Original subtitles

(plodding percussion music)

Germany, 1937.

In only four years and by imposing

his national economic policies by brute force,

Adolf Hitler appears to be fulfilling his promise

of returning Germany to prosperity.

Germany in 1933's economically on its back.

There are more than six million unemployed people

and unemployment has reached

nearly a third of the German population.

When Hitler takes power in 1933,

he makes a promise to the German people

that this will be his first priority.

The Nazis had reaped the rewards

of the global economic recovery

and relied on common sense protectionist policies

designed to prioritize homegrown German manufacturing,

while instituting military rearmament on a massive scale.

I don't know of any industrialist

or business that didn't support rearmament.

And indeed you could say it was something

that most patriotic Germans would do.

You've got what looks like economic growth,

political stability, and you've got a country

that's starting to look like

it's being well-run, well managed.

But there was an altogether more sinister side

to this economic recovery:

the use of the notorious Nuremberg Racial Laws

to seize Jewish-owned businesses and property

for the Nazi state.

The Nazis and their collaborators

benefited from Aryanization,

which was widespread theft of Jewish property and assets.

Even as Germany was basking in the glow

of her newfound confidence,

Hitler and his cronies were busy selling her soul.

(soft suspenseful orchestral music)

(pensive music)

January 30th, 1933.

Germany salutes their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

The Austrian immigrant and former army corporal

has promised the Nazi faithful that Germany will rise again

to a position of prominence and prosperity.

But Hitler is not happy

with simply holding the future of Germany in his hands.

He wants to control all of Europe

and maybe the entire world.

When Hitler comes to power,

he decides to call a general election

because he wants to see if he can get

enough Reichstag deputies to introduce an Enabling Act.

The Enabling Act is to try and get rid of democracy.

Then he will have all of the powers

that parliament used to have in his own hands.

He wanted absolute power.

But to get it, he needed money, lots of it.

On February 20th, 1933, Hermann Goring,

the president of the Reichstag,

called 25 of the most prominent industrialists

and financiers in Germany

to attend a secret meeting with Hitler

at his official residence to discuss the financing

of the Nazis' general election campaign.

Now, you've got some really, really significant figures

at this meeting.

You've got Gustav Krupp, Fritz Von Opel,

Georg Von Schnitzler, Albert Vogler.

These are seriously big, impressive players.

At Goring opened the meeting and made the introductions,

Hitler took over and did what he did best:

He flattered and cajoled his audience

and made sure they knew he was about to make life

considerably easier for all of them,

as long as they went along with his plans

and lined his pockets.

14 years later at the Nuremberg trials in 1946,

court documents revealed the extent

of the industrialists' subsequent collusion

and financial contributions to the Nazi cause.

(pensive music)

The amounts contributed by the participants

in the meeting of 20 February, 1933 at Goring's house

were paid by them to the bankers, Delbruck, Schickler & Co.,

to the credit of an account "Nationale Treuhand."

It was arranged that I was entitled

to dispose of this account,

which I administered as a trustee.

I disposed of the amounts of this account

by writing out checks to Mr. Hess.

I do not know what Mr. Hess actually did with the money.

With the millions of Deutschmarks

transferred by Schacht to Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess,

the NSDAP could embark upon its general election campaign

confident of the victory which would give them the votes

to pass the Enabling Act and assume absolute power.

That campaign was marked by the burning of the Reichstag,

an event that was blamed on the communists

and used as a pretext by Hitler to outlaw them.

(speaking foreign language)

In the election on the 5th of March,

the Nazis increased their share of the vote,

but still fell short of the outright majority they wanted.

They would need to bargain their way

to a coalition in the Reichstag,

so keeping the party coffers full was more vital than ever.

(pensive orchestral music)

As a reward for his services as intermediary

with Germany's leading industrialists and bankers,

Schacht was invited to reoccupy his post

as president of the Reichsbank.

Hitler's regime needed some credibility early on,

and the best way to do that was to retain

some figures who had some international credibility.

So, Schacht is kinda the mouthpiece

of the conservative financial world

and to give it credibility, really.

