Banking on Hitler

While historians have criticized the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), located in Basel, Switzerland, for its role in helping to fund the Nazi war machine prior to and during WWII, the truth of the matter is that the Swiss were hardly alone. As this episode from the BBC series Timewatch makes abundantly clear, the international composition of the BIS--ranging from Nazis holding key board positions to the bank's American president, Thomas H. Kittrick--suggests a wide-ranging culpability. When Germany's practice of militarily blitzkrieging a European country and then economically hoovering its treasury with the help of the BIS aroused the suspicion of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Morgenthau, he went after the BIS (but was deterred by, in one of history's quirky coincidences, economist John Maynard Keynes--the same man who earlier correctly pointed out that Germany's WWI war reparations were a terrible financial burden that would only lead to further social upheaval). Combining interviews with surviving members of banking families as well as members of Morgenthau's investigative team, Banking with Hitler not only examines central BIS activity (BIS member Emil Puhl invested money in German concentration camps), but also looks at the role of the Bank of England and Paris's Chase bank (which froze the assets of Jewish customers) during the building of the Third Reich. A story more interesting in the tale than the telling, this otherwise unremarkable television episode is priced well out of the range of general collections and is therefore only recommended for subject-specific academic collections. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)