The General from the Shtetl and the Wizard of the Reichsbank

David Sarnoff was the shtetl-born pioneer in American radio and television, renowned as the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for half a century, from just after its establishment until 1970, and one of the founders of NBC. He was named a brigadier general in World War II and was called “The General” from then on because of the way he ran his media companies. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht has gone down in history as the man most responsible for reviving the German economy after Hitler came to power. (His father had spent many years in America and admired the famous liberal editor of the New-York Tribune, hence the unusual middle name). I never thought of these two together until I read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s absorbing new book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation.

Sarnoff and Schacht met each other months before the crash, when they were both participating in an international conference in Paris tasked with resolving the still festering problem of Germany’s payment of reparations to the powers that had defeated it a decade earlier. Schacht led the German delegation; Sarnoff was an American backbencher who developed a surprisingly smooth relationship with Schacht. The two worked closely together for a few weeks in June hammering out the details of an agreement.

One evening Schacht showed up furious over the way a prominent Frenchmen had just insulted him as a German. Sarnoff tried both to calm him down and to challenge him. “I can offer some comfort in this matter,” he said. “After all, you’re an amateur in the area of prejudice, but I have had two thousand years of experience with it. Besides, your people are not free from such feelings either.” When Schacht indignantly denied there was any racial prejudice in Germany, Sarnoff held his ground, accusing Germany of being “the cradle of antisemitism” and adducing the rise of the Nazis as evidence”:

As they argued, Schacht suddenly stopped and stared at Sarnoff.

“Do you speak Hebrew,” he asked.

“No,” Sarnoff replied, but I understand it, because I studied the sacred books in my boyhood.”

“Well, I’m not a Jew,” Schacht said, “but I do speak it.” In excellent Hebrew he began to recite the opening verses of Genesis. Astonished, Sarnoff learned that Schacht had earned his doctorate not in economics, as most people thought, but with a thesis on the Hebrew language. Their mutual respect deepened, and they continued negotiations.

Did the future Nazi minister of finance and head of the Reichsbank really have a doctoral degree in Hebrew? A quick search shows that he did not; his dissertation was indeed about economics, and its title was Der theoretische Gehalt des englischen Merkantilismus (The theoretical content of English mercantilism). This makes sense, given the neo-mercantilism of the Nazi economic policy Schacht enforced in the 1930s, when he took over both monetary and trade policy.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a terrific economic journalist and popular historian, so he didn’t, of course, make up the story of Schacht as a deep scholar of Hebrew. He got it from a reliable enough source, the biography of David Sarnoff written by Eugene Lyons. Lyons was Sarnoff’s first cousin and presumably heard it from Sarnoff himself. But is it true, or is it a tall tale? Sarnoff, it seems, was not above embellishing his own biography. One of his early claims to fame was to have been the first to have heard (at a telegraph station on top of the Wanamaker department store in New York City) the news of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. But this turns out to be basically—but not entirely—a self-promoting bubbe-mayse.

In this instance, however, it’s not Sarnoff but Schacht who was telling tall tales out of school. Schacht wrote a memoir after the war, which was published in America as Confessions of the Old Wizard: The Autobiography of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. It turns out that he had indeed studied the language of the Old Testament—in what we would call high school. Schacht writes:

In addition to compulsory Latin and Greek I had chosen Hebrew as my optional subject. I did not know whether I would ever go in for theology, but a variety of subjects never does anyone any harm—and later we would frequently say—in fun—that the Hebrew language was by no means a bad preparation for a banking career. (italics mine)

Most probably, then, Schacht really had given Sarnoff his Bereshit bara shtick at the 1929 conference, and Sarnoff bought the doctoral boast that went with it. So, there’s no mystery here.

But the story turns out to be even creepier than it first seems. Schacht had been cleared at Nuremberg of charges of conspiracy and crimes against peace, but just barely. In part it was because he’d been in contact with Resistance leaders like Hans Gisevius and could point to his arrest by the Gestapo after Operation Valkyrie, though his actual involvement in the plot by German elites to kill Hitler in 1944 is unclear. The autobiography was an attempt, as almost all biographies are, to further plead his case. And yet Schacht couldn’t help himself from ending the story of learning Hebrew with the sneering antisemitic punchline I’ve italicized above.