HITLER'S BANKER is a full-scale biography of Hjalmar Schacht, one of history's premier financial wizards. Chief Architect of the Nazi economy, Schacht's rampant inflation financed the creation of the most powerful war machine in Europe out of the rubble of a devastated Weimar Republic. Weitz chronicles Schacht's early life and his meteoric success in the international banking world, deftly juxtaposing the twentieth-century history of Germany itself. HITLER'S BANKER is the riveting life story of a man imprisoned by Hitler because of his anti-Nazi sentiments and charged as a war criminal by the Allies. Exonerated of all charges at Nuremberg, Schacht lived to become a successful author and economic adviser to foreign nations, and a wealthy private banker.
John Weitz was born in Germany, educated at Oxford and emigrated to the USA. He was recruited by the OSS during World War II as a spy in Alsace-Lorraine and now heads John Weitz Design, a Madison Avenue couture house of international renown
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Weitz is perhaps at his best in the details of the floundering Deutschmark, when speculators played the interenational markets, and in the well placed reminders of the way in which the Americans, British and French were prepared to overlook the increasing thuggery of Nazi Germany so long as their own institutions were safe. (DAILY TELEGRAPH)
Weitz's account is a fluidly written insight into the life of a man whom the world once regarded as a genius, yet is remembered by history as having been, in the phrase of another dictator, Vladimir Lenin, a "useful idiot" (SUNDAY TIMES)
Few writers have probed so deeply the personal dramas of the Nazi era as John Weitz. (TOM WOLFE)