In the wooing of big business and finance,

Schacht was Hitler and Goring's

most important co-collaborator,

but their collaboration wasn't without conflict.

On April 1st, 1933,

tensions between them erupted after Hitler declared

a national boycott of Jewish businesses

and Brownshirt thugs were sent in to intimidate

and disrupt Jewish-owned shops and department stores.

Schacht immediately recognized the stupidity of such a move.

First of all, there were the foreign investors

in the department stores.

They said, "These department stores may be Jewish,

"but we're English, French, and Italians.

"We're not Jewish, and we're suffering,

"because if they go bankrupt,

"we lose our investment in 'em."

The banks were the same.

The banks said, "We're not Jewish.

"We loan money to these department stores!

"If they can't pay their loans, it comes back on us!"

Finally, it got so extreme that even the Nazis

who worked as employees in the Jewish department stores

said, "Well, the boss may be Jewish, but we're not.

"We're going to lose our job."

On this occasion,

Hitler listened to Schacht and called off the boycott.

Interestingly, however, this sign of how far Hitler

was willing to go in pursuit of his Aryanization policies

proved attractive to his new friends in business

and to one in particular:

arms manufacturer Gustav Krupp Von Bohlen.

Once an outspoken critic of Hitler and the Nazis,

Krupp chose this moment to convert to the Nazi cause.

In 1918, (pausing) when they knew defeat was coming,

the Krupps and other industrials were very good

getting their patents and their engineers out of Germany

and getting them to Spain, to Sweden,

to the neutral countries.

And they even experimented with new weapons

in communist Russia.

(speaking foreign language)

Since they had the chance

to secretly meet Hitler on the 3rd of February, 1933,

Krupp was now assured of Germany's imminent rearmament

on a massive scale and the opportunity

to bring his factories and production lines

back within Germany's borders.

A few days after Hitler comes to power,

he gives a speech to a group of army figures.

So, he lays out quite clearly and he says,

"The number-one priority of my government is rearmament,

"and the army will have the biggest place in my government."

(speaking foreign language)

Gustuv Krupp had already donated

a million marks to the Nazi electoral campaign

as a sign of his goodwill.

Now he wanted to go further.

He revealed to Hitler that his industries

were ready to rearm Germany

and further contribute to the NSDAP

without any conditions attached,

other than the ability to serve and support Hitler's Reich.

This was the beginning of the Faustian pact

between the Nazi elite, big business, and the German Army,

which would control the Third Reich

for the duration of its doomed tenure.

(pensive orchestral music)

(pensive orchestral music)

To consolidate his power

over the whole of the German economy,

Hitler needed control of all German labor.

May 1st, 1933.

Hitler declares National Labor Day and a fully-paid holiday.

All over Germany,

trade unions organize massive demonstrations

to celebrate this event,

grateful that the new regime was supporting its members.

In reality, Hitler had a very different plan for them.

The following day, Nazi stormtroopers took over

the trades union headquarters all over the country,

arresting their leaders and confiscating all their assets,

including wholly-owned businesses, banks, newspapers,

shops, and other service companies.

In all, assets worth more than 180 million marks

were confiscated,

making it one of the most profitable operations

for the Nazi regime in peacetime.

The man behind this operation

was Hitler's new labor chief, Robert Ley.

Ley established a new Nazi state-run union,

the German Labor Front, or DAF.

Under new labor laws,

German workers were only permitted membership

of this Nazi-controlled union.

In 1934 alone, the collected dues of the DAF

made a contribution to the Nazi Party of 300 million marks.

But its main responsibility

was to keep organized labor under state control.

Benefits, higher salaries, less working hours, and strikes

ceased to be a problem for German employers,

as Hitler fulfilled his promise

to bring the trade unions to heel.

At the same time, using their new financial muscle,

the National Socialists enacted a major new public works

and construction program aimed at ensuring full employment.

So, Hitler embarks on a number of public works projects

as part of this economic recovery project

that he has promised the German people.

The most famous of those is the Autobahn,

which is this incredibly impressive system of roads

that are really unprecedented elsewhere in the world.

Within a few months, Germany was barely recognizable.

