The Last Days of the Big Lie

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President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe

President Roosevelt’s Campaign To Incite War in Europe : The Secret Polish Documents
By Mark Weber
Source: Institute for Historical Review

Major ceremonies were held in 1982 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With the exceptions of Washington and Lincoln, he was glorified and eulogized as no other president in American history. Even conservative President Ronald Reagan joined the chorus of applause. In early 1983, newspapers and television networks remembered the fiftieth anniversary of Roosevelt’s inauguration with numerous laudatory tributes.

And yet, with each passing year more and more new evidence comes to light which contradicts the glowing image of Roosevelt portrayed by the mass media and politicians.

Much has already been written about Roosevelt’s campaign of deception and outright lies in getting the United States to intervene in the Second World War prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Roosevelt’s aid to Britain and the Soviet Union in violation of American neutrality and international law, his acts of war against Germany in the Atlantic in an effort to provoke a German declaration of war against the United States, his authorization of a vast “dirty tricks” campaign against U.S. citizens by British intelligence agents in violation of the Constitution, and his provocations and ultimatums against Japan which brought on the attack against Pearl Harbor — all this is extensively documented and reasonably well known.[1]

Not so well known is the story of Roosevelt’s enormous responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War itself. This essay focuses on Roosevelt’s secret campaign to provoke war in Europe prior to the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939. It deals particularly with his efforts to pressure Britain, France and Poland into war against Germany in 1938 and 1939.

Franklin Roosevelt not only criminally involved America in a war which had already engulfed Europe. He bears a grave responsibility before history for the outbreak of the most destructive war of all time.

This paper relies heavily on a little-known collection of secret Polish documents which fell into German hands when Warsaw was captured in September 1939. These documents clearly establish Roosevelt’s crucial role in bringing on the Second World War. They also reveal the forces behind the President which pushed for war.

While a few historians have quoted sentences and even paragraphs from these documents, their importance has not been fully appreciated. There are three reasons for this, I believe. First, for many years their authenticity was not indisputably established. Second, a complete collection of the documents has not been available in English. And third, the translation of those documents which has been available in English until now is deficient and unacceptably bad.

When the Germans took Warsaw in late September 1939, they seized a mass of documents from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a letter of 8 April 1983, Dr. Karl Otto Braun of Munich informed me that the documents were captured by an SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg, whom Braun knew personally. In a surprise attack, the brigade captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular German army. Von Kuensberg told Braun that his men took control of the Polish Foreign Ministry just as Ministry officials were in the process of burning incriminating documents. Dr. Braun was an official of the German Foreign Office between 1938 and 1945.

The German Foreign Office chose Hans Adolf von Moltke, formerly the Reich’s Ambassador in Warsaw, to head a special Archive Commission to examine the collection and sort out those documents which might be suitable for publication. At the end of March 1940, 16 of these were published in book form under the title Polnische Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges [“Polish Documents on the Pre-History of the War”]. The Foreign Office edition was subtitled “German White Book No. 3.” The book was immediately published in various foreign language editions in Berlin and some other European capitals. An American edition was published in New York by Howell, Soskin and Company as The German White Paper. Historian C. Hartley Grattan contributed a remarkably cautious and reserved foreword.[2]

The translation of the documents for the U.S. White Paper edition was inexcusably bad. Whole sentences and parts of sentences were missing and portions were grossly mistranslated. H. Keith Thompson explained to me why this was so during a conversation on 22 March 1983 and in a letter of 13 May 1983. A poor first draft English-language translation had been prepared in Berlin and sent to America. It was given to George Sylvester Viereck, a prominent pro-German American publicist and literary advisor to the German Library of Information in New York City. Thompson knew Viereck intimately and served as his chief aide and re-writer. Viereck had hurriedly redrafted the translation from Berlin into more readable prose but without any opportunity of comparing it to the original Polish text (which he could not read in any case) or even the official German-language version. In making stylistic changes for the sake of readability, the meaning of the original documents was thereby inadvertently distorted.

The matter was also discussed at a small dinner for Lawrence Dennis hosted by Thompson at Viereck’s apartment in the Hotel Belleclaire in New York City in 1956. Viereck explained that he had been a highly paid literary consultant to the German government, responsible for the propaganda effect of publications, and could not be concerned with the translation groundwork normally done by clerks. Even the most careful translation of complicated documents is apt to distort the original meaning, and literary editing is certain to do so, Viereck said. Thompson agreed with that view.

In preparing the English-language text for this essay, I have carefully examined the official German translation and various other translations, and compared them with facsimiles of the original Polish documents.

Media Sensation

The German government considered the captured Polish documents to be of tremendous importance. On Friday, 29 March, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda confidentially informed the daily press of the reason for releasing the documents:

These extraordinary documents, which may be published beginning with the first edition on Saturday, will create a first-class political sensation, since they in fact prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of the present war. America’s responsibility must not, of course, be stressed in commentaries; the documents must be left to speak for themselves, and they speak clearly enough.

The Ministry of Propaganda specifically asks that sufficient space be reserved for the publication of these documents, which is of supreme importance to the Reich and the German people.

We inform you in confidence that the purpose of publishing these documents is to strengthen the American isolationists and to place Roosevelt in an untenable position, especially in view of the fact that he is standing for re-election. It is however not at all necessary for us to point Roosevelt’s responsibility; his enemies in America will take care of that.[3]

The German Foreign Office made the documents public on Friday, 29 March 1940. In Berlin, journalists from around the world, including the United States, were given facsimile copies of the original Polish documents and translations in German. journalists were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with an enormous pile of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry.

The release of the documents was an international media sensation. American newspapers gave the story large front page headline coverage and published lengthy excerpts from the documents. But the impact was much less than the German government had hoped for.

Leading U.S. government officials wasted no time in vehemently denouncing the documents as not authentic. Secretary of State Cordell Hull stated: “I may say most emphatically that neither I nor any of my associates in the Department of State have ever heard of any such conversations as those alleged, nor do we give them the slightest credence. The statements alleged have not represented in any way at any time the thought or the policy of the American government.” William Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador to Paris who was particulary incriminated by the documents, announced: “I have never made to anyone the statements attributed to me.” And Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington whose confidential reports to Warsaw were the most revealing, declared: “I deny the allegations attributed to my reports. I never had any conversations with Ambassador Bullitt on America’s participation in war.”[4]

These categorical public denials by the highest officials had the effect of almost completely undercutting the anticipated impact of the documents. It must be remembered that this was several decades before the experiences of the Vietnam war and Watergate had taught another generation of Americans to be highly skeptical of such official denials. In 1940, the vast majority of the American people trusted their political leaders to tell them the truth.

After all, if the documents made public to the world by the German government were in fact authentic and genuine, it would mean that the great leader of the American democracy was a man who lied to his own people and broke his own country’s laws, while the German government told the truth. To accept that would be quite a lot to expect of any nation, but especially of the trusting American public.

Comment from Capitol Hill generally echoed the official government view. Senator Key Pittman, the Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the documents “unmitigated falsehood designed to create dissension in the United States.” Senator Claude Peper, Democrat of Florida, declared: “It’s German propaganda and shouldn’t affect our policies in the least.” Only a few were not impressed with the official denials. Representative Hamilton Fish of New york, the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for a Congressional investigation and declared in a radio address: “If these charges were true, it would constitute a treasonable act. If President Roosevelt has entered into secret understandings or commitments with foreign governments to involve us in war, he should be impeached.”[5]

American newspapers stressed the high-level denials in reporting the release of the documents. The New York Times headline read: U.S. BRANDS AS FALSE NAZI DOCUMENTS CHARGING WE FOSTERED WAR IN EUROPE AND PROMISED TO JOIN ALLIES IF NEEDED. The Baltimore Sun headlined: NAZI DOCUMENTS LAYING WAR BLAME ON U.S. ARE ASSAILED IN WASHINGTON.[6]

Although the book of Polish documents was labeled “first series,” no further volumes ever appeared. From time to time the German government would make public additional documents from the Polish archives. These were published in book form in 1943 along with numerous other documents captured by the Germans from the French Foreign Ministry and other European archives, under the title Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten Staaten [“Roosevelt’s Way Into War: Secret Documents on the War Policy of the President of the United States”].[7]

A very important unanswered question is: Where are the original Polish documents today? Unless they were destroyed in the conflagration of the war, they presumably fell into either American or Soviet hands in 1945. In view of recent U.S. government policy on secret archival material, it is very unlikely that they would still be secret today if they had been acquired by the United States. My guess is that if they were not destroyed, they are now either in Moscow or at the East German Central State Archives in Potsdam.

It is particularly important to keep in mind that these secret reports were written by top level Polish ambassadors, that is, by men who though not at all friendly to Germany nonetheless understood the realities of European Politics far better than those who made policy in the United States.

For example, the Polish ambassadors realized that behind all their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and expressions of love for the United States, the Jews who agitated for war against Germany were actually doing nothing other than ruthlessly furthering their own purely sectarian interests. Many centuries of experience in living closely with the Jews had made the Poles far more aware than most nationalities of the special character of this people.

The Poles viewed the Munich Settlement of 1938 very differently than did Roosevelt and his circle. The President bitterly attacked the Munich agreement, which gave self-determination to the three and a half million Germans of Czechoslovakia and settled a major European crisis, as a shameful and humiliating capitulation to German blackmail. Although wary of German might, the Polish government supported the Munich agreement, in part because a small Polish territory which had been a part of Czechoslovakia against the wishes of its inhabitants was united with Poland as a result of the Settlement.

The Polish envoys held the makers of American foreign policy in something approaching contempt. President Roosevelt was considered a master political artist who knew how to mold American public opinion, but very little about the true state of affairs in Europe. As Poland’s Ambassador to Washington emphasized in his reports to Warsaw, Roosevelt pushed America into war in order to distract attention from his failures as President in domestic policy.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the complexities of German-Polish relations between 1933 and 1939 and the reasons for the German attack against Poland at dawn on the first day of September 1939. However, it should be noted that Poland had refused to even negotiate over self-determination for the German city of Danzig and the ethnic German minority in the so-called Polish Corridor. Hitler felt compelled to resort to arms when he did in response to a growing Polish campaign of terror and dispossession against the one and a half million ethnic Germans under Polish rule. In my view, if ever a military action was justified, it was the German campaign against Poland in 1939.

Poland’s headstrong refusal to negotiate was made possible because of a fateful blank check guarantee of military backing from Britain — a pledge that ultimately proved completely worthless to the hapless Poles. Considering the lightning swiftness of the victorious German campaign, it is difficult to realize today that the Polish government did not at all fear war with Germany. Poland’s leaders foolishly believed that German might was only an illusion. They were convinced that their troops would occupy Berlin itself within a few weeks and add further German territories to an enlarged Polish state. It is also important to keep in mind that the purely localized conflict between Germany and Poland was only transformed into a Europe-wide conflagration by the British and French declarations of war against Germany.

After the war the Allied-appointed judges at the International Military Tribunal staged at Nuremberg refused to admit the Polish documents as evidence for the German defense. Had these pieces of evidence been admitted, the Nuremberg undertaking might have been less a victors’ show trial and more a genuinely impartial court of international justice.

Authenticity Beyond Doubt

There is now absolutely no question that the documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw made public by the German government are genuine and authentic.

Charles C. Tansill, professor of American diplomatic history at Georgetown University, considered them genuine. “… I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic,” he wrote.[8] Historian and sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes confirmed this assessment: “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[9] In America’s Second Crusade, William H. Chamberlain reported: “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[10]

More importantly, Edward Raczynski, the Polish Ambassador in London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed the authenticity of the documents in his diary, which was published in 1963 under the title In Allied London. In his entry for 20 June 1940, he wrote:

The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki in Washington, Lukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of originals and not merely copies.

In this ‘First Series’ of documents I found three reports from this Embassy, two by myself and the third signed by me but written by Balinski. I read them with some apprehension, but they contained nothing liable to compromise myself or the Embassy or to impair relations with our British hosts.[11]

In 1970 their authenticity was reconfirmed with the publication of Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939. This important work consists of the official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Lukasiewicz, the former Polish Ambassador to Paris who authored several of the secret diplomatic reports made public by the German government. The collection was edited by Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member, and later Professor Emeritus of Wellesley and Ripon colleges. Professor Jedrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine. He quoted extensively from several of them.

Mr. Tyler G. Kent has also vouched for the authenticity of the documents. He states that while working at the U.S. embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents and which confirmed their accuracy.

Two Key Diplomats

Two American diplomats who played especially crucial roles in the European crisis of 1938-1939 are mentioned often in the Polish documents. The first of these was William C. Bullitt. Although his official position was U.S. Ambassador to France, he was in reality much more than that. He was Roosevelt’s “super envoy” and personal deputy in Europe.

Like Roosevelt, Bullitt “rose from the rich.” He was born into an important Philadelphia banking family, one of the city’s wealthiest. His mother’s grandfather, Jonathan Horwitz, was a German Jew who had come to the United States from Berlin.[12] In 1919 Bullitt was an assistant to President Wilson at the Versailles peace conference. That same year, Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George sent him to Russia to meet with Lenin and determine if the new Bolshevik government deserved recognition by the Allies. Bullitt met with Lenin and other top Soviet leaders and upon his return urged recognition of the new regime. But he had a falling-out with Wilson and left diplomatic service. In 1923 he married Louise Bryant Reed, the widow of American Communist leader John Reed. In Europe Bullitt collaborated with Sigmund Freud on a psychoanalytical biography of Wilson. When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he brought Bullitt back into diplomatic life.[13]

In November 1933, Roosevelt sent Bullitt to Moscow as the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. His initial enthusiasm for the Soviet system gave way to a deep distrust of Stalin and Communism. In 1936 the President transferred him to Paris. He served there as Roosevelt’s key European diplomat until 1940 when Churchill’s assumption of leadership in Britain and the defeat of France made his special role superfluous.

In the Spring of 1938, all U.S. envoys in Europe were subordinated to Bullitt by an internal directive of the State Department.[14] As the European situation worsened in 1939, Roosevelt often spoke with his man in Paris by telephone, sometimes daily, frequently giving him precisely detailed and ultra-confidential instructions on how to conduct America’s foreign policy. Not even Secretary of State Cordell Hull was privy to many of the letters and communications between Bullitt and Roosevelt.

In France, the New York Times noted, Bullitt “was acclaimed there as ‘the Champagne Ambassador’ on account of the lavishness of his parties, but he was far more than the envoy to Paris: He was President Roosevelt’s intimate adviser on European affairs, with telephone access to the President at any hour.”[15]

Bullitt and Roosevelt were fond of each other and saw eye to eye on foreign policy issues. Both were aristocrats and thorough internationalists who shared definite views on how to remake the world and a conviction that they were destined to bring about that grand reorganization.

“Between these teammates,” the Saturday Evening Post reported in March 1939,

there is a close, hearty friendship and a strong temperamental affinity. The President is known to rely upon Bullitt’s judgment so heavily that the ambassador’s mailed and cabled reports from abroad are supplemented several times a week by a chat by transatlantic telephone. In addition, Bullitt returns to the United States several times each year to take part in White House councils, to the displeasure of the State Department, which considers him a prima donna.

In the whole roster of the State Department the President could not have found an adviser who would have been so responsive to his own champagne personality as Bullitt. Both men, born patricians, have the same basic enthusiasm for remolding society …[16]

In Europe, Bullitt spoke with the voice and the authority of President Roosevelt himself.

The second most important American diplomat in Europe was Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt’s Ambassador at the Court of St. James. Like Bullitt he was a wealthy banker. But this Boston Catholic of Irish ancestry was otherwise a very different sort of man. Roosevelt sent Kennedy, an important Democratic party figure and father of a future President, to Britain for purely political reasons. Roosevelt disliked and distrusted Kennedy, and this sentiment grew as Kennedy opposed the President’s war policies more and more vehemently. Moreover, Kennedy despised his counterpart in Paris. In a letter to his wife, he wrote: “I talk to Bullitt occasionally. He is more rattlebrained than ever. His judgment is pathetic and I am afraid of his influence on F.D.R. because they think alike on many things.”[17]

The Documents

Here now are extensive excerpts from the Polish documents themselves. They are given in chronological order. They are remarkably lucid for diplomatic reports and speak eloquently for themselves.

* * * * *

On 9 February 1938, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, reported to the Foreign Minister in Warsaw on the Jewish role in making American foreign policy:

The pressure of the Jews on President Roosevelt and on the State Department is becoming ever more powerful …

… The Jews are right now the leaders in creating a war psychosis which would plunge the entire world into war and bring about general catastrophe. This mood is becoming more and more apparent.

in their definition of democratic states, the Jews have also created real chaos: they have mixed together the idea of democracy and communism and have above all raised the banner of burning hatred against Nazism.

This hatred has become a frenzy. It is propagated everywhere and by every means: in theaters, in the cinema, and in the press. The Germans are portrayed as a nation living under the arrogance of Hitler which wants to conquer the whole world and drown all of humanity in an ocean of blood.

In conversations with Jewish press representatives I have repeatedly come up against the inexorable and convinced view that war is inevitable. This international Jewry exploits every means of propaganda to oppose any tendency towards any kind of consolidation and understanding between nations. In this way, the conviction is growing steadily but surely in public opinion here that the Germans and their satellites, in the form of fascism, are enemies who must be subdued by the ‘democratic world.’

