Norman J. W. Goda

Black Marks: Hitler's Bribery of His Senior Officers during World War II*

Though scholars have paid little attention to Adolf Hitler’s bribery of his senior military officers during World War II, the fact that large secret cash payments existed is not news. German officers in the two highest ranks received monthly tax-exempt supplements to their salaries, which more than doubled their salary total, from 1940 until the end of the war. In 1941 and 1942, certain top-ranking officers also received tax-exempt checks of 250,000 Reichsmark (RM) for milestone birthdays (fiftieth, sixtieth, and sixty-fifth), and in 1944 a small group of officers was given tremendous landed estates, some valued at over 1 million marks, also with no tax liability. The base materialism of these practices once interested historians of the DDR, and the secrecy surrounding them has caught the imagination of journalists more recently. Meanwhile, the importance of corruption in the context of Hitler’s war combined with the virtual absence of resistance in the top ranks has brought leading historians to call for further investigation.1 Yet a truly systematic analysis has been missing for several reasons. First, the source material is sparse. A relatively small number of files in the German Federal Archives along with occasional diary entries and some postwar accusations are all that document Hitler’s cash gifts to his senior officers. Second, the study of illicit gift giving in general and modern corruption in particular

Tomorrow the world : Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the path toward America

Did Adolf Hitlers Germany have designs on the Western Hemisphere? As early as the 1920s Hitler had repeatedly argued that the Nordic struggle for racial dominance would become worldwide, but his thoughts regarding the United States were sometimes obscured by his aims in Europe. In Tomorrow the World, Norman J. W. Goda retraces the documentary evidence to demonstrate that Germanys long-term strategy, developed early in World War II, pointed toward the United States following the expected conquest of the European continent. Goda questions both the more traditional interpretations that Hitlers Germany operated from unplanned opportunism and that its aims were confined to the European continent. His extremely close reading of the diplomatic and military sources from German, Spanish, and French records also opens new windows on the policies of Francos Spain and Petains France. By focusing on policy formulation and implementation at the political and diplomatic level, he adds substantial evidence for the view that Hitlers ambitions were not just grandiose table talk, but formed the basis for concrete military plans and building projects.

Franco's bid for empire: Spain, Germany, and the western Mediterranean in World War II

Using German and Spanish records, this article argues that Spanish foreign policy during World War II must be understood within the context of Madrids aims in the western Mediterranean, particularly in French Morrocco. Unwilling to enter the European war when it erupted in 1939, the Franco government changed its policy with the impending French defeat in June 1940. Francos first attempts to gain French colonial territory were made without consulting the Germans or Italians. Only after attempts to negotiate with the new Vichy regime had failed did Madrid offer to enter the war on the Axis side. Confluent aims in Northwest Africa, however, combined with the German need to support the temporary sanctity of the French empire, would keep Spain out of the war.

Hitler's Demand for Casablanca in 1940: Incident or Policy?

French government ot Marshal Henri Philippe Petain received an official note from the German government on 15 July 1940, in which Germany demanded active help from France in the war against Great Britain. Specifically, Adolf Hitler asked for the use of eight airfields to be built near Casablanca, Moroccos most important city and best harbour, on sites to be chosen by a German commission. The French would provide equipment, including ground personnel; land nearby for anti-aircraft batteries; unrestricted use of their merchant shipping, North African ports, and the Tunis-Rabat railroad; and full access to North Africas communications network and weather stations. Although the entire network would operate under German command, France would be held responsible for acts of sabotage by French nationals or subjects. Hitler demanded agreement immediately.1 Few historians have examined the demand in detail and those who

Nazi Germany and the Arab/Muslim World: Recent Historical Directions:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and shock of the al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001 combined in the early 2000s with longer-standing scholarly interest in the Holocaust to produce a wave of scholarship linking Nazi Germany and the Middle East. What were Adolf Hitler’s aims there? What were those of his Arab/Muslim interlocutors? The work added critical detail concerning Nazi Germany’s intentions to murder the Middle East’s Jews. It also argued for a connection between modern European and Nazi anti-Semitism – which emphasized Jewish power, global Jewish conspiracies, and redemptive remedies – and its later variants in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The latter finding is especially important given recent waves of anti-Jewish violence by Hamas, murders of Jews by disaffected Muslims in western Europe, and continued calls from Iranian leaders for Israel’s destruction. But how straight is the line between Nazism and Arab/Muslim sentiments about Jews? The books under review represent a second wave of scholarship in this area. They broaden the focus outwards from earlier works, which focused mainly on

Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

nition for their combat roles (the Germans developed the most elaborate system of military honors among the belligerents in the Second World War), and the willingness to fight to the bitter end. All of this, Neitzel and Welzer emphasize, did not make German soldiers into Nazis; on the contrary, it made them very much like the combatants in all the armies. And yet, the authors recognize that German military values were profoundly influenced by the post-First World War doctrines of ‘total war’ and hardened and sharpened by the new racial thinking of the National Socialist state. The broad acceptance of racial hierarchies and of the grass-roots practices of exclusion, which worked themselves into everyday life with astonishing speed in the years after 1933, shredded empathy and pity for outsiders. The ability to make hard distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the face of civilians is perhaps not the function of explicit ideological conviction, but it certainly was an ideological or political effect of which German soldiers were conscious. The authors try too hard to show that the battlefield violence was not specifically ‘Nazi’. They do this because they are astonished at the ability of individuals in a wide variety of war conditions to adjust to the conditions of extraordinary violence, to kill civilians as partisans, and to count women and children in the ranks of partisans, all of which has lessons for the present day. However, both Neitzel and Welzer make clear that the murder of Soviet prisoners of war and of Jewish civilians was specifically National Socialist. And although some soldiers took on less active roles, they remained integral parts of what can only be called ‘the machinery of destruction’.

