“WHAT about Hitler?” most people wondered when they read the revelations about the £3,334,000 fortune in cash and securities and the £3,640,600 in life assurances lodged in foreign countries by Ribbentrop, Goebbels, Goering, Hess, Himmler and Ley.
There is evidence that Hitler, too, has his nest egg in “safe” countries, ready for the day when he is on the run. But he has been more cunning than his lieutenants in hiding the fact from the world.
Hitler is head of the Eher Verlag, his own publishing company. From the Eher Verlag are issued “Mein Kampf,” the newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications which the German people are forced to buy. From “Mein Kampf” alone Hitler is estimated to have made £1,700,000.
It was from the Eher Verlag that, before the war started, foreigners had to order German official books. When they did so they were instructed to pay their bills into the Eher Verlag’s account at the London office of the bank of a neutral country.
And this at a time when Germany was - as she still is - desperately in need of foreign currency. It is impossible to conceive any reason why Hitler’s firm should use a non-German bank unless a fortune was being built up outside Germany.
H. R. Knickerbocker, the American journalist who revealed the story of the Nazi hoards, has been accused by the Nazis of getting his information for the British Ministry of Information. He did not. Following a hint which he received from international bankers, he put a world-famous investigation agency on the job of checking up the facts with a result that the world knows.