On 21 November 1938, Ambassador Potocki sent a report to Warsaw which discussed in some detail a conversation between himself and Bullitt, who happened to be back in Washington:

The day before yesterday I had a long conversation with Ambassador Bullitt, who is here on vacation. He began by remarking that friendly relations existed between himself and [Polish] Ambassador Lukasiewicz in Paris, whose company he greatly enjoyed.

Since Bullitt regularly informs President Roosevelt about the international situation in Europe, and particularly about Russia, great attention is given to his reports by President Roosevelt and the State Department. Bullitt speaks energetically and interestingly. Nonetheless, his reaction to events in Europe resembles the view of a journalist more than that of a politician …

About Germany and Chancellor Hitler he spoke with great vehemence and strong hatred. He said that only force, and ultimately a war would put an end to the insane future German expansionism.

To my question asking how he visualized this coming war, he replied that above all the United States, France and England must rearm tremendously in order to be in a position to oppose German power.

Only then, when the moment is ripe, declared Bullitt further, will one be ready for the final decision. I asked him in what way a conflict could arise, since Germany would probably not attack England and France first. I simply could not see the connecting point in this whole combination.

Bullitt replied that the democratic countries absolutely needed another two years until they were fully armed. In the meantime, Germany would probably have advanced with its expansion in an easterly direction. It would be the wish of the democratic countries that armed conflict would break out there, in the East between the German Reich and Russia. As the Soviet Union’s potential strength is not yet known, it might happen that Germany would have moved too far away from its base, and would be condemned to wage a long and weakening war. Only then would the democratic countries attack Germany, Bullitt declared, and force her to capitulate.

In reply to my question whether the United States would take part in such a war, he said, ‘Undoubtedly yes, but only after Great Britain and France had let loose first!’ Feeling in the United States was no intense against Nazism and Hitlerism, that a psychosis already prevails today among Americans similar to that before America’s declaration of war against Germany in 1917.

Bullitt did not give the impression of being very well informed about the situation in Eastern Europe, and he conversed in a rather superficial way.

Ambassador Potocki’s report from Washington of 9 January 1939 dealt in large part with President Roosevelt’s annual address to Congress:

President Roosevelt acts on the assumption that the dictatorial governments, above all Germany and Japan, only understand a policy of force. Therefore he has decided to react to any future blows by matching them. This has been demonstrated by the most recent measures of the United States.

The American public is subject to an ever more alarming propaganda which is under Jewish influence and continuously conjures up the specter of the danger of war. Because of this the Americans have strongly altered their views on foreign policy problems, in comparison with last year.

Of all the documents in this collection, the most revealing is probably the secret report by Ambassador Potocki of 12 January 1939 which dealt with the domestic situation in the United States. This report is given here in full:

The feeling now prevailing in the United States is marked by a growing hatred of Fascism and, above all, of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with Nazism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100 percent radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible-above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited-this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.

Right now most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and Nazism as the greatest evil and greatest danger threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who don’t spare any words to incite the public here with every kind of slander. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.

It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely excluded. If mentioned at all, it is only in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way as if Soviet Russia were working with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathy of the American public is completely on the side of Red Spain.

Besides this propaganda, a war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is unavoidable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America must also take an active part in order to defend the slogans of freedom and democracy in the world.

President Roosevelt was the first to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose: First, he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from domestic political problems, especially the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors about danger threatening Europe, he wanted to get the American people to accept an enormous armament program which exceeds the defense requirements of the United States.

Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is steadily growing worse. The unemployed today already number twelve million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far there have only been the usual strikes and local unrest. But how long this kind of government aid can be kept up cannot be predicted. The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.

As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever political player and an expert of the American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand, to conjure up a war menace hanging over the world because of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by babbling about an attack of the totalitarian states against the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He portrayed it as a capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As people say here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.

The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German Nazism is further kindled by the brutal policy against the Jews in Germany and by the émigré problem. In this action, various Jewish intellectuals participated: for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau; and others who are personal friends of President Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-makers. These groups of people who occupy the highest positions in the American government and want to pose as representatives of ‘true Americanism’ and ‘defenders of democracy’ are, in the last analysis, connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.

For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to portray the President of the United States as the ‘idealist’ champion on human rights was a very clever move. In this manner they have created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a masterly manner. Roosevelt has been given the foundation for activating American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous military stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving very consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is very convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism, which is constantly growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending religion and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.

On 16 January 1939, Polish Ambassador Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry on another lengthy conversation he had with Roosevelt’s personal envoy, William Bullitt:

The day before yesterday, I had a longer discussion with Ambassador Bullitt in the Embassy where he called on me. Bullitt leaves on the 21st of this month for Paris, from where he has been absent for almost three months. He is sailing with a whole ‘trunk’ full of instructions, conversations, and directives from President Roosevelt, the State Department and Senators who belong to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In talking with Bullitt I had the impression that he had received from President Roosevelt a very precise definition of the attitude taken by the United States towards the present European crisis. He will present this material at the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry] and will make use of it in discussions with European statesmen. The contents of these directives, as Bullitt explained them to me in the course of a conversation lasting half an hour, were:

1. The vitalizing of foreign policy under the leadership of President Roosevelt, who severely and unambiguously condemns totalitarian countries.

2. United States preparations for war on sea, land and air will be carried out at an accelerated pace and will consume the colossal sum of 1.25 billion dollars.

3. It is the decided opinion of the President that France and Britain must put an end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not get into any discussions aiming at any kind of territorial changes.

4. They have the moral assurance that the United States will abandon the policy of isolation and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth of money and raw materials at their disposal.

The Polish Ambassador to Paris, Juliusz (Jules) Lukasiewicz, sent a top secret report to the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw at the beginning of February 1939 which outlined U.S. policy towards Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:

A week ago, the Ambassador of the United States, William Bullitt returned to Paris after a three months’ leave in America. Meanwhile, I have had two conversations with him which enable me to inform you of his views regarding the European situation and to give a survey of Washington’s policy.

The international situation is regarded by official circles as extremely serious and in constant danger of armed conflict. Those in authority are of the opinion that if war should break out between Britain and France on the one hand, and Germany and Italy on the other, and should Britain and France be defeated, the Germans would endanger the real interests of the United States on the American continent. For this reason, one can foresee right from the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally some time after the outbreak of the war. As Ambassador Bullitt expressed it: ‘Should war break out we shall certainly not take part in it at the beginning, but we shall finish it.’

On 7 March 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent a remarkably lucid and perceptive report on Roosevelt’s foreign policy to his government in Warsaw. This document was first made public when leading German newspapers published it in German translation, along with a facsimile reproduction of the first page of the Polish original, in their editions of 28 October 1940. The main National Socialist party newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, published the Ambassador’s report with this observation:

The document itself needs no commentary. We do not know, and it does not concern us, whether the internal American situation as reported by the Polish diplomat is correct in every detail. That must be decided by the American people alone. But in the interest of historical truth it is important for us to show that the warmongering activities of American diplomacy, especially in Europe, are once again revealed and proven by this document. It still remains a secret just who, and for what motives, have driven American diplomacy to this course. In any case, the results have been disastrous for both Europe and America. Europe was plunged into war and America has brought upon itself the hostility of great nations which normally have no differences with the American people and, indeed, have not been in conflict but have lived for generations as friends and want to remain so.

This report was not one of the Polish documents which was released in March 1940 and published as part of the “German White Book No. 3” (or the German White Paper). However, it was published in 1943 as part of the collection entitled “Roosevelt’s Way Into War.” As far as I can determine, this English translation is the first that has ever appeared. Ambassador Potocki’s secret report of 7 March 1939 is here given in full:

The foreign policy of the United States right now concerns not only the government, but the entire American public as well. The most important elements are the public statements of President Roosevelt. In almost every public speech he refers more or less explicitly to the necessity of activating foreign policy against the chaos of views and ideologies in Europe. These statements are picked up by the press and then cleverly filtered into the minds of average Americans in such a way as to strengthen their already formed opinions. The same theme is constantly repeated, namely, the danger of war in Europe and saving the democracies from inundation by enemy fascism. In all of these public statements there is normally only a single theme, that is, the danger from Nazism and Nazi Germany to world peace.

As a result of these speeches, the public is called upon to support rearmament and the spending of enormous sums for the navy and the air force. The unmistakable idea behind this is that in case of an armed conflict the United States cannot stay out but must take an active part in the maneuvers. As a result of the effective speeches of President Roosevelt, which are supported by the press, the American public is today being conscientiously manipulated to hate everything that smacks of totalitarianism and fascism. But it is interesting that the USSR is not included in all this. The American public considers Russia more in the camp of the democratic states. This was also the case during the Spanish civil war when the so-called Loyalists were regarded as defenders of the democratic idea.

The State Department operates without attracting a great deal of attention, although it is known that Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull and President Roosevelt swear allegiance to the same ideas. However, Hull shows more reserve than Roosevelt, and he loves to make a distinction between Nazism and Chancellor Hitler on the one hand, and the German people on the other. He considers this form of dictatorial government a temporary “necessary evil.” In contrast, the State Department is unbelievably interested in the USSR and its internal situation and openly worries itself over its weaknesses and decline. The main reason for United States interest in the Russians is the situation in the Far East. The current government would be glad to see the Red Army emerge as the victor in a conflict with Japan. That’s why the sympathies of the government are clearly on the side of China, which recently received considerable financial aid amounting to 25 million dollars.

Eager attention is given to all information from the diplomatic posts as well as to the special emissaries of the President who serve as Ambassadors of the United States. The President frequently calls his representatives from abroad to Washington for personal exchanges of views and to give them special information and instructions. The arrival of the envoys and ambassadors is always shrouded in secrecy and very little surfaces in the press about the results of their visits. The State Department also takes care to avoid giving out any kind of information about the course of these interviews. The practical way in which the President makes foreign policy is most effective. He gives personal instructions to his representatives abroad, most of whom are his personal friends. In this way the United States is led down a dangerous path in world politics with the explicit intention of abandoning the comfortable policy of isolation. The President regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own personal ambition. He listens carefully and happily to his echo in the other capitals of the world. In domestic as well as in foreign policy, the Congress of the United States is the only object that stands in the way of the President and his government in carrying out his decisions quickly and ambitiously. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Constitution of the United States gave the highest prerogatives to the American parliament which may criticize or reject the law of the White House.

The foreign policy of President Roosevelt has recently been the subject of intense discussion in the lower house and in the Senate, and this has caused excitement. The so-called Isolationists, of whom there are many in both houses, have come out strongly against the President. The representatives and senators were especially upset over the remarks by the President, which were published in the press, in which he said that the borders of the United States lie on the Rhine. But President Roosevelt is a superb political player and understands completely the power of the American parliament. He has his own people there, and he knows how to withdraw from an uncomfortable situation at the right moment.

Very intelligently and cleverly he ties together the question of foreign policy with the issues of American rearmament. He particularly stresses the necessity of spending enormous sums in order to maintain a defensive peace. He says specifically that the United States is not arming in order to intervene or to go to the aid of England or France in case of war, but rather because of the need to show strength and military preparedness in case of an armed conflict in Europe. In his view this conflict is becoming ever more acute and is completely unavoidable.

Since the issue is presented this way, the houses of Congress have no cause to object. To the contrary, the houses accepted an armament program of more than one billion dollars. (The normal budget is 550 million, the emergency 552 million dollars.) However, under the cloak of a rearmament policy, President Roosevelt continues to push forward his foreign policy, which unofficially shows the world that in case of war the United States will come out on the side of the democratic states with all military and financial power.

In conclusion it can be said that the technical and moral preparation of the American people for participation in a war-if one should break out in Europe-is preceding rapidly. It appears that the United States will come to the aid of France and Great Britain with all its resources right from the beginning. However, I know the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the opinion that the possibility that America will enter war as in 1917 is not great. That’s because the majority of states in the mid-West and West, where the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at all costs. They remember the declaration of the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of unpaid billions which the European states still owe America.

Juliusz Lukasiewicz, Poland’s Ambassador to France, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 about further conversations with U.S. envoy Bullitt in Paris. Lukasiewicz discussed Roosevelt’s efforts to get both Poland and Britain to adopt a totally uncompromising policy towards Germany, even in the face of strong sentiment for peace. The report concludes with these words:

… I consider it my duty to inform you of all the aforesaid because I believe that collaboration with Ambassador Bullitt in such difficult and complicated times may prove useful to us. In any case it is absolutely certain that he agrees entirely with our point of view and is prepared for the most extensive friendly collaboration possible.

In order to strengthen the efforts of the American Ambassador in London [Joseph Kennedy], I called the attention of Ambassador Bullitt to the fact that it is not impossible that the British may treat the efforts of the United States with well-concealed contempt. He answered that I am probably right, but that nevertheless the United States has at its disposal the means to really bring pressure on England. He would be giving serious consideration to mobilizing these means.

The Polish Ambassador in London, Count Edward Raczynski, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 on the continuing European crisis and on a conversation he had with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, his American counterpart. Kennedy’s remarks to Raczynski confirmed Bullitt’s reputation in diplomatic circles as an indiscreet big mouth:

I asked Mr. Kennedy point blank about the conference which he is supposed to have had recently with [British Prime Minister] Mr. Chamberlain concerning Poland. Kennedy was surprised and declared categorically that a conversation of such special significance never took place. At the same time, and thereby contradicting his own assertion to a certain extent, Kennedy expressed displeasure and surprise that his colleagues in Paris and Warsaw [William Bullitt and Anthony Biddle] ‘who are not, as himself, in a position to get a clear picture of conditions in England’ should talk so openly about this conversation.

Mr. Kennedy-who made me understand that his views were based on a series of conversations with the most important authorities here-declared that he was convinced that should Poland decide in favor of armed resistance against Germany, especially with regard to Danzig, it would draw England in its wake.

This concludes the excerpts from the Polish reports.

* * * * *

The Path To War

While the Polish documents alone are conclusive proof of Roosevelt’s treacherous campaign to bring about world war, it is fortunate for posterity that a substantial body of irrefutable complementary evidence exists which confirms the conspiracy recorded in the dispatches to Warsaw.

The secret policy was confirmed after the war with the release of a confidential diplomatic report by the British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay. During his three years of service in Washington, the veteran diplomat had developed little regard for America’s leaders. He considered Roosevelt an amiable and impressionable lightweight, and warned the British Foreign Office that it should not tell William Bullitt anything beyond what it wouldn’t mind reading later in an American newspaper.[18]

On 19 September 1938 — that is, a year before the outbreak of war in Europe — Roosevelt called Lindsay to a very secret meeting at the White House. At the beginning of their long conversation, according to Lindsay’s confidential dispatch to London, Roosevelt “emphasized the necessity of absolute secrecy. Nobody must know I had seen him and he himself would tell nobody of the interview. I gathered not even the State Department.” The two discussed some secondary matters before Roosevelt got to the main point of the conference. “This is the very secret part of his communication and it must not be known to anyone that he has even breathed a suggestion.” The President told the Ambassador that if news of the conversation was ever made public, it could mean his impeachment. And no wonder. What Roosevelt proposed was a cynically brazen but harebrained scheme to violate the U.S. Constitution and dupe the American people.

The President said that if Britain and France “would find themselves forced to war” against Germany, the United States would ultimately also join. But this would require some clever maneuvering. Britain and France should impose a total blockade against Germany without actually declaring war and force other states (including neutrals) to abide by it. This would certainly provoke some kind of German military response, but it would also free Britain and France from having to actually declare war. For propaganda purposes, the “blockade must be based on loftiest humanitarian grounds and on the desire to wage hostilities with minimum of suffering and the least possible loss of life and property, and yet bring the enemy to his knees.” Roosevelt conceded that this would involve aerial bombardment, but “bombing from the air was not the method of hostilities which caused really great loss of life.”

The important point was to “call it defensive measures or anything plausible but avoid actual declaration of war.” That way, Roosevelt believed he could talk the American people into supporting war against Germany, including shipments of weapons to Britain and France, by insisting that the United States was still technically neutral in a non-declared conflict. “This method of conducting war by blockade would in his [Roosevelt’s] opinion meet with approval of the United States if its humanitarian purpose were strongly emphasized,” Lindsay reported.[19]

The American Ambassador to Italy, William Phillips, admitted in his postwar memoirs that the Roosevelt administration was already committed to going to war on the side of Britain and France in late 1938. “On this and many other occasions,” Phillips wrote, “I would like to have told him [Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister] frankly that in the event of a European war, the United States would undoubtedly be involved on the side of the Allies. But in view of my official position, I could not properly make such a statement without instructions from Washington, and these I never received.”[20]

Carl J. Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner to Danzig, reported in his postwar memoirs on a remarkable conversation held at the end of 1938 with Anthony Drexel Biddle, the American Ambassador to Poland. Biddle was a rich banker with close ties to the Morgan financial empire. A thoroughgoing internationalist, he was an ideological colleague of President Roosevelt and a good friend of William Bullitt. Burckhardt, a Swiss professor, served as High Commissioner between 1937 and 1939.

Nine months before the outbreak of armed conflict, on 2 December 1938, Biddle told Burckhardt

with remarkable satisfaction that the Poles were ready to wage war over Danzig. They would counter the motorized strength of the German army with agile maneuverability. ‘In April,’ he [Biddle] declared, ‘a new crisis would break out. Not since the torpedoing of the Lusitania [in 1915] had such a religious hatred against Germany reigned in America as today! Chamberlain and Daladier [the moderate British and French leaders] would be blown away by public opinion. This was a holy war!,[21]

The fateful British pledge to Poland of 31 March 1939 to go to war against Germany in case of a Polish-German conflict would not have been made without strong pressure from the White House.

