Europe's Jewish population.
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September 1935. At the seventh annual Nazi party Congress, the texts of the Nuremberg Laws were unanimously adopted.
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Hitler thus strengthened the process for ridding German society of its Jews. Hjalmar Schacht took part in certain debates which reflected his beliefs. He was an anti-Semite in the sense that it was commonplace back then. There were a great many publications that spoke about Jews as the sickness afflicting society, and Schacht was like everyone else. He believed in the great anti-Semitic myth of the Jewish banker, the myth that Jews controlled the economy because they controlled finance. Schacht witnessed the dispossession of the Jews as they lost their businesses and industries. But his beliefs were more moderate for one very precise reason. He was absolutely aware of the course of dispossession between 1933 and 1939 within Germany, and he was broadly acquiescent in it. He did warn the Nazis that if they moved too fast, they could disrupt the German economy, and so he wanted to slow the pace at which Jews were being driven out of industry and the banking system and so on. But he did not fundamentally disagree with that process of removing them.
Schacht, nonetheless, never doubted his role in the government. A recent historical investigation shows that Schacht even profited personally from the spoliation of Germany's Jews. Schacht then decided to participate in the spoliation of a very renowned Munich art gallery. A friend of his, who was the appraiser of this gallery, addressed Schacht whether he could borrow him some money to take this Jewish business, an art gallery acquired for next to nothing from a Jewish owner banished by the Nazis, which was then sold on for a veritable fortune. I think Schacht always tried to depict himself as a very honest politician and banker who was not interested in his personal and financial well-being. But this case of the spoliated Jewish art gallery tells the contrary. He was did not shy away from making personal profits from expropriations, and this is something which he kept secret until the end of his life.
While the Führer was reforming the country at breakneck speed, from his ministry, Schacht was helping with the construction of the concentration camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and later Buchenwald. But a few months before the horrors of Kristallnacht, a man Schacht considered a friend would turn his friendship with Hitler on its head.
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Adolf Hitler ordered a new megalomaniacal economic plan to be launched in 1936 to arm Germany even more and make it independent in just 4 years. It was Hermann Göring, the regime's second-in-command, who had run the project. But as the Minister of the Economy, Schacht was against it. Where Schacht believed that German rearmament could be stopped at some point, when Germany was sufficiently armed, Göring was committed to rearm Germany in order to prepare a war. Between 1933 and 1936, spending on arms rose from 4% of German government spending to almost 10 times that share, almost 40%. Schacht thought that this was as much as they could afford, that if they continued to pour money into armament spending, that they would generate an inflationary crisis. Göring and Hitler did not care about such things. Their objective was to arm the nation so that it would be ready for war, so that it could conduct a war of conquest that would give Germany the resources it needed. The relationship between Schacht and Göring became unbearable. Schacht was hated by the other Nazi leaders and was pushed towards the exit. So Schacht decided to play his trump card. He went to Bavaria during the summer of 1937 to convince Hitler, who was staying in his summer residence.
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Hitler and Schacht met at Berchtesgaden, and Schacht told them clearly: "Listen, this can't go on. Either you choose Göring, or you choose me." Hitler was very troubled by this. He said, "Listen, Schacht, I really like you. We can't let it get to this. So let's try to work with Göring." Schacht made an effort for another two months to get along with Göring, but then he resigned permanently as Minister of the Economy. The following day, Göring called him to inform him that he was sitting at his desk in his minister's chair. Schacht was livid. He had seen himself as Hitler's mentor, but now had to accept the evidence before him. He had been manipulated, used, then excluded. They each thought they could use the other to achieve their ends, but there was only one using the other. Hitler used Schacht, and not the other way around. But he didn't go away empty-handed. The Führer had not forgotten what Schacht did for the nation between '33 and '38. When he left his job, unemployment had fallen from 7 million to virtually nothing. Hitler left him in charge of the Central Bank and named him Minister without portfolio, a kind of made-up role. Despite this, the banker still nurtured his anger against Göring and Hitler.
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So, in the utmost secrecy, he made a last roll of the dice and changed sides again. His apartment in Berlin and his house in Gulden became meeting places for gatherings with opponents to the Nazi regime. Even if he'd lost all his responsibilities, he nonetheless had been a cog in the machinery, so he was kept at a certain distance: military men, intellectuals, politicians. Schacht tried to be accepted by the shadowy resistance figures and to pass on information to them. One evening, the banker discovered that microphones had been hidden in his Berlin apartment. He knew that he'd gone from being a Nazi dignitary to a suspect. We don't know when these microphones have been placed, but from then on, Schacht was naturally less trusting. We don't know who put them there, but it was probably the Gestapo. One foot in the Nazi camp and the other in the camp of the opponents to the regime, Schacht's double dealings would last until 1944, during which time he came to a definitive decision: Hitler must be eliminated.
