Re: Report: Japan executes mentally ill prisoners
Michael Ejercito
> Murderers and rapists need to die. It's called justice.
>
> http://www.ihr.org/ www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
>
> http://www.natvan.com http://www.nsm88.org
>
> http://heretical.com/ http://immigration-globalization.blogspot.com/
Yes, indeed.
Many of your Nazi heroes received justice.
Michael
Topaz
Leon Degrelle
"We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins."
Those were Hitler's words on the night of January 30, 1933, as
cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the
windows of the Chancellery in Berlin.
His political struggle had lasted 14 years. He himself was 43, that
is, physically and intellectually at the peak of his powers. He had
won over millions of Germans and organized them into Germany's largest
and most dynamic political party, a party girded by a human rampart of
hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, three fourths of them members
of the working class. He had been extremely shrewd. All but toying
with his adversaries, Hitler had, one after another, vanquished them
all.
Standing there at the window, his arm raised to the delirious throng,
he must have known a feeling of triumph. But he seemed almost torpid,
absorbed, as if lost in another world.
It was a world far removed from the delirium in the street, a world of
65 million citizens who loved him or hated him, but all of whom, from
that night on, had become his responsibility. And as he knew-as almost
all Germans knew on January 1933 -- that this was a crushing, an
almost desperate responsibility.
Half a century later, few people understand the crisis Germany faced
at that time. Today, it's easy to assume that Germans have always been
well-fed and even plump. But the Germans Hitler inherited were virtual
skeletons.
During the preceding years, a score of "democratic" governments had
come and gone, often in utter confusion. Instead of alleviating the
people's misery, they had increased it, due to their own instability:
it was impossible for them to pursue any given plan for more than a
year or two. Germany had arrived at a dead end. In just a few years
there had been 224,000 suicides - a horrifying figure, bespeaking a
state of misery even more horrifying.
By the beginning of 1933, the misery of the German people was
virtually universal. At least six million unemployed and hungry
workers roamed aimlessly through the streets, receiving a pitiful
unemployment benefit of less than 42 marks per month. Many of those
out of work had families to feed, so that altogether some 20 million
Germans, a third of the country's population, were reduced to trying
to survive on about 40 pfennigs per person per day.
Unemployment benefits, moreover, were limited to a period of six
months. After that came only the meager misery allowance dispensed by
the welfare offices.
Notwithstanding the gross inadequacy of this assistance, by trying to
save the six million unemployed from total destruction, even for just
six months, both the state and local branches of the German government
saw themselves brought to ruin: in 1932 alone such aid had swallowed
up four billion marks, 57 percent of the total tax revenues of the
federal government and the regional states. A good many German
municipalities were bankrupt.
Those still lucky enough to have some kind of job were not much better
off. Workers and employees had taken a cut of 25 percent in their
wages and salaries. Twenty-one percent of them were earning between
100 and 250 marks per month; 69.2 percent of them, in January of 1933,
were being paid less than 1,200 marks annually. No more than about
100,000 Germans, it was estimated, were able to live without financial
worries.
During the three years before Hitler came to power, total earnings had
fallen by more than half, from 23 billion marks to 11 billion. The
average per capita income had dropped from 1,187 marks in 1929 to 627
marks, a scarcely tolerable level, in 1932. By January 1933, when
Hitler took office, 90 percent of the German people were destitute.
No one escaped the strangling effects of the unemployment. The
intellectuals were hit as hard as the working class. Of the 135,000
university graduates, 60 percent were without jobs. Only a tiny
minority was receiving unemployment benefits.
"The others," wrote one foreign observer, Marcel Laloire (in his book
New Germany), "are dependent on their parents or are sleeping in
flophouses. In the daytime they can be seen on the boulevards of
Berlin wearing signs on their backs to the effect that they will
accept any kind of work."
But there was no longer any kind of work.
The same drastic fall-off had hit Germany's cottage industry, which
comprised some four million workers. Its turnover had declined 55
percent, with total sales plunging from 22 billion to 10 billion
marks.
