I PAID HITLER — Fr!tz Thyssen — Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).
"If human civilization is not to perish, everything that is possible must be done to make war impossible in Europe. But the violent solution dreamed of by Hitler, a primitive person obsessed by ill-digested historical memories, is a romantic folly and a barbarous and bloody anachronism."
So, in the foreword to this book, says Fritz Thyssen, onetime rich and powerful head of the German steel trust, onetime National Socialist party member, onetime financial backer of Adolf Hitler, now probably a corpse or a haggard prisoner of the Gestapo. I Paid Hitler reveals Thyssen as one of history's rankest examples of The Man Who Was Wrong.
In April 1940 a tired refugee and his wife got off a train at the Gare du Nord in Paris and proceeded to the sumptuous Hotel Crillon. They were Herr and Frau Thyssen. Emery Reves, president of Co-operation Publication Co. (international newspaper syndicate), persuaded him to write and publish his memoirs. Reves, Thyssen, a collaborator and a secretary went to Monte Carlo. Thyssen, says Reves, dictated three solid hours every day, then revised and approved the copy.
Reves found Thyssen "a charming old gentleman, unusually witty, with a perfect sense of humor. He loved good food and the best wines, and our luncheons rarely took less than three hours. . . ." Thyssen told some juicy tales of the private lives of Nazi bigshots, but when he remembered how they had hoodwinked him, he would pound his head and mutter, "Ein Dummkopf war ich!" ("What a dumbhead I was!").
In late May Reves took the almost-final manuscript to Paris to check some names and dates. At the approach of the German steamroller, he fled to Bordeaux, sailed thence on a British destroyer with the manuscript. He never saw or heard from Thyssen again. After more than a year, it seemed obvious that Thyssen was a captive; for if he were free, he would have communicated with his family in South America. Alive or dead, he was, Reves decided, beyond the power of the book to hurt or help. So Reves decided to publish.
"Victim of Sharpers." Fritz Thyssen calls himself "a man of good will." Looking back, he decided that in 1930 he had really been a liberal—and adds naively, "I should have been astonished if anyone had called me a liberal." He claims that all his troubles and all the damage he did to the world grew out of his endless capacity for being fooled by political sharpers. History's verdict is likely to be harsher.
In 1918 he had seen naval mutiny, strikes, riots, revolution, chaos—during which he was imprisoned for a few days by radical upstarts. In the 19205 he saw a crucifying inflation. In 1931 he saw six or seven million restless unemployed. And he saw in Hitler a potential guarantor of order and prosperity, a holder of the dike against Bolshevist Russia.
Says Thyssen: "I have personally given altogether one million marks to the National Socialist party. Not more." He estimates that other contributors from "heavy industry" gave the movement two million marks annually in the last years before Hitler became chancellor.