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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion. Anonymous.

On 24 April 1945, one day before Lancaster bombers of the RAF made a serious dent in his real estate holdings and six days before his suicide in Berlin, Adolf Hitler was probably the richest individual in Europe, with a fortune worth between &8364;1.35 and &8364;43.5 billion at 2003 prices. This book sets out to answer three questions:

Where did Hitler's personal fortune come from; how much was it; and where did it go?

On Tuesday, 8 August, 1950, the following item appeared on page seven of the Washington Evening Star:

Hitler's Bankroll Found!

Legal action is now under way for disposing of a secret $42 million bank account maintained since 1939 in the United Kingdom by Adolf Hitler.

Not surprisingly, this raised eyebrows in Washington and London and letters flowed between the relevant Treasuries. According to Vinton W. Mitchell, Office of the Treasury Representative, US Embassy, London:

The Department of State inquired of the paper concerning this item and was informed that it was obtained by that newspaper from one of its filler services. There was no further information than this and to the Department's knowledge the item appeared in no other newspaper either in Washington or in New York.

... If the story has any substance to it, the Department is particularly interested in being advised as to the name or names in which the account referred to in the item was maintained in England so that a check can be made of such names with respect to accounts in the United States.

S. E. Wigmore, a British Treasury official, sent a memo to his colleague F. C. Wells at the Administration of Enemy Property Department:

... We are not disposed to treat this matter very seriously but I should welcome your comments before we reply to the Americans which we want to do in the immediate future.

The following day, F. C. Wells replied:

... I have canvassed likely sources here but no one in A.E.P. [Administration of Enemy Property] Department has any knowledge of the matter. It is true, I believe, that voice has been given from time to time in this country – and even I believe in the House of Commons – to suggestions of the kind – or parallel suggestions about Goering – but only in the vaguest terms of rumour.

It can at once be said with assurance that no such account in Hitler's nameexists [emphasis added by author]. And I would not like to assume that the resources of the Treasury would be inadequate to the discovery long before this in the U.K. of any likely account of the magnitude in question in any other name, existing, as this would presumably have had to exist, since the beginning of the war in 1939.

For your personal information [Author's comment: i.e. not to be revealed to the Americans] the only germ of fact which might conceivably underlie this report from the pen of some imaginative American journalist is that (as indeed you may already know) a writ in the High Court has been issued against the Administrator of Hungarian Property in respect of a portion (about £13/4 million) of the Thyssen Gold; and legal proceedings against the German Administrator in relation to the balance of about £11/4 millions of Thyssen Gold will conceivably before long supervene.

Anything else, so far as our knowledge goes, is pure fiction.

But of course we are always open to receive information and suggestions for specific inquiry from any source.

Based on this, Wigmore replied to Mitchell:

You wrote to me on 20th October about a report which appeared in the Washington Evening Star concerning an alleged $42 million bank account in this country owned by Adolf Hitler.

Your letter raised our hopes considerably, and we all set out in an effort to find this cash. Alas, we have not been successful!

Not only would our Administration of Enemy Property Department be interested in getting this cash ... but we, of the Treasury, might be just as interested in getting hold of this dollar sum....

Wigmore presumably meant that the account, not the country, was owned by Adolf Hitler. But there the correspondence on this matter ends, leaving open the question: did Hitler have a bank account in the UK? To which this book answers: very probably, but not in his name.

This is a book about Adolf Hitler's personal fortune. It is about what Hitler owned and could legally have left to his heirs. That is the criterion: if it could be bequeathed, it is part of his personal fortune; if not, not. Where that fortune came from, what its extent was, and how it was finally disposed of has never been investigated in detail. But one may well ask: Why bother about his personal fortune? Why indeed. Part of the reason is curiosity, the desire to know about a subject which has hardly been addressed by other writers. This book attempts to provide some answers and also challenges some accepted 'facts', notably:

• Hitler personally received large sums of money from German 'Big Business' – he did not.

• Henry Ford subsidised Hitler – he did not.

• The Shell oil company subsidised Hitler – they did, but only by accident.

• Hitler did not own the Eher Verlag, the dominant publishing company in Nazi Germany – new evidence suggests that he did.

Adolf Hitler liked money. However, he did not like working for it, and his general attitude seems to have been that the world owed him a substantial fee in return for the privilege of its enjoying his existence. There is nothing unique or revolutionary about such an attitude; what is extraordinary is that Hitler managed to use it to amass such an enormous fortune. He did it, as he managed his political career, with a mixture of deceit, bluff, and arrogance.