Hardest hit of all were construction workers; 90 percent of them were
unemployed.
Farmers, too, had been ruined, crushed by losses amounting to 12
billion marks. Many had been forced to mortgage their homes and their
land. In 1932 just the interest on the loans they had incurred due to
the crash was equivalent to 20 percent of the value of the
agricultural production of the entire country. Those who were no
longer able to meet the interest payments saw their farms auctioned
off in legal proceedings: in the years 1931-1932, 17,157 farms-with a
combined total area of 462,485 hectares - were liquidated in this way.
The "democracy" of Germany's "Weimar Republic" (1918 -1933) had proven
utterly ineffective in addressing such flagrant wrongs as this
impoverishment of millions of farm workers, even though they were the
nation's most stable and hardest working citizens. Plundered,
dispossessed, abandoned: small wonder they heeded Hitler's call.
Their situation on January 30, 1933, was tragic. Like the rest of
Germany's working class, they had been betrayed by their political
leaders, reduced to the alternatives of miserable wages, paltry and
uncertain benefit payments, or the outright humiliation of begging.
Germany's industries, once renowned everywhere in the world, were no
longer prosperous, despite the millions of marks in gratuities that
the financial magnates felt obliged to pour into the coffers of the
parties in power before each election in order to secure their
cooperation. For 14 years the well-blinkered conservatives and
Christian democrats of the political center had been feeding at the
trough just as greedily as their adversaries of the left..
One inevitable consequence of this ever-increasing misery and
uncertainty about the future was an abrupt decline in the birthrate.
When your household savings are wiped out, and when you fear even
greater calamities in the days ahead, you do not risk adding to the
number of your dependents.
In those days the birth rate was a reliable barometer of a country's
prosperity. A child is a joy, unless you have nothing but a crust of
bread to put in its little hand. And that's just the way it was with
hundreds of thousands of German families in 1932..
Hitler knew that he would be starting from zero. From less than zero.
But he was also confident of his strength of will to create Germany
anew-politically, socially, financially, and economically. Now legally
and officially in power, he was sure that he could quickly convert
that cipher into a Germany more powerful than ever before.
What support did he have?
For one thing, he could count on the absolute support of millions of
fanatical disciples. And on that January evening, they joyfully shared
in the great thrill of victory. Some thirteen million Germans, many of
them former Socialists and Communists, had voted for his party.
But millions of Germans were still his adversaries, disconcerted
adversaries, to be sure, whom their own political parties had
betrayed, but who had still not been won over to National Socialism.
The two sides-those for and those against Hitler-were very nearly
equal in numbers. But whereas those on the left were divided among
themselves, Hitler's disciples were strongly united. And in one thing
above all, the National Socialists had an incomparable advantage: in
their convictions and in their total faith in a leader. Their highly
organized and well-disciplined party had contented with the worst kind
of obstacles, and had overcome them..
In the eyes of the capitalists, money was the sole active element in
the flourishing of a country's economy. To Hitler's way of thinking,
that conception was radically wrong: capital, on the contrary, was
only an instrument. Work was the essential element: man's endeavor,
man's honor, blood, muscles and soul.
Hitler wanted not just to put an to the class struggle, but to
reestablish the priority of the human being, in justice and respect,
as the principal factor in production..
For the worker's trust in the fatherland to be restored, he had to
feel that from now on he was to be (and to be treated) as an equal,
instead of remaining a social inferior. Under the governments of the
so-called democratic parties of both the left and the right, he had
remained an inferior; for none of them had understood that in the
hierarchy of national values, work is the very essence of life; ..
The objective, then, was far greater than merely getting six million
unemployed back to work. It was to achieve a total revolution.
"The people," Hitler declared, "were not put here on earth for the
sake of the economy, and the economy doesn't exist for the sake of
capital. On the contrary, capital is meant to serve the economy, and
the economy in turn to serve the people."
