Description:

‘The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities... Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) - with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.’ Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception and duplicity, Professor Antony C. Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable but unreported facts of the Second World War: that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler’s rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavoury conclusion that the catastrophic Second World War was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history. This classic study, first published in 1976 - the third volume of a trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series study the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia and the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States.)

Review

Antony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler is best read as two books bound into one spine, pulling against each other on every page. The first is a documentary prosecution — patient, sourced, built from bank transfer slips, Nuremberg trial transcripts, and congressional hearings — that names specific American corporations and shows them doing specific business with Nazi Germany. The second is a metahistory: a claim that an unelected financial elite, the same Morgan, Rockefeller, and Warburg houses each time, deliberately installed Hitler, engineered Roosevelt's New Deal, and bankrolled the Bolsheviks, all as moves in one continuous campaign of plunder. The first book is, on its narrowest particulars, hard to wave away. The second is where Sutton loses all but the already-convinced. My contention is that the conspiratorial book feeds on the documentary one and ruins it — that Sutton has assembled evidence which deserved a disciplined hearing and then spent it on a thesis the evidence cannot carry.

The documentary book is real, and it should be said plainly before the criticism begins. Sutton works from captured German records, the Nuremberg Military Tribunal's I.G. Farben case, the Kilgore, Bone, and Truman committee hearings, the Morgenthau Diary, State Department decimal files, and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. He reproduces primary artifacts in five appendices rather than asking the reader to trust his gloss on them: the 1920 NSDAP program, Hjalmar Schacht's sworn affidavit, the ledger of the National Trusteeship account, a War Department letter to the Ethyl Corporation, a Morgenthau Diary extract. He traces corporate control through interlocking directorates using Moody's and Poor's, the standard reference shelf. This is not the apparatus of a pamphleteer, and where Sutton stays close to the paper he is genuinely useful. The trouble is that he rarely stays close to the paper for long.

The book announces itself as the third volume of a trilogy — after Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and FDR — and the framing matters, because Sutton has decided the verdict before this volume opens. His thesis, as he states it, is that the rise of Hitler and the rearmament of Germany were not accidents of statecraft but the premeditated, profit-driven work of a small circle of Wall Street bankers and corporations acting "with knowledge that war was the probable outcome." His opening salvo is characteristic: "The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities." The first sentence is defensible. The second is an assertion of causal necessity that the rest of the book must earn — and the gap between what Sutton can document and what he asserts is the gap that swallows the project.

Part One, "Wall Street Builds Nazi Industry," opens with the Dawes and Young Plans. Sutton argues these 1924 and 1928 reparations programs were Morgan-engineered devices — bankers "wearing the hats of statesmen" — that funneled roughly $800 million in American-subscribed loans into Germany, money that built and consolidated the cartel system. He notes that three houses handled three-quarters of the German bond issues, and that the resulting cartels later produced the overwhelming bulk of German war materiel. To crown the chapter he reaches past his own files to Carroll Quigley, quoting the Georgetown historian's description of an aim "to create a world system of financial control, in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole," and names the Bank for International Settlements as that system's "apex." He even offers a nice human detail — Owen Young's reaction to Schacht's idea for the BIS, "Dr. Schacht, you gave me a wonderful idea and I am going to sell it to the world." But notice what has happened. A documented flow of loan capital has been silently upgraded into a documented intention. That the Dawes loans capitalized German industry is bookkeeping; that they were floated in order to arm a Germany that did not yet have Hitler is a claim of foresight Sutton never substantiates. This is the first of the chapter ratings that should temper a reader: the loans-to-cartels-to-Hitler chain is, on the evidence offered, contested rather than proven.

The I.G. Farben chapter is the book's centerpiece and its rhetorical method in miniature. Sutton traces Farben's 1925 creation, its near-total dominance of German explosives and synthetics, its production of Zyklon B, its VOWI economic-espionage arm, and — his structural keystone — the American financiers who sat on the board of its U.S. affiliate, American I.G. He has a genuinely arresting epigraph in Senator Homer Bone's 1943 line to the Senate Military Affairs Committee, "Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben," and a damning postwar admission from the Farben director von Schnitzler: "Thus, I must conclude that I.G. is largely responsible for Hitler's policy." Von Schnitzler again, on the cartel's war role: "It is no exaggeration to say that without the services of German chemistry performed under the Four Year Plan the prosecution of modern war would have been unthinkable." These are strong cards. But Sutton cannot resist trumping them with his own: "Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I. G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II." That sentence is the book in distilled form — a counterfactual with no possible documentary basis, asserted with the same flat confidence as the bank ledgers. A reader who notices the move once will notice it everywhere, and it corrodes trust in the pages where Sutton is actually right.