Some authors have suggested that 'loot and plunder' were the primary motives behind Hitler's politics. This is improbable: looting and plundering on a grand scale require skills in organisation and planning that Hitler just did not have. Hitler did very little to amass his fortune, beyond letting it be known to his followers that he expected one; once that had been made clear, the money flowed in.

Hitler always presented himself as a simple soldier, a man of the people. Only two persons close to him saw through the myth: Otto Wagener, a self-made businessman, and Franz Xaver Schwarz, the quintessential bookkeeper. The majority of those close to Hitler – Speer, Lüdecke, Hanfstaengl, Dietrich – shared this 'simple soldier' view of their Führer. As Dietrich wrote in his self-serving post-war memoir:

There can be no doubt that Hitler had no selfish desires for private riches or superficial comforts. In his whole mode of life he remained amazingly modest and undemanding.

Heiden was one of the first to suggest the reality behind the image, though even he missed some essential features:

All his life Hitler never had conducted a household, never had a budget; for him money is something you give away or borrow, but never earn; in his youth his receipts were tiny, in his maturity they were immense; but he never established any relation between them and his work, for he worked, not to earn money, but to secure his public position, to win the applause and admiration – shared, to be sure, with a glass of beer – of his audience.

The reference to beer is not an error; Hitler certainly drank the occasional glass of beer before his imprisonment in 1923 and later drank a special low-alcohol brew at public appearances.

There was always pomp around him, and it was one of his master accomplishments that he was able to conceal his own comfortable person in a grey legend of frugality and even asceticism.

And further:

Hitler, who indulged himself in everything, was fortunate enough not to be plagued with conspicuous desires. His inclination to conceal his private life helped him to enhance the legend of his monastic frugality, giving it a quality of the pitiful, saintly, and awe-inspiring.

One might take issue with Heiden as to whether Hitler's desire for grandiose buildings, opera, and paintings was or was not 'conspicuous'. As Toland says:

[Hitler] was publicised as construction worker, artist and student; as a man of the people who sat next to his chauffeur and ate simple meals. He refused to accept any honorary doctorates and would address workers in plants with the intimate plural form Ihr, boasting that he too was without estates or stocks – but neglecting to note that Mein Kampf had made him a millionaire.

In fact, it was neither Mein Kampf nor the royalties exacted for the use of his portrait, especially on postage stamps, that made Hitler a millionaire, though they certainly helped. Rather, it was the Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing company, and the Adolf Hitler Spende, the fund to which German industry willingly contributed that gave him the income necessary to amass a valuable art collection and to purchase and run his extensive mountain estate, the Berghof.

Hitler even boasted that he was the only major European statesman who did not have a bank account, but anyone who received a personal letter from him in the nineteen-twenties knew where Hitler's bank account was. The number of his Munich checking account was printed on his notepaper, presumably as a convenience to those eager to send him money. There is also evidence, revealed here for the first time, for at least one foreign bank account in Hitler's name – in the Netherlands – and that this was known to the British government in March of 1939. Possibly because of a simple spelling mistake, but probably because they were busy at the time with more militarily important matters, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) does not seem to have followed this up. Another account has been found in London, under the name of one of his proxies.

Where did it come from?

Between 1919 and his assuming power in 1933, Hitler personally received money from sources as diverse as the German Army and a major shareholder in Finnish paper mills. For a variety of reasons, Hitler was very attractive to women and many women contributed to his personal financial needs. Hitler had some very powerful patrons and, as Kershaw notes:

... Hitler would have remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he obtained from influential circles in Bavaria.

He would also have remained much poorer. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hitler was in trouble with the tax authorities and certainly made false statements about his income. (His 1925-32 letters to the tax authorities, headed 'From the Chancellery of Adolf Hitler', take the attitude that a person of his importance should be granted tax concessions not normally allowed to lesser mortals.) By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, his arrears of taxes and penalties ran to millions of marks. On his accession to power, these were cancelled and it was decided that the Führer should be exempt from all taxes. A grateful Hitler announced that he would give his salary to charity – and did so, but only for only one year.

Hitler and Max Amann, the wealthy publisher of Nazi material, drew enormous sums from the profits of the Eher Verlag. This money financed Hitler's personal art collection and the decoration of the Berghof. After coming to power, the Adolf Hitler Spende, a fund set up by German 'Big Business' to support the political activities of the Nazi party, was hijacked by Hitler and Bormann to fund the construction of the Berghof. After 1934, Hitler received a royalty on the use of his image, including postage stamps. This, and royalties from the books and postcards produced by Hoffmann, also went to fund his art collection, though Hitler, the self-styled art expert, was often cheated by dealers.

