Every time he faced the head of the Reich, who was twenty-two years younger than himself, Walter . Funk felt like a errant student who met the dean. Although the temperature in the room was cool and pleasant, a bead of sweat still appeared on Funke's forehead.

The Deputy Minister of the Reich Ministry of Economy was well aware of the character of the apostle of God in front of him, and he had always had a good personal relationship with the Führer, and had already established a friendship with Stadler when he was a small press spokesman in the Nazi Party, and he used to like this boy who used to hide in the shadows, and especially admired the quick thinking and eloquent language of the other party.

But now the status of the two sides is very different from what it used to be, Funk has gone from the former government minister to the deputy minister, and the former partner has stood at the top of the power, and the changes in the Nazi party in just a few months now seem like a dream.

In the past, high-spirited colleagues were dismissed, and the scale of arrests even exceeded the purge of the Roma SA in those years, and the brutality was even more impressive. In those days, dozens, if not hundreds, of people were convicted every day, most of them sentenced to death, and Funk thought perhaps the word slaughter would be more appropriate to describe the situation during that period.

The fifty-year-old deputy minister of the Reich's economy, who had already been on the top, was short and stocky, with a huge beer belly, and looked like the standard Prussian businessman described in a satirical novel. Originally from a merchant family, he was born in Trekner, East Prussia, and as a young man studied law, philosophy, and economics at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Leipzig.

After a brief and painful period in the last war, when he was eventually dismissed from the army for physical reasons, he took a job as an editor at the Berliner Stock Exchange, a right-wing financial newspaper at the time, and was exposed to nationalist ideas and established his political beliefs for the rest of his life.

When Hitler's Nazi Party stood out from the crowd of jumbled right-wing parties, the passionate mustachioed leader made him feel bright, and Hitler's every word seemed to speak to Funck's heart, so he resolutely quit his lucrative editorial job and joined the Nazi Party, which was still in the entrepreneurial stage at the time.

Because of his previous work experience in financial newspapers, Funk has become one of the few talents in the party who understands both propaganda and economics. After a period of work in the party, Hitler also recognized his outstanding talents and began to entrust him with important tasks. He also served for a time as head of the Nazi National Enlightenment and Propaganda Department, now in Goebbels' position. In fact, his interest has always been in the economy, he was chairman of the Nazi Economic Policy Committee for a time, and he also served as the Nazi economic chief representative, and finally when Schacht resigned as economic minister, he got his wish to be the German economic minister.

In fact, he was supposed to be Hitler's man, but by mistake, he was with Reinhardt. Feng. Stadler formed a friendship. When the two kings clashed, he firmly chose to side with Hitler, and when the outcome was clear, he was imprisoned, taken from his home by the SS, and placed under house arrest in a special military prison for three days.

These three days of darkness and terror made him interested in Feng. Stadler had a new understanding of his abilities, and he realized that once he lost the protection of his leader, he was not even as good as a street vendor. At that time, Feng. It only takes one order from Städler to take away his power, honor, property, and family, as well as everything he owns, including the cause he has been fighting for more than a decade now. When Rosenberg was dragged away by firing squad, he was confined to the first cell in the corridor, diagonally opposite Ribbentrop, and to this day he often remembers the beaten face of the godfather of Nazi thought.

Fortunately, Xu Jun values his personal abilities more seriously, and coupled with the friendships he has formed before, Funk is considered to be the kind of person who can be won over. However, the Minister of Economy could not continue to work, his set of Nazi wartime economic theories were used to fool Hitler, Xu Jun was well aware of the shortcomings, but it was not Xu Jun's habit to put aside a known talent, so he treated Ribbentrop in the same way, demoted Funk by half a level, and retained him as the deputy minister of economy.

"My Führer, the numbers don't lie, and according to the statements we have made this quarter, I share the opinion of Minister Schacht, that if this plan is followed, we can reduce the deficit to 30 percent in a year." Funk stood at the conference table and respectfully reported to Xu Jun.

