The Patron and the Engineer: Fritz Thyssen, Helmut Saffran, and the Financial Architecture of Nazi Funding

This working paper examines the financial relationship between German industrialist Fritz Thyssen and Dutch-Swiss commodity trader Helmut Saffran, through whom Thyssen routed funds to the Nazi Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing on partial access to the Thyssen family papers, restricted records from the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. in Rotterdam, and the 2026 Credit Suisse disclosure, the paper reconstructs the architecture of capital concealment that enabled industrial financing of National Socialism. It also traces the post-war continuity of Saffran family wealth through the testimony of Arno Saffran, Helmut's grandson, who has voluntarily acknowledged and repudiated his grandfather's wartime activities—a documented exception in a landscape characterised overwhelmingly by institutional silence. This paper forms part of the broader Silent Families project, which investigates German and Austrian industrial dynasties and their unfinished accounting with wartime capital.

Keywords: Fritz Thyssen · Nazi financing · Holocaust restitution · German industrial history · forced labour · Swiss banking · corporate accountability · Silent Families