It would not be enough merely to reopen the thousands of closed
factories and fill them with workers. If the old concepts still ruled,
the workers would once again be nothing more than living machines,
faceless and interchangeable..
Nowhere in twentieth-century Europe had the authority of a head of
state ever been based on such overwhelming and freely given national
consent. Prior to Hitler, from 1919 to 1932, those governments piously
styling themselves democratic had usually come to power by meager
majorities, sometimes as low as 51 or 52 percent.
"I am not a dictator," Hitler had often affirmed, "and I never will
be. Democracy will be rigorously enforced by National Socialism."
Authority does not mean tyranny. A tyrant is someone who puts himself
in power without the will of the people or against the will of the
people. A democrat is placed in power by the people. But democracy is
not limited to a single formula. It may be partisan or parliamentary.
Or it may be authoritarian. The important thing is that the people
have wished it, chosen it, established it in its given form.
That was the case with Hitler. He came to power in an essentially
democratic way. Whether one likes it or not, this fact is undeniable.
And after coming to power, his popular support measurably increased
from year to year. The more intelligent and honest of his enemies have
been obliged to admit this, men such as the declared anti-Nazi
historian and professor Joachim Fest, who wrote:
For Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny. Sheer
greed for power will not suffice as explanation for his personality
and energy-He was not born to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon
his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race ... Never had he
felt so dependent upon the masses as he did at this time, and he
watched their reactions with anxious concern.
These lines weren't written by Dr. Goebbels, but by a stern critic of
Hitler and his career..
When it came time to vote, Hitler was granted plenary powers with a
sweeping majority of 441 votes to 94: he had won not just two thirds,
but 82.44 percent of the assembly's votes. This "Enabling Act" granted
Hitler for four years virtually absolute authority over the
legislative as well as the executive affairs of the government..
After 1945 the explanation that was routinely offered for all this was
that the Germans had lost their heads. Whatever the case, it is a
historical fact that they acted of their own free will. Far from being
resigned, they were enthusiastic. "For the first time since the last
days of the monarchy," historian Joachim Fest has conceded, "the
majority of the Germans now had the feeling that they could identify
with the state."..
"You talk about persecution!" he thundered in an impromptu response to
an address by the Social Democratic speaker. "I think that there are
only a few of us [in our party] here who did not have to suffer
persecutions in prison from your side ... You seem to have totally
forgotten that for years our shirts were ripped off our backs because
you did not like the color . . . We have outgrown your persecutions!"
"In those days," he scathingly continued, "our newspapers were banned
and banned and again banned, our meetings were forbidden, and we were
forbidden to speak, I was forbidden to speak, for years on. And now
you say that criticism is salutary!"..
Hitler's millions of followers had rediscovered the primal strength of
rough, uncitified man, of a time when men still had backbone..
Gustav Noske, the lumberjack who became defense minister - and the
most valiant defender of the embattled republic in the tumultuous
months immediately following the collapse of 1918 - acknowledged
honestly in 1944, when the Third Reich was already rapidly breaking
down, that the great majority of the German people still remained true
to Hitler because of the social renewal he had brought to the working
class..
Here again, well before the collapse of party-ridden Weimar Republic,
disillusion with the unions had become widespread among the working
masses. They were starving. The hundreds of Socialist and Communist
deputies stood idly by, impotent to provide any meaningful help to the
desperate proletariat.
Their leaders had no proposals to remedy, even partially, the great
distress of the people; no plans for large-scale public works, no
industrial restructuring, no search for markets abroad.
Moreover, they offered no energetic resistance to the pillaging by
foreign countries of the Reich's last financial resources: this a
consequence of the Treaty of Versailles that the German Socialists had
voted to ratify in June of 1919, and which they had never since had
the courage effectively to oppose..
In 1930, 1931 and 1932, German workers had watched the disaster grow:
the number of unemployed rose from two million to three, to four, to
five, then to six million. At the same time, unemployment benefits
fell lower and lower, finally to disappear completely. Everywhere one
saw dejection and privation: emaciated mothers, children wasting away
in sordid lodgings, and thousands of beggars in long sad lines.