On 14 March 1939, Slovakia declared itself an independent republic, thereby dissolving the state known as Czechoslovakia. That same day, Czechoslovak President Emil Hacha signed a formal agreement with Hitler establishing a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech portion of the federation. The British government initially accepted the new situation, but then Roosevelt intervened.

In their nationally syndicated column of 14 April 1939, the usually very well informed Washington journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported that on 16 March 1939 Roosevelt had “sent a virtual ultimatum to Chamberlain” demanding that henceforth the British government strongly oppose Germany. According to Pearson and Allen, who completely supported Roosevelt’s move, “the President warned that Britain could expect no more support, moral or material through the sale of airplanes, if the Munich policy continued.”[22] Chamberlain gave in and the next day, 17 March, ended Britain’s policy of cooperation with Germany in a speech at Birmingham bitterly denouncing Hitler. Two weeks later the British government formally pledged itself to war in case of German-Polish hostilities.

Bullitt’s response to the creation of the German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia was to telephone Roosevelt and, in an “almost hysterical” voice, urge him to make a dramatic denunciation of Germany and immediately ask Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act.[23]

In a confidential telegram to Washington dated 9 April 1939, Bullitt reported from Paris on another conversation with Ambassador Lukasiewicz. He had told the Polish envoy that although U.S. law prohibited direct financial aid to Poland, it might be possible to circumvent its provisions. The Roosevelt administration might be able to supply war planes to Poland indirectly through Britain. “The Polish Ambassador asked me if it might not be possible for Poland to obtain financial help and aeroplanes from the United States. I replied that I believed the Johnson Act would forbid any loans from the United States to Poland but added that it might be possible for England to purchase planes for cash in the United States and turn them over to Poland.”[24]

On 25 April 1939, four months before the outbreak of war, Bullitt called American newspaper columnist Karl von Wiegand, chief European correspondent of the International News Service, to the U.S. embassy in Paris and told him: “War in Europe has been decided upon. Poland has the assurance of the support of Britain and France, and will yield to no demands from Germany. America will be in the war soon after Britain and France enter it.”[25]

In a lengthy secret conversation at Hyde Park on 28 May 1939, Roosevelt assured the former President of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Edvard Benes, that America would actively intervene on the side of Britain and France in the anticipated European war.[26]

In June 1939, Roosevelt secretly proposed to the British that the United States should establish “a patrol over the waters of the Western Atlantic with a view to denying them to the German Navy in the event of war.” The British Foreign Office record of this offer noted that “although the proposal was vague and woolly and open to certain objections, we assented informally as the patrol was to be operated in our interests.”[27]

Many years after the war, Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister in 1939, confirmed Bullitt’s role as Roosevelt’s deputy in pushing his country into war. In a letter to Hamilton Fish dated 26 March 1971, Bonnet wrote: “One thing is certain is that Bullitt in 1939 did everything he could to make France enter the war.”[28] An important confirmation of the crucial role of Roosevelt and the Jews in pushing Britain into war comes from the diary of James V. Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. In his entry for 27 December 1945, he wrote:

Played golf today with [former Ambassador] Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and [British Prime Minister] Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain’s position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy’s view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for [William] Bullitt’s urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn’t fight; Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversations with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939, the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside.[29]

When Ambassador Potocki was back in Warsaw on leave from his post in Washington, he spoke with Count Jan Szembek, the Polish Foreign Ministry Under-Secretary, about the growing danger of war. In his diary entry of 6 July 1939, Szembek recorded Potocki’s astonishment at the calm mood in Poland. In comparison with the war psychosis that had gripped the West, Poland seemed like a rest home.

“In the West,” the Ambassador told Szembek, “there are all kinds of elements openly pushing for war: the Jews, the super-capitalists, the arms dealers. Today they are all ready for a great business, because they have found a place which can be set on fire: Danzig; and a nation that is ready to fight: Poland. They want to do business on our backs. They are indifferent to the destruction of our country. Indeed, since everything will have to be rebuilt later on, they can profit from that as well.”[30]

On 24 August 1939, just a week before the outbreak of hostilities, Chamberlain’s closest advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, went to Ambassador Kennedy with an urgent appeal from the British Prime Minister for President Roosevelt. Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself in March to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned in despair to Roosevelt as a last hope for peace. He wanted the American President to “put pressure on the Poles” to change course at this late hour and open negotiations with Germany. By telephone Kennedy told the State Department that the British “felt that they could not, given their obligations, do anything of this sort but that we could.” Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to possibly save the peace of Europe, Roosevelt rejected Chamberlain’s desperate plea out of hand. At that, Kennedy reported, the Prime Minister lost all hope. “The futility of it all,” Chamberlain had told Kennedy, “is the thing that is frightful. After all, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe.”[31]

Roosevelt liked to present himself to the American people and the world as a man of peace. To a considerable degree, that is still his image today. But Roosevelt cynically rejected genuine opportunities to act for peace when they were presented.

In 1938 he refused even to answer requests by French Foreign Minister Bonnet on 8 and 12 September to consider arbitrating the Czech-German dispute.[32] And a year later, after the outbreak of war, a melancholy Ambassador Kennedy beseeched Roosevelt to act boldly for peace. “It seems to me that this situation may crystallize to a point where the President can be the savior of the world,” Kennedy cabled on 11 September from London. “The British government as such certainly cannot accept any agreement with Hitler, but there may be a point when the President himself may work out plans for world peace. Now this opportunity may never arise, but as a fairly practical fellow all my life, I believe that it is entirely conceivable that the President can get himself in a spot where he can save the world …”

But Roosevelt rejected out of hand this chance to save the peace of Europe. To a close political crony, he called Kennedy’s plea “the silliest message to me that I have ever received.” He complained to Henry Morgenthau that his London Ambassador was nothing but a pain in the neck: “Joe has been an appeaser and will always be an appeaser … If Germany and Italy made a good peace offer tomorrow, Joe would start working on the King and his friend the Queen and from there on down to get everybody to accept it.”[33]

Infuriated at Kennedy’s stubborn efforts to restore peace in Europe or at least limit the conflict that had broken out, Roosevelt instructed his Ambassador with a “personal” and “strictly confidential” telegram on 11 September 1939 that any American peace effort was totally out of the question. The Roosevelt government, it declared, “sees no opportunity nor occasion for any peace move to be initiated by the President of the United States. The people [sic] of the United States would not support any move for peace initiated by this Government that would consolidate or make possible a survival of a regime of force and aggression.”[34]

Hamilton Fish Warns The Nation

In the months before armed conflict broke out in Europe, perhaps the most vigorous and prophetic American voice of warning against President Roosevelt’s campaign to incite war was that of Hamilton Fish, a leading Republican congressman from New York. In a series of hard-hitting radio speeches, Fish rallied considerable public opinion against Roosevelt’s deceptive war policy. Here are only a few excerpts from some of those addresses.[35]

On 6 January 1939, Fish told a nationwide radio audience:

The inflammatory and provocative message of the President to Congress and the world [given two days before] has unnecessarily alarmed the American people and created, together with a barrage of propaganda emanating from high New Deal officials, a war hysteria, dangerous to the peace of America and the world. The only logical conclusion to such speeches is another war fought overseas by American soldiers.

All the totalitarian nations referred to by President Roosevelt … haven’t the faintest thought of making war on us or invading Latin America.

I do not propose to mince words on such an issue, affecting the life, liberty and happiness of our people. The time has come to call a halt to the warmongers of the New Deal, backed by war profiteers, Communists, and hysterical internationalists, who want us to quarantine the world with American blood and money.

He [Roosevelt] evidently desires to whip up a frenzy of hate and war psychosis as a red herring to take the minds of our people off their own unsolved domestic problems. He visualizes hobgoblins and creates in the public mind a fear of foreign invasions that exists only in his own imagination.

On 5 March, Fish spoke to the country over the Columbia radio network:

The people of France and Great Britain want peace but our warmongers are constantly inciting them to disregard the Munich Pact and resort to the arbitrament of arms. If only we would stop meddling in foreign lands the old nations of Europe would compose their own quarrels by arbitration and the processes of peace, but apparently we won’t let them.

Fish addressed the listeners of the National Broadcasting Company network on 5 April with these words:

The youth of America are again being prepared for another blood bath in Europe in order to make the world safe for democracy.

If Hitler and the Nazi government regain Memel or Danzig, taken away from Germany by the Versailles Treaty, and where the population is 90 percent German, why is it necessary to issue threats and denunciations and incite our people to war? I would not sacrifice the life of one American soldier for a half dozen Memels or Danzigs. We repudiated the Versailles Treaty because it was based on greed and hatred, and as long as its inequalities and injustices exist there are bound to be wars of liberation.

The sooner certain provisions of the Versailles Treaty are scrapped the better for the peace of the world.

I believe that if the areas that are distinctly German in population are restored to Germany, except Alsace-Lorraine and the Tyrol, there will be no war in western Europe. There may be a war between the Nazis and the Communists, but if there is that is not our war or that of Great Britain or France or any of the democracies.

New Deal spokesmen have stirred up war hysteria into a veritable frenzy. The New Deal propaganda machine is working overtime to prepare the minds of our people for war, who are already suffering from a bad case of war jitters.

President Roosevelt is the number one warmonger in America, and is largely responsible for the fear that pervades the Nation which has given the stock market and the American people a bad case of the jitters.

I accuse the administration of instigating war propaganda and hysteria to cover up the failure and collapse of the New Deal policies, with 12 million unemployed and business confidence destroyed.

I believe we have far more to fear from our enemies from within than we have from without. All the Communists are united in urging us to go to war against Germany and Japan for the benefit of Soviet Russia.

Great Britain still expects every American to do her duty, by preserving the British Empire and her colonies. The war profiteers, munitions makers and international bankers are all set up for our participation in a new world war.

On 21 April, Fish again spoke to the country over nationwide radio:

It is the duty of all those Americans who desire to keep out of foreign entanglements and the rotten mess and war madness of Europe and Asia to openly expose the war hysteria and propaganda that is impelling us to armed conflict.

What we need in America is a stop war crusade, before we are forced into a foreign war by internationalists and interventionists at Washington, who seem to be more interested in solving world problems rather than our own.

In his radio address of 26 May, Fish stated:

He [Roosevelt] should remember that the Congress has the sole power to declare war and formulate the foreign policies of the United States. The President has no such constitutional power. He is merely the official organ to carry out the policies determined by the Congress.

Without knowing even who the combatants will be, we are informed almost daily by the internationalists and interventionists in America that we must participate in the next world war.

On 8 July 1939, Fish declared over the National Broadcasting Company radio network:

If we must go to war, let it be in defense of America, but not in defense of the munitions makers, war profiteers, Communists, to cover up the failures of the New Deal, or to provide an alibi for a third term.

It is well for all nations to know that we do not propose to go to war over Danzig, power politics, foreign colonies, or the imperialistic wars of Europe or anywhere in the world.

Powers Behind The President

President Roosevelt could have done little to incite war in Europe without help from powerful allies. Behind him stood the self-serving international financial and Jewish interests bent on the destruction of Germany. The principal organization which drummed up public support for U.S. involvement in the European war prior to the Pearl Harbor attack was the cleverly named “Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.” President Roosevelt himself initiated its founding, and top administration officials consulted frequently with Committee leaders.[36]

Although headed for a time by an elderly small-town Kansas newspaper publisher, William Allen White, the Committee was actually organized by powerful financial interests which stood to profit tremendously from loans to embattled Britain and from shrewd investments in giant war industries in the United States.

At the end of 1940, West Virginia Senator Rush D. Holt issued a detailed examination of the Committee which exposed the base interests behind the idealistic-sounding slogans:

The Committee has powerful connections with banks, insurance companies, financial investing firms, and industrial concerns. These in turn exert influence on college presidents and professors, as well as on newspapers, radio and other means of communication. One of the powerful influences used by the group is the ‘400’ and social set. The story is a sordid picture of betrayal of public interest.

The powerful J.P. Morgan interest with its holdings in the British Empire helped plan the organization and donated its first expense money.

Some of the important figures active in the Committee were revealed by Holt: Frederic R. Coudert, a paid war propagandist for the British government in the U.S. during the First World War; Robert S. Allen of the Pearson and Allen syndicated column; Henry R. Luce, the influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines; Fiorella LaGuardia, the fiery half-Jewish Mayor of Now York City; Herbert Lehman, the Jewish Governor of New York with important financial holdings in war industries; and Frank Altschul, an officer in the Jewish investment firm of Lazard Freres with extensive holdings in munitions and military supply companies.

If the Committee succeeded in getting the U.S. into war, Holt warned, “American boys will spill their blood for profiteers, politicians and ‘paytriots.’ If war comes, on the hands of the sponsors of the White Committee will be blood-the blood of Americans killed in a needless war.”[37]

In March 1941 a list of most of the Committee’s financial backers was made public. It revealed the nature of the forces eager to bring America into the European war. Powerful international banking interests were well represented. J.P. Morgan, John W. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and others of the great Morgan banking house were listed. Other important names from the New York financial world included Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Felix M. and James F. Warburg, and J. Malcolm Forbes. Chicago department store owner and publisher Marshall Field was a contributor, as was William Averill Harriman, the railroad and investment millionaire who later served as Roosevelt’s ambassador in Moscow.

Of course, Jewish names made up a substantial portion of the long list. Hollywood film czar Samuel Goldwyn of Goldwyn Studios was there, along with David Dubinsky, the head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The William S. Paley Foundation, which had been set up by the head of the giant Columbia Broadcasting System, contributed to the Committee. The name of Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman, wife of the New York Governor, was also on the list.[38]

Without an understanding of his intimate ties to organized Jewry, Roosevelt’s policies make little sense. As Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz noted: “Roosevelt himself brought into his immediate circle more Jews than any other President before or after him. Felix Frankfurter, Bernard M. Baruch and Henry Morgenthau were his close advisers. Benjamin V. Cohen, Samuel Rosenman and David K. Niles were his friends and trusted aides.”[39] This is perhaps not so remarkable in light of Roosevelt’s reportedly one-eighth Jewish ancestry.[40]

In his diary entry of 1 May 1941, Charles A. Lindbergh, the American aviator hero and peace leader, nailed the coalition that was pushing the United States into war:

The pressure for war is high and mounting. The people are opposed to it, but the Administration seems to have ‘the bit in its teeth’ and [is] hell-bent on its way to war. Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio and most of our motion pictures. There are also the ‘intellectuals,’ and the ‘Anglophiles,’ and the British agents who are allowed free rein, the international financial interests, and many others.[41]

Joseph Kennedy shared Lindbergh’s apprehensions about Jewish power. Before the outbreak of war he privately expressed concerns about “the Jews who dominate our press” and world Jewry in general, which he considered a threat to peace and prosperity. Shortly after the beginning of hostilities, Kennedy lamented “the growing Jewish influence in the press and in Washington demanding continuance of the war.”[42]

Betrayal, Failure, Delusion

Roosevelt’s efforts to get Poland, Britain and France into war against Germany succeeded all too well. The result was untold death and misery and destruction. When the fighting began, as Roosevelt had intended and planned, the Polish and French leaders expected the American president to at least make good on his assurances of backing in case of war. But Roosevelt had not reckoned on the depth of peace sentiment of the vast majority of Americans. So, in addition to deceiving his own people, Roosevelt also let down those in Europe to whom he had promised support.

Seldom in American history were the people as united in their views as they were in late 1939 about staying out of war in Europe. When hostilities began in September 1939, the Gallup poll showed 94 percent of the American people against involvement in war. That figure rose to 96.5 percent in December before it began to decline slowly to about 80 percent in the Fall of 1941. (Today, there is hardly an issue that even 60 or 70 percent of the people agree upon.)[43]

Roosevelt was, of course, quite aware of the intensity of popular feeling on this issue. That is why he lied repeatedly to the American people about his love of peace and his determination to keep the U.S. out of war, while simultaneously doing everything in his power to plunge Europe and America into war.

In a major 1940 re-election campaign speech, Roosevelt responded to the growing fears of millions of Americans who suspected that their President had secretly pledged United States support to Britain in its war against Germany. These well-founded suspicions were based in part on the publication in March of the captured Polish documents. The speech of 23 October 1940 was broadcast from Philadelphia to the nation on network radio. In the most emphatic language possible, Roosevelt categorically denied that he had

pledged in some way the participation of the United States in some foreign war. I give to you and to the people of this country this most solemn assurance: There is no secret Treaty, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any Government or any other nation in any part of the world, to involve this nation in any war or for any other purpose.[44]

We now know, of course, that this pious declaration was just another one of Roosevelt’s many brazen, bald-faced lies to the American people.

Roosevelt’s policies were more than just dishonest-they were criminal. The Constitution of the United States grants authority only to the Congress to make war and peace. And Congress had passed several major laws to specifically insure U.S. neutrality in case of war in Europe. Roosevelt continually violated his oath as President to uphold the Constitution. If his secret policies had been known, the public demand for his impeachment would very probably have been unstoppable.

The Watergate episode has made many Americans deeply conscious of the fact that their presidents can act criminally. That affair forced Richard Nixon to resign his presidency, and he is still widely regarded as a criminal. No schools are named after him and his name will never receive the respect that normally goes to every American president. But Nixon’s crimes pale into insignificance when compared to those of Franklin Roosevelt. What were Nixon’s lies compared to those of Roosevelt? What is a burglary cover-up compared to an illegal and secret campaign to bring about a major war?

