To: bentway who wrote (633301 ) 9/27/2004 10:42:52 AM From: Neocon Respond to I am sorry that I was confused about the "end game" of Thyssen. Here is a summary:Fritz Thyssen (November 9, 1873 - February 8, 1951) was a German industrialist associated with the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. en.wikipedia.org By the late 1930s, he had become increasingly disillusioned with the regime's rearmament policy (even though it scarcely harmed his business interests), and angered by its anti - Catholicism and persecution of the Jews, which caused him to resign from the Prussian State Council. In a letter to Hitler of 28 December 1939, written after fleeing Germany for Switzerland, Thyssen emphasized that his doubts about the Nazi regime had begun with the dismissal of the conservative von Papen as Vice - Chancellor followed by 'the persecution of Christianity. . . the brutalization of its priests . . . the desecration of its churches'. Thyssen observed that the Crystal Night pogrom of 9 November 1938 had deeply shocked him - '. . . the Jews were robbed and tortured in the most cowardly and brutal manner, and their synagogues destroyed all over Germany' - but his protests were to no avail. Thyssen's appeal was ignored, he was stripped in absentia of his German citizenship and his property was confiscated. In 1941, his memoirs, I Paid Hitler, first appeared in English, an anguished settling of accounts with the Nazi regime which 'has ruined Germany' but singularly unreliable in its recounting of his financial relationship with the National Socialists. Thyssen was arrested and turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy police for return to Germany, where he was imprisoned for the rest of the war. He died in Buenos Aires on 8 February 1951.motlc.wiesenthal.com