New modern buildings had sprung up in German cities

connected by a new revamped transport infrastructure

of modern highways and railway lines,

plus affordable housing for German workers

and their families.

The quality of life of ordinary Germans

had improved significantly

and unemployment was nearly eradicated.

But as always with the Nazis,

this upsurge in economic prosperity

was a front for sinister activities behind the scenes.

But in reality, he's thinking about

the militaristic implications of this as well.

Having an incredibly sophisticated road system

where you can transport goods and military vehicles quickly

will be incredibly important to the Second World War

on the German side.

There is a conspiracy there to rearm secretly

against the wishes of the Allies

and, of course, the conditions of the League of Nations.

And Germany in the early part of 1930

is still in the League of Nations,

and also it's a condition of the Treaty of Versailles.

So, you see there Hitler is willing to go

in a secretive wealth here to rearm.

Needing to conduct

their armament of Germany in secret,

the Nazis had to find a way to conceal

the cost of this vast undertaking.

A new secret source of money was desperately needed.

Once again, the reliable Hjalmar Schacht

came up with an ingenious solution:

the introduction of MEFO Bills.

MEFO stood for the Metallurgical Research Corporation,

a shell company established by Schacht

as a means by which the government

could extend credit notes to German companies

in return for redeemable government bonds.

(speaking foreign language)

MEFO's startup capital came from four of the country's

biggest arms manufacturers, including Krupp.

These German companies

would not only build Germany's war machine,

they would also be a major player

in the march toward full employment.

With his furnaces now blasting at full capacity

and business booming, it was time for Gustav Krupp

to show Hitler how grateful he was for his support.

He established a trust fund

called the Adolf Hitler Spende,

into which he and his fellow industrialists

could donate part of the proceeds

of the rearmament campaign to the Nazis.

Initially, those donations were considered voluntary.

Later, however, Krupp would mandate

that the donations had to equal

a half a percent of a company's previous year's salaries.

In its first year alone, this amounted to 30 million marks.

At first, Hitler decreed that the fund set up in his name

should only be used to finance the Nazi Party.

When Hitler comes to power, he makes a big play of saying,

"I am financially clean.

"I will not accept the chancellor's salary.

"I can draw funds from the Nazi Party, which I created,

"and from royalties from my book, "Mein Kampf."

And of course, Max Amann has made it clear

that every married couple

is gonna get a copy of "Mein Kampf,"

and it costs quite a lot of money.

So, from that, he raises a huge amount of money.

He always would pull out his pockets and say,

"I carry no money; I have no money."

He had a number of important people like Max Amann

that acted as his personal trustees.

And they use a device that is little known,

which is a trust can be verbal.

A trust does not have to be a written document.

And he had verbal trusts with Max Amann,

his photographer, Hoffmann,

who handled more personal money.

If Max Amann, his publisher,

was Hitler's right arm when he came to his private finances,

his left arm was his personal photographer,

Heinrich Hoffman.

Hoffmann managed Hitler's

second-most-important source of income: his image rights.

Hitler and Hoffmann were cashing in

from every postcard, autographed photo,

and picture printed in a newspaper or magazine.

During the years of his rule, both men amassed a fortune.

(pensive orchestral music)

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels

filed a copyright for Hitler's name

so that any city that wished to name

a square or a street after the new chancellor

would have to pay for the right to do so.

Despite his claims of modest living,

Hitler was raking in the money.

In his first year in power alone,

he declared for tax purposes an income of 1.2 million marks.

This would be his first and last filing of his tax returns

during his 13-and-a-half years in power.

A sort of hardworking civil servant

in the income tax department of the German government

comes to Hitler and he says,

"My fuhrer, we can't find any tax returns for you."

And Hitler introduces an immediate decree

absolving himself of any criminal activity.

The only thing to be said for Hitler

is that he was not extravagant.

He wasn't that extravagant, really.

He dressed in a very sorta normal way,

didn't spend loads of money,

didn't have a massive designer designing his clothes.

But there were always exceptions to the rule.

In 1935, Gustav Krupp steps aside

as chairman of the Adolf Hitler Spende and is replaced

by Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann.

