Conjuring Hitler - How Britain and America made the Third Reich (Page 1 of 2)

Dear all,

I'd like to recommend to you a book which I've recently come across:
"Conjuring Hitler - How Britain and America made the Third Reich" by Guido
Giacomo Preparata, Prof. of Political Economy and Economic History at
University of Washington, Tacoma (London, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005).
ISBN 0-7453-2181-X
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Conjuring-Hitle … 074532181X
http://www.amazon.com/Conjuring-Hitler- … 074532181X

It totally challenges the conventional view of the history of the first half
of the 20th century, arguing that Britain and America (especially the
former)  deliberately and deceitfully set out to create an extreme
conservative reactionary force in Germany (a force which became the Nazis)
after Versailles that could be used to throw Germany against the USSR. This
strategy was based on the grand geopolitical idea, first enunciated by
Halford Mackinder and others in Britain in the first decade of the 20th
century that  it was vital that continental Europe under German leadership
never be allowed to establish a Eurasian alliance with Russia, as this would
effectively terminate the global domination of the English-speaking "Sea
Powers", Britain and the USA. In brief, Britain and the USA carried out
their
strategy against Germany and Russia, Preparata argues, by:

1) manipulating Russia 1916-1922 so that the Bolsheviks would triumph
2) supporting and financing Hitler 1922-33 until his takeover
3) destroying the German economy 1919-1923 so that Germany's control over
its own finances could be ceded to the USA (Dawes Plan) in order that they
could then burst its bubble when the time was right, which happened after
the Great Crash (1929) that was engineered by the City and Wall St (notably
Montagu Norman of the Bank of England)
4) financing Hitler in his bids for electoral victory 1930-33
5) enabling him through their proxy von Schroeder (of the Schroeder Bank) to
gain the Chancellery in January 1933 5) supporting the Nazis throughout the
1930s with loans, aid, military supplies, diplomatic assistance, denial of
support to anti-Nazi forces in Germany
6) playing a deliberate double game of diplomacy throiughout the 1930s to
lure and trap the Nazis
7) having enabled the Bolsheviks to seize and consolidate power 1917-1922,
they supported them and helped them industrialise and encouraged them not to
obstruct the Nazis to any serious degree during the 1920s and 30s so that
Russia could be the wall against which Britain would inexorably and
stealthily drive the Germans 1917-1944 until the 3 years 1941-44 when they
were crushed; Churchill refused to allow a landing in the West until the Red
Army had effectively destroyed most of the Wehrmacht (by June 1944); the
western allies thus had a relatively easy time after D-Day ('easy' compared
to World War I, that is).

One must be grateful at least  that a western academic has written such a
work. It's a brave thing to do; it's the kind of book people put their
careers at risk with,  though I note it came out 2 years ago. Maybe the
mainstream are killing it  with silence. I recall no mainstream attention to
what is, after all, a  dynamite thesis that turns 20th history conventions
on their heads.

However, from an academic point of view the book does have some serious
weaknesses, apart from its style, which is often overloaded with  cumbersome
phraseology and unnecessary latinisms which will have even  well-educated
English speakers reaching for their dictionaries.

1) One of his key contentions is the overarching influence of Mackinder, but
he doesn't actually show definitively any real links between Mackinder and
the power elite. He just describes Mackinder's views and then, in effect,
describes the Anglo-American foreign policy  actions and infers that they
must have been following his programme. That  surely won't stand up in
academic historical circles.

2)  He's pretty good on the 1920s and Montagu Norman's manipulations - he's
an economic historian after all,  but he's poor when it comes to the crucial
years of 1930-33. E.g. he makes clear how Montagu Norman and Benjamin Strong
(Bank of England and New York Federal Reserve bosses respectively)
manipulated the  markets to engineer the Great Crash (something similar
seems to be going on  right now, in fact!) but he doesn't go into anywhere
near enough detail  about how the Nazis were actually financed. From the
bibliography and the Notes  one can see he's read many of the 'key' sources
that have also contributed to challenging the mainstream view, including a
lot of  unconventional stuff (and unfortunately, rather too many references
to David Irving; his detractors will spot that) but he doesn't make enough
use of  Anthony Sutton's work for instance (e.g. Sutton's books "Wall St and
the Bolshevik Revolution", "Wall St & the Rise of Hitler"). It's not enough
only to mention Thyssen's  financing from 1930 onwards; one needs to know
how the West was financing  the Nazi party organisation after 1921-2; until
then, it seems the  Reichswehr was funding it. Who was funding the SA and
Nazi Party  organisation 1922-30, for example? He doesn't really go into
this enough, unlike  Sutton.

3) Another major weakness is that he has far too little, hardly anything of
substance, about the role of  the Vatican in smoothing the Nazis' path,
especially 1932-4.