"The total economic volume of the empire has not changed, and the imbalance between the balance of payments continues to grow. We need to expand the scale of trade and control the output of some enterprises. Shacht added that the Minister of Economy was now sitting in the first seat to Xu Jun's right, and across from him was the Empire's Minister of Labor.

After the fall of Hitler, Schacht was renamed Minister of Reich Economy by Xu Jun, but he explicitly refused at first.

He did not choose to resign as minister because of a conflict with Hitler's ideas, as the outside world thinks, but in fact because he found that the loopholes in the Nazi economy were getting bigger and bigger, and he would be unable to hold on to it, so this shrewd old fox deliberately quarreled with Hitler and took the opportunity to decisively get rid of the black cauldron.

He was an expert in international finance and trade, and he also admired state intervention in economic production, which seemed contradictory, but it was very much in line with the realities of Germany at the time. Under Schacht's leadership, the German economy developed exponentially, and he used sophisticated financial means to obtain tens of billions of valuable foreign exchange from investors from all over the world.

But Hitler invested large sums of foreign exchange and loans in military production, and although it seemed that in the short term Germany had a prosperous scene in the world, Schacht clearly realized that this temporary prosperity was in fact an illusion to deceive the people. It is true that military production can make a lot of profits in the short term, but the problem is that it is impossible to continue to produce arms in unlimited quantities, and it is also impossible for a country's economy to be supported by the arms manufacturing industry alone. The military industry provides a large number of jobs, and all the products produced are paid for by the state, and it is the state finance that supports all this, and once there is a financial problem, the entire industrial chain will collapse immediately, and most of the German financial expenditure at that time actually came from national debt and overseas investment and loans, and sooner or later the money will have to be repaid.

Hitler's intentions were then exposed in Germany's four-year plan, which was to build a self-sufficient society that could survive in isolation from the rest of the world. Under what circumstances would Germany have such a need, there is no doubt that it was a bloody and brutal war, and Hitler was preparing for the goal that after the outbreak of the war, once Germany was completely blockaded, it could still support the goal of continuing to fight.

The Nazis' economic policies would completely ruin the hard-won gains that had been made, and Schacht was unable to oppose it, so he decided to find a way to get out of this bottomless trap before the consequences occurred, and finally Schacht managed to escape, replacing Funk, who was thrown down by his side.

In fact, Germany was close to bankruptcy in 39 years, with a fiscal deficit of 20 billion marks, and the more than 30 billion national bonds sold before were about to mature in 40 years, which also made Hitler ignore the army's war preparations that had not really been completed, ignoring the opposition of a group of generals and officials around him, and recklessly launched a series of foreign military adventures, because he urgently needed to make up for the economic deficit with the plundered spoils.

He personally wrote a letter to Schacht, first using a lot of data and intelligence to prove the crisis facing Germany, and sincerely asking Schacht to give up his previous grudge against Hitler and the Nazi Party, and to contribute his strength to Germany again. Xu Jun claimed that if Schacht was willing to return to his post as economy minister, he assured that he would be given more space than ever before to use his abilities, because he was no longer in front of a German empire, but the entire German-led European Union.

Xu Jun promised Schacht that he would be able to use his talents to the fullest, and that he would not interfere with them at will, except when it came to key national policies. Schacht would become the economic policy planner and leader of the European Alliance, and the whole world would then be his stage, with a powerful imperial armed force as his solid backing.

Xu Jun also told him that Germany was preparing to establish a European bank with European countries, and that Schacht would be assigned to represent Germany in this matter, and that he would be appointed as its first president.

It is not so much that Schacht was moved by the sincerity of the new Führer, but that he could not resist the temptations in the letter at all, so the Minister of Economy did not hesitate to swallow the bait thrown by Xu Jun into his mouth, and the next day he went to the office building of the Ministry of Economy with his bag in high spirits.

I ask for a monthly pass, I ask for a recommendation ticket, and thank you for your encouragement and support.

Thank you. (To be continued.) )