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November 1938. Germany became the theater for a key moment in Hitler's anti-Semitic strategy.
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On the night of the 9th of November, Germany's Jews and their homes were targeted in what became known as Kristallnacht. Schacht was stunned by this violence.
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Jews were murdered, synagogues set on fire. Kristallnacht rocked him to the core, and he had, what you might call, the courage to denounce it publicly. I mean, over the following days, 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Segregation laws were toughened, removing the right to work and a host of other rights from the Jewish people. Schacht contacted Hitler to explain that his strategy of persecution would drive the country to ruin. The banker wanted to find a solution. He went to talk to representatives of the Jewish community in Britain about what to do, but it didn't work. Did he put a lot of energy into this? I don't know. At the end of the year, Adolf Hitler, angered by Schacht's position, summoned him to Berlin. Hitler didn't want to listen. Hitler all of a sudden told Schacht that he was dismissed, and this is something which Schacht had not expected. In the history of the Third Reich, 1938 was a year that marked a turning point because Hitler got rid of a swath of dignitaries who represented a more conservative wing within the regime.
In January 1939, Schacht was relieved of any power he might have had in the Nazi regime. Hitler had kicked him out of the government and then out of the Central Bank. Surprisingly, he kept hold of his ministerial title, but it was an empty shell. For Schacht, it was time to stay out of the way in his house in Gulden. He rested, gardened, and contemplated, and watched on powerlessly at the chaos of the Second World War.
February 1941. Germany had already invaded Poland and then France and was preparing to take on the Soviet Union. Hjalmar Schacht could no longer ignore that the war also involved the worst ever crime against humanity: the Holocaust. Did he know about the murder of Europe's Jews? I think he did. We know that information circulated amongst the German elite, and it came from the East. He had some friends among senior German army officers and generals, and he had very good friends among conservative anti-Hitler opponents. Anyone in that high a position in Berlin knew that there were concentration camps all over Europe, that there were increasing numbers of slave labor camps all over Europe, and everyone in the higher reaches of Nazi Germany knew that there were mass executions going on on the Eastern Front, many of Jews. However, Schacht maintained his relationship with Hitler and even informed him of his desire to remarry after the death of his first wife. This meeting happened in February 1941 and would be their last.
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But the special link between the two men would spare Schacht from death. Almost 4 years later, July 1944. Concentration camps and death camps had already sealed the fate of millions of victims. Hitler had devastated Europe. The war was not over, but the Nazis were losing, and that was when the German resistance decided to strike with Operation Valkyrie, that was set to overthrow Hitler. The Führer had been subject to more than 40 attempted assassinations since 1921, but this would be the most spectacular. Schacht received the conspirators at his house in Gulden, and he was party to some details about the plan. He knew. He knew that something was going to happen. He didn't know what exactly, and he didn't know who was going to do it. He received information through his contacts with key members of the resistance. He was almost certainly not in the inner circle, but you might say he was in the second circle, which was quite significant indeed. Schacht even had the audacity to put himself forward as the new Chancellor. His name was circulating on underground lists. But if the assassination attempt failed, he knew he'd be killed. He knew that he was now in danger, and that he had to do something to save his head.
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On July the 20th, 1944, Hitler was in one of his headquarters, the Wolf's Lair.
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He was attending a summit meeting with several military leaders and the Nazi regime. Hitler was studying a map of military positions when a bomb exploded.
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Hitler was injured. Five others were killed.
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Hitler had a lucky escape, and he was naturally furious. The backlash would strike anybody in the country who could possibly be in opposition to the regime. His revenge had no limits. Adolf Hitler had 7,000 of the regime's opponents arrested, tortured, or executed. And among them, Hjalmar Schacht. On the morning of the 23rd of July, men came to arrest Schacht on Hitler's orders. His house in Gulden was searched from top to bottom. It goes without saying that they found nothing. He had removed anything that could possibly implicate him. Schacht was 67 years old and was thrown into a concentration camp. It was the most terrible time of his life.
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He was a prisoner, and he was imprisoned with most of the plotters from Operation Valkyrie, who were eventually all executed one after another. People kept secret, and the good thing for Schacht was that his name couldn't be found on these documents which were produced by the main civilian conspirators against Hitler. So there was not a smoking gun which could tell the Gestapo that Schacht was actually a part of the conspiracy against Hitler. Schacht moved between camps, including Ravensbrück, Flossenburg, and Dachau. His conspirator friends were put to death, but not him, because Schacht was Hitler's special prisoner. His life was never in danger.
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The last camp Schacht was sent to was liberated in April 1945 by the Americans.