4) It feels rather as if he got exhausted by the time he got to 1930 and
had  to hurry up to finish the last part - 1930-44. He makes a reasonably
convincing case that Montagu Norman was a real evil genius and has a lot
on him in the 1920s but has almost  nothing to say about him after 1931 yet
Norman continued to be the Bank of England Governor until 1944.

5) A key part of the story is where Papen manages to outwit Schleicher in
January 1933. If Schleicher had managed to outwit Papen instead of the other
way round, then, as Preparata himself says, "Germany would probably have
been saved" from Hitler. The Nazis were at their wits'
end and close to bankruptcy in Nov-December 1932. Hitler was even talking
about blowing his brains out. Preparata implies that this is where the
Anglo-Americans brought their man (Hitler) to power, but he only mentions
briefly the financier von  Schroeder "and his syndicate of investors" and
the key meeting at his  mansion where the deal was done.Then he simply says
that 3 weeks later President Hindenburg  sacked Schleicher, implying that
this was the result of the meeting at the mansion. Von Schroeder certainly
had British connections but Preparata  doesn't go into any detail here. It's
all very circumstantial, to say the  least. Compared to this very thin
treatment, there are pages and pages about  lesser characters such as
Matthias Erzberger, Thorstein Veblen and the master double agent Ignatz
Trebitsch-Lincoln, who worked for the British. What he  says about T-L and
his role in the Kapp putsch (1920) is certainly fascinating, but  it's only
a sideshow within the whole story, whereas what happened in  January 1933,
when Hitler finally became Chancellor, was crucial.

6) Another important part of his thesis is that the Soviets were shadowing
British policy ever since the Revolution and in effect playing along with it
to trap the Nazis. Well, again, he does the 1916-22 period reasonably well,
but doesn't really show how Stalin was persuaded to comply with
Anglo-American wishes in the 1930s. There's almost no mention of Averell
Harriman's company and other Wall St operations, for example in this
context.

7) There is also too much store, I feel, set on American sociologist
Thorstein Veblen and his "prophecies" of what would happen to Germany. He
comes close to saying that Veblen's prophecies are some kind of proof that
the Brits were planning the whole thing. Again, interesting though Veblen's
"predictions" are, such reasoning will not stand up in 'the academic court
of law'.
e.g. p.263. "So deception was employed on a major scale to trip [sic?] the
Nazis into the inescapable war on two fronts. That such was the intention at
Versailles may not be doubted. The astonishing prophecy of Veblen is there
to attest it." But he offers no evidence that Veblen actually knew anything
of the actual thinking of the Anglo-American planners or had met any of
them, read any of their views etc.

8) At certain points there is rather too much reliance on the book  "Hitler,
Born at Versailles" by Leon Degrelle (1987, Institute for  Historical
Review). Degrelle was the Belgian fascist founder of  Rexism and commander
of the SS Walloon Legion, and IHR is regarded with  scorn in the mainstream
as one of the leading historical revisionist and Holocaust denial groups.
The use of such material only predisposes  Preparata to dismissal by many
historians.

Nevertheless, Preparata is certainly no Nazi apologist or Holocaust denier;
at least, his text gives no real indication of that. What seems to motivate
this bold and feisty book is his sense of the rank hyprocrisy, deviousness
and utter
ruthlessness he has detected in the behaviour of the western allies,
especially the British (with their longer traditions of such behaviour).
From 1900 to 1945 he seeks to show how, following their long-term aim to
destroy and then control Germany in order to prevent its alliance with
Russia, they completely outfoxed the gullible, ignorant and foolhardy German
leaderships of the Second and Third Reichs and the Weimar Republic. Hitler
thus becomes to a considerable extent their creation. Preparata  is appalled
at the consequences of their actions 1900-1945: Bolshevism, Nazism, the
destruction and division of Europe, the deaths of countless millions
including those of  the Jewish Holocaust. What he DOES manage to do in his
book is put up at least a very plausible  case a) that the British were
thoroughly machiavellian and b) that their foreign policy, in its main
thrust if not necessarily in all its details (they too had setbacks
sometimes) was a conscious design, rather than a clumsy, well-meaning,
error-ridden improvisation, as the mainstream would often have us believe.
In  other words, if the reader gets to the end of this book, unless he was
already totally prejudiced by the conventional view before he started it, he
will at least begin  to think: "hmm, yes, very interesting, it could indeed
have been like that. Now, is further corroboration to be found?" The book -
if it is read (!) - will, I feel,  serve to get some people thinking along
other than the conventional tracks. It's very much worth a read to challenge
your entire view of the 20th century.

Best wishes,
Terry

You can check out what his students say about Preparata at:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRat … tid=356937
Here is his email address:
ggprep@u.washington.edu
And there is a pic of the man himself