Simpson Amos Edwin (1 results)

Condition: very good. The Hague : Mouton, 1969. Orig. cloth binding. Dustjacket. 202 pp. 25 cm. (Studies in European history, 18). From the publisher : This biography of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1877-1970) delineates his influential career under both the Weimar and Hitler governments. As a public figure he has exercised such strong political in- fluence that a study of his relation to the govern- ments between the wars is of vital importance to the student of Germany. Indeed, his career pro- vides an unique sounding board for the historian. Schacht helped found the German Democratic Party during the revolutionary days at the end of World War I; yet he was an early supporter of and participant in the Nazi government after January 30, 1933. He is scrupulously honest in his personal relationship and holds as his greatest achievement the salvation of the mark; yet he devised economic policies and currencies which damaged those of countries in Southeast Europe and Latin America. He insists on the primacy of economics over poli- tics; yet when he lost his power through economics he turned to political action to gain his ends. By his overwhelming success between 1933 and 1936 in overcoming the effects of the depression, he con- tributed greatly to Hitler's achieving mastery over the German people; yet today he finds no sense of guilt in his role. Schacht is an ardent nationalist. Many of his actions have no other motivation so powerful as his belief that Germany's need overrides other con- siderations. For years he blinded himself to the essential nature of the Nazi movement by his con- viction that his work was essential to Germany's well-being. As President of the Reichsbank, Schacht was representative of a most significant portion of the influential Germans who were truly never Nazis. But these same men contributed to the Nazi power through their conviction that Hitler was saving Germany from worse horrors. Their awareness later that "something had gone wrong" appears not to have made them a different kind of German. Much of the literature concerning Schacht and his period reflects either the passions generated by the war and its attendant atrocities or the apolo- getic disclaimers of the participants. It is now pos- sible for a new generation less touched by the passions of war, to steer a course between what might be termed a white-wash on the one hand, and the bête-noire story on the other. Condition : very good copy. Keywords : ECONONICS, Schacht, Hjalmar (1877-1970).