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1923-1945 - Fritz Thyssen and the Nazis

Fritz Thyssen, the second son, learned the steel business and eventually became sole manager of his father's empire. Fritz Thyssen volunteers for service in the First World War, but is discharged in 1916/17 with a lung condition. During the Great War the Thyssen works boomed. Thyssen the Younger turned tough as his dad when the French occupied the Ruhr in 1921 and began issuing demands to German industrialists. During the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, as spokesman for the affected mining companies he rejects the orders of the occupying power as illegal, is promptly arrested and together with other industrialists ordered to pay a fine by a French military court. "For his services to uphold German law during the Ruhr conflict" he is made an honorary doctor of law just a few weeks later by the University of Freiburg. Thereafter he was a strident nationalist, consistently anti-French. Fritz Thyssen nevertheless sought reconciliation with France; in the mid 1920s he participates in the Franco-German industrial negotiations on founding the international crude steel association.

Fritz Thyssen was a conservative nationalist, but not a realist. Up to 1932 he is a member of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and is among the followers of the corporative state ideas of the economist, philosopher and sociologist Othmar Spann. Instead of accepting with resignation the Weimar Republic, which accepted the Versailles Treaty, he put his money for a time on the reactionary Stahlhelm veterans' organization, which was bent on restoring the monarchy.

Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, the same year that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the gigantic German steel trust, was formed. Herr Thyssen headed this organization, which controlled 75% of Germany's iron-ore production and 50% of coal-mine output and which listed among its properties 33,000 acres of mines and factories, a 1,200-mile railway system, 14 private ports, 209 electric power stations, numerous cement factories, and tenements housing 60,000 employes' families. His total number of employes rose to 200,000.

Fritz Thyssen became the first big industrialist to believe that a young, up-&-coming agitator named Adolf Hitler was fundamentally safe & sound for Big Business. Thyssen's first contribution was indirect -about 100,000 gold marks to Ludendorff for a Hitler-Ludendorff coup against the Communist Government of Saxony. (It did not come off, but turned into the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.) In 1928 Rudolf Hess went to Thyssen and told him the Nazis were hard put to pay for the Brown House they had bought in Munich. Thyssen arranged a loan through the banks.

Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and in his autobiography, "I Paid Hitler", admitted backing Hitler when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. In the 1933 election, in which the Nazis finally won, he contributed some 3,000,000 marks ($1,200,000) toward the Hitler campaign fund. Thyssen grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. Like countless others, Herr Thyssen saw clearly enough a dangerous revolution in Soviet Russia (he financed the Nazis as a bulwark against Communism), but failed to detect a social upheaval in Germany.

On 14 July 1933, the Nazi government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Off-spring, or "Sterilization Law" - allowing the forcible sterilization of anyone suffering from "genetically-determined" illnesses such as feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, genetic blindness or deafness, or chronic alcoholism. The measure was drawn up after a series of meetings by several of Germany's leading racial hygienists, including Lenz, Ploetz, Rüdin, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Reich Physicians' Fuehrer Gerhard Wagner, and the industrialist Fritz Thyssen.

Thyssen protested the Blood Purge of 1934, the persecution of Catholic and Protestant clergymen, the Jewish pogrom of 1938. The Nazis got tired of his protests. Thyssen warned the Nazis against going to war. No one could have been more dismayed or surprised by the Nazi-Communist in August 1939. His move away from NS thinking culminates in a clean break when he fails to attend the Reichstag assembly in Berlin to approve the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, openly stating in a telegraph to Hermann Göring: "... I am against war. ..." Thyssen was wise enough to leave Austria for Switzerland when Germany invaded Poland. In December 1939 the Nazis confiscated the vast Thyssen estate.

Fritz Thyssen flees with his family via Switzerland to France with a view to emigrating from there to Argentina, but his plans are frustrated by the German invasion of France. During this time the so-called autobiography, published under the title "I paid Hitler" in New York in 1941, is written. The publisher is the journalist Emery Reves, an American of Hungarian descent. The text is based on dictations, only the first nine chapters of which were edited by Fritz Thyssen himself. The rest, the most frequently quoted section, has been imaginatively embellished by the publisher, and is of limited value as a source of reference on Thyssen's actual movements and his role up to 1939. The very title of the book is misleading and for this reason Thyssen always contested its authenticity. The board of arbitration in the denazification trial agreed with him.

Fritz Thyssen, Catholic steel magnate, in the book "I Paid Hitler", published in the United States, stated that the whole plan of Hitler's National Socialism (as he understood it) was to establish a confederation of Central European countries under a Catholic monarch. When he went to Switzerland in 1940, Thyssen published an article in the Swiss Arbeiterzeitung entitled "Pius XII, as Nuncio Brought Hitler to Power". "The idea," he wrote, "was to have a sort of Christian Corporate State organised according to the classes, which would be supported by the Churches - in the West by the Catholic, and in the East by the Protestant - and by the Army."

Thyssen wrote "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."

Fritz Thyssen spent most of the war in a Nazi internment camp. Fritz Thyssen and his wife Amélie are among the first Germans to be delivered to the national socialists by the Vichy government at the end of 1940. Their assets are confiscated by the state. After spending two years confined in the secure section of a sanatorium near Berlin, they are both incarcerated first of all in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, in February 1945 in Buchenwald and finally in Dachau. The denazification trials ordered by the Allies in 1948 found that Fritz Thyssen donated around 650,000 Reichsmarks to various right-wing and conservative national political parties and groups, including the NSDAP, between 1923 and 1932. He died in 1951.