Background
Fritz Thyssen was born in Mülheim on 9 November 1873, the son of a Catholic, Rhineland family.
Fritz Thyssen was born in Mülheim on 9 November 1873, the son of a Catholic, Rhineland family.
Fritz Thyssen, heir to the family fortune, became an ardent nationalist who organized passive resistance during the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr, for which he was arrested and condemned by a French court-martial. In the same year he first heard Hitler speak and, impressed by his oratory, his ability to lead the masses and the quasi-military discipline of his followers, gave 100.000 gold marks to the Nazis via General Ludendorff.
Thyssen was convinced that Hitler could save Germany from Bolshevism and during the next decade was a heavy financial contributor to the Nazi Party, helping them to pay for the Brown House in Munich and to finance their electoral campaigns. The founder and leading shareholder of the United Steel Works (Germany's largest steel trust), he joined the Party in December 1931 after Hugenberg’s alliance with the Nazis convinced him that the Young Plan spelled catastrophe for Germany and that only a strong State authority could save the nation. Thyssen brought about the connection between Hitler and the Rhenish- Westphalian industrialists. He invited the Nazi leader to speak before a meeting of industrialists in Düsseldorf on 27 January 1932, where Hitler shrewdly harangued the coal and steel magnates, defending private property and the need for a powerful State and stressing the dangers of Bolshevism. Henceforth, the big industrialists, along with Thyssen, began to increase their contributions to the Nazi cause, smoothing Hitler’s road to power.
In September 1933 Thyssen was appointed Prussian State Councillor for life by Goenng, whom he had specially subsidized as a ‘moderate’ bulwark against the radicalism of the Nazi Left. On 12 November 1933 he became a member of the Reichstag for Düsseldorf East and in the same year he was chosen to head an institute for research into the corporate state {Ständische Wirtschaftsordnung). Thyssen's support for the industrial guild system advocated by the Austrian philosopher-economist, Othmar Spann, however, proved irreconcilable with the totalitarian Nazi claim for a leading role in all spheres. By the late 1930s he had become increasingly disillusioned with the régime's rearmament policy (even though it scarcely harmed his business interests), and angered by its anti-Catholicism and persecution of the Jews, which caused him to resign from the Prussian State Council.
Thyssen was arrested and turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy police for return to Germany, where he was imprisoned for the rest of the war.
He died in Buenos Aires on 8 February 1951.
In a letter to Hitler of 28 December 1939, written after fleeing Germany for Switzerland, Thyssen emphasized that his doubts about the Nazi régime had begun with the dismissal of the conservative von Papen as Vice-Chancellor followed by ‘the persecution of Christianity . . . the brutalization of its priests . . . the desecration of its churches’.
Thyssen observed that the Crystal Night pogrom of 9 November 1938 had deeply shocked him - *. . . the Jews were robbed and tortured in the most cowardly and brutal manner, and their synagogues destroyed all over Germany’ - but his protests were to no avail.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 and the aggressive war policy of the régime had been the last straw for Thyssen, who wrote to Hitler as ‘a free and upright German', claiming to be the ‘voice of the tormented German nation' calling for a restoration of ‘freedom, right and humanity' in the German Reich. Thyssen's appeal was ignored, he was stripped in absentia of his German citizenship and his property was confiscated. In 1941 his memoirs, / Paid Hitler, first appeared in English, an anguished settling of accounts with the Nazi regime which has ruined Germany', but singularly unreliable in its recounting of his financial relationship with the National Socialists.