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A few days later, Hitler killed himself with a shot to the head beside the woman he just married, Eva Braun. For Schacht, this meant freedom at last. He thought he was free, and it's true that when his camp was liberated, he was very happy. He was relieved because he really thought he was going to be executed. On numerous occasions, he thought his number was up. But Schacht had no idea what was coming next. He was interrogated for several days by the Americans, then kept in prison until he faced the judges at the most momentous trial in history: the trial of those accused of Nazi war crimes.
In October 1946, Schacht was summoned before the judges of Nuremberg. How did he do? Very well, because he knew exactly what buttons to push and what to deny. Hjalmar Schacht delivered a brilliant summary of his career, talking about the resistance, criticizing the horrors of the Nazi regime, in which he said he had absolutely not participated. During the Nuremberg trial, Schacht saw the American and Soviet recordings of the extermination camps, and he said that he was deeply shocked by what he saw. Schacht's case was subject to a great deal of debate amongst the judges at the Nuremberg court. There were four judges: a Brit, an American, a Frenchman, and a Soviet, and ultimately, it was the Brit who prevailed, which led to Schacht being acquitted, which most people found surprising. Don't forget, he was an extraordinary negotiator, so he managed to present himself in a favorable light. His acquittal was very surprising, but that meant nothing. Schacht would still be marked for life. He spoke very little about that time. For him, it was a fairly traumatic experience, I'd say. After Nuremberg, he was also cleared in other trials against former Nazis in Germany, but he was left with nothing and had to move out of his house in Gulden. He was found innocent of all accusations and was able to build some kind of new life. He was a very old man by this time, he was over 70, but despite everything, he had a future ahead of him.
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January 1951. Hjalmar Schacht had just turned 74, but in Germany, nobody wanted to work with a survivor of the Third Reich. So Schacht decided to travel. He was not important in postwar Germany at all. Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, who was Chancellor from 1949 into the early 1960s, hated Schacht. He was called upon by emerging countries to advise them on how to best ensure economic growth. He worked with countries like Indonesia, for example, under President Sukarno. He worked in Egypt for Gamal Abdel Nasser. Incidentally, Egypt employed a lot of former Nazis in the 1950s. The plane he took to return from India was forced to make an unexpected stopover in a country he wanted to avoid at all costs: Israel. Schacht felt a cold sweat running down his spine. Israel was a country where he was not welcome. It was the land of the Jews, and he hadn't behaved so well with the Jews, far from it. In the Tel Aviv airport lounge, Schacht was frightened of being recognized, arrested, and thrown into jail as a former Nazi. But once again, luck was on his side. Eventually, he took off again, untroubled, despite him having met two people who knew him and recognized him. One was a waiter who happened to be there, whom he previously met in Germany, and another was a woman who was heading to South America and who also recognized him as Hitler's banker. The hunt for Nazis who'd slipped through the net intensified when the former Nazi dignitary Adolf Eichmann was captured in May 1960 by the Israeli secret services. Others who'd been close to Hitler were very worried, but not Hjalmar Schacht. It's true that after Eichmann's arrest in Buenos Aires, worried former Nazi chiefs who'd slip through the net, was Schacht worried? Let me reassure you, I don't think he lived with his heart in his mouth, afraid of being assassinated, picked up, or condemned. Schacht's past never caught up with him.
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June 1970. Hitler's banker was 93 years old. He had escaped the war, the camps, and the Nazi trials, but now it was his day of reckoning. Schacht was invited to a dinner party in 1970, and then, since this was a very formal dinner party, Schacht put on his tuxedo pants. He fell and he broke his leg, and he was taken to a hospital, and then he died, I think, because his heart stopped. To strike on the 3rd of June 1970, it was time to settle Hitler's banker's account, and he died peacefully, feeling that he had been an important man for Germany. He didn't feel guilty about anything that he had done for the Third Reich. He had only one regret: he felt that Hitler had cheated him, and he always said it: "That man tricked me. He took advantage of me." He believed he was the only man who had the clue how to run Germany's economy, but he was wrong. He underrated Hitler's determination to prepare Germany for a war. He died old and forgotten, somewhere nice and peaceful. So yes, it's true that he didn't leave a big mark in history because others did much worse things than he did. He was one of the great enablers of Hitler's rise to power. He was one of the great enablers of the carnage of the Second World War. So any points that he may be getting in the eyes of some scholars for his supposed brilliance are greatly outweighed by the terrible horrors that he made possible. The two-faced banker took the last secrets of the real nature of his relationship with Nazism and with Adolf Hitler with him to the grave, but his name will remain engraved on the list of those thousands of Nazi bosses without whom the apocalypse of the Third Reich could never have happened.
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