Venture capitalist Tom Perkins would have you believe
America's 1 percent are yesterday's Jews but nothing could be further
from the truth…
Before he came to power: Hitler and Industrialist Fritz Thyssen, right
Venture capitalist
Thomas Perkins, not to be confused with the equally befuddled, dishonest, and hyperbolic religio
-wingnut figure, compared,
in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, America’s 1 percent to the Jews of Nazi Germany:
Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San
Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi
Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the
progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’
In a time when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting
poorer, when the unemployed are denied unemployment benefits and the
sick are denied medical care and everyone is denied a job, Perkins wrote
of “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent,” He claimed,
“In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class
demonization.”
Perkins concluded that, “This is a very dangerous drift in our
American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its
descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”
From this, you would expect the 1 percent to be thrown into
concentration camps almost immediately. But nothing could be further
from the truth, and the parallels with Nazi thinking are nonexistent.
Perkins, not to put too fine a point on it, lied through his teeth.
Actually, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party were eager to
climb into bed with the German 1 percent, other than rich Jews, of
course, whose money could simply be confiscated later. In fact, it has
been argued that without support from rich German industrialists, Hitler
would never have risen to power in 1933. And not only did Hitler have
financial supporters in Germany
but in the United States.
Hitler’s confident and friend Ernst Hanfstaengl recalled later how in
the early days of the Nazi movement, he brought Hitler into contact
with “national-minded wealthy business men” and “national-minded
Bavarian industrialists.” He notes also that Hitler was involved with
the Bruckmanns, whom he described as “big publishers in Munich” and that
Elsa Bruckmann “made something of a protégé of Hitler.” The Bechstein
family, the piano makers, also took an interest in Hitler. The Party was
also subsidized by the Germany army in Bavaria, which was looking for
allies against the communists.
Another close acquaintance of Hitler, his photographer Heinrich
Hoffmann, wrote that when Hitler left Landsberg prison he had not even
“a farthing” in his pocket but that one of his “most ardent supporters, a
wealthy member of famous aristocratic family and the wife of a highly
respected businessman, arranged a personal office for him and furnished
it with furniture of her own…”
Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, wrote in his memoirs that
“Hitler addressed captains of industry for the first time in 1926 in my
home town of Essen.” By the end of the 1920s, Hitler was not only
receiving the support of German monarchists and the German aristocracy
(“these were people from the right sort of society” as Hanfstaengl
related – the 1 percent in other words), but started receiving, in
Hanfstaengl’s words, “quite large subsidies” from German industrialists
in the Ruhr like Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf. Fritz Thyssen later
claimed in his memoirs that he “donated 100,000 gold marks to the NSDAP
in October 1923.”
Accoding to Dietrich, Hitler “was a frequent guest at his [Kirdorf's]
house in Mülheim-Saarn near Duisberg.” Hitler’s secretary Christa
Schroeder, related in her memoirs an important incident related to
Kirdorf:
He [Hitler] often spoke of the financial bonds in which
the Party invested earlier, and were signed by him. Often somebody had
to be found in the last moment to redeem them. He liked to quote this
example:
I signed a Loan Note for the Party for 40,000 RM. Money I was
expected had not been received, the Party coffers were empty and the
redemption date on the note was coming nearer without any hope of my
getting the money together. I was considering shooting myself, since
there seemed no alternative. Four days before the redemption date I
informed Frau Bruckmann of my unfortunate plight. She phoned Emil
Kirdorf and sent me to see him. I told Kirdorf of my plans and won him
over at once to the cause. He placed the money at my disposal and thus
enabled me to liquidate the debt on time.
This is a story Hitler also related to Joseph Göbbels, who noted it in his diary on 15 November 1936.
From 1931 – and this is two years before Hitler came to power – 5
pfennigs out of every ton of coal sold by Rhine-Westfalen Coal
Syndicate, went to the NSDAP.
Wikipedia notes that Kirdorf “was personally awarded by
Adolf Hitler the
Order of the German Eagle,
Nazi Germany‘s highest distinctions, on his 90th birthday in 1937, for his support to the
Nazi Party in the late 1920s.”
