Within two months, as we can see here from this Manchester Guardian article of 21 March 1933, the Nazis had opened the first concentration camp at Dachau, just outside Munich, and started rounding up ‘undesirable elements’ such as trade unionists and socialists. In 1935, the year of the Deterding oil credit deal, the wildly anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were passed. So how does the historic Shell mantra – ‘we don’t interfere with national politics’ – relate here? How would the inmates of Dachau, driven there in vans fuelled by Shell, have felt about this? Or Jews who’d had their businesses ‘Aryanised’ (i.e. stolen), and were forced into emigration, how might they have reflected on this Anglo-German alliance, this marriage of business and fascism?
It wasn’t Shell alone – by 1938, with German war preparation now in full flow, Shell, Anglo-Persian (later BP) and Standard Oil (later Exxon) were, between them, quite literally fuelling fascism – by supplying almost two-thirds of Germany’s oil. How is it possible for us to appreciate the impact of such economically vital support? Without this oil how would the factories have met their growing demands? How could the autobahns have been built? How would the Luftwaffe have functioned? Yet this aspect of Germany’s history – or rather, it should be said, this aspect of Britain’s historical relationship with Nazi Germany – is hardly discussed at all. The vast power emanating from decisions made by Deterding and his friends from St Helen’s Place in the heart of the City of London. Papers signed at desks. Ink lines and curves that meant wheels would move and armies could invade hundreds of miles to the east. We do not yet have the language to describe this connectivity, the responsibility of the people who kill through paper and ink.
*
In a similar vein, how much do we really know, or understand, about the financial underpinnings of Nazism? How familiar are we with the businessmen and the white-collar backers of fascism? History teaches us about the rise of the Nazis, about the Munich putsch, Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg, the writing of Mein Kampf and a hundred other matters, taking us up to his coming to power in January 1933. But who paid for the party in the early years? Who rescued it from potential bankruptcy? Who funded the 1932 and 1933 election campaigns? Who funded the national advertising campaign? How were offices of the NSDAP established? How were the secretaries and telephones paid for?
In 1927 the party had been on the verge of bankruptcy when the right-wing publisher Hugo Bruckmann, and his wife Elsa, introduced Hitler to the industrialist Emil Kirdorf at their Munich home on 4 July, and, after a four-hour discussion, Kirdorf agreed to pay off the majority of the party’s debts. But, more significantly, he also introduced Hitler to many leading industrialists and financiers, who would support the party through the challenging economic years of the Great Depression. Hitler always remembered the crucial role played by German business in funding the nascent National Socialist movement, but it seems that history has been more forgetful.
On 20 February 1933, just two weeks before the March elections which infamously consolidated Hitler’s power (in the wake of the Reichstag Fire), a meeting took place at the Berlin villa of Hermann Goering, the newly appointed president of the Reichstag. That evening at six o’clock, twenty-five of Germany’s leading industrialists and businessmen assembled – among them Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, Gustav Krupp (armaments and heavy industry), Georg von Schnitzler and three other directors of IG Farben (chemicals and pharmaceuticals), Günther Quandt (armaments and metals), Albert Vögler (steel), Ludwig von Winterfeld of Siemens (electrical engineering), and Kurt Schmitt of Allianz (insurance). Hitler and Goering both made speeches – Hitler’s lasting more than an hour. They explained quite openly that their objective was the destruction of the parliamentary system and the end of the organised left in Germany, Goering stating bluntly that the forthcoming election would ‘surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years’. On hearing this, the twenty-five industrialists, the elite of German business, pledged over 2 million Reichsmarks towards the Nazis fighting fund for the election. This, it should be noted, at a time when the party was desperately short of funds.
Two weeks later, in the 5 March elections, the Nazis increased their share of the vote by 10.82 per cent, to 43.91 per cent, adding 5.5 million votes in the four months since the previous election. Just as Goering had predicted, there wasn’t another democratic election in Germany for sixteen years, during which time over 60 million people had been killed in the deadliest war in history. So why do these businessmen and industrialists, so critical to the survival of the Nazi Party, not share at least some of the historical vilification that’s been attached to the Hitlers, the Himmlers and the Heydrichs? Without the funding from big business and industry, Nazism would never have got off the drawing board.
*
Even less visible to us today, the Dutchman who led the world’s largest oil company in the 1930s. In 1936, on his retirement from Shell, when so many were trying to flee Germany, Henri Deterding, shockingly, made the reverse journey. He took his family from Buckhurst Park, just outside Windsor – to Berlin – to a villa in the leafy lakeside suburb of Wannsee, where their neighbours now included Albert Speer and Josef Goebbels. He also bought an enormous estate in Mecklenburg, north of Berlin, where he went hunting frequently with another Nazi friend, Hermann Goering. He even bought Goering his own hunting lodge at Rominten, and in return received a portrait of the Reichsmarschall, signed ‘To my dear Deterding, in gratitude for your noble gift of the Rominten Hunting Lodge’. He had a similar portrait of Hitler in his new residence, thanking him ‘in the name of the German people, for your noble donation of a million Reichsmarks’. In his retirement, as we’ve seen, Deterding continued to actively support the Nazis, and when he died in 1939, he was given a state funeral by the party in Mecklenburg and Hitler sent this personal message, consciously or unconsciously Germanifying his name: ‘I greet thee, Heinrich Deterding, the great friend of the Germans.’
But if you look for this part of Shell’s past in another of its official histories, what do you find? Just a few lines regretting Deterding’s late eccentricities, written in a kind of headmasterly ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone:
Tainted by his late and brief association with the Nazis, Deterding left the saddest possible memory for his former colleagues … but the man they all liked and admired had, in truth, died several years before.
And on the substantive issue of Shell’s role in fuelling Nazism? Nothing whatsoever – apart from these two shameful sentences:
Before the outbreak of World War II, Germany, Italy and Japan were ominous and unpleasant as customers, but still just possible to deal with in business. However, in the same years Mexico shifted politically very much to the left, and made itself an impossible business partner.fn8
*
20 September 2004, a farmhouse not far from Reigate, Surrey
Through the strangest sequence of events I find myself sitting in an unfamiliar house on this soft autumn afternoon, patting an elderly black Labrador, and waiting for the story of a life, several lives, to begin. Opposite me, sunk into a jade-green armchair, a woman I’ve never met before starts talking to me in a voice huskied by years of smoking – around eighty, eyes still flirtatious, carefully made-up, with vigorous, darting hand movements that belie her age. Henri Deterding’s daughter, Ella, is taking me back seventy years into her past.