How much was it?

Only one person seems to have made any serious attempt to estimate Hitler's wealth and that was a journalist covering the Nuremberg Trials who estimated that Hitler's known expenditure during his 12-year dictatorship was at least RM 305 million. Drawing on neglected 'back door' sources and using simple statistical techniques, I have been able to estimate the extent of Hitler's personal fortune. In 2003 terms, his real estate holdings were between 244 and 566 million Reichsmarks at the end of 1944 – between &8364;1 and &8364;2.2 billion – his income from the Eher Verlag was between 2 and 68 million Reichsmarks in 1944 – between &8364;4 and &8364;272 million – his income from the Adolf Hitler Spende was between 23 and 99 million Reichsmarks in 1944 – between &8364;92 and &8364;400 million.

Where did it go?

At least four men controlled Hitler's income on his behalf: Amann; Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's photographer; Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary; and Julius Schaub, Hitler's personal servant. The first three of these men made millions for their Führer (and, in the case of Amann and Hoffmann, for themselves); what became of this money has never been satisfactorily resolved. Previous attempts to investigate Hitler's Fortune have not paid sufficient attention to these characters. Hitler certainly had a secret Swiss bank account, controlled by Max Amann. The contents of this account and its subsequent disposition are not yet fully known.

Who inherited what? Hitler's descendants – collateral or self-styled – are still arguing over the remnants of his estate. Who are they? This book presents the most comprehensive investigation of Hitler's heirs that has so far been published. Despite the efforts of the Bavarian authorities to gain control of foreign copyrights, Hitler's works are still being published and still sell. Who is getting the royalties?

Hitler spent a fortune on his personal art collection; its final disposition remains uncertain because few historians have taken the trouble to distinguish between pictures collected by Hitler personally and destined for the proposed museum in Linz, Austria after his death, and pictures acquired by the Sonderaktion Linz for the immediate use of the museum. The former were paid for out of Hitler's own pocket, the latter out of secret state funds.

The German authorities are less than open about the question of Hitler's Fortune and, as time goes on, documentary evidence is coming under tighter and tighter control. The author of this work is not a 'conspiracy theorist' – he tends to subscribe to the 'cock-up theory' of history – but the German attitude is, to say the least, disturbing.

Hitler and Money

What does this study tell us about Hitler the man? As a youth, Hitler took more than his share of his father's inheritance and squandered it, and he fraudulently received an orphan's pension to pay for an education that he never took. His attitude to work – and its reward, money – show a fundamental laziness; money, in his view, was due to him for the simple reason that he was Adolf Hitler, Artist and Führer.

Much of the responsibility for the lack of knowledge about Hitler's financial affairs lies with Hitler himself – he was notoriously secretive about his private life – and with his two lieutenants, Bormann and Amann. This latter pair vied for control over Hitler's personal financial affairs, with neither ever claiming final victory. Significantly, the one person who knew least about Hitler's personal finances – and who complained bitterly about the situation – was the treasurer of the Nazi party, Franz Xaver Schwarz. Turner suggests that Hitler wanted his affairs kept separate from those of the party because:

... he was obviously an unscrupulous tax evader who sought all possible means to minimize the amount of income he reported on his yearly returns. As Party Treasurer Schwarz explained to Otto Wagener at the time, Hitler feared that the republican tax officials would pry into the account books of the party and so did not want his name to appear there.

This is plausible before 1933, but not afterwards since Hitler, as Chancellor, was declared exempt from taxes. More probably, Hitler did not want the party to know just how much he was getting, though an astute accountant such as Schwarz could make an educated guess.

It is interesting to note that Hitler could be quite generous, providing handouts and jobs (at state expense, of course) to old comrades and picking up the occasional bill, such as those for Unity Mitford's medical and other expenses after her 1939 suicide attempt. He was also a generous tipper, as Hanfstaengl recalls:

He was certainly beginning to give himself airs in financial matters at the time, and at the Hotel Hauffe, where we were staying, when I thought I was being particularly generous in giving the maidservant a 20 per cent tip of about three marks, I saw him give her ten marks. In my travels with him he always gave three or four times the amount that was necessary, and claimed that it had a very good effect, as the staff showed the notes around in the kitchen and sometimes even got him to autograph them.

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Excerpted from "Hitler's Fortune"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Cris Whetton.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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