Those who defend Roosevelt’s record argue that he lied to the American people for their own good — that he broke the law for lofty principles. His deceit is considered permissible because the cause was noble, while similar deception by presidents Johnson and Nixon, to name two, is not. This is, of course, a hypocritical double standard. And the argument doesn’t speak very well for the democratic system. It implies that the people are too dumb to understand their own best interests. It further suggests that the best form of government is a kind of benevolent liberal-democratic dictatorship.

Roosevelt’s hatred for Hitler was deep, vehement, passionate — almost personal. This was due in no small part to an abiding envy and jealousy rooted in the great contrast between the two men, not only in their personal characters but also in their records as national leaders.

Superficially, the public fives of Roosevelt and Hitler were astonishingly similar. Both assumed the leadership of their respective countries at the beginning of 1933. They both faced the enormous challenge of mass unemployment during a catastrophic worldwide economic depression. Each became a powerful leader in a vast military alliance during the most destructive war in history. Both men died while still in office within a few weeks of each other in April 1945, just before the end of the Second World War in Europe. But the enormous contrasts in the lives of these two men are even more remarkable.

Roosevelt was born into one of the wealthiest families in America. His was a life utterly free of material worry. He took part in the First World War from an office in Washington as UnderSecretary of the Navy. Hitler, on the other hand, was born into a modest provinicial family. As a young man he worked as an impoverished manual laborer. He served in the First World War as a front line soldier in the hell of the Western battleground. He was wounded many times and decorated for bravery.

In spite of his charming manner and soothing rhetoric, Roosevelt proved unable to master the great challenges facing America. Even after four years of his presidency, millions remained unemployed, undernourished and poorly housed in a vast land richly endowed with all the resources for incomparable prosperity. The New Deal was plagued with bitter strikes and bloody clashes between labor and capital. Roosevelt did nothing to solve the country’s deep, festering racial problems which erupted repeatedly in riots and armed conflict. The story was very different in Germany. Hitler rallied his people behind a radical program that transformed Germany within a few years from an economically ruined land on the edge of civil war into Europe’s powerhouse. Germany underwent a social, cultural and economic rebirth without parallel in history. The contrast between the personalities of Roosevelt and Hitler was simultaneously a contrast between two diametrically different social-political systems and ideologies.

And yet, it would be incorrect to characterize Roosevelt as merely a cynical politician and front man for powerful alien interests. Certainly he did not regard himself as an evil man. He sincerely believed that he was doing the right and noble thing in pressuring Britain and France into war against Germany. Like Wilson before him, and others since, Roosevelt felt himself uniquely qualified and called upon by destiny to reshape the world according to his vision of an egalitarian, universalist democracy. He was convinced, as so many American leaders have been, that the world could be saved from itself by remodeling it after the United States.

Presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt view the world not as a complex of different nations, races and cultures which must mutually respect each others’ separate collective identities in order to live together in peace, but rather according to a selfrighteous missionary perspective that divides the globe into morally good and evil countries. In that scheme of things, America is the providentially permanent leader of the forces of righteousness. Luckily, this view just happens to correspond to the economic and political interests of those who wield power in the United States.

President Roosevelt’s War

In April 1941, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota prophetically predicted that one day the Second World War would be remembered as Roosevelt’s war. “If we are ever involved in this war, it will be called by future historians by only one title, ‘the President’s War,’ because every step of his since his Chicago quarantine speech [of 5 October 1937] has been toward war.[45]

The great American historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, believed that war could probably have been prevented in 1939 if it had not been for Roosevelt’s meddling. “Indeed, there is fairly conclusive evidence that, but for Mr. Roosevelt’s pressure on Britain, France and Poland, and his commitments to them before September 1939, especially to Britain, and the irresponsible antics of his agent provocateur, William C. Bullitt, there would probably have been no world war in 1939, or, perhaps, for many years thereafter.”[46] In Revisionism: A Key to Peace, Barnes wrote:

President Roosevelt had a major responsibility, both direct and indirect, for the outbreak of war in Europe. He began to exert pressure on France to stand up to Hitler as early as the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936, months before he was making his strongly isolationist speeches in the campaign of 1936. This pressure on France, and also England, continued right down to the coming of the war in September 1939. It gained volume and momentum after the quarantine speech of October 1937. As the crisis approached between Munich and the outbreak of war, Roosevelt pressed the Poles to stand firm against any demands by Germany, and urged the English and French to back up the Poles unflinchingly.

There is grave doubt that England would have gone to war in September 1939 had it not been for Roosevelt’s encouragement and his assurances that, in the event of war, the United States would enter on the side of Britain just as soon as he could swing American public opinion around to support intervention.

Roosevelt had abandoned all semblance of neutrality, even before war broke out in 1939, and moved as speedily as was safe and feasible in the face of anti-interventionist American public opinion to involve this country in the European conflict.[47]

One of the most perceptive verdicts on Franklin Roosevelt’s place in history came from the pen of the great Swedish explorer and author, Sven Hedin. During the war he wrote:

The question of the way it came to a new world war is not only to be explained because of the foundation laid by the peace treaties of 1919, or in the suppression of Germany and her allies after the First World War, or in the continuation of the ancient policies of Great Britain and France. The decisive push came from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Roosevelt speaks of democracy and destroys it incessantly. He slanders as undemocratic and un-American those who admonish him in the name of peace and the preservation of the American way of life. He has made democracy into a caricature rather than a model. He talks about freedom of speech and silences those who don’t hold his opinion.

He talks about freedom of religion and makes an alliance with Bolshevism.

He talks about freedom from want, but cannot provide ten million of his own people with work, bread or shelter. He talks about freedom from the fear of war while working for war, not only for his own people but for the world, by inciting his country against the Axis powers when it might have united with them, and he thereby drove millions to their deaths.

This war will go down in history as the war of President Roosevelt.[48]

Officially orchestrated praise for Roosevelt as a great man of peace cannot conceal forever his crucial role in pushing Europe into war in 1939.

* * * * *

It is now more than forty years since the events described here took place. For many they are an irrelevant part of a best-forgotten past. But the story of how Franklin Roosevelt engineered war in Europe is very pertinent — particularly for Americans today. The lessons of the past have never been more important than in this nuclear age. For unless at least an aware minority understands how and why wars are made, we will remain powerless to restrain the warmongers of our own era.

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Notes

1. See, for example: Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); William Henry Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Chicago: Regnery, 1952, 1962); Benjamin Colby, ‘Twas a Famous Victory (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1979); Frederic R. Sanborn, Design for War (New York: Devin-Adair, 1951); William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980); Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War (Chicago: Regnery, 1952); John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 1982).
2. Saul Friedlander, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States 1939-1941 (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 73-77; U.S., Congress, House, Special Committee on Investigation of Un-American Activities in the United States, 1940, Appendix, Part II, pp. 1054-1059.
3. Friedlander, pp. 75-76.
4. New York Times, 30 March 1940, p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 4, and 31 March 1940, p. 1.
6. New York Times, 30 March 1940, p. 1. Baltimore Sun, 30 March 1940, p. 1.
7. A French-language edition was published in 1944 under the title Comment Roosevelt est Entre en Guerre.
8. Tansill, “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” in Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1953; reprint eds., New York: Greenwood, 1969 and Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review [supplemented], 1982), p. 184 (note 292). Tansill also quoted from several of the documents in his Back Door to War, pp. 450-51.
9. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Court Historians Versus Revisionism (N.p.: privately printed, 1952), p. 10. This booklet is reprinted in Barnes, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1972), and in Barnes, The Barnes Trilogy (Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 1979).
10. Chamberlin, p. 60.
11. Edward Raczynski, In Allied London (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), p. 51.
12. Orville H. Bullitt (ad.), For the President: Personal and Secret (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), p. x1v [biographical foreword]. See also Time, 26 October 1936, p. 24.
13. Current Biography 1940, ed. Maxine Block (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1940), p. 122 ff.
14. Gisleher Wirsing, Der masslose Kontinent: Roosevelts Kampf um die Weltherrschaft (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1942), p. 224.
15. Bullitt obituary in New York Times, 16 February 1967, p. 44.
16. Jack Alexander, “He Rose From the Rich,” Saturday Evening Post, 11 March 1939, p. 6. (Also see continuation in issue of 18 March 1939.) Bullitt’s public views on the European scene and what should be America’s attitude toward it can be found in his Report to the American People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin [Cambridge: Riverside Press], 1940), the text of a speech he delivered, with the President’s blessing, under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society in Independence Hall in Philadelphia shortly after the fall of France. For sheer, hyperventilated stridency and emotionalist hysterics, this anti-German polemic could hardly be topped, even given the similar propensities of many other interventionists in government and the press in those days.
17. Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 203-04.
18. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 31. See also pp. 164-65.
19. Dispatch No. 349 of 20 September 1938 by Sir. R. Lindsay, Documents on British Foreign Policy (ed. Ernest L. Woodward), Third series, Vol. VII (London, 1954), pp. 627-29. See also: Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941 (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 25-27; Dallek, pp. 164-65; Arnold A. Offner, America and the Ori-, gins of World War II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 61.
20. William Phillips, Ventures in Diplomacy (North Beverly, Mass.: privately published, 1952), pp. 220-21.
21. Carl Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 (Munich: Callwey, 1960), p. 225.
22. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, “Washington Daily Merry-Go-Round,” Washington Times-Herald, 14 April 1939, p. 16. A facsimile reprint of this column appears in Conrad Grieb (ed.), American Manifest Destiny and The Holocausts (New York: Examiner Books, 1979), pp. 132-33. See also: Wirsing, pp. 238-41.
23. Jay P. Moffat, The Moffat Papers 1919-1943 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 232.
24. U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Diplomatic Papers), 1939, General, Vol. I (Washington: 1956), p. 122.
25. “Von Wiegand Says-,” Chicago Herald-American, 8 October 1944, p. 2.
26. Edvard Benes, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Benes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), pp. 79-80.
27. Lash, p. 64.
28. Hamilton Fish, FDR: The Other Side of the Coin (Now York: Vantage, 1976; Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 1980), p. 62.
29. James V. Forrestal (ads. Walter Millis and E.S. Duffield), The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), pp. 121-22. I have been privately informed by a colleague who has examined the original manuscript of the Forrestal diaries that many very critical references to the Jews were deleted from the published version.
30. Jan Szembek, Journal 1933-1939 (Paris: Plan, 1952), pp. 475-76.
31. David E. Koskoff, Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 207; Moffat, p. 253; A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961; 2nd ed. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Premier [paperback], 1965), p. 262; U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, General, Vol. I (Washington: 1956), p. 355.
32. Dallek, p. 164.
33. Beschloss, pp. 190-91; Lash, p. 75; Koskoff, pp. 212-13.
34. Hull to Kennedy (No. 905), U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, General, Vol. I (Washington: 1956), p. 424.
35. The radio addresses of Hamilton Fish quoted here were published in the Congressional Record Appendix (Washington) as follows: (6 January 1939) Vol. 84, Part 11, pp. 52-53; (5 March 1939) same, pp. 846-47; (5 April 1939) Vol. 84, Part 12, pp. 1342-43; (21 April 1939) same, pp. 1642-43; (26 May 1939) Vol. 84, Part 13, pp. 2288-89; (8 July 1939) same, pp. 3127-28.
36. Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 128, 136-39.
37. Congressional Record Appendix (Washington: 1941), (30 December 1940) Vol. 86, Part 18, pp. 7019-25. See also: Appendix, Vol. 86, Part 17, pp. 5808-14.
38. New York Times, 11 March 1941, p. 10.
39. Lucy Dawidowicz, “American Jews and the Holocaust,” The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1982, p. 102.
40. “FDR ‘had a Jewish great-grandmother'” Jewish Chronicle (London), 5 February 1982, p. 3.
41. Charles A. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 481.
42. Koskoff, pp. 282, 212. The role of the American press in fomenting hatred against Germany between 1933 and 1939 is a subject that deserves much more detailed treatment. Charles Tansill provides some useful information on this in Back Door to War. The essay by Professor Hans A. Muenster, “Die Kriegsschuld der Presse der USA” in Kriegsschuld und Presse, published in 1944 by the German Reichsdozentenfuehrung, is worth consulting.
43. An excellent essay relating and contrasting American public opinion measurements to Roosevelt’s foreign policy moves in 1939-41 is Harry Elmer Barnes, Was Roosevelt Pushed Into War By Popular Demand in 1941? (N.p.: privately printed, 1951). It is reprinted in Barnes, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets.
44. Lash, p. 240.
45. New York Times, 27 April 1941, p. 19.
46. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, 2nd ed. (N.p.: privately published, ca. 1948), p. 12. See also the 9th, final revised and enlarged edition (N.p.: privately published, ca. 1954), p. 34; this booklet is reprinted in Barnes, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets.
47. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace,” Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought Vol. II, No. 1 (Spring 1966), pp. 29-30. This article was republished in Barnes, Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays (San Francisco: Cato Institute [Cato Paper No. 12], 1980).
48. Sven Hedin, Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1943), p. 54.

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Bibliography

Listed here are the published editions of the Polish documents, the most important sources touching on the questions of their authenticity and content, and essential recent sources on what President Roosevelt was really-as opposed to publicly-doing and thinking during the prelude to war. Full citations for all references in the article will be found in the notes.

Beschloss, Michael R. Kennedy and Roosevelt. New York: Norton, 1980.

Bullitt, Orville H. (ed.). For the President: Personal and Secret. [Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt.] Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Germany. Foreign Office Archive Commission. Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1943.

Germany. Foreign Office. The German White Paper. [White Book No. 3.] New York: Howell, Soskin and Co., 1940.

Germany. Foreign Office. Polnische Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Kriegs. [White Book No. 3.] Berlin: F. Eher, 1940.

Koskoff, David E. Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Lukasiewicz, Juliusz (Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, ed.). Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Wirsing, Giselher. Der masslose Kontinent: Roosevelts Kampf um die Weltherrschaft. Jena: E. Diederichs, 1942.

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This item was first presented at the Fourth IHR Conference in Chicago, September 1982. It was first published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983 (Vol. 4, No. 2), pages 135-172.

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War in Iraq and Afghanistan : Who Benefits?

War in Iraq and Afghanistan : Who Benefits?
By Tom Sunic
August 17th, 2010
Source: The Occidental Observer

The following article is a translated and edited transcript of the speech Mr. Sunic gave on August 7, 2010 at the festival-conference of the NPD (National Democratic Party), near the town of Goerlitz, Germany.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear friends. Thank you all for being here. Many thanks for the invitation to our friends, the NPD chief Mr. Udo Voigt and Mr. Gerd Finkenwirth. Also many thanks to a lovely young lady Silvana for her professionalism and her kindness. I’d like to extend also my best greetings from my friends in the USA and from my colleagues from the American Third Party Position, our Chairman, William Johnson, Prof. Kevin MacDonald, the radio host of Political Cesspool, James Edwards, and many, many other valiant members. Our recently launched party shares many similar ideas and pursues similar goals.

Instead of raising the question “who benefits from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq,” one might just as well ask the question: Who was the instigator of these two wars? The latter question does not sound very specific and provides a treasure trove for various conspiracy theoreticians. Wild speculations about the true motives of these wars are of no interest for us despite the fact that some of these conspiratorial allegations may be true. What we wish to find out is how these two wars were justified from the standpoint of international law and how they were legitimized by public discourse.

By the way, conspiracy theories, often ascribed to proverbial right-wingers, are not only the hallmark of right-wingers. The ruling class in the West does not shun using different types of conspiratorial vocabulary whose prime purpose is to demonize and criminalize the political foe. In addition, the liberal system resorts frequently to conspiracy theories in order to justify its military interventions. Months before the invasion of Iraq, many American politicians, including the media had in all seriousness ranted about the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” It soon turned out that the Iraqis had no such weapons, which was later conceded [albeit rather quietly] by the very same politicians.

From my own experience I could give you some firsthand illustrations of this conspiratorial vocabulary. As a young man in communist Yugoslavia, I witnessed daily the endless verbal demonization of fictitious political opponents. The Yugo-communist system used the words “Nazi and fascist threat” in order to legitimize its repression against its critics. Although there were no more fascists in communist Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Second World War, the system and its scribes had to dig up fictitious Nazi-Croats in order to justify its shortcomings and its terror. Back then we used a joke, which soon became iconic all over ex-communist Europe: “Even when a fly farts the Yugo-communist judiciary will not level criminal charges against the fly, but will instead apprehend the proverbial ‘Nazi-Croats.’” Similar linguistic escapades have now become part and parcel of the official vocabulary of the European Union, whose politicians dish out their propaganda under the elegant cloak of “freedom of speech” and “human rights.”

It is important to analyze how the liberal politicians and their warmongers manipulate public discourse. On the one hand we are bombarded by a litany of horrific labels, such as “war on terror”, “Islamo-fascism”, and “Al Qaeda terrorists”; on the other, we must daily stay tuned to their sentimental utterings such as the “fight for human rights,” “multicultural tolerance”, or “freedom for Afghan women.” The German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not sound credible at all when she recently rendered homage to fallen German soldiers and the enduring commitment of German troops in Afghanistan, “which serves the interest of our country.” The entire address by Chancellor Merkel was teeming with theatrical verbiage, better known in Germany as “cemented language” (Betonsprache), once commonly used in former communist East Germany.

Regardless of the hyper-moralistic lexicon used by the Western ruling class, empirical evidence regarding the true motives for the US commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan is very sparse if not completely absent.

