Hitler's Banker
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht was a genius - but like his name, eccentric and highly enigmatic. Now, in the first-ever full-scale biography to appear in English, historian John Weitz brings this brilliant Nazi-era financier to life. Born to an impoverished family of the German upper middle class, Schacht gained worldwide fame as Germany's commissioner of currency and president of the Reichsbank in the 1920s. Single-handedly, he halted Germany's runaway inflation and, as a tough negotiator, freed Germany from the crippling reparation debts imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Later, under the Nazis, he built the economic and financial juggernaut that underwrote Hitler's military machine. Yet before the war was over, Hitler had imprisoned him in Dachau; afterward, he was one of only three defendants at the Nuremberg trials to be acquitted.