Bormann uses the proceeds from the fund

to renovate Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat and compound,

in which Bormann also maintained a residence,

into a luxurious fortress

that would famously become known as the Berghof.

He actually was using this money

to enhance the efficiency of his rule of Germany,

hence why he wants to extend the Berghof,

because it was a government center, wasn't it?

So, it made sense.

And of course he could say,

"Well, the governments aren't paying for this.

"The taxpayers are paying for this.

"I'm paying for this.

"And all the donations to the Adolf Hitler Fund are free."

On August 3rd, 1934,

President Paul Von Hindenburg passes away.

With the money now rolling in

and his popularity at an all-time high,

Hitler loses no time and holding a referendum

to consolidate the duties of the president

and chancellor of the German Republic.

It's overwhelmingly passed,

and Hitler is now the fuhrer of the Third Reich,

with all the power at his disposal

to launch the next phase of his plan

to restore the German Reich to its pre-Versailles borders,

from which to launch a terrifying assault

on the rest of Europe.

(speaking foreign language) (pensive orchestral music)

Adolf Hitler is now fuhrer, the absolute ruler of Germany.

After outlawing and exiling

all his internal political opponents

and consolidating all authority in his own hands,

he is now willing to go public

with his already-far-advanced plan for military rearmament.

While he charms his fellow world leaders,

reassuring them that his rearmament

is in no way a sign of aggressive intent,

he relies on his newly-promoted

minister of economic affairs, Hjalmar Schacht,

to financially fuel rearmament at a rapid pace.

(speaking foreign language)

On March 16th, 1935,

Hitler officially proclaims the rearmament of Germany,

setting its industries to full speed.

Further, as he increases Germany's military spending,

he also reintroduces military conscription.

Conscription is a huge step

in reducing Germany's unemployment problem.

It takes millions of men outta the workforce,

largely young men, and puts them into the armed forces.

By 1936, Germany is claiming

that it has reduced unemployment to 0%.

It's achieved full employment.

This is a huge step.

When most of the world is still mired

in double-digit unemployment, even above 20% in some cases,

Germany has apparently solved this problem almost overnight.

You've got what looks like economic growth,

political stability, and you've got a country

that's starting to look like

it's being well-run, well managed.

And of course, in 1936,

it's also famously the year of the Berlin Olympics,

and this is a kind of fantastic advertisement, if you like.

The Berlin Olympics of August 1936

was the perfect showcase for a resurgent Germany

and a way of reassuring the world

of the Nazis' peaceful intent.

When it came to impressing on the world stage,

no expense was spared by Hitler

and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

So, they spend over about 16 million Reichsmark.

Nationally, they spend about 30 million Reichsmark.

And of course, you have this incredible

propaganda documentary film called "Olympia"

by the famous director Leni Riefenstahl,

and that comes in at about 7 million marks.

So, these are big figures,

but for a really important project.

And you know what?

It really works for the Nazis.

Hitler could now strut and preen

on the world stage

confident that the so-called great powers were cowed

by the new Germany's show of strength and supremacy.

He had rearmed the country

in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles

to only brief and half-hearted protest

from the Western Allies.

And he had enacted the vile Nuremberg Racial Laws,

and no one had lifted a finger.

He was untouchable.

(rising suspenseful music music)

With one highly successful four-year economic plan complete,

Hitler was ready to immediately launch the next one.

But this time, its supervision would be handled

by someone closer to the Hitler throne: Hermann Goring.

(speaking foreign language)

With Goring's society and establishment links,

this was a way of further strengthening the ties

between the Nazi Party

and one particularly influential German company,

the giant chemical conglomerate IG Farben.

In the 1920s, IG Farben is 450th, somewhere around there,

richest company in the world.

By 1942, it's the third-richest company in the world.

How did this happen?

How did this company, which was a chemical company,

rise to be such a dominant monopoly company in Nazi Germany?

(speaking foreign language)

It was a chemical company,

but it also made synthetic rubber, synthetic oil,

and later on it makes a pesticide called Zyklon B.

Zyklon B would ultimately play

a hugely significant and diabolical role

in the horrors of the Final Solution.

