The textbooks tell a simple story about World War II — Hitler was evil, he invaded Poland, the Allies stopped him. But the records reveal something they don’t teach in school: American banks funded Hitler’s rise, profited from Nazi Germany’s rearmament, and treated World War II as a debt collection operation to recover unpaid World War I loans. From the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that created unpayable German debts, to American corporate investment in the Third Reich, to the Bretton Woods system that emerged from the war, this wasn’t a conflict about ideology — it was the world’s largest financial consolidation disguised as military combat.
From 1919 when Germany was burdened with 132 billion gold marks in reparations, to 1944 when American banks formalized global financial dominance at Bretton Woods, World War II followed the exact pattern of World War I: create debt crisis → fund both sides → collect through conquest → emerge more powerful. This video uses banking records, corporate documents, and government archives to reveal how World War II served the same function as World War I — transferring wealth from taxpayers to international creditors: