Schacht, Hjalmar

All in all, a magnificent achievement since 1933, when Krauch and his longtime friend, Hjalmar Schacht, had begun to dream of it. But Schacht had wanted moderate expansion, because he believed an all-out synthetic economy could not yet be developed by free enterprise. Krauch s talks with Schacht had led him to get up a brochure which he had presented to the new Ministry of Economics in 1933. He called it The Four Year Plan of 1933. 

Soon Farben was producing double this 1000 tons 2000 tons being the most Farben s one plant could put out, Krauch then renewed the request to have a second buna plant constructed, which would produce still another 2000 tons every month. He wanted to finance the second plant by a loan from the Reichsbank. Such a loan needed the approval of his old friend Hjalmar Schacht. Reluctantly Schacht had stayed on in the Hitler government as Finance Minister. He turned the loan down. 

That is what the Baron von Schnitzler heard Hitler say on February 20, 1933. Goering then asked for financial support. Hjalmar Schacht said "On this table we must raise a fund of 3,000,000 marks."... 

Senator Claude Pepper s preface made it clear that the book was an indictment of what he called ig Farbenism , that is, cartels and monopolies. For him the German war maker, in a real sense, was not so much Adolf Hitler s brown-shirted, swaggering storm trooper, as it was the soberly-clad superficially honorable type - Hjalmar Schacht or Hermann Schmitz, president of ig Farben. 57... 

Others, though, saw a different Fritz Haber, charming, mentally acute, and still the life of the party. Almost to the very end, Haber had the ability to gather himself and perform his accustomed public role, though he often paid the price later. Rudolf Stern remembered one such occasion, when he accompanied a weak and depressed Fritz Haber to a formal dinner in 1929. They ended up seated at a small table with Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding and Hjalmar Schacht, president of the central bank. It was a socially awkward arrangement, for Schacht, who would later serve the Nazis loyally and lead Hitler s economics ministry,... 

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