He is most right in the chapters on technology transfer, and it is worth saying so against the grain of the general criticism. The General Electric and Standard Oil chapters contain the book's best-supported argument: that American firms handed Germany the specific industrial processes without which the Wehrmacht could not have fought. Standard Oil of New Jersey transferred hydrogenation, iso-octane, and tetraethyl-lead know-how to I.G. Farben; German synthetic-oil output climbed into the millions of tons on the back of the hydrogenation process; and Sutton can point to a captured I.G. Farben memorandum by von Knieriem conceding that German tetraethyl-lead production was made possible by American plans supplied just before the war — over the explicit protest of the U.S. War Department, whose December 1934 warning letter to the Ethyl Corporation he reproduces in full as Appendix D. Here the documents do the work and Sutton lets them. The contrast with Standard Oil chairman F. W. Abrams's wartime telegram to the Secretary of War — "During the entire period of our business contacts, we had no inkling of Farben's conniving part in Hitler's brutal politics" — lands hard, because for once Sutton has the paper to show the disclaimer is false. When his strongest arguments are graded strong, it is because in these chapters he resists the upgrade from transaction to conspiracy.

The I.T.T. chapter, by contrast, shows him at his most tendentious about motive while still surfacing real material. He recounts how Sosthenes Behn's International Telephone and Telegraph used the Nazi banker Kurt von Schroder and the attorney Gerhard Westrick as conduits, held a stake in the Focke-Wolfe aircraft works, and reinvested its German profits into armaments rather than repatriating them — a pattern Anthony Sampson would later anatomize in The Sovereign State of I.T.T., which Sutton cites. The Morgenthau Diary extract reproduced as Appendix E, a 1945 Treasury meeting transcript accusing Behn of pursuing behind-the-scenes deals in Nazi Germany throughout the war, is damaging. But Sutton's reading — that I.T.T. "worked both sides" of the war by deliberate design — leans on the inference that reinvesting blocked profits inside Germany proves intent to arm the enemy, when the same facts are equally consistent with a corporation simply unable to extract its money and unwilling to write it off. He never seriously entertains the duller explanation, and a reviewer must, because the duller explanation is usually the true one.

Part Two, "Wall Street and Funds for Hitler," turns from cartels to the man, and contains the book's single most solid chapter alongside its single most embarrassing one. The solid chapter is "Who Financed Adolf Hitler?" Here Sutton has the goods: the February 20, 1933 meeting in Hermann Goering's house, where Hitler told assembled German industrialists and bankers that "either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds, and for this purpose once more this election; or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices" — and the three-million-mark fund raised that night, laundered through the Delbruck Schickler bank into the "Nationale Treuhand" account administered by Rudolf Hess, with the individual contributions itemized in the reproduced ledger of Appendix C and corroborated by Schacht's affidavit in Appendix B. That American-affiliated German firms paid into the fund that financed the decisive March 1933 election is, on this evidence, simply established. The Henry Ford chapter is nearly as concrete: Ford as Hitler's first foreign backer in 1922, his 1938 Nazi Grand Cross, and Edsel Ford's cabled reply to the manager of French Ford after the latter reported building trucks for the Wehrmacht — "Delighted to hear you are making progress. Your letters most interesting." Sutton also catches Ford in a revealing 1938 self-exculpation, distinguishing "a constructive and a destructive Wall Street" and placing the House of Morgan among the constructive — a useful glimpse of how a famous critic of "the bankers" made his peace with the ones who suited him.

The embarrassing chapter is "The Myth of 'Sidney Warburg.'" Sutton devotes an entire chapter to a suppressed 1933 Dutch book attributed to a man named Sidney Warburg — and concedes, in the chapter, that no such person ever existed and that the book is almost certainly a fabrication. He keeps it in evidence anyway, treating it as "suggestive" and spending his energy attacking James Paul Warburg's 1949 affidavit denial as evasive. A historian who has just told you his source is a forgery, and then asks you to find it suggestive, has told you something important about his standards of proof. The chapter on Hanfstaengl — "Putzi," the Harvard-educated American who financed early Nazism and knew Roosevelt — runs the same risk: Sutton places Putzi at the Reichstag fire and quotes a message Roosevelt supposedly sent him, "Think of your piano playing and try and use the soft pedal if things get too loud," then uses the personal link to argue that the New Deal and Hitler's New Order were the same corporate-state program backed by the same men. That Gerard Swope of General Electric authored both the "Swope Plan" behind the NRA and sat on the board of a Hitler-financing firm is a real and interesting coincidence of personnel; that it makes Roosevelt and Hitler interchangeable instruments of one cabal is a leap the convergence thesis demands and the documents refuse to underwrite. This argument too is rated contested, and rightly.

