The reality could not be further from the truth. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the links between Shell and the Nazi leadership became even stronger, with a direct relationship soon established between Deterding and Hitler – prepared by Rosenberg’s earlier visits and discussions. This new relationship is most vividly illustrated by the fact that we know that Deterding not only met Hitler, but stayed for four days at the Führer’s private residence, his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, in 1934. Under the headline ‘Reich Oil Monopoly Sought by Deterding’, the New York Times of 26 October 1934 relates the following details of Deterding’s visit:
LONDON, Oct. 25 – It is reported confidentially from Berlin that the object of Sir Henry Deterding’s recent visit to Chancellor Hitler at Berchtesgaden, where he stayed for four days, was to discuss the conditions for granting a monopoly to the Royal Dutch and Shell Companies of petrol distribution in Germany for a long period of years.
Such a length of stay at Hitler’s personal retreat was quite exceptional, and only given to the closest of allies – Neville Chamberlain, by contrast, in September 1938, in talks to resolve the crisis in Czechoslovakia, received only a three-hour audience with the German leader on the Obersalzberg. Among other matters Hitler and Deterding discussed during their days together was a proposal for Shell to supply oil on credit to Germany for a year, and for the company to build a network of petrol stations (designed to be ‘protected against air attacks’) along the new networks of major roads and autobahns that were then being constructed all across the Reich. Deterding’s discussions with Hitler were also reported in the Montreal Gazette (26 October) and the Daily Gleaner (29 October).
In the following two years, right up to his retirement from Shell, Deterding did all he could to personally ensure that the fascist governments in Germany and Italy would receive the most preferential treatment possible from his oil company. As well as the warm relations with Germany, Deterding also cultivated Mussolini, writing in his autobiography, An International Oilman, in 1934 that ‘In Italy, not long ago, it fell to my lot to talk with Mussolini, a man who … has shown a driving force almost unparalleled in running a country … My talk with Mussolini proved that there were several points on which we saw eye to eye.’ Such contacts were soon reaping dividends for Shell. An American newspaper ran a headline in September 1935, ‘Europe’s Oil Napoleon Seen Winner Over US Rivals for World Trade’, and reported that Deterding and Shell had not been wasting any time over consolidating deals with the new political forces in Europe. It recorded that ‘Shell has been awarded a monopoly to furnish fuel to Italy’s armed forces during the coming Ethiopian struggle’, and that ‘huge importations of Soviet oil and by-products by Germany before Hitler’s rise to power have been curtailed and … Sir Henri now enjoys a monopoly in the Nazi state’. This may have been an exaggeration, but there’s no doubting the trajectory of Deterding’s ambitions.
In 1934 the American consul in Hamburg reported back to the US government that not only had Deterding ‘contributed fairly large sums to the National Socialist treasury before the advent of the Party into power’, but he had also ‘offered to supply the Reich with all their oil requirements in return for payment in blocked Reichsmarks’.fn6 This tallies with the American foreign correspondent Edgar Mowrer’s assertion in Germany Puts the Clock Back that there had been a pre-1933 agreement between Deterding and the Nazis. But by 1934 the co-operation between Shell and the new fascist government had gone to a different level altogether.
We know that there was a further meeting between Deterding and Rosenberg in April 1934 to negotiate a new oil deal, with discussions continuing into May. Rosenberg wrote in his diaries that he had ‘made a deal with Deterding in May 1934’ – the deal was that the Shell Group would ‘stock one million tons of oil products’ in underground tanks which the company would build across the Reich. But Deterding wasn’t satisfied with this; he saw Germany not only as an ally in the anti-communist cause, but as a huge potential market, and wasn’t remotely put off by increasing evidence of the Nazis’ brutality in dealing with their political opponents. He considered Hitler’s bloody purge of June 1934 (‘the Night of the Long Knives’) as a necessary step, and expressed that it had only ‘increased his respect and veneration for the Nazi leader’. There were more American consular reports the following year stating that Shell were aiming ‘to obtain a monopoly in Germany’ and that Deterding had agreed a major oil loan to the German government, to facilitate this agreement – reports which Mowrer, at the Foreign Press Association, confirmed: ‘In 1935 [Deterding] agreed to give Germany one year’s oil supply on credit.’fn7
By 1935 Germany was increasing its rearmament programme, so when these deals became public knowledge there was understandable nervousness in the British government. The Foreign Office, and the British ambassador in Germany, Sir Eric Phipps, were asked to investigate the situation further, but details could not be verified. However, it seems that it was Deterding’s proposed oil credit deal that was the final straw, and contributed to his stepping down as the head of Royal Dutch/Shell in 1936 at the age of seventy – no doubt British government pressure on the Shell board of directors in London playing a significant role in his resignation. In June 1936, Deterding moved with his new wife, Charlotte Knaack, and his young family to Germany, formally relinquishing his position as chairman of the company on 31 December 1936.
In his last years Deterding could finally be completely open about his support for fascism. In December 1936 (when he was still Shell chairman), he donated 10 million guilders (40 million RM) to establish a fund for buying surplus food in the Netherlands and re-routing it to German consumers – the proceeds going to support the Nazi charity Winterhilfswerk. Goebbels noted approvingly in his diary on 12 January 1937 that ‘Deterding has donated 40 million’. He also helped to finance a Dutch fascist organisation’s newspaper in 1937, and gave Hitler a further large donation. All this from the man who the official Shell history describe as holding ‘few political convictions’, a man who ‘rarely mentioned fascism or Nazism in his letters’.
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Much of what I have outlined above relates to Deterding’s own contacts and relationships with senior Nazis and fascists, but we should also understand that, in the 1920s and 30s, to all intents and purposes, given the authoritarian nature of his leadership, Deterding and Shell were indivisible – one and the same entity. The British Foreign Office had made precisely this point back in 1927 when a worried diplomat had written: ‘Sir Henri’s word is law, he can bind the Board of Shell without their knowledge’. And so throughout this period we need to remember the fact that an Anglo-Dutch company was playing a critical role in supporting Hitler’s rise to power, and then directly fuelling Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s – between 1932 and 1938, British oil exports doubled, with a particularly steep increase in aviation fuel for Hermann Goering’s rapidly developing Luftwaffe. There seem to have been no scruples whatsoever about dealing with a fascist government, no concern about the morality of aiding a dictatorship that had made its intentions clear in the first weeks it came to power.