Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht Accepted Hitler’s Offer of the Position of President of the Reichsbank on March 17, 1933

Hitler also showed his pragmatic side when Hjalmar Schacht was called into his first meeting with the new chancellor. After all, Schacht was not a party member, and although he had more than demonstrated his willingness to be helpful, he was distrusted by most of the party establishment, who still saw Schacht as a collaborator of the Jewish bankers.

It was middle of March 1933.

Herr Schacht, I am sure we are agreed that the most urgent task for the new government is to end unemployment. That will need a lot of money. Do you think it can be obtained without the Reichsbank?

Schacht agreed with the immediate need to end unemployment but told Hitler it could not be done without the Reichsbank. When pressed for the amount of money needed, Schacht hedged.

Herr Chancellor, all I can tell you is that the Reichsbank should be ready to lend all assistance until the last unemployed citizen is back at work. 

 Then came Hitler’s pivotal question.

Would you be willing to resume leadership of the Reichsbank? 

 Later, Schacht remembered his reaction. Could he accept the offer from a leader “whose political methods and individual acts he found difficult to accept”? Or should he overcome his scruples “for the sake of the six and a half million unemployed”? Besides, he was quite aware that Luther, who had held the Reichsbank presidency since Schacht had resigned, had already met with Hitler and had given an unsatisfactory answer to Hitler’s question. Schacht told Hitler that he would not find it “fair” — he used the English term — to fire Reichsbank president Luther, but Hitler reassured him that Luther had already been slated for another position. Schacht then decided on the spot.

“If that is so, then I am ready, once again, to take the presidency of the Reichsbank;” and “on March 17, almost exactly three years after I had left it, I went back to work at the Reichsbank.”

He insisted that it was not out of personal ambition or agreement with the National Socialist Party or personal greed. It was for the “welfare of the broad masses of our people.”

—John Weitz, Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 142-143.