Excellent synopsis of Hitler’s ascendence., 22 Jun 1999

As a novice reader in this area I found the book tremendously helpful in setting the context for Hitler’s inexorable rise to power and illuminating the financial machinations that made it possible. His political adversaries badly underestimated him and the Allies sowed the seeds of WW2 as far back as the punitive Versailles treaty. He was an opportunist par excellence and obviously capable of great evil but Mr. Pool does an admirable job of presenting the everyday, human side of Hitler and the Nazi movement. After all, despite the carnage he wrought he was a man born like the rest of us. Many others, including representatives of countries who eventually ended up sacrificing the flower of their youth to contain his destructive actions, aided and abetted the formation of a totalitarian state. Mr.Pool’s greatest achievement is making the book read like a rather exciting novel. It is not at all dry as the title might suggest. You feel a certain sense of tension and anticipation as they struggle towards their utterly contemptuous goals. The great tragedy is that the average Nazi Party member, and the other politicians who tried to use the Hitler bandwagon for their own more moderate aims, thought they were doing a good thing for Germany. Sadly they could not control the beast they unleashed. I look forward to reading the sequel “Hitler’s Secret Partners 1933-45″.

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Thorough, succinct, fascinating, 22 Mar 1998

In accordance with the title, this book tells pretty much all that is now known about “Who Financed Hitler.” Most of us are familiar with the rich women who mothered and gave money to Hitler. We’ve long suspected that at some point Henry Ford financed a portion of Hitler’s anti-Semitic fight. Thyssen has long admitted (and repented) having given large sums to Hitler, and of getting other industrialists to do the same. But not many of us were aware that Mussolini gave early financial contributions to his German side-kick. Nor did we realize that a British banker contributed funds to the Nazi party. And how many of us perceived that Hitler also got contributions from people in France, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Finland, and Czecho-Slovakia, as well as other countries? However, as fascinating as all this is, the strength of Mr. Pool’s book lies in his ability to take complex situations and condense them into thorough, accurate, and understandable reading. Although I have read more than 150 books on Hitler, I found Pool’s reporting to have clarified several points on which I was still fuzzy. If you can read only one book about Hitler’s early political years, this would be a good choice. If you’ve read many books on those early years, you will still want to add this one to your repertoire.

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