20 February 1933 - the election fund: what the affidavit says, against what gets said about it

[Report #202] **In plain terms:** three weeks after taking office, the new Chancellor and the Reichstag President got Germany's heavy industry into a room and asked for election money. The meeting is real and documented. Almost every detail usually attached to it is wrong, including in the research pass this ripple is built from. WHAT THE NUREMBERG RECORD ESTABLISHES: 'On the invitation of the defendant Goering, approximately 25 of the leading industrialists of Germany, and the defendant Schacht, attended a meeting in Berlin on the 20th day of February, 1933', shortly before the 5 March election; the meeting was 'designed to obtain the industrialists’ financial and political support for the Nazi program'; and at it 'Hitler and Goering announced some of the fundamental Nazi objectives', including 'the destruction of the parliamentary system in Germany' and 'the crushing of all internal opposition by force'. THE DOCUMENTS, named because Scorecard #280 rejected round one's citation for this meeting as 'graded ‘Avalon Project’ but footnoted to a Speer-memoir copy on an unrelated archive'. The clean identifiers are: **D-201** Goering's invitation; **D-203** Hitler's speech, in Krupp's own record of it; **EC-439** the Schnitzler affidavit of 10 November 1945 (Exhibit USA-618, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression VII, 501-02); **PS-2828** the interrogations of Walther Funk of 4 and 26 June 1945 (Exhibit USA-654, IMT Vol. V p. 478), cited in the prosecution's own case for Funk's presence at this meeting; and **NI-391** the list of deposits. PS-2828 is a real document of this meeting - what failed round one was the footnote, not the document. WHAT THE AFFIDAVIT ACTUALLY SAYS, verbatim, and it contradicts the standard retelling on three points: 'Krupp von Bohlen thanked Hitler for his speech. After Hitler had left the room, Dr. Schacht proposed to the meeting the raising of an election fund of—as far as I remember—RM 3,000,000. The fund should be distributed between the two “Allies” according to their relative strength at the time being.' And: 'The amounts which the individual firms had to contribute were not discussed.' And, on his own firm: 'as far as I know there is no evidence that I.G. Farben participated in the payments.' SO: the proposer was SCHACHT, not Krupp, and he proposed it after Hitler had left; Krupp thanked the speaker; the 3,000,000 RM was an ASK, hedged by the proposer himself ('as far as I remember'); it was to be SPLIT with the coalition partner, not given to the NSDAP; and no per-firm amount was agreed in the room. **The research pass asserted that Krupp initiated the collection, pledged 1,000,000 RM from the Ruhr, and that 3,000,000 RM 'was collected to bankroll the NSDAP'. None of those three survives the affidavit.** The likely origin of the Krupp error is visible in the document list above: D-203 is Hitler's speech as recorded BY Krupp. He took the minutes; he did not open the subscription. WHAT WAS ACTUALLY PAID, at encyclopedia tier and flagged as such: a deposit-receipt list entered at the IG Farben trial together with a complete statement of all payments prepared for Schacht dated 5 April 1933 record 2,021,000 Reichsmark into a special account titled 'Nationale Treuhand, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht', of which 1,660,000 had arrived by polling day; the agreed split was 75% NSDAP and 25% Kampffront Schwarz-Weiss-Rot, on Fritz Springorum's proposal, with the Deutsche Volkspartei added on Paul Stein's; 162,500 RM went to the Papen fund and heavy industry sent 215,000 RM directly to Hugenberg. NI-391 and the 5 April statement were NOT retrieved directly for this record. A second figure of 2,071,000 circulates; 2,021,000 is the one tied to the named documents. WHAT THIS DOES AND DOES NOT ESTABLISH: it establishes that heavy industry was asked for, and largely supplied, campaign money TWENTY-ONE DAYS AFTER the chancellorship was already held. It does not establish that industry money created the chancellorship. See big_business_funding_debate for both sides of that question at equal burden. Held; name no holder.