Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht always has been a dangerous man. He still is.

This frock-coated ex-Nazi with the convenient American middle name turned up recently in Iran, where he was “advising” Mossadegh. Now he turns up in Cairo, where he is “advising” the Egyptian Government.

Schacht’s “advice” to Egyptian leaders is to distrust Americans. He says he doesn’t “hate Americans,” but he does “hate Americanization of trade markets ... which causes damage to small nations.”

This is precisely the sort of thing to be expected from this man who first won the reputation of being a “magician” by financing Hitler, and later reinforced that reputation by hoodwinking the American Military Government in Germany, the International Military Tribunal, and no less than five denazification courts, with the tall story that his notorious career as Hitler’s financial expert was “camouflage” to disguise the fact that he really hated the Fuehrer.

The record shows that Schacht helped Hitler to power, then employed the bootstrap economics which financed the Third Reich’s launching of the Second World War. As one prosecutor asserted: “Without Schacht, Hitler might never have come to power.”

As early as 1933 a key Nazi said: “Schacht is one of the few who quite steadily side with the Fuehrer.” He arranged the loans by which a credulous U.S. not only paid Germany’s reparations from the First World War but even paid the Reich a bonus on the deal.

Later, it is true, Schacht turned up in a concentration camp. He said he had fallen into disfavor with Hitler, that he would have liked to kill him. But it would be quite in character for this smart operator to have himself planted in a concentration camp so he could fool the Allies and—once again—land on his feet.

Anyone who knows the details of Schacht’s career knows that wherever he goes, trouble follows. That is why the activities of Hitler’s “magician” need careful watching. The Near East is a troubled area, and Schacht is an expert at fishing in troubled waters.

So far as we know, Schacht never shot anybody, never swung a whip on war prisoners, never tortured the pitiable inmates of concentration camps. But Schacht found the money to pay the men who did those things. It was Schacht whose “magic” financed not only the war, but the massacres, the Gestapo, the whole bestial orgy of Nazi barbarism.

Yet this is the man who supposedly is “de-Nazified.” It seems incredible that he ever should fool anyone—again. But there he is. In Cairo, when he should be in prison.