One of the last Reich Chancellors of the Weimar Republic before Hitler came to power, Dr Heinrich Brüning was enabled to flee to Britain in 1934 (having been provided with a laissez-passer by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess). From there he made his way to the USA and took up a teaching position at Harvard University.

In private he retained a vitriolic hatred of the German Jews, whom he blamed (in a private 1937 letter to Winston Churchill) for having financed Hitler’s rise to power [see BOTTOM PANEL]

Brüning’s papers are now housed at the University of Syracuse, New York state, USA. British writer David Irving made these notes from a Brüning MS while researching his biography of Winston Churchill.

The ribbon copy of Brüning's MS is in: Syracuse University, N.Y.: George Arents Research Library: Dorothy Thompson collection, box #1, file: "Heinrich Brüning."

English typescript by ---, l3pp., 1943, on Nazi principles and methods.

Mentions that Hans Frank's father was "a leading member of the Jewish community in Munich."

Alfred Rosenberg had Jewish, Tartar, Russian, and Lett ancestry, mother was French. Allegations about Hitler's ancestors.

"After the inflation there was only one big bank not controlled by Jews, and some of them were utterly corrupt."

When the banks came under government control in 1931 findings of dishonesty were kept secret by the [Brüning] government for fear of provoking anti-Semitic riots.

Morally wrong and distasteful as it is for the Nazis to put Jews into concentration camps in Poland, the same action by the Soviet Government after the Russian occupation of the eastern parts of Poland cannot have been morally superior. The tactical abuse of uncontested moral principles, which began during the last war, has destroyed the scale of moral values all over the world, and we are now suffering from it. Therefore it would be good to establish commissions after the war to enquire in all countries what people were in fact responsible, and for what atrocities, without discrimination against any nation. . .

"It would also be necessary to determine the number of atrocities that have been committed. One cannot, of course, as was done a few weeks ago in an advertisement in the New York Times, base an accusation of the murder of hundreds of thousands of people on the facsimile of an envelope that, for anyone who took the trouble to look at it, bore obvious evidence of forgery, as the German 's' had been replaced by the Polish, and certain German words that are not capitalized had been capitalized, and thirdly, as the title chosen for the office supposedly dealing with the poor Jews in Poland would have provoked a contemptuous smile from anyone who understood even a little about administration..."

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"It has been disastrous for the Jews in Germany that at the beginning of the Nazi regime the occasional ill-treatment of Jews was exaggerated by foreign correspondents. In the spring of 1933 foreign correspondents reported that the River Spree was covered with the corpses of murdered Jews. At that time hardly any Jews, except for leaders of the Communist Party and two or three leaders of the Social Democratic Party had been attacked. . . In my Party, on the other hand, more than 300 local members were then in concentration camps. More than a hundred members of the Protestant and Catholic youth movements had already been tortured to death. If the Jews had been treated so badly from the beginning of the regime, it could not be explained that so very few of them left the country before 1938. especially when the following circumstance is considered: The Nazis did not cancel a decree of the spring of 1931 permitting any German citizen to leave the country with his entire property after paying a 25% property tax on the flight of capital. . ."

The immigration of Jews from Poland, Russia; the Gottlosenbewegung, "led by Jews of a type who had no religious conviction left."

"It was a tragedy that non-religious Jews tried to monopolize leading positions in banking and, to a very large extent, in Government departments."

Then: Pan-Germanism.

Demands punishment of Hitler and Co. by trial.

Brüning was reluctant to provide any ammunition that might be used against his fellow Germans in “the so-called war crimes trials.” He felt [he wrote] that Friedrich Flick and the IG Farben company were blameless, having been forced to make their contributions after the Nazis came to power; and added,

“I did not and do not even today, for understandable reasons, wish to reveal that from October 1928 the two largest regular contributors to the Nazi Party were the general managers of two of the largest Berlin banks, both of Jewish faith, and one of them the leader of Zionism in Germany.”

Brüning [wrote that he] also knew that French sources, including the Schneider-Creusot works and both French intelligence services, had paid one half of Hitler’s revenue from 1921 until 1932; that the SA and SS had before 1933 been equipped largely with revolvers and machine guns made in the United States.

(Source: Letter from Heinrich Brüning to Daniel Longwell, February 7,1948; Longwell collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City)