Hitler vs banks

Snickers Man

First things first: of course there is an economic/financial dimension to most political movements and controversies and by extension to wars. But it is not the ONLY dimension.

The well known economist and commentator Niall Ferguson makes this point very well in his book and TV series The Ascent of Money, in which he says--reasonably enough--that people spend far too much time studying battles and military campaigns and very little looking at the economic back story that sets the scene for why many of those battles happened in the first case.

By way of example, he says that the most crucial battle of the American Civil War was the Union's capture of New Orleans.
Wait!
I thought it was Gettysburg! I never heard of the Union capture of New Orleans!

Ferguson's point is that the Southern Economy was based on cotton and they raised money by selling bonds backed by cotton on the European Markets. This meant bonds could be redeemed by delivering cotton instead of cash, something European traders were more than happy to do. As long as the South could credibly sell these bonds, they had enough money to finance the war.
But it all depended on their being able to deliver cotton to Europe as security for those bonds. New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi was the main export port for cotton out of the south. Cotton growers used the river to transport their cotton downstream to New Orleans for onward shipping to Europe. When New Orleans fell, their whole supply chain was disrupted and the value of their cotton bonds collapsed.

Interestingly, he talks specifically about the Rothschilds in that book and about how they made their fortune. He also described how propaganda has been used against them to discredit them and portray them as something they are not: evil conspirators bent on world domination.

He showed a clip from a Nazi film which described a well known anti-Jewish trope: namely that the Rothschilds had rigged the battle of Waterloo to ensure Napolen's defeat so that they could benefit financially from it. In the flim, a Rothschild emissary is bribing a French general effectively to "throw" the battle so that the "Jews" can make a financial killing.

In fact, the Rothschilds would have much preferred Napoleon to prevail in that battle, although they did ultimately benefit very greatly from its outcome. They were hired by the British to finance the armies on the continent using their admittedly extensive networks of contacts to supply gold, as currency, to the armies in the field. In this they had been enjoying a lucrative business since the Peninsular War.

When Napoleon escaped from Elba, they foresaw a return of the same opportunity: the British would need, and would pay for, the Rothschilds web of contacts to ensure the armies were paid. They also foresaw a sharp rise in the price of gold as it was needed as a trusted currency in times of strife. So the Rothschilds bought gold heavily, knowing that the renewed war with Napoleon would raise the price. The longer the war went on, the more business for them.

And then Napoleon was defeated. And the Rothschilds were sitting on all this gold, which would naturally decline in value thanks to the onset of peace. Disaster!

In one of the deftest pieces of financial manoeuvring in history, the Rothschilds got out of this predicament by selling their gold and buying British government bonds at a huge rate. Peace would see the value of gold fall but lower interest (coupon) rates on bonds brought about by stability would see the face value of bonds appreciate dramatically. Which it did.

So they benefited from the outcome of the battle of Waterloo not because of what they had done before, or the outcome they would have preferred but in spite of it.

Of course that didn't suit the Nazi line which was that Jews were evil untermenschen who had to be exterminated. So they lied and presented an inaccurate picture of what had really happened.

There was nothing inherently financial or economic in the Nazis characterisation of Jews as subhuman. That was based on a pseudo scientific, over simplified version of Darwinism called antisemitism. But there was also no reason why that could not be exploited for financial/economic ends.

The two things are entirely separate, but they can be combined.