Hitler's Banker

1932. The economic crisis in Germany was unprecedented—a severe recession, 6 million unemployed, and a collapse in the popularity of Chancellor Brüning, who was criticized for his lack of foresight and who stubbornly focused on a single objective—reducing public deficits and restoring the state's finances under pressure from other European countries. All the while far-right parties, which would soon take power, were experiencing an irrepressible rise. How can one not be struck by the similarity between the economic and political situation in Germany in 1932 and that of some Western countries in 2022? In a fictionalized biography tracing the astonishing career of Hjalmar Schacht, a German financial genius of the last century, Jean-François Bouchard indirectly highlights the interest in drawing inspiration from the economic methods that worked at that time. With this perspective, the current economic situation does not seem to be without a solution. In 1933, Hitler appointed Hjalmar Schacht as Minister of the Economy. A child from a modest background, severely raised in the working-class neighborhoods of the port of Elba, brilliant at school but also mocked by his classmates, he developed a distant, haughty and arrogant personality very early on. After studying philosophy and economics (he wrote his thesis on mercantilism), he climbed the ladder of power one step at a time. As currency commissioner of the Weimar Republic, Hjalamar Schacht reduced inflation and stabilized the Mark with a miraculous initiative—the creation of a transitional currency, the Rentenmark, backed by mortgages. The population embraced the idea. It was a masterly success. For Schact, "the savior of German currency," devotion to his country was boundless. He became close to the NSDAP and participated in Hitler's rise to power, attracted by his economic program. Quickly appointed president of the Reichsbank in a still very weak Germany, he did not try to restore the balance of the state's accounts. Quite the contrary! Abolishing the dogma of balanced public finances, he applied an economic policy close to the New Deal (launching major works) and implemented his own solutions (repatriation of German capital, limiting imports to only those raw materials necessary for rearmament, organizing Germany's insolvency vis-à-vis external creditors, creating MEFO bills, etc.). It was the end of unemployment that became the factor of social stabilization for Adolf Hitler, and of consolidation of his power and of military hegemony. In this regard, sadly, the incredible story of Hjalmar Schacht is the most painful demonstration of this process. Jean-François Bouchard began a classic executive career in 1986 after studying law, with positions in the banking industry and at the corporate level. He also taught financial analysis at the University of Toulon. In 1995, he joined the Inspection Générale de la Banque de France. From then on, he carried out control missions in French and foreign banks (France, Europe, the Caribbean and Africa), as a specialist in banking supervision, risk control and the fight against money laundering. In 2005, he was resident advisor for two years to the National Bank of Romania, where on behalf of the European Commission, he piloted the upgrading program of this institution in view of Romania's admission to the European Union, which took place on January 1, 2007. He then went to Bulgaria to work on the preparation of that country's entry into the euro, a project that did not materialize in the end due to the turbulence in the euro zone, and the Bulgarian political authorities preferred to give up. Back in France, he was appointed head of mission at the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel; he also headed the Lyon branch of the Banque de France for three years. As head of mission, he participated in the major European bank assessment exercise, before the European Central Bank took over banking supervision in the framework of the Banking Union. At the end of this large project, he left in June 2014 as resident advisor to the International Monetary Fund in Libreville, Gabon. He is in charge of banking supervision for Central Africa, i.e., the six countries of the CEMAC zone (Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Congo Brazzaville, and Chad), as well as for the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo Kinshasa) and Burundi.