The relationship between IG Farben and the Nazis

went back to the days before Hitler took power,

when they gave financial contributions

to Nazis' electoral campaigns.

Some of its prominent executives were members of the party.

(pensive orchestral music)

At the secret meeting between Hitler

and leading German industrialists of February 20th, 1933,

the chemical cartel would be represented

by leading IG Farben board member Georg Von Schnitzler.

Following that meeting,

IG Farben became one of the main donors to the Nazi Party.

It gives huge donations to the Adolf Hitler Fund.

But there's a quid-pro-quo as well because IG Farben

doesn't just support Hitler from the sidelines,

it insists that its directors

have a National Socialist outlook

and it actually does training courses

on National Socialism within its training days.

So, here you have a company

that isn't just sort of on the sidelines here.

This is a company that really gets involved

with Hitler's regime.

The new economic four-year plan

would boost war production to unprecedented levels,

but not everyone was impressed with Herman Goring's work.

Hjalmar Schacht felt that the heavyweight Nazi

was stepping on his toes and using his position

to enrich and promote himself as much as Germany.

Whatever was successfully accomplished

under the Four-Year Plan

was nothing but the continuation of measures

I had inaugurated as minister for economic affairs.

At the end of 1937, I had linked them up

with a Four-Year Plan and with industry

when the founding of the Hermann Goring Works

took me completely by surprise.

Goring had lost no time

in exploiting the Four-Year Plan for personal gain.

When concerns were raised by German armaments manufacturers

about the quality of Germany's main iron ore reserves

in the heart's mountains, Goring not only forbade the use

of better-quality imported ore from abroad

but founded a new state-run iron or smelting company

named Reichswerke Hermann Goring,

from which he would take a healthy slice of the profits.

(pensive music)

Although a number of German industrialists

were concerned by Goring's megalomania and corruption,

one who was not and who was profiting even more than Goring

was coal and steel magnate Friedrich Flick.

A self-made man who built his own industrial empire

from the ground up, Flick was one of the 25 present

at the secret meeting of the 20th of February, 1933.

At that time, Flick contributed a donation of 100,000 marks.

He would make that an annual donation.

Like many other industrialists, Flick would get contracts

for the governmental rearmament program.

But he would become more intimately involved

with the Nazi regime

when his representative, Otto Steinbrinck,

introduced him to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler.

Flick quickly became an ardent supporter

of the Reichsfuhrer SS.

(speaking foreign language)

Himmler had watched enviously

as his bitter rival for Hitler's attention, Goring,

had become overlord of German economic affairs.

Ironically, however, when Goring became responsible

for the new Four-Year Plan, he found he needed

the nationwide organization of the SS to administer it.

The SS would also be useful in liaising

with financiers like Friedrich Flick,

who would agree to supply the millions of tons of coal

to the Reichswerke Hermann Goring furnaces.

A casualty of the newfound cooperation

between Himmler and Goring

on the coordination of the German economy

was Hjalmar Schacht.

Schacht had antagonized Goring by raising his concerns

about Goring stewardship of the economy with Hitler.

Now, with Himmler in his camp,

Goring was able to swiftly sideline Schacht, who,

as a consolation, was allowed to remain president

of the Reichsbank for the moment.

I don't think Hitler was a good manager.

I think that his technique was to give

about four people the same job

and let them fight over doing it.

And you have so many people competing

to try and get the attention of Hitler.

There's no proper delegation.

There's no proper management

With Schacht outta the way,

Goring had successfully consolidated his position

as sole and supreme head of the German economy and industry.

In his typically bombastic way,

he couldn't resist a parting shot at the humiliated Schacht,

delivered in a farewell phone call from his palatial office

in the Ministry for Economic Affairs.

Herr Schacht, I am now sitting in your chair.

(pensive music)

Germany, November 1937.

For the past year, the nation's expanding economy

has been under the control

of one of Hitler's closest henchman, Hermann Goring.

But despite its rate of growth,

it is still hampered by several major problems.

Its self-sufficiency and protectionist approach

has meant replacing high-quality imported raw materials

with inferior domestic ones.

