THE GRAVEDIGGERS: How Hitler’s Elite Business Supporters Were Executed By Hanging
And other cautionary tales about the fate of those who back fascists from the Keppler Circle files
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As with Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, it is taking me months to get through The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by historians Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs. Both books are so rich with original source material that I pause to read the books and first-hand reporting referenced, before getting back to each historic work.
The same is true from my many readings of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works. Because of these great scholars, I am able to bring you some of my most important reporting to date, reporting that I believe is quite relevant in this moment.
Top left to bottom right: Wilhelm Keppler, Friedrich Flick, Oswald Pohl, Heinrich Bütefisch, Otto Ohlendorf
Keppler Circle
As I returned to The Gravediggers last night, I learned about Hitler’s Keppler Circle, a group of elite businessmen who worked to bring the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) to power.
The Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft or Circle of Friends of the Economy, which was also known as Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS, Freundeskreis Himmler or Keppler Circle, was a group of German industrialists whose promoted aim was to strengthen the ties between the Nazi Party and business and industry but whose legacy is far, far darker.
It was called the Keppler Circle, because the group was formed by Wilhelm Keppler, an economic advisor to Adolf Hitler.
They appeared on the outside to be a Gentlemen’s Club, formed in 1932 at Hitler’s request. Among the 40 known members were notable industrialists, manufacturers, bankers, and SS leaders.
Keppler was also closely aligned with Nazi leader and Holocaust architect, Heinrich Himmler, and from the mid-30s through the duration of World War II, Keppler Circle members donated one million Marks a year for Himmler to use for “special” projects, like the Ahnernerbe project — a pseudoscientific group that promoted racial doctrines, paying academic hacks to nurture the idea of Germans being descended from an Aryan race racially superior to other races. Alternately, it promoted something so ugly I am not going to write about the details. Suffice it to say, it involved the denigration of a race of people and it violated the remains of victims murdered at Auschwitz.
Among the evil supported by these elite businessmen was how they benefited from the aryanization of Jewish-owned business competitors. As Jewish business owners were forced to sell their companies at a fraction of their value, members of the Circle were able to buy those businesses. Among them, industrialist Friedrich Flick, who was later tried at Nuremberg and declared “nothing will convince us that we are war criminals.”
The judges, however, were convinced, and he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on December 22, 1947, sentenced to seven years in prison. Upon his release, he rebuilt his industrial empire and become one of West Germany’s wealthiest people by the 1950s.
But it doesn’t end so well for other members of the infamous Keppler Circle. In fact, their untimely deaths offer a cautionary tale for the business elite propping up Trump because they believe he will funnel the country’s spoils to them should he return to power.
Members of the Keppler Circle were killed by bombs, committed suicide and were executed by hanging after Ministries Trials at Nuremberg.
Richard Kaselowsky, who helped fund the Aryan historical and eugenicist research, was killed in 1944 in a bunker in the basement of his villa during an American air raid on Bielfeld.
Keppler Circle members Fritz Kranefuss, Emil Heinrich Meyer, Albert Vögler all committed suicide at the end of the war. Kranefuss and Meyer were bankers and Vögler was a munitions manufacturer, and they each had benefited from forced slave labor during the war. Each killed themselves in 1945. Kranefuss destroyed all the files from Friends of Himmler before suiciding.
William Keppler, the Circle’s founder, and another banker, Karl Rasche, were both sentenced to prison at the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg. Both were released in the early ‘50s. In addition, Heinrich Bütefisch was convicted as a war criminal. He was head of production at the Bunawerke facility at Monowitz, part of the Auschwitz camp, documented by survivors Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.
Industrialist Otto Steinbrinck, who had been a decorated World War I hero as U-Boat Commander, died in prison, after being sentenced alongside Friedrich Flick.
Among the members of Keppler Circle sentenced to death by hanging were Otto Ohlendorf, who helped perpetuate mass murder in Moldova and Ukraine, and Oswald Pohl, a key figure in the final solution. Both were executed by hanging in 1951.
I wrote in last week’s Hot Type column for Byline that Elon Musk is scared at the prospect of Trump losing.
The modern day industrialists like Musk bet on riding the new Axis of Evil wave.
Men like Trump and Vance tell racist lies about immigrants, lies that are straight from the cruel and effective playbook of Nazi Germany. Lies that are weaponized to create fake realities to push people to overthrow their own governments, to become fascist foot soldiers.
And the industrialists know this.
Women like Bella Fromm reported on these men:
March 5, 1934: At a party: “My stomach slowly turning sour in me at the sight of Fritz Thyssen and other big industrial figures dancing eagerly in a stately and humiliating minuet around their Nazi masters.”
We are watching Elon Musk dance eagerly, humiliatingly, and yet…
We have a small window to completely rebuke these racist fascists.
Nothing short of complete repudiation will do.
They are aligned with a war criminal who has been indicted for crimes against humanity, for trafficking children out of Ukraine to Russia.
I write about monsters.
We see them. We know who they are.
We’re not going back.
Not now, not ever.
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Related:
‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’: Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia
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