James Peron
2 min readMay 18, 2020

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I’m sorry but that old theory was debunked by historians long ago. In fact, it was largely trashed when I was in college. I suggest:

German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler by Turner (Oxford University)

The Wages of Destruction by Tooze, (Penguin)

Who Financed Hitler by Pool (Dial)

In “Five myths about Nazis” in the Washington Post, Thomas Childers, professor of history writes: “But the Nazis were neither “financed” nor “bankrolled” by big corporate donors. During its rise to power, the Nazi Party did receive some money from corporate sources — including Thyssen and, briefly, industrialist Ernst von Borsig — but business leaders mostly remained at arm’s length. After all, Nazi economic policy was slippery: pro-business ideas swathed in socialist language. The party’s program, the Twenty-Five Points, called for the nationalization of corporations and trusts, revenue sharing, and the end of “interest slavery.” Capitalism, the Nazis charged, “enslaves human beings under the slogan of progress, technology, rationalization, standardization, etc.”

The party largely depended on grass-roots sources of funding (membership dues, subscriptions to the party press, admission to events and so forth). The Nazi propaganda machine — the dances, the “German evenings,” the concerts, the speeches — was also a moneymaking operation, as is made clear in entries in Joseph Goebbels’s diary.”

Hitler used the welfare state to buy support and the whole purpose of confiscating Jewish wealth was to redistribute it to buy support. When that wealth was used up they invaded other countries to keep their redistribution scheme going. For a detailed history of that con game I suggest “Hilter’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State” by Götz Aly praised widely for it’s detailed analysis and the winner of National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust.

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James Peron
James Peron

Written by James Peron

James Peron is the president of the Moorfield Storey Institute, was the founding editor of Esteem a LGBT publication in South Africa under apartheid.

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