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Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (22 January 1877 – 3 June 1970) was the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank under both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich until 1939. Schacht was one of the primary drivers of Germany's policy of redevelopment, reindustrialization and rearmament. Schacht ended World War II in a concentration camp for his complicity in the 20 July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler. His prior activities working for the Nazi Party led to his trial at Nuremberg after the war, for "crimes against peace" (not war crimes or crimes against Humanity) but he was acquitted.
Schacht's parents originally decided on the name Horace Greeley Schacht, in honor of the American journalist Horace Greeley. However they yielded to the insistence of the Schacht family grandmother, who firmly believed the child's given name should be Danish.
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht in The Man With the Iron Heart[]
Hjalmar Schacht[1] was one of several German officials who was captured by the Allies at the end of World War II.[2] The Allies sought to try Schacht and the other men for crimes related to Nazi atrocities. These plans were stopped twice by the German Freedom Front, first in November 1945, when the GFF destroyed the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg[3] and second in 1946, when the GFF destroyed the American residency zone in Frankfurt with a radium bomb.[4]
In 1947, the Soviets decided to try the officials in their zone. The GFF prevented this by crashing a plane into the courthouse, killing all the lawyers and judges, but leaving Schacht and his fellow accused unharmed.
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht in Southern Victory[]
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht was appointed ambassador to the United States in the 1930s. On Remembrance Day, 1941, as the Entente powers were beginning to assert themselves and war seemed inevitable, Schacht made a short, eloquent speech reaffirming the alliance between the United States and Germany. Schacht's speech was followed by one from his Austrian counterpart Kurt Schussnigg.[5]
References[]
- ↑ Schacht is not named in the book, but the Point of Divergence does not seem to have changed the composition of the Nuremberg defendants.
- ↑ The Man With the Iron Heart, pg. 108.
- ↑ Ibid., pg. 112-113.
- ↑ Ibid., pg. 261-262.
- ↑ The Victorious Opposition, pg. 591.
| Political offices (OTL) | ||
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| Preceded by Kurt Schmitt |
German Minister of Economics 1934–1937 |
Succeeded by Hermann Göring |
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