A Balance Sheet

The war in Afghanistan was launched 3 weeks after the terror attack on September 11, 2001 in New York. Even a halfwit can tell that a long-term military strategy for Afghanistan could not be readied in three weeks. The plan to overthrow the regime in Afghanistan and Iraq had already been waiting in the wings. The first indications of the upcoming war in the Middle East and Central Asia had been put on paper by pro-Zionist academics in America in the early nineties, namely, after the first indecisive Gulf War in 1991. Many American pro-Israeli journalists and many well-known Jewish-American scholars had began drafting a long term plan for the reorganization of the region — “regime change” in the Middle East and Asia. Especially important was the role of the American Enterprise Institute and the launching of “the Project for the New American Century.” Many important names participated in these projects, names that later came to be associated with the code term “neoconservatives.” September 11, came to them as if sent by God.

Any war anywhere in the world must be always preceded by cultural warfare. The US neocons understood that very well. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq began first as an academic dispute — largely spearheaded by neocon journals, such as Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Today, however, the language of “weapons of mass destruction” has replaced its bellicose denominator with the euphemism of “fighting for democracy.” In retrospect, one must raise the question whether one could also draw parallels between the fraudulent motives for the current war in Iraq and the Allied motives for their WWII commitment in Europe and the subsequent “reeducation” of the German people.

Even after nine years of war in Afghanistan, even after seven years of Iraq, the security climate in the Middle East and Afghanistan, or for that matter in the entire West, has not improved. It has deteriorated. There is far more terrorist threat today than eight or nine years ago. One can argue that the risk of Islamic terrorism in Europe and the USA grows in proportion to the continuation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what happened with European politicians during that time? In 2001, during the deployment of US troops in Afghanistan, as well as two years later during the invasion of Iraq, the consent of the European allies was difficult to come by. European NATO members, apart from their servile policies toward Washington, knew well that no quick war results were at hand. Official Germany and France were skeptical because they have twice as many Muslim immigrants than the entire U.S., and in addition, they have different visions about how to fight terrorism. For Germany, as a valiant US ally and a NATO member, it was not easy to openly defy the Americans. It is not worth talking about this post-World War II German subservience now. In order to grasp German foreign policy somersaults over the last 60 years one must first delve into the Allied laundering of the German character and the process of massive reeducation which is still part of the German media landscape.

Unlike Germany and France, the Bush administration had no problem drumming up support among Eastern Europeans for their foreign expeditions. Here are two reasons:

Only two decades ago all East European countries were allies of the Soviet Union; they became NATO members just a decade ago. The political and cultural mimicry of Americanism — albeit with a broken Slavic accent — in this part of Europe is more widespread than in Germany or in France.

The other reason is that the bulk of politicians and academics from the Baltic to the Balkans, is made up of rebranded communist apparatchiks and their progeny. In order to cover up their own criminal past, or for that matter their former communist terror policies, they needed to become more Catholic than the Pope, i.e. more American than the Americans themselves.

Hence the reasons Eastern Europeans politicians can now be far better manipulated and are far easier to bribe into political servility than Western European politicians — with the exception of Russia. Once upon a time East European politicians made obligatory pilgrimages to Moscow, Belgrade, or Havana. Today, their mandatory places of pilgrimage are Washington and Tel Aviv.

American Political Theology

The beneficiaries of these two wars were, at least at the beginning of the hostilities, US neoconservatives and the state of Israel. But it is wrong to blame them only. To understand the deep-seated motives of U.S. foreign policy, one has to delve into American political theology — the conviction of many American politicians of their country’s divine chosenness. The architects and beneficiaries of these wars are motivated by secular political consequences, but the root causes of these wars have a theological dimension. These two cannot be separated. Uri Avnery, an Israeli leftist writer, remarked some time ago that “Israel is a small America, the USA is a huge Israel.”

Sure, it goes without saying that an Israeli journalist, but also many left-leaning Jewish American scholars, such as Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein can easily get away with such anti-Israeli rhetoric. Its is questionable what type of grammar, let alone language structure a non-Jewish intellectual, or some “right-winger” would need to use in order to express the same judgments.

Over one hundred years US politicians and their advisors have tapped into the Old Testament in quest of their notion of the political. Many American politicians have adopted their political conceptualization from the ancient Hebrew thought. One hundred and fifty years ago it was the ante bellum secessionist South which became the symbol of absolute evil; later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the symbol of the absolute evil became the “bad German” and shortly afterward the proverbial “Nazi.” During the Cold War it was temporarily the role of Communists in the Soviet Union to play the bad guys. As there are today no more Communists, no more Fascists, no more Southern Segregationists, some substitute had to be urgently looked for. So for many American Bible do-gooders the Ersatz was to be found among the so-called Islamo-fascists, or Islamic terrorists.

Soon this new category of absolute evil expanded to include the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah and “rogue states”, like Iraq, Syria and Iran. Geopolitically, these states, including Israel, are of no importance to America’s security whatsoever. But America’s metaphysical ties to Israel make many American politicians perceive Israeli’s enemies as their own.

It is wrong, therefore, to solely blame the Israelis and US neoconservatives, or for that matter the Jews for these two wars. They were or may still be the beneficiaries, but much of the popular support for this “make-the-world-safe-for-democracy” political theology comes from the millions of Christian-Zionists.

Their spirit of chosenness has had its offshoot in a secular ideology of human rights, taken now for granted as something humane and indispensable by the entire world. Yet it is in the name of human rights that the worst mass crimes are often committed. It is in the name of “human rights” that many non-conformist intellectuals can be easily shut up. When a self-proclaimed democrat talks about human rights, one should raise a critical question: “What happens then to those who do not fit into the category of humans or democrats?” Logically, they must be tagged as beasts and animals and therefore, cannot be re-educated, but must be physically wiped out or shut down. Let us try to picture what was crossing the mind of young American pilots who flew over Cologne and Hamburg in the summer of 1943. They had no remorse firebombing these cities below. They viewed the creatures down below as the embodiment of the absolute evil, as the most dangerous beasts that needed to be exterminated for good.

Christian-Zionists bear some of the responsibility for these two wars. Their self-serving idea of some special divine election does not lead to better understanding among different nations and different races, but to endless and futile wars.

Dr. Sunic (www.tomsunic.info) is a writer and former U.S. professor in political science. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Third Position. He is the author of several books. His latest book, dealing with the meaning of national identity is in French, La Croatie; un pays par défaut? (Paris: éd Avatar, 2010)

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An ‘Unknown Holocaust’ and the Hijacking of History

An ‘Unknown Holocaust’ and the Hijacking of History
by Mark Weber
July 25, 2009
Source: Archives, Institute for Historical Review

We hear a lot about terrible crimes committed by Germans during World War II, but we hear very little about crimes committed against Germans. Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era of destruction, looting, starvation, rape, “ethnic cleansing,” and mass killing — one that Time magazine called “history’s most terrifying peace.” / 1

Even though this “unknown holocaust” is ignored in our motion pictures and classrooms, and by our political leaders, the facts are well established. Historians are in basic agreement about the scale of the human catastrophe, which has been laid out in a number of detailed books. For example, American historian and jurist Alfred de Zayas, along with other scholars, has established that in the years 1945 to 1950, more than 14 million Germans were expelled or forced to flee from large regions of eastern and central Europe, of whom more than two million were killed or otherwise lost their lives. / 2

One recent and particularly useful overview is a 615-page book, published in 2007, entitled After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. / 3 In it, British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate German Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. He explains how some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities — about two million civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, and about one million prisoners of war.

Some people take the view that, given the wartime misdeeds of the Nazis, some degree of vengeful violence against the defeated Germans was inevitable and perhaps justified. A common response to reports of Allied atrocities is to say that the Germans “deserved what they got.” But however valid that argument might be, the appalling cruelties inflicted on the totally prostrate German people went far beyond any understandable retribution.

Although I’m focusing here on the treatment of Germans, it’s worth keeping in mind that they were not the only victims of postwar Allied brutality. Across central and eastern Europe, the heavy hand of Soviet rule continued to take lives of Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and people of other nationalities.

As Soviet troops advanced into central and eastern Europe during the war’s final months, they imposed a reign of terror, pillage and killing without compare in modern history. The horrors were summarized by George F. Kennan, the acclaimed historian who also served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union. He wrote: / 4

“The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces; and one cannot believe that they all succeeded in fleeing to the West … The Russians … swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.”

During the last months of the war, the ancient German city of Königsberg in East Prussia held out as a strongly defended urban fortress. After repeated attack and siege by the Red Army, it finally surrendered in early April 1945. Soviet troops then ravished the civilian population. The people were beaten, robbed, killed and, if female, raped. The rape victims included nuns. Even hospital patients were robbed of their possessions. Bunkers and shelters, packed with terrified people huddling inside, were torched with flame-throwers. About 40,000 of the city’s population were killed, or took their own lives to escape the horrors, and the remaining 73,000 Germans were brutally deported. / 5

In a report that appeared in August 1945 in the Washington DC Times-Herald, / 6 an American journalist wrote of what he described as “the state of terror in which women in Russian-occupied eastern Germany were living. All these women, Germans, Polish, Jewish and even Russian girls `freed’ from Nazi slave camps, were consumed by one desperate desire — to escape from the Red zone “

“In the district around our internment camp … Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 12 and 60 [some reports say 8 and 80]. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth. The only exceptions were girls who managed to remain in hiding in the woods or who had the presence of mind to feign illness – typhoid, dyptheria or some other infectious disease … Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”

In accord with policy set by the “Big Three” Allied leaders of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — millions of Germans were expunged from their ancient homelands in central and eastern Europe.

In October 1945, a New York Daily News report from occupied Berlin told readers: / 7

“In the windswept courtyard of the Stettiner Bahnof [rail station], a cohort of German refugees, part of 12 million to 19 million dispossessed in East Prussia and Silesia, sat in groups under a driving rain and told the story of their miserable pilgrimage, during which more than 25 percent died by the roadside, and the remainder were so starved they scarcely had strength to walk …

“A nurse from Stettin, a young, good-looking blond, told how her father had been stabbed to death by Russian soldiers who, after raping her mother and sister, tried to break into her own room. She escaped and hid in a haystack with four other women for four days …

“On the train to Berlin she was pillaged once by Russian troops and twice by Poles. Women who resisted were shot dead, she said, and on one occasion she saw a guard take an infant by the legs and crush its skull against a post because the child cried while the guard was raping its mother.

“An old peasant from Silesia said … victims were robbed of everything they had, even their shoes. Infants were robbed of their swaddling clothes so that they froze to death. All the healthy girls and women, even those 65 years of age, were raped in the train and then robbed, the peasant said.”

In November 1945 an item in the Chicago Tribune told readers: / 8

“Nine hundred and nine men, women and children dragged themselves and their luggage from a Russian railway train at Lehrter station [in Berlin] today, after eleven days traveling in boxcars from Poland. Red Army soldiers lifted 91 corpses from the train, while relatives shrieked and sobbed as their bodies were piled in American lend-lease trucks and driven off for interment in a pit near a concentration camp.

“The refugee train was like a macabre Noah’s ark. Every car was packed with Germans … the families carry all their earthly belongings in sacks, bags and tin trunks … Nursing infants suffer the most, as their mothers are unable to feed them, and frequently go insane as they watch offspring slowly die before their eyes. Today four screaming, violently insane mothers were bound with rope to prevent them from clawing other passengers.”

Although most of the millions of German girls and women who were ravished by Allied soldiers were raped by Red Army troops, Soviet soldiers were not the only perpetrators. During the French occupation of Stuttgart, a large city in southwest Germany, police records show that 1,198 women and eight men were raped, mostly by French troops from Morocco in north Africa, although the prelate of the Lutheran Evangelical church estimated the number at 5,000. / 9

During World War II, the United States, Britain and Germany generally complied with the international regulations on the treatment of prisoners of war, as required by the Geneva accord of 1929. But at the end of the fighting in Europe, the US and British authorities scrapped the Geneva convention. In violation of solemn international obligations and Red Cross rules, the American and British authorities stripped millions of captured German soldiers of their status, and their rights, as prisoners of war by reclassifying them as so-called “Disarmed Enemy Forces” or “Surrendered Enemy Personnel.” / 10

Accordingly, British and American authorities denied access by International Red Cross representatives to camps holding German prisoners of war. Moreover, any attempt by German civilians to feed the prisoners was punishable by death. / 11 Many thousands of German POWs died in American custody, most infamously in the so-called “Rhine meadow camps,” where prisoners were held under appalling conditions, with no shelter and very little food. / 12

In April 1946, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) protested that the United States, Britain and France, nearly a year after the end of fighting, were violating International Red Cross agreements they had solemnly pledged to uphold. The Red Cross pointed out, for example, that the American transfer of German prisoners of war to French and British authorities for forced labor was contrary to International Red Cross statutes. / 13

Another report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in August 1946 stated that the US government, through its military branch in the US zone of occupation in Germany, was exacting forced labor from 284,000 captives, of whom 140,000 were in the US occupation zone, 100,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, and 14,000 in Belgium. Holdings of German prisoners or slave laborers by other countries, the Red Cross reported, included 80,000 in Yugoslavia, and 45,000 in Czechoslovakia. / 14

Both during and after the war, the Allies tortured German prisoners. In one British center in England, called “the London Cage,” German prisoners were subjected to systematic ill-treatment, including starvation and beatings. The brutality continued for several years after the end of the war. Treatment of German prisoners by the British was even more harsh in the British occupation zone of Germany. / 15 At the US internment center at Schwäbisch Hall in southwest Germany, prisoners awaiting trial by American military courts were subjected to severe and systematic torture, including long stretches in solitary confinement, extremes of heat and cold, deprivation of sleep and food, and severe beatings, including kicks to the groin. / 16

Most of the German prisoners of war who died in Allied captivity were held by the Soviets, and a much higher portion of German POWs died in Soviet custody than perished in British and American captivity. (For example, of the 90,000 Germans who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 ever returned to their homeland.) More than five years after the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of German prisoners were still being held in the Soviet Union. Other German prisoners perished after the end of the war in Yugoslavia, Poland and other countries. In Yugoslavia alone, authorities of the Communist regime killed as many as 80,000 Germans. German prisoners toiled as slave labor in other Allied countries, often for years.

At the Yalta conference in early 1945, the “Big Three” Allied leaders agreed that the Soviets could take Germans as forced laborers, or “slave labor.” It is estimated that 874,000 German civilians were abducted to the Soviet Union. These were in addition to the millions of prisoners of war who were held by the Soviets as forced laborers. Of these so-called reparations deportees, nearly half — 45 percent — perished. / 17

For two years after the end of the fighting, Germans were victims of a cruel and vindictive occupation policy, one that meant slow starvation of the defeated population. To sustain life, a normal adult needs a minimum of about 2,000 calories per day. But in March and February 1946, the daily intake per person in the British and American occupation zones of Germany was between one thousand and fifteen hundred calories. / 18

In the winter of 1945-46, the Allies forbid anyone outside the country to send food parcels to the starving Germans. The Allied authorities also rejected requests by the International Red Cross to bring in provisions to alleviate the suffering. / 19

Very few persons in Britain or the United States spoke out against the Allied policy. Victor Gollancz, an English-Jewish writer and publisher, toured the British occupation zone of northern Germany for six weeks in late 1946. He publicized the death and malnutrition he found there, which he said was a consequence of Allied policy. He wrote: “The plain fact is … we are starving the Germans. And we are starving them, not deliberately in the sense that we definitely want them to die, but willfully, in the sense that we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.” / 20

Another person who protested was Bertrand Russell, the noted philosopher and Nobel Prize recipient. In a letter published in a London newspaper in October 1945, he wrote: “In eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies on an unprecedented scale, and an apparently deliberate attempt is being made to exterminate many millions of Germans, not by gas, but by depriving them of their homes and of food, leaving them to die by slow and agonizing starvation. This is not done as an act of war, but as a part of a deliberate policy of ‘peace‘.” / 21

As the war was ending in what is now the Czech Republic, hysterical mobs brutally assaulted ethnic Germans, members of a minority group whose ancestors had lived there for centuries. In Prague, German soldiers were rounded up, disarmed, tied to stakes, doused with gasoline, and set on fire as living torches. / 22 In some cities and towns in what is now the Czech Republic, every German over the age of six was forced to wear on his clothing, sewn on his left breast, a large white circle six inches in diameter with the black letter N, which is the first letter of the Czech word for German. Germans were also banned from all parks, places of public entertainment, and public transportation, and not allowed to leave their homes after eight in the evening. Later all these people were expelled, along with the entire ethnic German population of what is now the Czech Republic. / 23 In the territory of what is now the Czech Republic, a quarter of a million ethnic Germans were killed.

In Poland, the so-called “Office of State Security,” an agency of the country’s new Soviet-controlled government, imposed its own brutal form of “de-Nazification.” Its agents raided German homes, rounding up some 200,000 men, women, children and infants — 99 percent of them non-combatant, innocent civilians. They were incarcerated in cellars, pris­ons, and 1,255 concentration camps where typhus was rampant and torture was commonplace. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans perished at the hands of the “Office of State Security.” / 24

We are ceaselessly reminded of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps. But few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz were kept in operation after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.

For many years we’ve heard a lot about so-called Nazi art theft. But however large the scale of confiscation of art by Germans in World War II, it was dwarfed by the massive theft of art works and other objects of cultural value by the Allies. The Soviets alone looted some two and half million art objects, including 800,000 paintings. In addition, many paintings, statues, and other priceless art works were destroyed by the Allies. / 25

In the war’s aftermath, the victors put many German military and political leaders to death or sentenced them to lengthy prison terms after much-publicized trials in which the Allies were both prosecutor and judge. The best-known of these trials was before the so-called “International Military Tribunal” at Nuremberg, where officials of the four Allied powers were both the prosecutors and the judges.