The failure, or incapacity, of the leftist leaders to act, not to
mention their insensitivity, had stupefied the working class. Of what
use were such leaders with their empty heads and empty hearts-and,
often enough, full pockets?
Well before January 30, thousands of workers had already joined up
with Hitler's dynamic formations, which were always hard at it where
they were most needed. Many joined the National Socialists when they
went on strike. Hitler, himself a former worker and a plain man like
themselves, was determined to eliminate unemployment root and branch.
He wanted not merely to defend the laborer's right to work, but to
make his calling one of honor, to insure him respect and to integrate
him fully into a living community of all the Germans, who had been
divided class against class.
In January 1933, Hitler's victorious troops were already largely
proletarian in character, including numerous hardfisted street
brawlers, many unemployed, who no longer counted economically or
socially.
Meanwhile, membership in the Marxist labor unions had fallen off
enormously: among thirteen million socialist and Communist voters in
1932, no more than five million were union members. Indifference and
discouragement had reached such levels that many members no longer
paid their union dues. Many increasingly dispirited Marxist leaders
began to wonder if perhaps the millions of deserters were the ones who
saw things clearly. Soon they wouldn't wonder any longer.
Even before Hitler won Reichstag backing for his "Enabling Act,"
Germany's giant labor union federation, the ADGB, had begun to rally
to the National Socialist cause. As historian Joachim Fest
acknowledged: "On March 20, the labor federation's executive committee
addressed a kind of declaration of loyalty to Hitler." (J. Fest,
Hitler, p. 413.)
Hitler than took a bold and clever step. The unions had always
clamored to have the First of May recognized as a worker's holiday,
but the Weimar Republic had never acceded to their request. Hitler,
never missing an opportunity, grasped this one with both hands. He did
more than grant this reasonable demand: he proclaimed the First of May
a national holiday..
I myself attended the memorable meeting at the Tempelhof field in
1933. By nine o'clock that morning, giant columns, some of workers,
others of youth groups, marching in cadence down the pavement of
Berlin's great avenues, had started off towards the airfield to which
Hitler had called together all Germans. All Germany would follow the
rally as it was transmitted nationwide by radio..
In the dark, a group of determined opponents could easily have heckled
Hitler or otherwise sabotaged the meeting. Perhaps a third of the
onlookers had been Socialists or Communists only three months
previously. But not a single hostile voice was raised during the
entire ceremony. There was only universal acclamation.
Ceremony is the right word for it. It was an almost magical rite.
Hitler and Goebbels had no equals in the arranging of dedicatory
ceremonies of this sort. First there were popular songs, then great
Wagnerian hymns to grip the audience. Germany has a passion for
orchestral music, and Wagner taps the deepest and most secret vein of
the German soul, its romanticism, its inborn sense of the powerful and
the grand.
Meanwhile the hundreds of flags floated above the rostrum, redeemed
from the darkness by arrows of light.
Now Hitler strode to the rostrum. For those standing at the of the
field, his face must have appeared vanishingly small, but his words
flooded instantaneously across the acres of people in his audience.
A Latin audience would have preferred a voice less harsh, more
delicately expressive. But there was no doubt that Hitler spoke to the
psyche of the German people.
Germans have rarely had the good fortune to experience the enchantment
of the spoken word. In Germany, the tone has always been set by
ponderous speakers, more fond of elephantine pedantry than oratorical
passion. Hitler, as a speaker, was a prodigy, the greatest orator of
his century. He possessed, above all, what the ordinary speaker lacks:
a mysterious ability to project power.
A bit like a medium or sorcerer, he was seized, even transfixed, as he
addressed a crowd. It responded to Hitler's projection of power,
radiating it back, establishing, in the course of myriad exchanges, a
current that both orator and audience gave to and drew from equally.
One had to personally experience him speaking to understand this
phenomenon.
