Architects of the Third Reich: the Wall Street Nazi connection

McKittrick ran the Bank for International Settlements, the most powerful international bank in the world. His trip to meet Reichsbank officials in Berlin wasn't a rumour or a conspiracy theory. It's in the Treasury Department memos. It's in the wartime intelligence reports.

That's the part most people have never heard. What follows is the part they really should have.

A boardroom decision, not a grassroots movement

The rise of the Nazi regime gets told as a political story. Angry crowds, a broken economy, a charismatic demagogue. All true. But there's another version running underneath it, and this one happens in boardrooms, not beer halls.

Germany after 1918 was a wrecked country, crushed under the reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. By 1923 the inflation was so severe that banknotes were worth less as currency than as kindling. Wall Street looked at that wreckage and saw something else entirely: an opportunity.

The Dawes Plan of 1924 restructured German reparations and opened the door for American capital to pour in. The circle it created was almost elegant. American loans rebuilt German industry. Germany used that industrial output to pay reparations to Britain and France. Britain and France used those payments to service war debts back to the United States. Bankers collected fees at every stop along the way.

Between 1924 and 1929, roughly 70 percent of the 30 billion gold marks in foreign loans into German industry came from American bankers. The House of Morgan led it. The Rockefeller interests, the Warburg banking dynasty and Dillon Read weren't far behind. By 1933, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and the core of German industry were substantially under American financial influence.

The man who built the bridge

If there's one name that connects Wall Street to Hitler's rise, it's Hjalmar Schacht. He ended the hyperinflation crisis of the early 1920s and built deep ties to the JP Morgan network along the way. His most consequential move came later: leading the group of industrialists who pushed President Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor.

Meetings in January 1932 and January 1933 brought together Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, and the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, who would go on to run the State Department and the CIA respectively. Financing for the Nazi Party got worked out in rooms like these. Not on the street. In private, among men who understood exactly what they were funding.

Once Hitler had power, Schacht met with Franklin Roosevelt and Wall Street bankers and came away with roughly a billion dollars in new loans. That money went straight into rearmament.

The chemistry of war

No company sat closer to the Nazi war machine than IG Farben. It made synthetic fuel, synthetic rubber, and the Zyklon B used in extermination camps. Wall Street financed its expansion, raising 30 million dollars for its American subsidiary through New York in 1929. Its board had direct lines into major New York financial institutions, and the company handed 400,000 reichsmarks to the secret fund that bankrolled the Nazi takeover in 1933.

Then there's Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Rockefeller flagship, and its cartel partnership with IG Farben. Standard Oil shared hydrogenation technology, the process that turns coal into synthetic gasoline. Germany had almost no domestic oil. Without that technology, the military doesn't run. The Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, jointly owned by Standard Oil and General Motors, handed over the production plans for tetraethyl lead, the compound that made high-octane aviation fuel possible. No tetraethyl lead, no Luftwaffe performing the way it did in the air.

While all this flowed to Germany, Standard Oil was quietly restricting synthetic rubber development back home in the US, protecting its cartel partner's interests. Senator Harry Truman had a word for that. He called it treasonable.

Banking with the enemy

Chase National Bank and JP Morgan kept operating in occupied Paris while American soldiers were fighting the Third Reich elsewhere in Europe. Chase, the Rockefeller crown jewel, built what internal correspondence called a "very special esteem" with Nazi occupation authorities. Its deposits grew fast. It also moved to block Jewish customers' funds and property in France before the Nazis even asked it to. Separately, the bank helped raise over 20 million dollars through the "Rückwanderer marks" scheme, currency that in many cases had been stolen from Jewish refugees.

And then there's the BIS itself, sitting quietly in Basel. It gave central bankers from countries at war with each other a permanent, private room to keep doing business. Its wartime board included Walther Funk and Emil Puhl, both later convicted war criminals. Puhl personally oversaw the processing of dental gold pulled from concentration camp victims.

Under McKittrick's presidency, the BIS took in gold looted from occupied nations' central banks. In 1939 it moved 23 tons of Czechoslovak gold straight to the Reichsbank, a transfer the Bank of England authorised without even consulting the British Treasury. Henry Morgenthau tried to shut the BIS down at Bretton Woods in 1944. The central bankers in the room killed that idea. The institution is still running today.

The hardware

Ford's German subsidiary got called an "arsenal of Nazism" in a 1945 US Army report, building military trucks for the Wehrmacht with forced and slave labour. Henry Ford got a mention in Mein Kampf and picked up the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938. General Motors wasn't far behind through its subsidiary Opel, which controlled a huge share of the German car market and got retooled for the war effort.

Then there's the Union Banking Corporation in New York, where Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, sat as a director. UBC operated as a clearinghouse for Fritz Thyssen, one of the Nazi Party's earliest and largest financial backers. The US government seized UBC's assets in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Nobody was charged. Bush went on to become a US senator.

What happened after

Schacht was acquitted at Nuremberg, over the strong objection of the Soviet judge. He lived until 1970, building a second career as a financial consultant. McKittrick landed a vice presidency at Chase and later invited Emil Puhl, a convicted war criminal, to visit him in the United States as a personal guest.

Ford and General Motors both successfully billed the US government for war damages after American bombs hit their own Nazi-operated factories. As the Cold War took shape, the same industrial and financial machinery that had served Hitler got reclassified as essential to containing the Soviets. The bankers and industrialists who financed the Reich became partners in the Marshall Plan within a few short years.

Accountability lost out to strategic convenience.

The architecture that made all this possible, capital moving freely across borders while responsibility stops dead at every checkpoint, was built in the 1920s and 30s by the people who financed a genocide. The names on the letterhead have changed since then. The mechanism hasn't.

A note on sources

Some of this is as solid as history gets. McKittrick's 1943 trip, his OSS file, his friendship with Emil Puhl, his postwar job at Chase: all of that sits in declassified archives, Nuremberg depositions and multiple independent historians' work, from Higham to LeBor to Talbot. The Union Banking Corporation seizure and Prescott Bush's directorship are a matter of public record. So is Ford-Werke's use of forced labour and the Bretton Woods fight over Resolution VI.

Other parts of this piece, particularly the precise lending figures, the account of a formal 1932 to 1933 financing agreement being struck in a room with Dulles and Norman present, and some of the IG Farben numbers, come primarily from Antony Sutton's 1976 book. Sutton worked from real documents and his central claim, that Wall Street capital built the industrial base Hitler rearmed with, holds up and is backed elsewhere. But some of his sharper details and framing have been disputed by other historians on emphasis and certainty, even where they don't dispute the underlying money trail. Worth knowing before you take every figure here as gospel.

By Michael Lennard Gnaedinger. © 2026 Gnaedinger Consultancy. All rights reserved.