Set within its traditions, the book is a curious hybrid. Pass through it as historiography and it belongs to the materialist line — history driven by capital, production, and the balance sheet rather than ideology or contingency — and to a recognizable strain of investigative journalism, the interlocking-directorate exposé that traces power through shared boardroom seats. On those terms Sutton has kin: James Stewart Martin's All Honorable Men and Sampson on I.T.T. cover adjacent ground with more restraint, and the Treasury and Senate investigators Sutton quotes were asking his questions first. He is honest enough to record his disagreements. He explicitly disputes Gabriel Kolko's conclusion that the American firms' motives "were not pro-Nazi," and he rejects the Senate Kilgore Committee's word for the technology transfer — "accidental" — as a plea the evidence contradicts. On the narrow point he may even have the better of Kolko. But Sutton also leans hard on Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope while faulting Quigley for documenting a financial elite without "penetrating" its manipulation of events — which is to say, Quigley would not go where Sutton wants to go, and Sutton resents it. That tension is the book's whole problem in one sentence. The sober sources establish that an interlocked financial elite existed and profited; Sutton needs them to establish that it conspired, and they will not.

This is where the book slides into territory its better evidence cannot redeem. Sutton's keystone claim — that the assistance was premeditated, undertaken in full knowledge that a European and American war was the probable outcome — is, by the honest reckoning of his own material, speculative. His support is thin: that the American business press was aware of German rearmament from about 1935, and that I.T.T. reinvested profits in armaments. Awareness that Germany was arming is not the same as intent that it should; the first is reading the newspaper, the second is conspiracy, and Sutton routinely treats them as one. Worse is the claim, advanced as fact, that plants affiliated with American firms were spared Allied strategic bombing while comparable German-owned plants were destroyed. The evidence — that A.E.G. and I.T.T. plants were not a designated target system while Brown Boveri and Siemens were hit — is consistent with target selection driven by a hundred operational variables, and Sutton offers no document showing anyone protected anything. It is presented with the same confidence as the bank ledgers, and it is not remotely the same kind of claim.

The concluding chapter abandons restraint entirely. Sutton summarizes his four assertions of Wall Street complicity and then broadens into the trilogy's master thesis: that "the financial elite knowingly and with premeditation assisted the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917," that the same elite governs the United States through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Council on Foreign Relations, that formal democracy is a facade, that the country has drifted into a "quasi-totalitarian state" disciplining dissidents through the IRS and the courts, and that mainstream history is itself orchestrated propaganda — built on selectively released documents, written by "compliant and spineless" academics, with revisionist books denied distribution. There is a self-sealing quality here that should trouble any reader: the absence of corroboration becomes proof of suppression, and the very respectability of his critics becomes evidence they are co-opted. To his credit, Sutton resists one ugly temptation. He explicitly refuses the anti-Semitic reading of Hitler's financing, stressing that the implicated elite was non-sectarian — Rockefeller, Morgan, and Ford alongside the Warburgs — that the Warburgs were themselves expelled by the Nazis, and that the forged "Sidney Warburg" book names no Jewish donor. That distancing is real and worth noting. But the architecture he builds — an unelected financial cabal secretly manipulating wars, revolutions, and elections, its traces hidden by a captured press and a captured professoriate — is the load-bearing structure of exactly the conspiracy genre he disclaims, and disowning one tenant does not change the building.

One charge in that final chapter, though, deserves to survive the general skepticism, because it is the rare place where Sutton's outrage and his evidence point the same way. He notes that the Nuremberg tribunals tried the German directors of American I.G. while leaving the American directors of the very same board unindicted and unquestioned, and he asks why Henry and Edsel Ford, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, and I.T.T. were not held to the standard applied to their German counterparts. Strip away the cosmic framing and that is a fair and uncomfortable question — the kind the Morgenthau-era Treasury memos themselves raised before the inquiry they recommended was quietly dropped. It is the question a more disciplined version of this book would have been built around.

So who is this book for? Not the reader looking for a reliable history of how Hitler came to power — Sutton's monocausal frame cannot accommodate the German politics, the Depression, or the contingency that real historians must. It is for the reader willing to do the sorting Sutton will not do himself: to extract the documented transactions — the tetraethyl-lead transfer over War Department objection, the itemized contributions to the 1933 election fund, the Edsel Ford cable, the Behn dealings in the Morgenthau Diary — and to leave behind the premeditation, the non-bombing favoritism, the New Deal-as-New Order equation, and the forged Dutch book treated as a witness. Read that way, against its own grain, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler is a real contribution to an uncomfortable subject: American corporate capital was amorally entangled with Nazi rearmament, profited from it, and was never made to answer for it. Read the way Sutton wants — as the smoking-gun third act of a unified conspiracy running from Petrograd to the New Deal — it discredits its own best pages. The tragedy of the book is structural. Sutton had genuine evidence of a genuine scandal, and he spent it buying a theory of everything.