“Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht”, by John Weitz

361 pages, Little Brown & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0316929165

Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht by John Weitz is the tale of Hjalmar Schacht, a Frisian German who stopped the German hyper-inflation of the 1920s and became a prominent financier of the 1930s; his actions also resulted in funding the rise of the Third Reich and the armaments industry. Whoops. Weitz is from a German Jewish background and tries to review Schacht’s actions both as a banker and politician. While Schacht was instrumental in helping fund the Nazi political machine, he didn’t belong to the party and broke with Hitler prior to the war. The Federal Republic sought to imprison him for what he did when he was Finance Minister and head of the German Bank, but he was acquitted by the Allies at Nuremburg and lived a quiet existence after the war. After reading this book, one can detect how arrogant Schacht was: he was probably not a pleasant person to be around and was one of those people who think they know everything and seek to tell you how intelligent they are (we all know at one of those, don’t we?).

While I, for one, don’t think it was unjustified to prosecute him after the war, because he was, after all, responsible for (eventually) funding the Third Reich. His actions didn’t immediately cause the deaths of millions, even if his policies led to the Third Reich being financially solvent during rearmament. Overall, Hitler’s Banker is a surprisingly even-handed treatment of the controversial banker who helped ease Hitler’s rise to power and then fell out of favor and landed up in a concentration camp. It’s too easy to demonize everyone associated with Hitler and tougher to show how someone like Schacht could see how Hitler could help a devastated Germany after Versailles and the great inflation but not recognize his inherent evil. Those who like a world of stark blacks and whites may not like this book because it shows humanity in a portrait of grays.