And to match the exacting demands of the Four-Year Plan

and the rate of rearmament,

the German treasury has to borrow heavily

and the country is now deeply in debt.

What you've gotta look at

is the fact that it's recovering because it's on credit.

He's borrowing a lot of money.

And the only way he's gonna be able to pay that money back

is frankly by territorial expansion.

Actually, that means invading other countries

and pillaging them.

On March 12th, 1938,

German troops annex its small neighbor Austria

without firing a single shot.

After 25 years away from his native country,

Adolf Hitler symbolically uses the border crossing

at Braunau am Inn, his birth town,

to make his triumphant entry.

Thousands of enthusiastic Austrians

welcome home their favorite son.

(crowd cheering)

There was a really warm reception

for the Nazis in many parts of Austria,

not just in Hitler's hometown but in Vienna.

The Nazis were greeted very warmly in many places,

although now they will say that,

"No, no, no, we were the first victim of Nazism."

As personally satisfying as it was

for Hitler to unite the country of his birth

with his adopted nation,

the Anschluss would be hugely advantageous

to the German economy and to Herman Goring personally.

(speaking foreign language)

At the same time as expanding its borders

and asset-stripping neighboring countries,

the Nazi Reich was also further extending

its policies of Aryanization,

enabling it to seize more Jewish businesses and savings.

Aryanization was a very well-developed

and well-orchestrated program.

Adolf Eichmann had developed a very efficient strategy

to essentially steal everything

from Jews who wanted to leave,

who wanted to leave at first Austria and then Germany.

So, then they would go to a business,

be it a department store, a Jewish newspaper, and say,

"Look, you can do one of two things.

"You can either sell out to us

"at about a tenth of its value, but we'll give you the money

"and we'll give you a ticket to France

"and you'll still be able to continue your lifestyle,

"or you're gonna be thrown in a concentration camp.

"Take your pick."

In Germany, it was a fairly long process,

starting from 1933 and increasing as the 1930s went on,

but not so immediate.

In Austria, it went very quickly

after the Anschluss in 1938.

And within a few months, businesses had been seized

in what were called wild Aryanizations,

and then it was completed by the Property Transfer Office

from the middle of 1938 onwards.

(pensive music)

At this stage, the Nazis had not yet enacted

the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

For the fortunate few,

there was still a way out of the German Reich,

as long as you agreed to hand over

any and all possessions to the German state.

The family that I wrote about,

the Hammerfelds, I saw their Aryanization documents.

And it's really heartbreaking

because everything from a broken emerald ring

or piano was on that list,

and you couldn't leave the country

unless you surrendered absolutely everything.

The Nazis benefited from Jewish immigration

by applying a flight tax,

which took away 25% of their property on emigration.

And they also got much more

when the Jews attempted to transfer currency,

as this was subjected to up to an 80% surcharge

on anything they tried to transfer.

As the pressure for Aryanization increased

between 1935 and 1938,

it was not uncommon for Jews to sell businesses

to Aryan managers, whom they thought they could trust

and caretake the business until they were allowed to return.

So, all of these Jews at this time who had businesses

thought that the Nazis, maybe it's a passing phase.

"Okay, we'll comply with Aryanization rules

"and I will on paper give over my business

"to my Aryan manager in the hopes that when I return

"from wherever I'm going-"

But unfortunately, once the transfer was completed,

then they were completely at the mercy

of those former partners and there was nothing they could do

if they got kicked out.

And then, secondly, the money that was given to them

for many sales were also put into blocked accounts,

so they had no real access to that either.

In Austria, this process intensified after Goring declared

the compulsory registration of Jewish property

as part of his Four-Year Plan.

The Reich main security office was like a clearing house.

They would essentially give you an exit visa

to leave your own country, but it was like a factory.

You went in, you were robbed of all of your possessions,

you submitted, and again, on paper.

And then, at the end, you got your paperwork to leave

if you were lucky.

The Nazi party controlled

the process of Aryanization very carefully.

For example, the Gau economic administrators

had the right to decide who would get particular property

by controlling the Aryanization process.

