Tuesday, January 16, 2018

pencil sketch of a Nazi by Dr K Prabhakar Rao


FRITZ. THYSSEN. NAZi ABETTOR

1 comment:

Dr K Prabhakar Rao said...

He was a leading business man in Germany and was anti communist and was against trade unions.Thyssen welcomed the suppression of the Communist Party, the Social Democrats and the trade unions. In 1934 he was one of the business leaders who persuaded Hitler to suppress the SA, leading to the "Night of the Long Knives". Thyssen accepted the exclusion of Jews from German business and professional life by the Nazis, and dismissed his own Jewish employees. But as a Catholic, he objected to the increasing repression of the Roman Catholic Church, which gathered pace after 1935: in 1937 he sent a letter to Hitler, protesting the persecution of Christians in Germany.[4] The breaking point for Thyssen was the violent pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, which caused him to resign from the Council of State. By 1939 he was also bitterly criticising the regime's economic policies, which were subordinating everything to rearmament in preparation for war.On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland marked the commencement of World War II. Thyssen sent Hermann Göring a telegram saying he was opposed to the war[citation needed], shortly before leaving for Switzerland with his family. He was expelled from the Nazi Party and the Reichstag, and his company was nationalised. The company was returned to other members of the Thyssen family some years after the war.

In 1940 Thyssen took refuge and moved to France, intending to emigrate to Argentina, but was caught up in the German invasion of France and the Low Countries while he was visiting his ill mother in Belgium. He was arrested by Vichy France and sent back to Germany, where he was confined, first in a sanatorium near Berlin, then from 1943 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His wife Amelie did not escape to Argentina and spent the whole war in the concentration camp with her husband.In February 1945 Thyssen was sent to Dachau concentration camp. He was comparatively well-treated and transferred to Tyrol in late-April 1945 together with other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was liberated by the 42nd Infantry Division & 45th Infantry Division on 5 May 1945.
Thyssen was tried for being a supporter of the Nazi Party. He did not deny that he had been a Nazi supporter until 1938, and he accepted responsibility for his companies' mistreatment of Jewish employees in the 1930s, although he denied involvement in the employment of slave labour during the war. On 2 October 1948, a denazification tribunal declared Thyssen a lesser offender and sentenced him to a fine of 15 % of his assets.Thyssen agreed to pay 500,000 Deutschmarks as compensation to those who suffered as a result of his actions, and was acquitted of other charges. In January 1950, he and his wife emigrated to Buenos Aires, where he died the following year. Thyssen was buried in the family mausoleum in Mülheim.