Fritz Thyssen paid for Hitler's rise, lost his fortune to him in 1939, survived the camps and emigrated on his book royalties

Fritz Thyssen, son of the steel magnate August Thyssen, chaired the supervisory board of Vereinigte Stahlwerke until 1939. Postwar investigators found he had given 650,000 Reichsmarks to right-wing parties, mostly the Nazis^†. He joined the Nazi party in 1933. In September 1939 he fled to Switzerland and wrote to Göring opposing the war. The regime confiscated all his German property and stripped him of his citizenship. In spring 1940, in Monte Carlo, he gave interviews to the publisher Emery Reves for a memoir and signed a contract. After France fell he was arrested in Nice and handed to Germany. He and his wife Amélie were held in a sanatorium, then in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau, and were freed in South Tyrol in 1945. Reves published I Paid Hitler in 1941. The Allies interned Thyssen. On 2 October 1948 a denazification tribunal at Königstein classed him as a lesser offender, fined him and released him. He collected his royalties from Reves and used the money to emigrate to Argentina, where his daughter Anita, Countess Zichy-Thyssen, lived. He died there in 1951, aged 77. Other Thyssen family members regained the company after the war^†. On 7 July 1959 Amélie and Anita founded the Fritz Thyssen Foundation with August Thyssen-Hütte shares of 100 million marks nominal value. In 2026 the Cologne foundation reports grants of about 561 million euros since 1959.