Justice — as opposed to vengeance — is a standard that is applied impartially. But in the aftermath of World War II, the victorious powers imposed standards of “justice” that applied only to the vanquished. The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other member states of the so-called “United Nations,” held Germans to a standard that they categorically refused to respect themselves.

Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46, privately acknowledged in a letter to President Truman, that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” / 26

Germans were executed or imprisoned for policies that the Allies themselves were carrying out, sometimes on a far greater scale. German military and political leaders were put to death on the basis of a hypocritical double standard, which means that these executions were essentially acts of judicial murder dressed up with the trappings and forms of legality. If the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunal had been applied impartially, many American, Soviet and other Allied military and political leaders would have been hanged.

An awareness of how the defeated Germans were treated by the victors helps in understanding why Germans continued to fight during the final months of the war with a determination, tenacity and willingness to sacrifice that has few parallels in history, even as their cities were being smashed into ruins under relentless bombing, and even as defeat against numerically superior enemy forces seemed inevitable.

Two years after the end of the war, American and British policy toward the defeated Germans changed. The US and British governments began to treat the Germans as potential allies, rather than as vanquished subjects, and to appeal for their support. This shift in policy was not prompted by an awakening of humanitarian spirit. Instead, it was motivated by American and British fear of Soviet Russian expansion, and by the realization that the economic recovery of Europe as a whole required a prosperous and productive Germany.

Oswald Spenger, the great German historian and philosopher, once observed that how a people learns history is its form of political education. In every society, including our own, how people learn and come to understand history is determined by those who control political and cultural life, including the educational system and the mass media. How people understand the past — and how they view the world and themselves as members of society — is set by the agenda of those who hold power.

That’s why, in our society, death and suffering during and after World War II of non-Jews — Poles, Russians and others, and especially Germans — is all but ignored, and why, instead, more than six decades after the end of the war, Jewish death and suffering — above all, what is known as “the Holocaust” — is given such prominent attention, year after year, in our classrooms and motion pictures, and by our political leaders.

What I’m calling here an “unknown holocaust” of non-Jews is essentially ignored not because the facts are disputed or unknown [though it is certainly peculiar that those who are unfamiliar with these facts often choose to dispute them], but rather because this reality does not fit well with the Judeo-centric view of history that is all but obligatory in our society, a view of the past that reflects the Jewish-Zionist hold on our cultural and educational life.

This means that it is not enough simply to “establish the facts.” It is important to understand, identify, and counter the power that controls what we see, hear and read — in our classrooms, our periodicals, and in our motion pictures — and which determines how we view history, our world and ourselves — not just the history of what is called “the Holocaust,” but the history and background of World War II, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Middle East turmoil, and much, much more.

History, as the old saying goes, is written by the victors. In our society, the “victors,” that is, the most important single group that sets our perspective on the past through its grip on the media, and on our cultural life, is the organized Jewish community .

This reality is hardly a secret. Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic, has acknowledged: “It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture … Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie stu­dios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.” / 27

One person who has carefully studied this subject is Jonathan J. Goldberg, editor of the influential Jewish community weekly Forward. In his 1996 book, Jewish Power, Goldberg wrote: / 28

“In a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood stu­dio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a sta­tistical observation …

“Hollywood at the end of the twentieth century is still an industry with a pronounced ethnic tinge. Virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews. Writers, pro­ducers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish — one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 per­cent among top-grossing films.

“The combined weight of so many Jews in one of America’s most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power. They are a major source of money for Democratic candidates.”

A writer for the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein, boldly declared in December 2008, in a column for the influential daily paper: “As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood … I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.” / 29

Thirty seven years ago, two of the most powerful men in our country, indeed, in the world, frankly discussed this matter in a private conversation that should be much better known. It was in 1972, in the oval office of the White House. President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham — the nation’s best-known and most influential Christian evangelist — were alone. These were not just prominent and influential men. They were shrewd and astute individuals who had accomplished much in their lives, and who had thought a lot about what they had observed and experienced over the years.

We know about this one-on-one conversation, and exactly what the two men said to each other, because Nixon had arranged for all conversations in his office to be secretly recorded. He regarded these recordings as his personal property, but he was later forced by court order to give them up. It wasn’t until thirty years later — in 2002 — that this conversation was finally made public. / 30

Here’s how their talk went. Graham said: “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” The President responded by saying: “You believe that?,” “Yes, sir,” said Graham. “Oh, boy,” Nixon replied, “So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

Now consider for a moment what this means, for America and the world, and for us today. Here’s the most powerful political personality in the United States at that time, indeed the most powerful man in the world, and the most influential religious figure in the US, in agreement about the Jewish hold on our media. They didn’t talk about the Jewish role in the media, or even Jewish domination of the media. They spoke about a Jewish “stranglehold” on our media.

For everyone who cares about our nation and the world, it’s worth asking and answering two questions. First, were Nixon and Graham right? Were they correct in what they said that day about what they called the Jewish “stranglehold” on the media? And, second, if they were right, what does that say about America and our society?

Two of the most influential men in our country were so afraid of the intimidating power of the organized Jewish community that they felt unable to even mention this “stranglehold” publicly — that’s the term Graham used — on our media, a “stranglehold” that they regarded as so harmful that unless it is broken, America, again, their words, is “going down the drain.” What a telling commentary on the corruption and perversion of our national life! If Nixon and Graham were right, is it not important, indeed, imperative, to clearly and forthrightly address the reality of this hold on our media?

What has brought us together here this evening is, first and foremost, our interest in real history — our passion for a clearer understanding of the past, free of “politically correct” orthodoxy and stricture. But an awareness of real history is not enough. It is important to understand the how and why of the systematic distortion of history in our society, and the power behind that distortion. Understanding and countering that power is a critically important task, not merely for the sake of historical truth in the abstract, but for the sake of our nation and humankind.

Notes

1. Time magazine issue of Oct. 15, 1945.
2. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). See also: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989. 3rd rev. ed.)
3. Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007). See also the review of this book by Mark Weber, “New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two.” (IHR: 2007).
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )
On this subject, see also: Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York: Crown, 1985); Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Harper, 2009); Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1949); James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950 (Little, Brown: 1997).
4. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston: 1967), p. 265. Also quoted in: A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 62.
5. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 47-50.
6. Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992), pp. 59-60. (In the original edition, published in Chicago in 1947, pp. 55-56.). Also mentioned, in part, in: Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), p. 479.
7. R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), pp.15-16.
8. R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 15.
9. R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 61. See also: R. Bessel, Germany 1945 (2009), pp. 116-117; Max Hastings, Armageddon (2004), pp. 428-431; G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 78-79.
10. Günter Bischoff and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 9-10 (incl. n. 24), 58-64, 147 (n. 33), 178.
11. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 392-395. See also: James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (1997), pp. 41-45.
12. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 396-399; G. Bischoff and S. Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (1992), pp. 165, 169, 170
13. R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), pp. 27-28 (or pp. 26-27 of the 1947 edition)
14. R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 26.
15. “Secrets of the London Cage,” The Guardian (London), Nov. 12, 2005
( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/12/secondworldwar.world ); G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 412- 413. F. Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (1949), pp. 185-201.
16. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 400, 406.
17. A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 113.
18. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 362-363; G. Bischoff and S. Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (1992), pp. 12, 106, 109.
19. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), p. 362.
20. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 362-365.
21. A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 108.
22. A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 85.
23. A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), pp. 86-92.
24. John Sack, An Eye For An Eye (2000. Fourth, revised and updated edition);
See also: “Behind An Eye for an Eye, an IHR Conference address by John Sack, May 2000. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n1p-9_Sack.html )
25. G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 38, 382, 386 , 389.
26. Jackson letter to Truman, Oct. 12, 1945. State Department files. Quoted in: R. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (1983), p. 68. Also quoted in: M. Weber, “The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Historical Review (Vol. 12, No. 2), Summer 1992. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html )
27. M. Medved, “Is Hollywood Too Jewish?,” Moment, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1996), p. 37. Also quoted in: M. Weber, “A Straight Look at the Jewish Lobby”
( http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/jewishlobby.shtml )
28. Jonathan Jeremy Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 280, 287-288. See also pp. 39-40, 290-291.
29. J. Stein, “How Jewish Is Hollywood?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 2008.
( http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column )
30. “Nixon, Billy Graham Make Derogatory Comments About Jews on Tapes,” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 2002 (or Feb. 28, 2002)
( http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/02/Graham_Nixon.html ); “Billy Graham Apologizes for ’72 Remarks,” Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2002. “Graham Regrets Jewish Slur,” BBC News, March 2, 2002. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1850077.stm ). The conversation apparently took place on Feb. 1, 1972.

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The Wrecking Crew and The War on Democracy

With the recent controversy surrounding Oliver Stone’s candor concerning Jewish media domination, Russians as suffering far greater losses in WWII than European Jewry, Adolf Hitler as an easy historical scapegoat lacking proper context, and the deleterious Zionist grip on America’s foreign policy, I was able to witness, point by point, the intricate workings of a Hollywood character-assassination ala the wrecking crew.

Following Stone’s recantation, I couldn’t help but notice that the wrecking crew was apparently not yet finished with him. What I did not expect, however, was Hugo Chavez to get dragged (quite literally) into the picture — another easy historical scapegoat lacking proper context. Photos of Stone and Chavez were now rather conveniently surfacing everywhere.

According to hawkish imperialists in D.C. and Tel Aviv, Hugo Chavez is “a brutal dictator,” which, according to the logic of the wrecking crew, only proves that Stone supports brutal dictatorships. But wait…

If Stone supports Chavez, and Chavez supports Ahmadinejad, and Ahmadinejad supports “wiping Israel off the map,” then my God, Haim Saban was right and good to demand the crucifixion of Mel Gibson — I mean, Oliver Stone — right?

This is how the wrecking crew works, and on account of widespread ignorance and indifference on both historical issues and current events of crucial importance, they typically surpass their objectives. I mean, why squander valuable time and energy in the character assassination of one opponent when you can line them up and take out two or three? And why stop there if you can accomplish more?
. . .

Admitting how little I knew of Hugo Chavez and politics in Venezuela, I sought, sifted, and extracted information which clarified precisely why he is an ongoing target of hawkish imperialists in D.C. and Tel Aviv. In short — and whether I agree with many of his positions or not is beside the point — Chavez fights for the right to self-determination. I support that right, and it isn’t necessary, in any case, that we agree on much else in this context. As he said himself, “We were trying to do the impossible. To have a revolution without crashing against the empire — it’s impossible.” I can appreciate that statement.

And while the documentary below has its faults and tends to run rather distastefully hard-left throughout, John Pilger’s “The War on Democracy” brings up some interesting points which accomplish more than he probably intended. Informed readers/viewers, for example, will have a more firm grasp of whom Mr. Pilger speaks when he refers to the well-funded organized coups, the puppet regimes, the destabilization of infrastructure, the theft of natural resources, the orchestrated paranoia, the art of “spin,” and the terror campaigns which masquerade behind “freedom and democracy” around the world this very instant. Informed readers/viewers will know that it is certainly not “the Fascists” who’ve profited from all of this madness, but rather their enduring enemies. The true patriots and nationalists of all lands naturally sympathize with more honest and honorable men than those traitorous cliques who claim to represent our national interests.

Once again, I trust my subscribers and regular readers have become, or have perhaps always been, adept in the art of separating gold from dross. Beyond appearances and titles, there is always something here to enrich and empower you. Discerning minds will reap what is essential and discard the rest. -W.

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The Avenger’s Tragedy

A few (obvious) points of disagreement throughout this article. Let us read between the lines.

The Avenger’s Tragedy
Leo McKinstry
Published 17 December 2009
Source: www.newstatesman.com

The British government has long denied that wartime air raids on German cities were intended to kill as many civilians as possible. In fact, the raids, led by Arthur Harris, were motivated largely by a desire to hit back and destroy indiscriminately.

The scene was apocalyptic in its scale of devastation. As the RAF bombers released their cargo of incendiaries on the night of 27 July 1943, the northern German port of Hamburg was engulfed in one of the worst firestorms in history. The flaming mass of bombs sent warm air soaring thousands of feet into the sky, creating a vacuum at ground level that was filled by winds gusting at 150mph. These tornadoes not only fanned the conflagration, but also scythed through almost everything in their path.

Trees were uprooted, buildings were destroyed and people were hurled through the air. Some burned to death in the street or in their homes from the sheer intensity of the heat. Other victims, screaming in agony, were stuck in the roadways as the asphalt turned to boiling liquid.

Thousands were asphyxiated by lack of oxygen, or died of smoke inhalation as they sought shelter in cellars. Those who made it to the rivers or canals fared little better: the scorching heat continued to suck oxygen out of the air, while the fire was spread across surface of the water by exploding oil tankers and the debris of burning coal barges.

The next morning, long after the bombers had left, much of Hamburg was a smouldering wilderness of death. The smoke was so thick that it blotted out the sun. There were corpses everywhere, many of them little more than twisted, blackened remnants of humanity. Occasionally, to the anguish of the rescue parties, a naked figure, charred beyond recognition, might emit a faint sound of life.

The raid that caused this inferno was one of a series of Allied attacks carried out against Hamburg in late July 1943, leaving roughly 45,000 people dead, including 21,000 women and 8,000 children. In addition, 1.2 million refugees left the city in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many of them mentally and physically scarred. One distraught mother was found to be carrying her dead infant in her suitcase.

In terms of civilian slaughter, the Hamburg campaign of mid-1943 was the most destructive assault by the Royal Air Force in the entire Second World War. The death toll was higher than that inflicted in the Dresden raid of February 1945, where as many as 25,000 people were estimated to have been killed [keep in mind, reliable sources place the range significantly higher]. Yet, for all their historic lethality, neither the Hamburg nor the Dresden raid was a departure from the RAF bombing strategy that prevailed from early 1942 until the end of the war. Far from being unfortunate or freak occurrences, they represented the ultimate fruition of British air policy. Bomber Command’s entire strategic offensive seems to have been based on the belief that the Nazi regime could be destroyed through wholesale, indiscriminate killing of Germany’s urban population.

Night after night, the RAF pounded the residential districts of German cities, its deadly effectiveness increasing as the bomber fleet, led by the mighty, four-engined Avro Lancasters, grew in size and the Reich’s defences weakened. On the night of 23 February 1945, 367 Lancasters dropped 1,825 tons of bombs on the town of Pforzheim, causing another firestorm that killed 17,600 people, a quarter of the population. This was proportionately a higher casualty rate than at Nagasaki in Japan, where the second atomic bomb was dropped a few months later. In March 1945, 225 Lancasters dropped 1,127 tons of bombs on the medieval city of Würzburg in a raid lasting just 17 minutes. More than 5,000 people died, 66 per cent of them women and 14 per cent children. “The inner core of Würzburg had become a cauldron of fire. The roar was deafening and the smoke suffocating,” wrote one witness.

Both during and after the war, the government maintained that it was never Britain’s policy to carry out carpet bombing of civilian targets. “We have always adhered firmly to the principle that we attack none but military objectives,” declared Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air, in the Commons in October 1943. The mounting toll of civilian deaths was presented as a regrettable consequence of raids against factories, energy plants, transport networks or military installations, not as an end in itself.

Even after victory was achieved, this unconvincing line was maintained. In one lecture, Charles Portal, the chief of the Air Staff for most of the war, said that it was “a curious and widespread fallacy that our bombing of the German cities was really intended to kill and frighten Germans and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. Any such idea is completely and utterly false. The loss of life, which amounted to some 600,000 killed, was purely incidental.” But as a study of wartime archives demonstrates, both Sinclair and Portal were being dishonest with the public. Urban destruction through “concentrating bomb-loads on the densest and most vulnerable areas of cities”, to quote one Air Staff paper, was the primary goal of Brit­ain’s air offensive over Germany.

It had not always been that way. After war had been declared on 3 September 1939, RAF Bomber Command mounted only occasional, sporadic raids against German military or naval targets, and pilots were under strict instructions not to put civilian lives at risk. “Indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy,” the RAF’s director of plans, John Slessor, pronounced with an air of moral certitude. The depths of caution were well illustrated by an episode in the war cabinet in 1939, when one minister suggested mounting a raid on a German armaments works. Kingsley Wood, then the air secretary, professed his outrage, saying that he would not countenance an attack on “private property”.

There were a number of factors that led Britain’s military and political leaders privately to adopt the policy of urban bombing from early 1941, even if the strategy was never openly declared in public. One was the Luftwaffe’s Blitz against British cities, which began in September 1940 and was symbolised by the notorious raid on Coventry [difference: a munitions center] in November that left nearly 600 people dead [let us, then, compare those numbers].

In a sense, the bombing of Germany was a sustained act of revenge for these atrocities. Arthur Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command, frequently justified the air offensive by adapting the Old Testament quotation, whereby the Germans had “sown the wind” and therefore deserved to “reap the whirlwind”. Another factor was the disastrous failure of Britain’s armed forces on almost every front, from continental Europe to the Far East. Bombing Germany’s cities seemed the only way to hit back at the Reich.

Because the bombers had to use the darkness of night as protective cover against German defences, their aiming could not be accurate, so the government made a virtue of necessity by declaring that whole cities, rather than specific sites, were targets. The arrival of the Lancaster, which first went into service in December 1941, transformed the threat of the bomber fleet with its phenomenal ability to carry huge loads. Designed by the far-sighted Avro engineer Roy Chadwick, it was a weapon of unique menace in the European theatre, capable of lifting a bomb weighing ten tons in its enormous bomb bay, stretching two-thirds of the way along the fuselage. Without the Lancaster, it would never have been possible to mount an effective offensive at all.