This special gift is what lay at the basis of Hitler's ability to win
over the masses. His high-voltage, lightning-like projection
transported and transformed all who experienced it. Tens of millions
were enlightened, riveted and inflamed by the fire of his anger,
irony, and passion.
By the time the cheering died away that May first evening, hundreds of
thousands of previously indifferent or even hostile workers who had
come to Tempelhof at the urging of their labor federation leaders were
now won over. They had become followers, like the SA stormtroopers
whom so many there that evening had brawled with in recent years.
The great human sea surged back from Tempelhof to Berlin. A million
and a half people had arrived in perfect order, and their departure
was just as orderly. No bottlenecks halted the cars and busses. For
those of us who witnessed it, this rigorous, yet joyful, discipline of
a contented people was in itself a source of wonder. Everything about
the May Day mass meeting had come off as smoothly clockwork.
The memory of that fabulous crowd thronging back to the center of
Berlin will never leave me. A great many were on foot. Their faces
were now different faces, as though they had been imbued with a
strange and totally new spirit. The non-Germans in the crowd were as
if stunned, and no less impressed than Hitler's fellow countrymen.
The French ambassador, Andr� Fran�ois-Poncet, noted:
The foreigners on the speaker's platform as guests of honor were not
alone in carrying away the impression of a truly beautiful and
wonderful public festival, an impression that was created by the
regime's genius for organization, by the night time display of
uniforms, by the play of lights, the rhythm of the music, by the flags
and the colorful fireworks; and they were not alone in thinking that a
breath of reconciliation and unity was passing over the Third Reich.
"It is our wish," Hitler had exclaimed, as though taking heaven as his
witness, "to get along together and to struggle together as brothers,
so that at the hour when we shall come before God, we might say to
him: 'See, Lord, we have changed. The German people are no longer a
people ashamed, a people mean and cowardly and divided. No, Lord! The
German people have become strong in their spirit, in their will, in
their perseverance, in their acceptance of any sacrifice. Lord, we
remain faithful to Thee! Bless our struggle!" (A. Fran�ois-Poncet,
Souvenirs d'une ambassade � Berlin, p. 128.)
Who else could have made such an incantatory appeal without making
himself look ridiculous?
No politician had ever spoken of the rights of workers with such faith
and such force, or had laid out in such clear terms the social plan he
pledged to carry out on behalf of the common people.
The next day, the newspaper of the proletarian left, the "Union
Journal," reported on this mass meeting at which at least two thirds-a
million-of those attending were workers. "This May First was victory
day," the paper summed up.
With the workers thus won over, what further need was there for the
thousands of labor union locals that for so long had poisoned the
social life of the Reich and which, in any case, had accomplished
nothing of a lasting, positive nature?
Within hours of the conclusion of that "victory" meeting at the
Tempelhof field, the National Socialists were able to peacefully take
complete control of Germany's entire labor union organization,
including all its buildings, enterprises and banks. An era of Marxist
obstruction abruptly came to an end : from now on, a single national
organization would embody the collective will and interests of all of
Germany's workers.
Although he was now well on his way to creating what he pledged would
be a true "government of the people," Hitler also realized that great
obstacles remained. For one thing, the Communist rulers in Moscow had
not dropped their guard-or their guns. Restoring the nation would take
more than words and promises, it would take solid achievements. Only
then would the enthusiasm shown by the working class at the May First
mass meeting be an expression of lasting victory.
How could Hitler solve the great problem that had defied solution by
everyone else (both in Germany and abroad): putting millions of
unemployed back to work?
What would Hitler do about wages? Working hours? Leisure time?
Housing? How would he succeed in winning, at long last, respect for
the rights and dignity of the worker?
How could men's lives be improved-materially, morally, and, one might
even say, spiritually? How would he proceed to build a new society fit
for human beings, free of the inertia, injustices and prejudices of
the past?
"National Socialism," Hitler had declared at the outset, "has its
mission and its hour; it is not just a passing movement but a phase of
history."