The
Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team notes that,
At a meeting of leading German industrialists with
Hjalmar Schacht, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, held on the 20
February 1933, IGF contributed 400,000 reichsmarks to the Nazi Party,
the largest single amount in the total sum of 3 million reichsmarks
raised at this meeting by German industrialists for the Nazi Party’s
election campaign.
According to Antony C. Sutton, this money went into Hitler’s
political “slush fund” and “It was this secret fund which financed the
Nazi seizure of control in March 1933.*
Not all Nazis were so willing to deal with the wealthy. Hitler and
Otto Straßer, for example, different how how to deal with these people
when the Nazis came to power (Kirdorf left the Nazi Party in 1928 on
account of Straßer but rejoined in 1934 after Straßer was killed on
Hitler’s orders).
Thomas Friedrich relates that Straßer asked Hitler “what he would do
with Krupp and similar companies in the event of his assuming power.
Would everything remain unchanged in terms of ownership, profits and
management?” “But of course,” Hitler is said to have replied. “Do you
think I’m mad enough to destroy the economy?” Straßer was dismayed,
writes Friedrich. “If Hitler was planning to retain the capitalist
system, he could hardly speak of ‘socialism’…Hitler retorted that the
term ‘socialism’ was intrinsically bad’ and repeated his view that
companies could be nationalized only if they failed to act in the
national interest. ‘As long as this does not happen, it would simply be a
crime to destroy the national economy.’”
Before the 1932 elections, Hitler met with the Industrial Club at the
Park Hotel in Düsseldorf and told them his economic policies were not a
threat to them. Henry Ashby Turner writes that “From all indications,
neither Hitler nor any other Nazis mounted any sustained follow-up from
those who had been present at his Industry Club speech or otherwise to
enlist them for their purposes.” Dietrich agrees, saying that the ice
was broken but that contributions were “insignificant in amount.”
But what counts here is the efforts to which Hitler went to court, rather than, as Thomas Perkins claims, kill rich Germans.
Ashby-Turner claims that these rich industrialists were never a huge
source of funding for the Nazi Party but whether they were or they
weren’t, that they gave any money at to Hitler, and that he courted
their support, and that after 1933 big business back Hitler to the hilt,
paints a very different picture than that presented by Perkins, who
would have us believe that the 1 percent should be equated with
Germany’s Jews (the old anti-Semitic claim that the “Jews own
everything”).
If anything, what emerges is a picture of Hitler and industrialists
that reminds us of nothing so much as the repugican cabal’s
relationship with the mainstream media and the tea party’s own
relationship with big business. Hitler publicly condemned industrialists
as Jewish interests just as the repugican cabal publicly condemns the mainstream
media as leftist tools, but secretly relied on them, just as the repugican cabal
relies on the mainstream media to spread wingnut propaganda and the tea party relies on Big Business to fund their supposed “grass roots”
activities.
In no way can the 1 percent be compared to Hitler’s Jewish victims.
They can, however, be compared to Hitler’s 1 percent, who saw in the
Nazi leader an ally against the radical left, the same alliance of
ultra-nationalist wingnut forces that exists today between the repugican cabal
and America’s rich against the radical populist, and working-class left.
One is reminded of Sarah Palin’s “blood libel” scandal, and Thomas
Perkins should apologize to Hitler’s Jewish victims and to the American
people.
* From Sutton: The I.G. Farben transfer slip dated February 27, 1933
is found on Nuremberg Military Tribunal document NI-391-395, the
“Original transfer slip dated March 19, 1933 from Accumulatoren-Fabrik
to Delbrück, Shickler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to pay 25,000 RM
to the ‘Nationale Treuhand’ fund administered by Hjalmar Schacht and
Rudolph Hess to elect Hitler in March 1933″ is found on Nuremberg
Military Tribunal document NI-391-395, and “The transfer slip, dated
March 2, 1933, from German General Eletric to Delbrück, Schickler Bank
in Berlin, with instructions to pay 60,000 RM to the ‘Nationale
Treuhand’ fund (administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess) used
to elect Hitler in March 1933 is found on Nuremberg Military Tribunal
document No. 391-395.”
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