A widely shared post says British and American agents groomed Hitler from London. The banking and intelligence files are damning. They do not, on their own, prove a thirty-year master plot.
On Friday, London filmmaker Robin Monotti shared a dark maroon book cover and a hard claim: two British secret agents and one American were planted at Adolf Hitler’s side through the 1930s “to groom and prepare him for power.” The American — a Harvard graduate and, in Monotti’s phrase, a “close friend” of Franklin Roosevelt — was “directly involved” in the 1933 Reichstag fire, which, he said, made a German dictatorship — and the world war — inevitable. “It was all masterminded from London back in the 1930s.”
The book is Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (2025), by retired Scottish physician Jim Macgregor and retired scientist John O’Dowd, published by Trine Day. It extends Macgregor’s Hidden History (2013, with Gerry Docherty), which blamed a “Secret Elite” of Anglo-American financiers and imperial officials — drawing on Carroll Quigley’s Milner-Rhodes circle — for steering the century’s wars.
What the files will bear
Some of the money trail is not a theory. The 1920s Dawes and Young Plans sent J.P. Morgan-led American loans into Weimar Germany. Fritz Thyssen, an early Nazi backer, ran U.S. interests through New York’s Union Banking Corporation, whose directors included Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman. Washington seized UBC in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act; Vesting Order 248 lists Bush holding one of 4,000 shares, all for a Dutch Thyssen bank. That is a business tie, not proof he funded Hitler’s rise. The Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of England under Montagu Norman later faced a row over Czechoslovak gold sent toward the Reichsbank after the 1939 occupation of Prague. Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler listed Western firms — Ford, Standard Oil, IBM’s German arm — still trading with the Nazi state. Historians confirm much of that commerce, not a plot to install the regime. None of this softens the regime’s crimes, including the Holocaust.
The men at his side
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a Harvard-educated early aide, was introduced to Hitler in 1922 by a U.S. military attaché and became foreign press chief. He had Roosevelt-family ties from Harvard; after fleeing Germany in 1937 he worked as an analyst for Roosevelt’s government. On the night of the Reichstag fire he was staying at Hermann Göring’s residence, next to the building that burned. The book makes him the American hand behind the arson. Historians still debate whether Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone or Nazis helped. They do not treat a Harvard piano player as the author of the fire, or as proof London scripted the war.
The British names are firmer as spies. William “Bill” de Ropp was a documented MI6 agent who met Hitler; a recent King’s College London study treats him as collecting intelligence, not grooming a dictator. His handler, F.W. Winterbotham of SIS’s Air Section, met Hitler in 1934 while assessing German rearmament. Access is not authorship.
The leap
Quigley described a real network of imperial and financial influence, not a thirty-year plan in which Britain built Hitler to wreck Germany and Russia. Mainstream historians of either world war do not share that thesis. The gold, the banks, and the agents in the room are ugly enough without turning the century into a single London operation. Keep the question. Just don’t let the cover do more work than the files.