Arthur Harris, who first took up his post at Bomber Command in February 1942, was also vital in adopting an aggressive bombing policy. Ferociously independent, stubborn and dogmatic, Harris was a veteran of the First World War and his experience of the Western Front had filled him with loathing for the idea of another land campaign in Europe. He passionately believed that the way to defeat Germany was not by invasion, but by smashing its economy with repeated hammer blows at its industrial workforce.

“The cities of Germany, including their working populations, are literally the heart of Germany’s war potential,” he once wrote. With his hatred of the Reich, he rarely had the slightest hesitation about inflicting carnage. “What we want to do, in addition to the horrors of fire, is to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche,” he told the Air Staff. Sometimes this belligerent spirit revealed itself in a morbid sense of humour. On one occasion he was being driven at high speed in his black Bentley to London from Bomber Command headquarters in High Wycombe when his car was stopped by the police.

“You could have killed someone,” said the aggrieved constable through Harris’s window. “Young man, I kill thousands of people every night,” was his laconic reply.

Harris was ruthless in implementing the bombing strategy but, until the last stages of the war, he had the full support of his political and military superiors. Indeed, as unpublished papers show, the air ministry and Air Staff had taken an uncompromising stance towards the German population long before Harris’s appointment. Typical was a paper, now in the archives of Cambridge University, written in August 1941 by the bombing operations directorate of the air ministry. This argued that the focus of future British attacks must be “the people in their homes and in factories, also the services such as electricity, gas and water upon which the industrial and domestic life of the area depends”.

Warming to this theme, the directorate then found support for such theories in the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Coventry. To most Britons, this attack had been an outrage. To the Air Staff, it was an inspiration. The assault on Coventry, argued the paper, was “one of the most successful raids carried out by the German Air Force on this country”, with a ton of high explosive and incendiaries for every 800 citizens. “If Bomber Command could carry out a raid on the Coventry scale every month, the result would be a complete state of panic in the industrialised west of Germany”, as well as “considerable loss of life and limb, widespread destruction and damage to the houses of workers“.

This was the outlook that existed throughout the top of the RAF and the government, contrary to public denials. In September 1941, Norman Bottomley, the deputy chief of the Air Staff, urged “saturation by incendiaries” to achieve the twin objectives of breaking “the morale of the population” and making “people conscious of constant physical danger”. His boss, Charles Portal, was just as hardline, telling Winston Churchill in late 1941 that if Bomber Command were provided with a force of 4,000 planes, enormous damage could be inflicted on Germany, including the destruction of six million homes and “civilian casualties estimated at 900,000 killed”. Already in 1941, wrote Portal to the prime minister: “We have caused death and injury to 93,000 civilians. The result was achieved with a fraction of the bomb-load we hope to employ in 1943.”

Portal largely got his wish, as bomber production was hugely stepped up. By the end of the war, no fewer than 7,377 Lancasters had been produced, operating in a force of 56 squadrons. In private, the Air Staff had no compunction about using the term “terror bombing” to describe their strategy, as is clear in one paper, from the bombing operations directorate in January 1945, which set out the case for a “spectacular catastrophe” from the air to break the will of the German population in the east. Code-named Operation Thunderclap, such an assault would adhere to “the basic principle of true morale bombing”, which was “to provoke a state of terror by air attack”. It was this mentality that led, a few weeks later, to the raid by 796 Lancasters on Dresden.

The fierce controversy over Dresden, which flared up in the final months of the war, did not perturb Harris. With characteristic bullishness, he remarked: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” But what had angered him about the Air Staff was the refusal to be open with the public about strategic bombing. Brutally frank himself, he despised the euphemisms and evasions that his superiors used to cover up the reality.

“The aim of Bomber Command should be unambiguously and publicly stated,” he wrote in 1943. “That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany.” He wanted the government to declare its commitment to “the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale”, and he expressed his contempt of the official eagerness “to downplay the obliteration of German cities and their inhabitants”.

One of Harris’s arguments in favour of greater openness was that the cover-up was an insult to the heroic men who flew in his command. They risked their lives in the hostile night skies over Germany, he said, yet the government seemed to regard their missions as so “disreputable” that their purpose could not be mentioned in public. The failure to be clear about the RAF’s objective “to eliminate entire cities” would, he warned, “inevitably affect adversely the morale of crews and I would urge that this rather than the appeasement of sentimental and humanitarian scruples should be our primary consideration”. But Harris never got the unequivocal statement he wanted from the government.

Whatever the debate about the morality of urban bombing, Harris was absolutely correct in his praise for the Bomber Command aircrews, which showed the most remarkable courage in the face of daunting odds. Of the 125,000 men who served in the command during the war, no less than 44 per cent were killed in action. When the campaign was at its most dangerous in early 1944, the chances of a bomber crewman surviving were lower than those for a British soldier at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Yet even in the face of anti-aircraft fire, blinding searchlights and menacing fighters, the aircrews continued on their missions. “All war is brutal,” Harris told his group commanders soon after taking over at High Wycombe. “It is going to be a damned sight more brutal still. The fact remains that if there are any weaker brethren who cannot stomach it, the sooner we dispose of them, the better.” Hardly any of his recruits showed that they did not have the stomach for the job. Yet the tragedy of the bomber war is that there could have been an alternative strategy, one made possible by the brilliance of the Lancaster and the reliability of its crews. In a host of daring raids, most notably the Dambusters attack of May 1943, the Lancaster proved that it could be a rapier as well as a bludgeon.

In the Dams raid, led by Guy Gibson, the Lancasters succeeded in dropping their bouncing bombs from just 60 feet above the water to an accuracy of a few yards, even while under fierce anti-aircraft fire. Other precision attacks, such as those on the French railway system in the run-up to D-Day in 1944, also achieved striking results, the Lancaster’s effectiveness enhanced by the introduction of ever more sophisticated navigational technology and bombsights. For all its unparalleled lifting capacity, the Lancaster was also highly maneuverable and fast, capable of over 300mph in a dive. “You couldn’t break that aircraft. You could pull it about and do steep turns and all that. The Lancaster was magnificent,” said one pilot.

But neither the virtues of Chadwick’s design nor the skills of the bomber crews were ever fully exploited, because of Harris’s myopic obsession with the mass killing of German civilians. The bomber chief never had any enthusiasm for precision raids on specific sites, such as oil plants, railway depots and army barracks, which he dismissed as “panacea targets”. He even privately said that the Dams raid “achieved nothing”, and in early 1945 threatened to resign when Portal, who had begun to see the ineffectiveness of continued mass urban destruction, urged him to concentrate more on Germany’s oil supplies.

Portal should have forced the issue much earlier. If the Lancaster fleet had been allowed to focus on targets of real military and economic value, it is likely that the German war machine would have collapsed more quickly and the conflict may have finished months earlier. Urban bombing might have been Brit­ain’s only way [think again] of fighting back against Nazi Germany in the middle years of the war, but by 1945, Bomber Command’s strategy had descended into gruesome futility.

Leo McKinstry’s most recent book is “Lancaster: the Second World War’s Greatest Bomber” (John Murray, £20)

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General Patton’s Late Realizations, Warnings, and Convenient Death

General Patton’s Warning
Issue Number 53, National Vanguard, 1977.
Source: National Vanguard

At the end of World War II, one of America’s top military leaders accurately assessed the shift in the balance of world power which that war had produced and foresaw the enormous danger of communist aggression against the West. Alone among U.S. leaders he warned that America should act immediately, while her supremacy was unchallengeable, to end that danger. Unfortunately, his warning went unheeded, and he was quickly silenced by a convenient “accident” which took his life.

Thirty-two years ago, in the terrible summer of 1945, the U.S. Army had just completed the destruction of Europe and had set up a government of military occupation amid the ruins to rule the starving Germans and deal out victors’ justice to the vanquished. General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. Third Army, became military governor of the greater portion of the American occupation zone of Germany.

Patton was regarded as the “fightingest” general in all the Allied forces. He was considerably more audacious and aggressive than most commanders, and his martial ferocity may very well have been [one of the] the deciding factor[s] which led to the Allied victory. He personally commanded his forces in many of the toughest and most decisive battles of the war: in Tunisia, in Sicily, in the cracking of the Siegfried Line, in holding back the German advance during the Battle of the Bulge, in the exceptionally bloody fighting around Bastogne in December 1944 and January 1945.

During the war Patton had respected the courage and the fighting qualities of the Germans — especially when he compared them with those of some of America’s allies — but he had also swallowed whole the hate-inspired wartime propaganda generated by America’s alien media masters. He believed Germany was a menace to America’s freedom and that Germany’s National Socialist government was an especially evil institution. Acting on these beliefs he talked incessantly of his desire to kill as many Germans as possible, and he exhorted his troops to have the same goal. These bloodthirsty exhortations led to the nickname “Blood and Guts” Patton.

It was only in the final days of the war and during his tenure as military governor of Germany — after he had gotten to know both the Germans and America’s “gallant Soviet allies” — that Patton’s understanding of the true situation grew and his opinions changed. In his diary and in many letters to his family, friends, various military colleagues, and government officials, he expressed his new understanding and his apprehensions for the future. His diary and his letters were published in 1974 by the Houghton Mifflin Company under the title The Patton Papers.

Several months before the end of the war, General Patton had recognized the fearful danger to the West posed by the Soviet Union, and he had disagreed bitterly with the orders which he had been given to hold back his army and wait for the Red Army to occupy vast stretches of German, Czech, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Yugoslav territory, which the Americans could have easily taken instead.

On May 7, 1945, just before the German capitulation, Patton had a conference in Austria with U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson. Patton was gravely concerned over the Soviet failure to respect the demarcation lines separating the Soviet and American occupation zones. He was also alarmed by plans in Washington for the immediate partial demobilization of the U.S. Army.

Patton said to Patterson: “Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.”

Patterson replied, “Oh, George, you have been so close to this thing for so long, you have lost sight of the big picture.”

Patton rejoined: “I understand the situation. Their (the Soviet) supply system is inadequate to maintain them in a serious action such as I could put to them. They have chickens in the coop and cattle on the hoof — that’s their supply system. They could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could give them for five days. After then it would make no difference how many million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. They lived on the land coming down. There is insufficient left for them to maintain themselves going back. Let’s not give them time to build up their supplies. If we do, then . . . we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!”

Patton’s urgent and prophetic advice went unheeded by Patterson and the other politicians and only served to give warning about Patton’s feelings to the alien conspirators behind the scenes in New York, Washington, and Moscow.

The more he saw of the Soviets, the stronger Patton’s conviction grew that the proper course of action would be to stifle communism then and there, while [it seemed] the chance existed. Later in May 1945 he attended several meetings and social affairs with top Red Army officers, and he evaluated them carefully. He noted in his diary on May 14: “I have never seen in any army at any time, including the German Imperial Army of 1912, as severe discipline as exists in the Russian army. The officers, with few exceptions, give the appearance of recently civilized Mongolian bandits.”

And Patton’s aide, General Hobart Gay, noted in his own journal for May 14: “Everything they (the Russians) did impressed one with the idea of virility and cruelty.”

Nevertheless, Patton knew that the Americans could whip the Reds then — but perhaps not later. On May 18 he noted in his diary: “In my opinion, the American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms, whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to right the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.”

Two days later he repeated his concern when he wrote his wife: “If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on we will get weaker and they stronger.”

Having immediately recognized the Soviet danger and urged a course of action which would have freed all of eastern Europe from the communist yoke with the expenditure of far less American blood than was spilled in Korea and Vietnam and would have obviated both those later wars not to mention future (world) wars — Patton next came to appreciate the true nature of the people for whom World War II was fought: the Jews.

Most of the Jews swarming over Germany immediately after the war came from Poland and Russia, and Patton found their personal habits shockingly uncivilized.

He was disgusted by their behavior in the camps for Displaced Persons (DP’s) which the Americans built for them and even more disgusted by the way they behaved when they were housed in German hospitals and private homes. He observed with horror that “these people do not understand toilets and refuse to use them except as repositories for tin cans, garbage, and refuse . . . They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relieve themselves on the floor.”

He described in his diary one DP camp, “where, although room existed, the Jews were crowded together to an appalling extent, and in practically every room there was a pile of garbage in one corner which was also used as a latrine. The Jews were only forced to desist from their nastiness and clean up the mess by the threat of the butt ends of rifles. Of course, I know the expression ‘lost tribes of Israel’ applied to the tribes which disappeared — not to the tribe of Judah from which the current sons of bitches are descended. However, it is my personal opinion that this too is a lost tribe — lost to all decency.”

Patton’s initial impressions of the Jews were not improved when he attended a Jewish religious service at Eisenhower’s insistence. His diary entry for September 17, 1945, reads in part: “This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about halfway up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General . . . The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my lunch as the result of remembering it.”

These experiences and a great many others firmly convinced Patton that the Jews were an especially unsavory variety of creature and hardly deserving of all the official concern the American government was bestowing on them. Another September diary entry, following a demand from Washington that more German housing be turned over to Jews, summed up his feelings: “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working. Harrison (a U.S. State Department official) and his associates indicate that they feel German civilians should be removed from houses for the purpose of housing Displaced Persons. There are two errors in this assumption. First, when we remove an individual German we punish an individual German, while the punishment is not intended for the individual but for the race. Furthermore, it is against my Anglo-Saxon conscience to remove a person from a house, which is a punishment, without due process of law. In the second place, Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”

One of the strongest factors in straightening out General Patton’s thinking on the conquered Germans was the behavior of America’s controlled news media toward them. At a press conference in Regensburg, Germany, on May 8, 1945, immediately after Germany’s surrender, Patton was asked whether he planned to treat captured SS troops differently from other German POW’s. His answer was: “No. SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat in America — that is not to be quoted. I mean by that that initially the SS people were special sons of bitches, but as the war progressed they ran out of sons of bitches and then they put anybody in there. Some of the top SS men will be treated as criminals, but there is no reason for trying someone who was drafted into this outfit . . .”

Despite Patton’s request that his remark not be quoted, the press eagerly seized on it, and the Jews and their front men in America screamed in outrage over Patton’s comparison of the SS and the Democratic Party as well as over his announced intention of treating most SS prisoners humanely.

Patton refused to take hints from the press, however, and his disagreement with the American occupation policy formulated in Washington grew. Later in May he said to his brother-in-law: “I think that this [law of] non-fraternization is very stupid. If we are going to keep American soldiers in a country, they have to have some civilians to talk to. Furthermore, I think we could do a lot for the German civilians by letting our soldiers talk to their young people.”

Various of Patton’s colleagues tried to make it perfectly clear what was expected of him. One politically ambitious officer, Brig. Gen. Philip S. Gage, anxious to please the powers that be, wrote to Patton: “Of course, I know that even your extensive powers are limited, but I do hope that wherever and whenever you can you will do what you can to make the German populace suffer. For God’s sake, please don’t ever go soft in regard to them. Nothing could ever be too bad for them.”

But Patton continued to do what he thought was right, whenever he could. With great reluctance, and only after repeated promptings from Eisenhower, he had thrown German families out of their homes to make room for more than a million Jewish DP’s — part of the famous “six million” who had supposedly been gassed — but he balked when ordered to begin blowing up German factories, in accord with the infamous Morgenthau Plan to destroy Germany’s economic basis forever. In his diary he wrote: “I doubted the expediency of blowing up factories, because the ends for which the factories are being blown up — that is, preventing Germany from preparing for war — can be equally well attained through the destruction of their machinery, while the buildings can be used to house thousands of homeless persons.”

Similarly, he expressed his doubts to his military colleagues about the overwhelming emphasis being placed on the persecution of every German who had formerly been a member of the National Socialist party. In a letter to his wife of September 14, 1945, he said: “I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending POW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death.”

Despite his disagreement with official policy, Patton followed the rules laid down by Morgenthau and others back in Washington as closely as his conscience would allow, but he tried to moderate the effect, and this brought him into increasing conflict with Eisenhower and the other politically ambitious generals. In another letter to his wife he commented: “I have been at Frankfurt for a civil government conference. If what we are doing (to the Germans) is ‘Liberty, then give me death.’ I can’t see how Americans can sink so low. It is Semitic, and I am sure of it.”

And in his diary he noted:, “Today we received orders . . . in which we were told to give the Jews special accommodations. If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc? . . . We are also turning over to the French several hundred thousand prisoners of war to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”

His duties as military governor took Patton to all parts of Germany and intimately acquainted him with the German people and their condition. He could not help but compare them with the French, the Italians, the Belgians, and even the British. This comparison gradually forced him to the conclusion that World War II had been fought against the wrong people.

After a visit to ruined Berlin, he wrote his wife on July 21, 1945: “Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what could have been a good race, and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages. And all Europe will be communist. It’s said that for the first week after they took it (Berlin), all women who ran were shot and those who did not were raped. I could have taken Berlin (instead of the Soviets) had I been allowed.”

This conviction, that the politicians had used him and the U.S. Army for a criminal purpose, grew in the following weeks. During a dinner with French General Alphonse Juin in August, Patton was surprised to find the Frenchman in agreement with him. His diary entry for August 18 quotes Gen. Juin: “It is indeed unfortunate, mon General, that the English and the Americans have destroyed in Europe the only sound country — and I do not mean France. Therefore, the road is now open for the advent of Russian communism.”

