Schacht took an extremely active part in the rightist nationalist opposition, and played a central role in the political intrigues that culminated in Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor. In March 1933, he was re-appointed President of the Reichsbank, and in August 1934 he also became Minister of Economic Affairs. In May 1935, he was made Generalbevollmaechtigter fuer die Kriegswirtschaft (Chief Plenipotentiary for the War Economy). It was Schacht who directed the rehabilitation of the German economy under Hitler and the reestablishment of Germany's military power. He did not, however, join the Nazi party and did not have the full confidence of the Nazi regime's leaders.
From Resignation to Incarceration
In November 1937, when preparations began for putting the German economy on a war footing, Schacht resigned as minister of economic affairs, and in January 1939 he was dismissed from his post as Reichsbank President. Officially, however, he retained a post in the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, up to 1943. Following the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler, Schacht was put in a concentration camp because of his loose ties with the conservative resistance circles led by Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. Owing to these circumstances, Schacht was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trial to be acquitted fully.
Schacht and the Persecution of the Jews
Schacht's positions and actions in connection with the persecution of the Jews have not yet been thoroughly researched. At the Nuremberg Trial and in his books of memoirs, he claimed to have been a "protector of the Jews." Research literature also frequently contains the assessment that Schacht's "protective hand" enabled the Jews to maintain their economic activities until his resignation as Minister of Economic Affairs. For pragmatic reasons, Schacht wanted certain Jews to take part in Germany's economic life, and he had the courage to protest, in confidential memorandums and even in public, against the "illegal" persecution of the Jews. He denounced the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms at a meeting of Reichsbank employees as 'a crime that ought to make the face of every decent German flush with shame.'
The Schacht-Rublee Negotiations
At the end of 1938, Schacht, with Hitler's permission, negotiated with George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees set up at the Evian Conference, a proposal to facilitate the emigration of the Jews of Germany with the help of an international loan to be raised by world Jewry. The representatives of Jewish organisations were divided over Schacht's proposal, which lent itself to the interpretation that world Jewry was prepared to give up to the Reich a large part of the assets of German Jewry. The negotiations continued even after Schacht's dismissal from the Reichsbank in January 1939, but no agreement was reached.
An Assessment
Schacht's statements and memorandums on the persecution of the Jews are evidence that the anti-Jewish policy as a whole did not mean enough to him to impel him to enter into an open confrontation with Hitler or other top Nazi leaders. The boycott of Jewish businesses and the elimination of Jews from the German economy proceeded throughout the time that he was in office, and there is no record of any important issue on which he gave all-out support to the Jews.
Post war
After the war, Schacht wrote two books about his years in office, published in English as "Account Settled"(1949) and "Confessions of the Old Wizard"(1955).
