Pulling Hitler's purse strings

This has been quite a year for books about Adolf Hitler, ranging from the first superb volume of an authoritative biography by the British historian, Ian Kershaw, to an account by a German academic which says that, in contrast to his simple-living vegetarian image, the Nazi dictator was a tax-dodging millionaire before gaining power.

While Hitler hogs the limelight more than 50 years after his death, his entourage holds its own special immoral fascination. Serving Hitler meant serving an evil cause. Whatever the protestations at war crime trials that they did not know what was going on, anybody with a senior post in the Nazi machine could have had no illusions about the terrible things being done in the Third Reich. Indeed, the regime delighted in its criminal behaviour on a massive scale.

So the defence became that the high functionaries of Nazi Germany had only been following orders.

That plea has become a cliche which can only be uttered with a satirical tone. In the case of Nazi Germany, being part of the means meant complicity with the ends - and this is what makes the career of Hitler's banker, Hjalmar Schacht, so interesting.

As president of Germany's central bank and controller of the currency in the 1920s, before the Nazis came to power, Schacht carved out a reputation for himself as the man who halted the runaway inflation that had gripped Germany after its defeat in World War I.

He negotiated financial aid and debt packages that gave the Weimar Republic a temporary lease of life.

But when the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s, Schacht put his skills at their disposal, organising the financial structure that paid for the construction of their war machine.