Chapter 8: Deterding support for Nazi Stormtroopers
The Sturmabteilung216 (SA), the paramilitary wing of the German Nazi Party, played an important role in Hitler’s rise to power. SA men were known as “brownshirts.”217 This chapter gathers evidence linking Deterding to the SA through Georg Bell and the Bell papers later discussed in Nuremberg-related material. The allegation is serious: that Deterding secretly backed the SA in return for preferential treatment of Shell’s business interests in Germany.
The following are extracts from “The Nuremberg Trial” by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb.218 Extracts from the FOREWORD: This book is an attempt to make the material of the Nuremberg Trial available to a wider public in a comprehensible form. In concentrating almost completely on the factual contents of the Trial, the authors have attempted to present the history of the Trial itself in all its aspects, based on documents, depositions, records, and historical facts. They have left nothing to speculation or imagination; they have strictly avoided all romantic embellishment and additions. Thus everything in this book is historically accurate, every action and reaction of the protagonists is vouched for by eyewitnesses, every event provable, every quoted word was actually spoken. Extracts from pages 110 & 111 covering The Reichstag Fire: Thus, all those who had been in the know, and all who had unconsciously come upon the facts of the fire, had lost their lives. Hanussen’s presumable informant, the engineer Georg Bell, who had his information from the highest Nazi circles, escaped to Austria, but before leaving he gave some secret Nazi papers to a Munich newspaper editor, Fritz Michael Gerlich. But his office was likely to be searched, and so those papers had to disappear as quickly as possible. The last to see them was the former State President of Wiirttemberg, Eugen Anton Bolz. Gerlich’s secretary, Miss Breit, clearly remembered the contents of the documents. They contained: detailed facts about the Reichstag fire; an agreement between the Nazi Party and the British oil millionaire, Deterding, concerning the secret backing of the SA in return for preferential treatment of his German interests; a list of witnesses to the fact that Hitler had murdered his niece Geli Raubal; plans for discrediting the Church; plans of SA Chief of Staff Roehm for getting rid of Hitler after the Nazis’ seizure of power. The men who had seen these dangerous documents had to die. Bell was ferreted out by SA unit commander Uhl in Austria and was there dispatched with six pistol shots. George Bell, an agent who acted jointly for Deterding and Hitler, was murdered in Austria in April 1933 by a death squad of Nazi Storm Troopers and the SS, after making revelations about Deterding and the Nazis. Dr. Bell apparently knew too much about sensitive matters the Nazis and Deterding wanted hushed up. “His German interests” were the interests of the Royal Dutch Shell Group. As was reported by The New York Times in 1934,219 Shell was seeking an oil monopoly in the German market. Extract from the book “The Secret War The War for Oil”:220 Dr. Bell was now left, like so many other secret agents, in a precarious position. Deterding had deserted him, and the Nazis began to look with suspicion on the agent of so changeable a man. In his desperation he began to talk and write, making revelations about Deterding and the Nazis. In no long time, realizing he was in danger, he fled to Austria. The book contains details of the grisly end of Dr. Bell in Austria at the hands of Storm Troopers, who crossed the border in three cars to assassinate him.
Notes
216. Link to royaldutchshellplc.com webpage containing photograph of a “Brownshirt” ↩
217. Link to Wikipedia article: “Sturmabteilung” aka “Brownshirts” Source 1 ↩
218. Link to royaldutchshellplc.com webpage containing pages from “The Nuremberg Trial” by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, originally published in German and later translated into English by R. A. Downie. (“A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY AS REVEALED THROUGH THE TESTIMONY AT NUREMBERG”) Published by Greenwood Press, 1975: ISBN 0837181313, 9780837181318: 398 pages ↩
219. Information from royaldutchshellplc.com webpage containing a New York Times articled published 26 October 1934 under the headline “REICH OIL MONOPOLY SOUGHT BY DETERDING” Source 1 ↩
220. Link to shellnews.net webpage containing the entire book “The Secret War: The War for Oil”: By Frank C. Hanighen & Anton Zischka, published in London by George Routledge & Sons: 1935: Note webpage does take some time to load, even though the le is compressed. See page 99 of 123. ↩