Schacht ‘gangster Financier,’ Declares London Newspaper

Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, virtual economic dictator of Germany, is accused of “gangster finance” in a long editorial in the Financial News.

“It must be admitted,” the editorial states, “that Dr. Schacht is a ready Nazi apprentice. A penultimate recruit to the Hitler gang, he is proving himself more Nazi than the Nazis. The speech he delivered last Sunday at the opening of the Leipzig Fair is a perfect example of Nazi morality applied to finance.

rears with her payments for for-

” ‘The foreign exporter is not free of all blame if Germany is in arrears with her payments for foreign goods,’ said Dr. Schacht. ‘Germany’s foreign currency position has never been a secret.’ …

“This sort of logic has hitherto been the copyright of ‘long-firm’ operators—it has now become the commercial and financial code of the Nazis. ‘It is the mug’s lookout if he is bilked,’ said Al Capone. ‘And so says all of us,’ comes the ringing Nazi chorus.

“Dr. Schacht repeated for the hundredth time another favorite argument of his, namely that while wicked foreign creditors insisted upon being paid, they refused to accept goods in payment. The facts are that the German trade balance, which showed huge deficits between 1924 and 1930, produced huge surpluses between 1931 and the advent of the National Socialist Government. It is clear that those wicked foreign creditors were quite willing to take German goods in payment of interest throughout 1931 and 1932 and during the early part of 1933. There are several reasons for the decline in German exports under the Nazi regime. The first, though perhaps not the most important, is the reprisals of the Jews. When Hitler put on the mantle of Torquemada he apparently forgot that his exemplar only wished to torture Jews, and not to trade with them.”