And therefore it was mainly given to Nazi Party members,

and this led to a lot of corruption

The ideological and economic persecution

of the Jews went hand-in-hand.

On November 9th, 1938,

incited by Goebbels' antisemitic propaganda,

members of the SA, aided by civilians,

carried out the largest and most vicious

of their pogroms against the Jews.

(people screaming)

Kristallnacht, or "the night of broken glass,"

hundreds of Jewish properties, businesses,

and synagogues systematically burnt to the ground.

(pensive music)

Much of the shop windows destroyed were insured

by Aryan landlords that rented these shops to Jews,

and now these Aryans were claiming their money back,

leaving some German insurance companies at risk of collapse.

Goring was furious with Goebbels.

(speaking foreign language)

Goring came up with a neat solution.

He decided to hold the Jews responsible for the violence

and demanded that they pay one million Reichsmarks

via additional direct taxation by way of reparation.

They imposed a wealth tax on all Jews,

which they had to pay over 18 months in five installments.

This took away 25% of all Jewish wealth;

that's over a billion Reichsmark.

And it was seen as a punitive tax

for the events of Kristallnacht, although, of course,

the Jews were not responsible for that at all.

They were the victims.

In a bid to protect

at least some of their assets,

some Jews would send them to Switzerland,

where they thought the secrecy of its banking system

could keep some of their possessions

out of the Nazis' reach,

although even this was not foolproof.

(phone ringing)

What became really gross was that the Gestapo

would send these agents into Switzerland,

often with a coerced power of attorney

from somebody they had put in a concentration camp,

and they would present these powers of attorney

and say, "Oh, I'm so-and-so's representative

"and I'm here to take all of their assets outta the bank."

Having marched into Austria

and then, in October 1938, into Sudetenland

to little more than a murmur of protest

from the international community,

Hitler was preparing to expand

his search for territory and resources.

On March 15th, 1939, Hitler mobilized his troops

and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

As in Austria, the German Army met little resistance

and the international community

abandoned the Czech government to its fate.

Czechoslovakia had some of the most developed industries

of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire,

as well as important reserves of coal

in the region of Silesia, all of which were quickly seized

and put under Reich control.

Czechoslovakia's advanced aeronautical,

armaments, and automotive industries allowed the country

to have one of the most well-equipped armed forces

in the interwar period.

And since there was no confrontation,

the Germans could confiscate

a vast array of military equipment,

enough to arm 30 divisions, half of the German Army.

But there was one thing

the Reich could not immediately get hold of:

the sizeable Czech gold reserves.

The Bank for International Settlements

was a bank that was set up after the First World War

to collect German reparation payments.

And so, each of the countries involved in that war

had accounts there.

In 1939, the governor of the Bank of England,

Montagu Norman, was a close friend

of his counterpart at the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht,

when, only a few days after the transfer

of the Czech gold reserves to the Bank of England,

Schacht requested that Norman

deliver the Czech gold reserves to the BIS

and for the BIS to then transfer the reserves

to the Reichsbank.

Norman willingly agreed.

None of the other participants in the BIS dared protest.

What Hitler wanted, Hitler got.

He was a Nazi sympathizer and he didn't protect it.

So, this was one of the ways

that they used a bank that was set up

for the purposes of collecting reparations

from the Germans after the First World War,

they used it in their vast money-laundering web.

I mean, it's actually quite brilliant what they did.

Brilliant, but utterly illegal and corrupt.

By the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler was the absolute ruler

of a Reich that was expanding unopposed across Europe.

He had been aided and abetted

by a slavishly-corrupt inner circle,

unscrupulous industrialists and financiers,

and the growing might of the German armed forces.

Not that Hitler is controlled by the army

or by big business, he's always a free agent in that cartel,

but of course they have an enormous amount of weight

at certain points in influencing his policies.

They don't control his policies.

Hitler's not the puppet of the army

or the puppet of big business, but he's a partner with them.

But despite the rapacious growth

of its economy, the German Reich's financial

and trade deficit had ballooned to unimaginable proportions.

To satisfy the monster he had created,

Hitler would need to expand Germany's borders

much further and steal much more.

(slow suspenseful orchestral music)