Conjuring Hitler [Paperback]

Guido Giacomo Giacomo Preparata (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2005

A fascinating and controversial new perspective on Hitler's rise to power; Provides startling evidence of Britain and America's financial support for the Third Reich; Suggests that the western elite deliberately supported Nazism in the pre-war period to destabilise any alliance between Germany and Russia Nazism is usually depicted as an eerie German phenomenon, the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated. Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he reveals that Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was actually facilitated over the course of a decade following WWI - and eventually financed - by the British and American political classes. Tracing events in the Third Reich, Preparata offers a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how Britain, through the Bank of England, came to exercise some control over Weimar and how Britain's financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power. Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British establishment of the time, it was a convenient way of destabilising Europe, and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia. In this way Britain ensured that it would prevent the formation of any rival continental power block. Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler's meteoric rise.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Conjuring Hitler is the most important book on modern European history since George Lichtheim's Europe in the Twentieth Century. Unlike Lichtheim's volume, however, Conjuring Hitler successfully challenges every aspect of conventional wisdom about the politics of the two world wars. George W. Bush famously said that Saddam Hussein was 'worse than Hitler.' President Bush had a point (his family after all was very familiar with the Nazis). Both Hitler and Saddam likely were evil creations of the US and British intelligence apparatus. As Conjuring Hitler makes clear, the rise of Hitler was assisted at many critical points by the war parties in England and the United States who plotted to set Russia and Germany against one another and collect the spoils. -- Professor David MacGregor, University of Western Ontario

About the Author

Guido Giacomo Preparata is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Washington. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised in the USA, France and Italy, he completed his PhD in Political Economy and Economic History at the University of Southern California in 1998.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (April 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074532181X
• ISBN-13: 978-0745321813
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,070,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Also conjured by Great Britain: WW I and the Soviet Union!, August 25, 2007

By 

Phillip M. Rose (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Conjuring Hitler (Paperback)

This book exposes Great Britain as the master geopolitical chess player of the late 19th to mid-twentieth centuries, and reveals the USA as her successor on the world scene. While this rather sweeping claim would probably not be rebuffed by many, Dr. Preparata's claims regarding the extent of Great Britain's power and manipulation are truly breathtaking.

I was convinced of the basic arguments that Dr. Preparata made concerning Great Britain's economic and political machinations. He cites multiple contemporaneous and modern sources in four different languages to support his historical accounts. The economic history alone is enough to prove that Great Britain and the US colluded with the Soviet Union to set Germany up for a big fall.

The final brief chapter makes two assertions that I will mention here. The first assertion is that "(t)he present geopolitical policy of the United States is a direct and wholly consistent continuation of the old imperial strategy of Britain". The other main assertion is that the Allied elite's redacted version of history we've been taught, especially the self-serving anti-German tirades, is scandalously false. I can only agree with Dr. Parata, as far as he goes, but in his attempt to set the record straight he also tells only part of the story. I do not question the author's motivation, for I think he means well, but I would like to point out a few things that I noticed. To borrow an expression, if something seems too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

The author's main thesis is supported by more documentation than most readers would ever be able to digest, much less gain access to. Many of the books in the 10-page bibliography must be long out of print and found in only a few major libraries. Of books that are accessible, however, I note that the author relies heavily on the works of David Irving and Carroll Quigley. If you are not familiar with these authors, I recommend doing a quick search of their works on this website, specifically "Hitler's War and the War Path" by David Irving, Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time". While Shaw and Quigley would make for valuable background information, I wouldn't rely on them to verify points of historical fact.

Dr. Parata cites some interesting historical figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who, while once highly influential, have unfortunately been eclipsed by time. The influential geographer, and some say, founder of geopolitics, Halford John Mackinder, receives a fair mention in the early chapters. Later on, Dr. Parata states that "Hitler hadn't read Mackinder". Perhaps Hitler himself had not read Mackinder's works, but the Third Reich interpretation of the Heartland (or "Earth Island") theory would seem to be based in part on Mackinder's earlier work (much to Mackinder's dismay), as well as Bismark during the Second Reich, and German writers including Oswald Spengler and Karl Haushofer leading up to and during the Third Reich. Preparata implies that Great Britain was guided by the principles of geopolitics, but omits Germany's history of Geopolitik. There is a lot of information on Geopolitik on the Internet.

Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist, predicted the rise of the Third Reich with uncanny accuracy. I sensed that the author felt a special affinity with Veblen, perhaps partly due to similarities in their respective fields of study, and perhaps also due to their shared heritage as European-Americans. They also seem to share an affinity for tortured syntax, though Preparata is much more readable!

Montagu Norman, who was governor of the Bank of England from 1920-44 is perhaps the evil genius of the book. Norman was at the forefront in the Anglo-Saxon intrigues that tampered with the German political system, successfully creating a situation where a reactionary government would come to power. There is another excellent and detailed treatment of Norman's machinations in Webster Tarpley's "Against Oligarchy", unfortunately unavailable on Amazon, but available (for free) on Mr. Tarpley's website, which is easy to find. An understanding of these economic intrigues is essential for understanding (and believing) the rest of "Conjuring Hitler".

I was, in the end, disappointed and frustrated by the fact that the economic analysis stopped somewhere near the end of WW II. In the conclusion, the author jumps to the present to condemn the US for following in the imperial footsteps of Great Britain, but says nothing of the highly suspicious "economic miracles" of Japan and West Germany following closely on WW II. He makes brief mention of the IMF and "Marshall aid", thus repeating the received history he decries, and on a topic where he should know better, political economics.

Preparata presents Germany as a hapless victim of the Machiavellian Anglo-Saxon intrigues. At the end of his book we are told that everyone lives unhappily ever after under the thumb of the oligarchical hegemon, America. I'm afraid it's not as simple as that. You can read Paul Manning's "Martin Bormann: Nazi in exile" to find out how Germany, while losing WW II militarily, actually became an economic winner. Read "Unholy Trinity" by Mark Aarons and John Loftus to find out about Anglo-American and Vatican collaboration with Nazi war criminals. And don't look now, but Germany is attempting to foist a neo-Bismarkian hegemony on the European Union.

While my review may be the most negative to date, I still highly recommend this book, but I believe it is as much an anti-Anglo-Saxon polemic as it is a scholarly study. However, it presents information and an important viewpoint that you won't easily find elsewhere.

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Research, Great Analysis, Bold Move., June 20, 2007

By 

T. Anderson (Annapolis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Conjuring Hitler (Paperback)

The book is worth buying just for the bibliography. Preparata has done a wonderful job assembling reference material and it is apparent that he has read and digested that material. This is a must read that helps move conspiracy theory towards conspiracy fact. Excellent anaysis throughout. My only complaint is that the author wants to prove his erudition through his vocabulary - but I suppose that can be a learning opportunity for those of limited vocabulary with a good dictionary or access to the Internet.

Although many of these ideas have been expressed by Sutton, et al., Preparata goes further and broader than his predecessors and does so in a style that keeps one engaged and eager to learn more.

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explained so many things!, October 7, 2005

By 

Naomi R (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conjuring Hitler (Paperback)

This book is incredible! So dense with vital information and so well supported~ this changes the way I have always thought about this era of history. The world is never so simple as the good guys and the bad guys and this book contains the proof for that leading up to WW2. I'm really hard to convince along these lines, but this book has blown me away. I'm a believer.