Review: Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; xiv + 247 pp.;

conscious Lithuanians returned from deportation in Russia (104–5; 118–9). He relies on only a handful of primary sources, such as the memoir of Martynas Yčas, head of the Lithuanian Society for the Support of War Victims. It is not surprising that Yčas overemphasized the significance of his own activity and that of his society, leading Balkelis to follow suit. The processes of nationalization among Lithuanian refugees during the first world war is an important and still hardly explored topic, but any research on this topic should be based on the widest possible material, rather than a few sources, as in this book. To be sure, quite a few former refugee intellectuals returned from deportation after 1918 and contributed to the building of the national state, but many of the persons mentioned (117) were already active participants in the Lithuanian national movement before the war. Thus the influence of the war on their national activism is doubtful. Besides, the processes that took place during the war in Lithuania itself should hardly be ignored. Thus, important aspects of the history of Lithuanian nationalism are addressed in the book, and it will, indeed, enrich the knowledge of non-Lithuanian readers about the birth and spread of the project of modern Lithuania. Nonetheless, some of the important issues raised in the book call for additional research as well as greater attention to the existing historiography.

40.00; ISBN 9780199532568:

W ith chase national bank assistance , the Nazi government earned dollars in the United States through the sale of special German marks—known as Ruckwanderer (“returnee”) marks—to U.S. residents of German descent. The currency scheme began in the late 1930s and lasted until the June 1941 executive order freezing German assets. Newly declassified FBI records offer a far more detailed picture of how and why the Nazi regime gave Germans abroad generous terms to move back to Germany and how they financed these subsidies through seized Jewish assets. The Development of the Ruckwanderer Mark Scheme After Hitler came to power and began to re-arm, Germany continued to import large quantities of American goods. In 1939 alone, for example, Germany imported 197 million Reichsmarks worth of American foodstuffs, raw materials, and finished goods (including lead, copper, aluminum, and oil) while exporting RM 125 million worth of goods to the United States. It needed dollars to finance its trade deficit. The Reich Ministry of Economics (RWM) under Hjalmar Schacht experimented with several ways to acquire dollars through its subsidiary office, the Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Control, created in December 1933 and led by Dr. Hans Hartenstein. A sure method of raising dollars lay in selling marks to Germans who wished to return to Germany temporarily or permanently, or to Germans living abroad who simply wished to purchase goods there. The problem lay in fair compensation in marks for Germans who wished to exchange dollars.

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis: Banking on Hitler: Chase National Bank and the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme, 1936–1941

N o case illustrates the moral , political, and operational complexities in the postwar intelligence world better than that of Wilhelm Hottl, an SD intelligence officer. Hottl established contacts with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), the West German Defense Ministry, and even the KGB. The release of his voluminous CIA Name File, which comprises over 1600 pages, along with previously withheld OSS records, substantially fills out what has been known about Hottl from Army Counterintelligence records. Hottl was an unapologetic Nazi who helped to expropriate assets from and annihilate Jews, particularly in Hungary in 1944. He was, furthermore, an unusually corrupt man who wove intricate lies as he built contacts, stashed secret funds, and enhanced his personal standing. He maintained these traits his entire life. Hottls career serves as a mirror, reflecting the nature of each intelligence organization that had contact with him. In the end, U.S. intelligence agencies determined to crush him professionally and bury all evidence of contact with him once the possibility was clear that he was working for the Soviets and that his past association with the United States could become public knowledge. Hottls Nazi Background Hottls SS personnel records comprise one of the longest SS officer files. Born in Vienna in 1915, Hottl became a dedicated Nazi even as a student. His association with Nazi groups began illegally in Austria—even before Hitlers takeover in Germany. In 1931, at age 16, Hottl joined the NS-Schulerbund; he joined the SS at age 18.

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis: The Nazi Peddler: Wilhelm Höttl and Allied Intelligence

A number of u.s. intelligence records declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 provide new evidence and insight into the activities of officials of the Independent State of Croatia, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of Ante Pavelic, the Ustasa (oo-sta-sh) regime in Croatia persecuted and carried out atrocities against Jews and Serbs while maintaining amicable relations with the Vatican. At the end of the war, the Ustasa regime collapsed, but Pavelic, after a number of mysterious episodes, was able to escape to Argentina in 1948. Meanwhile the United States Army used Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a senior Ustasa functionary who had helped suspected war criminals to escape from Italy after the war, as an agent against the Communist government of Yugoslavia. Background: The Ustasa and the War Ante Pavelic began his career as a Croatian separatist in the multi-ethnic, Serbdominated Yugoslav kingdom established after World War I. Pavelic went into exile in 1929, when King Alexander proclaimed a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia. In 1930, at age forty, Pavelic founded the Croatian Liberation Movement—also known as the Ustasa (“rebels”)—a group of Croatian emigres pledged to conspiracy and terrorism in the aim of an independent Croatia. The Ustasa received financial and logistical support from Fascist Italy and Hungary, both enemies of Yugoslavia that expected to gain territorially if that state were destroyed.