I paid Hitler

Friedrich Fritz Thyssen was a leading German industrialist was initially impressed by Hitler, primarily due to his strident opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. His principal motive appears to have been his fear of Communism. In 1932 he formally joined Hitler's National Socialists. Thyssen accepted the exclusion of Jews from German business and professional life by the Nazis, and dismissed his own Jewish employees. But as a Catholic, he objected to the increasing repression of the Roman Catholic Church, which gathered pace after 1935. Thereafter he experienced his awakening and drifted away from Hitler. He was against the violent pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, which caused him to resign from the Council of State. In 1940 Thyssen took refuge in France, but was caught up in the German invasion of France and the Low Countries while he was visiting his sick mother in Belgium. He was arrested and sent back to Germany, where he was confined, first in a sanatorium near Berlin, then from 1943 in Sachsenhausen. In February 1945 he was sent to Dachau but survived the war. Prior to his arrest he had dictated his memoirs which he entrusted to an American journalist, Emery Reves.