The instruments of real power now in his hands-an authoritarian state,
its provinces subordinate but nonetheless organic parts of the
national whole-Hitler had acted quickly to shake himself free of the
last constraints of the impotent sectarian political parties.
Moreover, he was now able to direct a cohesive labor force that was no
longer split into a thousand rivulets but flowed as a single, mighty
current.
Hitler was self-confident, sure of the power of his own conviction. He
had no intention, or need, to resort to the use of physical force.
Instead, he intended to win over, one by one, the millions of Germans
who were still his adversaries, and even those who still hated him.
His conquest of Germany had taken years of careful planning and hard
work. Similarly, he would now realize his carefully worked out plans
for transforming the state and society. This meant not merely changes
in administrative or governmental structures, but far-reaching social
programs.
He had once vowed: "The hour will come when the 15 million people who
now hate us will be solidly behind us and will acclaim with us the new
revival we shall create together." Eventually he would succeed in
winning over even many of his most refractory skeptics and
adversaries.
His army of converts was already forming ranks. In a remarkable
tribute, historian Joachim Fest felt obliged to acknowledge
unequivocally:
Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of a demagogue to that of a
respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was
spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those who
resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation-The past
was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had
more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and
suddenly had sound reasons on its side.
And even the prominent leftist writer Kurt Tucholsky, sensing the
direction of the inexorable tide that was sweeping Germany, vividly
commented: "You don't go railing against the ocean." (J. Fest, Hitler,
pp. 415 f.)
"Our power," Hitler was now able to declare, "no longer belongs to any
territorial fraction of the Reich, nor to any single class of the
nation, but to the people in its totality."
Much still remained to be done, however. So far, Hitler had succeeded
in clearing the way of obstacles to his program. Now the time to build
had arrived.
So many others had failed to tackle the many daunting problems that
were now his responsibility. Above all, the nation demanded a solution
to the great problem of unemployment. Could Hitler now succeed where
others had so dismally failed?..
Unemployment could be combated and eliminated only by giving industry
the financial means to start up anew, to modernize, thus creating
millions of new jobs.
The normal rate of consumption would not be restored, let alone
increased, unless one first raised the starvation-level allowances
that were making purchases of any kind a virtual impossibility. On the
contrary, production and sales would have to be restored before the
six million unemployed could once again become purchasers.
The great economic depression could be overcome only by restimulating
industry, by bringing industry into step with the times, and by
promoting the development of new products..
Nearly ten years earlier, while in his prison cell, Hitler had already
envisioned a formidable system of national highways. He had also
conceived of a small, easily affordable automobile (later known as the
"Volkswagen"), and had even suggested its outline. It should have the
shape of a June bug, he proposed. Nature itself suggested the car's
aerodynamic line.
Until Hitler came to power, a car was the privilege of the rich. It
was not financially within the reach of the middle class, much less of
the worker. The "Volkswagen," costing one-tenth as much as the
standard automobile of earlier years, would eventually become a
popular work vehicle and a source of pleasure after work: a way to
unwind and get some fresh air, and of discovering, thanks to the new
Autobahn highway network, a magnificent country that then, in its
totality, was virtually unknown to the German worker.
From the beginning, Hitler wanted this economical new car to be built
for the millions. The production works would also become one of
Germany's most important industrial centers and employers.
During his imprisonment, Hitler had also drawn up plans for the
construction of popular housing developments and majestic public
buildings.
Some of Hitler's rough sketches still survive. They include groups of
individual worker's houses with their own gardens (which were to be
built in the hundreds of thousands), a plan for a covered stadium in
Berlin, and a vast congress hall, unlike any other in the world, that
would symbolize the grandeur of the National Socialist revolution.
"A building with a monumental dome," historian Werner Maser has
explained, "the plan of which he drew while he was writing Mein Kampf,
would have a span of 46 meters, a height of 220 meters, a diameter of
250 meters, and a capacity of 150 to 190 thousand people standing. The
interior of the building would have been 17 times larger than Saint
Peter's Cathedral in Rome." (W. Maser, Hitler, Adolf, p. 100.)