Later diary entries and letters to his wife reiterate this same conclusion. On August 31 he wrote: “Actually, the Germans are the only decent people left in Europe. It’s a choice between them and the Russians. I prefer the Germans.” And on September 2: “What we are doing is to destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe, so that Russia can swallow the whole.”

By this time the Morgenthauists and media monopolists had decided that Patton was incorrigible and must be discredited. So they began a non-stop hounding of him in the press, a la Watergate, accusing him of being “soft on Nazis” and continually recalling an incident in which he had slapped a shirker two years previously, during the Sicily campaign. A New York newspaper printed the completely false claim that when Patton had slapped the soldier who was Jewish, he had called him a “yellow-bellied Jew.”

Then, in a press conference on September 22, reporters hatched a scheme to needle Patton into losing his temper and making statements which could be used against him. The scheme worked. The press interpreted one of Patton’s answers to their insistent questions as to why he was not pressing the Nazi-hunt hard enough as: “The Nazi thing is just like a Democrat-Republican fight.” The New York Times headlined this quote, and other papers all across America picked it up.

The unmistakable hatred which had been directed at him during this press conference finally opened Patton’s eyes fully as to what was afoot. In his diary that night he wrote: “There is a very apparent Semitic influence in the press. They are trying to do two things: first, implement communism, and second, see that all businessmen of German ancestry and non-Jewish antecedents are thrown out of their professions. They have utterly lost the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice and feel that a man can be kicked out because somebody else says he is a Nazi. They were evidently quite shocked when I told them I would kick nobody out without the successful proof of guilt before a court of law . . . Another point which the press harped on was the fact that we were doing too much for the Germans to the detriment of the DP’s, most of whom are Jews. I could not give the answer to that one, because the answer is that, in my opinion, and that of most nonpolitical officers, it is vitally necessary for us to build Germany up now as a buffer state against Russia. In fact, I am afraid we have waited too long.”

And in a letter of the same date to his wife: “I will probably be in the headlines before you get this, as the press is trying to quote me as being more interested in restoring order in Germany than in catching Nazis. I can’t tell them the truth that unless we restore Germany we will insure that communism takes America.”

Eisenhower responded immediately to the press outcry against Patton and made the decision to relieve him of his duties as military governor and “kick him upstairs” as the commander of the Fifteenth Army. In a letter to his wife on September 29, Patton indicated that he was, in a way, not unhappy with his new assignment, because “I would like it much better than being a sort of executioner to the best race in Europe.”

But even his change of duties did not shut Patton up. In his diary entry of October 1, we find the observation: “In thinking over the situation, I could not but be impressed with the belief that at the present moment the unblemished record of the American Army for non-political activities is about to be lost. Everyone seems to be more interested in the effects which his actions will have on his political future than in carrying out the motto of the United States Military Academy, ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’ I hope that after the current crop of political aspirants has been gathered our former tradition will be restored.”

And Patton continued to express these sentiments to his friends — and those he thought were his friends. On October 22, he wrote a long letter to Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord, who was back in the States. In the letter Patton bitterly condemned the Morgenthau policy; Eisenhower’s pusillanimous behavior in the face of Jewish demands; the strong pro-Soviet bias in the press; and the politicization, corruption, degradation, and demoralization of the U.S. Army which these things were causing.

He saw the demoralization of the Army as a deliberate goal of America’s enemies: “I have been just as furious as you at the compilation of lies which the communist and Semitic elements of our government have leveled against me and practically every other commander. In my opinion it is a deliberate attempt to alienate the soldier vote from the commanders, because the communists know that soldiers are not communistic, and they fear what eleven million votes (of veterans) would do.”

His denunciation of the politicization of the Army was scathing: “All the general officers in the higher brackets receive each morning from the War Department a set of American (newspaper) headlines, and, with the sole exception of myself, they guide themselves during the ensuing day by what they have read in the papers. . . .”

In his letter to Harbord, Patton also revealed his own plans to fight those who were destroying the morale and integrity of the Army and endangering America’s future by failing to oppose the burgeoning Soviet strength: “It is my present thought . . . that when I finish this job, which will be around the first of the year, I shall resign, not retire, because if I retire I will still have a gag in my mouth . . . I should not start a limited counterattack, which would be contrary to my military theories, but should wait until I can start an all-out offensive . . . .”

Two months later, on December 23, 1945, General George S. Patton was silenced forever.

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A New Openness to Discussing Allied War Crimes in WWII

A New Openness to Discussing Allied War Crimes in WWII
By Klaus Wiegrefe
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Source: http://www.spiegel.de/

D-Day may have been the beginning of the end of Germany’s campaign of horror during World War II. But a new book by British historian Antony Beevor makes it clear that the “greatest generation” wasn’t above committing a few [?] war crimes of its own.

It was the first crime William E. Jones had ever committed, which was probably why he could still remember it well so many years later. He and other soldiers in the 4th Infantry Division had captured a small hill. “It was pretty rough,” Jones later wrote, describing the bloody battle.

At some point, the GIs lost all self-control. As Jones wrote: “(The Germans) were baffled and they were crazy. There were quite a few of them still in their foxholes. Then I saw quite a few of them shot right in the foxholes. We didn’t take prisoners and there was nothing to do but kill them, and we did, and I had never shot one like that. Even our lieutenant did and some of the non coms (non-commissioned officers).”

The dead will most likely never be identified by name, but one thing is clear: The victims of this war crime were German soldiers killed in Normandy in the summer of 1944.

At daybreak on June 6, the Americans, British and their allies launched “Operation Overlord,” the biggest amphibious landing of all time. During the operation, Allied and German troops fought each other in one of the fiercest battles of World War II, first on the beaches and then in the countryside of Normandy. When it was over, more than 250,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed or wounded, and Normandy itself was ravaged.

The Only Good German Is a Dead German

There is no shortage of books on the Battle of Normandy, which also goes by the name of D-Day. And the same can be said about films, such as Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film “Saving Private Ryan,” which was a global success. Indeed, it would almost seem that everything that could be said about the battle has been said.

Still, that didn’t deter British historian and best-selling author Antony Beevor from taking another stab at the material. While conducting research for his newest book, “D-Day: The Battle for Normandy,” Beevor stumbled upon something that is currently a matter of much debate among experts. If some of these scholars are correct, Allied soldiers committed war crimes in Normandy to a much greater extent than was previously realized.

Beevor extensively quotes reports and memoirs of those who took part in the invasion, many of whom state that American, British and Canadian troops killed German POWs and wounded soldiers. They also reportedly used soldiers belonging to the German Wehrmacht or Waffen SS as human shields and forced them to walk through minefields.

For example, one recounts the tale of a private named Smith, who was fighting with the 79th US Infantry Division. Smith allegedly discovered a room full of wounded Germans in a fortification while he was drunk on Calvados, a local apple brandy. According to the official report: “Declaring to all and sundry that the only good German was a dead one, Smith made good Germans out of several of them before he could be stopped.”

In another account, Staff Sergeant Lester Zick reportedly encountered an American soldier on a white horse who was herding 11 prisoners in front of him. He called out to Zick and his men and told them that the prisoners were all Poles, except for two Germans. Then, according to Zick, the soldier took out his pistol “and shot both of them in the back of the head. And we just stood there.”

Beevor also quotes John Troy, a soldier with the 8th Infantry Division, who writes of finding the body of an American officer the Germans had tied up and killed because he had been caught carrying a captured German P-38 pistol. Troy describes his reaction in the following way: “When I saw that, I said no souvenirs for me. But, of course, we did it too when we caught (Germans) with American cigarettes on them, or American wristwatches they had on their arms.”

Rage and Violence

The issue of war crimes is an incredibly sensitive one. But, in this case, the evidence is overwhelming.

Given the high number of casualties they suffered, Allied paratroopers were particularly determined to exact bloody revenge. Near one village, Audouville-la-Hubert, they massacred 30 captured Wehrmacht soldiers in a single killing spree.

On the beaches, soldiers in an engineering brigade had to protect German prisoners from enraged paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division, who shouted: “Turn those prisoners over to us. Turn them over to us. We know what to do to them.”

When the same LSTs (landing ship tanks) were used to evacuate both German POWs and Allied wounded, the wounded attacked the Germans, and it was only through the intervention of a pharmacist’s mate that nothing more serious happened.

A New Approach to Writing History

Beevor frequently quotes from personal memoirs of Allied soldiers that have been available to historians for years. But could it be that they were ignored by them until now because they didn’t support the image of the “greatest generation,” the term that Americans have liked to use to describe their victorious soldiers from 1945? It would seem that no shadows were to be cast on the war that gave the Americans, in particular, the moral right to have a say in shaping Europe’s postwar future as well as creating the practical conditions for it to do so.

Still, that approach has recently been revised. In his 2007 book “The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1934-1944” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson described various war crimes committed by the Allies. And now we have the same thing with Normandy.

Beevor primarily attributes the Allied crimes to the epic ferocity of the battles. The Germans themselves called it a “dirty bush war,” a reference to the bushes and hedgerows, ranging in height between one and three meters (three and ten feet), used to demarcate the fields in Normandy’s bocage landscape.

Indeed, Normandy’s terrain is ideally suited for ambushes and booby traps. For example, German units stretched thin steel cables across roads at head level, so that when an American Jeep came roaring down the road, its driver and passengers would be decapitated. They also attached hand grenades to the dog tags of dead GIs, so that anyone who tried to remove the dog tags was blown up. Likewise, it is an established fact that German soldiers, and particularly those in the Waffen SS, shot prisoners. [According to the same people who’ve authored our established narrative, naturally.]

Allied Behavior Doesn’t Forgive Germany ‘s

The artillery fire from both sides and the Allied bombing attacks transformed Normandy into a moonscape. Beevor writes about soldiers who huddled in the craters screaming and weeping, while others walked around as if in a trance picking flowers in the midst of explosions. Indeed, American physicians reported 30,000 cases of combat neurosis among their troops alone.

In a letter to his family in Minnesota, a US infantryman wrote that he had never hated anything quite as much, adding: “And it’s not because of some blustery speech of a brass hat.”

But such “blustery speeches” did exist. According to the findings of German historian Peter Lieb, many Canadian and American units were given orders on D-Day to take no prisoners. If true, that might help explain the mystery of how only 66 of the 130 Germans the Americans took prisoner on Omaha Beach made it to collecting points for the captured on the beach.

It is also conspicuous that the Allies rarely captured members of the Waffen SS. Was it because the members of this organization — with its Totenkopf (death’s head) insignia — had sworn allegiance to Hitler until death and often fought to the last man? Or did the Allied propaganda about the SS have its desired effect on soldiers? “Many of them probably deserved to be shot in any case and know it,” a British XXX Corps report bluntly stated.

[And more with the disclaimers… This is Der Spiegel, after all.] Of course, for German apologists, this new information shouldn’t be something to make them feel better about their own side’s behavior. In fact, although the extent of Allied war crimes may have been greater than previously known, it cannot be compared with the scope of German crimes against civilians. For example, shooting innocent hostages was part of the German strategy for fighting the French partisans who struck out after D-Day. Up to 16,000 French citizens — men, women and children — fell victim to the terror of the Wehrmacht and the SS.

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Israel’s Development of Ethno-Biological Weapons

Israel is Developing ‘Ethnic Bomb’ for Growing Biological Weapons Arsenal
Mark Weber
Source: Archives, Institute for Historical Review

Israel is working on an “ethnically targeted” biological weapon that would kill or harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources cited in a front-page report in the London Sunday Times, November 15, 1998 (“Israel Planning ‘Ethnic’ Bomb as Saddam Caves In,” by Uzi Mahnaimi and Marie Colvin).

In developing this “ethno-bomb,” the British paper went on, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs, and then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus. The goal is to use the ability of viruses and certain bacteria to alter the DNA inside the host’s living cells. The scientists are trying to engineer deadly microorganisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes.

The secret Israel program is based at the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tsiona, a small town southeast of Tel Aviv, the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.

A scientist there said the task is very complicated because both Arabs and Jews are of Semitic origin. But he added: “They have, however, succeeded in pinpointing a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people.” Diseases could be spread by spraying organisms into the air or putting them in water supplies.

Some experts have commented that while an ethnically targeted weapon is theoretically feasible, the practical aspects of creating one are enormous. All the same, a confidential Pentagon report warned last year that biological agents could be genetically engineered to produce new lethal weapons.

US Defense Secretary William Cohen revealed that he had received reports of countries working to create “certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic-specific.” A senior western intelligence source confirmed that Israel is one of the countries Cohen had in mind, the Sunday Times report added.

Reliable Record

The Sunday Times report is all the more credible given the prestigious paper’s past record of reliable reporting. In a detailed front-page report published on June 19, 1977, the Sunday Times first revealed to the world that Israeli authorities had been torturing Palestinian prisoners, that this torture was “widespread and systematic,” and that it “appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy.” At the time Israeli officials and Jewish-Zionist leaders in the United States protested the Sunday Times revelations, and denied the charge. Later, though, Israeli torture of prisoners was independently verified by Amnesty International, and others.

Another recent Sunday Times article revealed that Israeli jets have been equipped to carry chemical and biological weapons. “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapons … which is not manufactured at the [Nes Tsiona] Institute,” a biologist who is a former Israeli intelligence official told the newspaper. And the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, citing a foreign report, has told readers that hundreds of bottles of deadly anthrax toxin are stored at the Institute.

The “ethnic bomb” claims have been given further credence in Foreign Report, an authoritative Jane’s publication that closely monitors security and military matters. It cites unnamed South African sources as saying that Israeli scientists, in trying to develop an “ethnic bullet” against Arabs, have made use of similar biological studies conducted by South African scientists during the Apartheid era (and later revealed in testimony before that country’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”). Foreign Report also says that Israelis have gained insights into the Arab genetic make-up by conducting research on “Jews of Arab origin, especially Iraqis.”

The British Medical Association has become so concerned about the lethal potential of genetically-based biological weapons that it has opened an investigation. Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, who organized the research, said: “With an ethnically targeted weapon, you could even hit groups within a population. The history of warfare, in which many conflicts have an ethnic factor, shows how dangerous this could be.”

A spokesman for Britain’s biological defense establishment confirms that such weapons are theoretically possible. “We have reached a point now where there is an obvious need for an international convention to control biological weapons,” he said.

The Anti-Defamation League lost no time denouncing the Sunday Times “ethnic bomb” report. Abraham Foxman, national director of the influential Jewish-Zionist organization, called it “irresponsible and dangerous.” The ADL official went on: “This sensational story is reminiscent of the age-old anti-Semitic blood libel myth of Jews deviously targeting non-Jews with poison.” Question: How would Foxman know that this report is not true? Do high-level Israeli officials routinely inform the ADL of the Zionist government’s top-secret military programs? [And would Foxman, of all people, openly confess anyhow?]

A senior Israeli government official similarly rejected the Sunday Times report, saying “this is the kind of story that does not deserve denial.” Such Israeli declarations are virtually worthless, however, considering that the Zionist state refuses officially to acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons, a fact that even authoritative American sources have confirmed.

‘Human Guinea Pigs’

Victor Ostrovsky, a former case officer of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, recalled in his book The Other Side of Deception how he first learned of the Zionist state’s secret weapons center:

It was Uri who enlightened me regarding the Nes Zionna [Tsiona] facility. It was, he said, an ABC warfare laboratory — ABC standing for atomic, biological and chemical. It was where our top epidemiological scientists were developing various doomsday machines. Because we were so vulnerable and would not have a second chance should there be an all-out war in which this type of weapon would be needed, there was no room for error. The [captured] Palestinian infiltrators came in handy in this regard. As human guinea pigs, they could make sure the weapons the scientists were developing worked properly and could verify how fast they worked and make them even more efficient.

As most of the world recognizes, United States policy toward countries that develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is sanctimonious and brazenly hypocritical.

Recently, for example, the US government sharply condemned India and Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons. Of course, the only country ever to have actually used nuclear weapons is the United States. In August 1945, American forces instantly killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians with atomic bombs, first in Hiroshima and then in Nagasaki — even though America’s most competent military leaders held that there was no military need to use the horrific weapon. (Read: “Was Hiroshima Necessary?”).

To prevent the government of Iraq from developing “weapons of mass destruction” (to use the currently fashionable phrase), the United States regularly bombs the hapless Arab country, and enforces an economic embargo that (according to authoritative estimates) has already claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Iraqi children (or, for an update on casualties, go HERE).

For decades, though, America’s political and intellectual leaders — reflecting their obsequious subservience to Jewish-Zionist interests — have condoned Israel’s growing arsenal of sophisticated nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
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This information was current in 1998, whether it was granted any attention in the mainstream media United States or not. In my world, though, there is no such thing as “old news” when it comes to explosive information. It remains valid. It remains relevant. Much of the world likely never heard a word about Israel’s development of ethno-biological weapons (or its anthrax supply), or those who had heard likely shrugged it off in the course of the last 12 years. Well, I want you to remember. If you care anything about the future, I want you to preserve the past. -W.

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A Forgotten Genocide: Germans in Postwar Central Europe

Source: Institute for Historical Review

Dr. Sunic provides an overview of the brutal “ethnic cleansing” of Germans in the aftermath of World War Two, in which some twelve million people, mostly women, children and elderly, were forcibly expelled from centuries-old homelands in eastern and central Europe. Of these, some two million were killed or otherwise perished. In this address at an IHR meeting, March 6, 2010, the European-American scholar contrasts the way in which this massive genocide is all but ignored in the US media, whereas Jewish “victimology” has become a central feature of our society’s “civic religion.”

Please listen to the informative audio file HERE.

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