"That hall," architect Albert Speer has pointed out, "was not just an
idle dream impossible of achievement."
Hitler's imagination, therefore, had long been teeming with a number
of ambitious projects, many of which would eventually be realized.
Fortunately, the needed entrepreneurs, managers and technicians were
on hand. Hitler would not have to improvise.
Historian Werner Maser, although quite anti-Hitler-like nearly all of
his colleagues (how else would they have found publishers?) - has
acknowledged: "From the beginning of his political career, he [Hitler]
took great pains systematically to arrange for whatever he was going
to need in order to carry out his plans."
"Hitler was distinguished," Maser has also noted, "by an exceptional
intelligence in technical matters." Hitler had acquired his knowledge
by devoting many thousands of hours to technical studies from the time
of his youth.
"Hitler read an endless number of books," explained Dr. Schacht. "He
acquired a very considerable amount of knowledge and made masterful
use of it in discussions and speeches. In certain respects he was a
man endowed with genius. He had ideas that no one else would ever have
thought of, ideas that resulted in the ending of great difficulties,
sometimes by measures of an astonishing simplicity or brutality."
Many billions of marks would be needed to begin the great
socioeconomic revolution that was destined, as Hitler had always
intended, to make Germany once again the European leader in industry
and commerce and, most urgently, to rapidly wipe out unemployment in
Germany. Where would the money be found? And, once obtained, how would
these funds be allotted to ensure maximum effectiveness in their
investment?
Hitler was by no means a dictator in matters of the economy. He was,
rather, a stimulator. His government would undertake to do only that
which private initiative could not.
Hitler believed in the importance of individual creative imagination
and dynamism, in the need for every person of superior ability and
skill to assume responsibility.
He also recognized the importance of the profit motive. Deprived of
the prospect of having his efforts rewarded, the person of ability
often refrains from running risks. The economic failure of Communism
has demonstrated this. In the absence of personal incentives and the
opportunity for real individual initiative, the Soviet "command
economy" lagged in all but a few fields, its industry years behind its
competitors.
State monopoly tolls the death of all initiative, and hence of all
progress.
For all men selflessly to pool their wealth might be marvelous, but it
is also contrary to human nature. Nearly every man desires that his
labor shall improve his own condition and that of his family, and
feels that his brain, creative imagination, and persistence well
deserve their reward.
Because it disregarded these basic psychological truths, Soviet
Communism, right to the end, wallowed in economic mediocrity, in spite
of its immense reservoir of manpower, its technical expertise, and its
abundant natural resources, all of which ought to have made it an
industrial and technological giant.
Hitler was always adverse to the idea of state management of the
economy. He believed in elites. "A single idea of genius," he used to
say, "has more value than a lifetime of conscientious labor in an
office."
Just as there are political or intellectual elites, so also is there
an industrial elite. A manufacturer of great ability should not be
restrained, hunted down by the internal revenue services like a
criminal, or be unappreciated by the public. On the contrary, it is
important for economic development that the industrialist be
encouraged morally and materially, as much as possible.
The most fruitful initiatives Hitler would take from 1933 on would be
on behalf of private enterprise. He would keep an eye on the quality
of their directors, to be sure, and would shunt aside incompetents,
quite a few of them at times, but he also supported the best ones,
those with the keenest minds, the most imaginative and bold, even if
their political opinions did not always agree with his own.
"There is no question," he stated very firmly, "of dismissing a
factory owner or director under the pretext that he is not a National
Socialist."
Hitler would exercise the same moderation, the same pragmatism, in the
administrative as well as in the industrial sphere.
What he demanded of his co-workers, above all, was competence and
effectiveness. The great majority of Third Reich functionaries - some
80 percent-were never enrolled in the National Socialist party.
Several of Hitler's ministers, like Konstantin von Neurath and
Schwerin von Krosigk, and ambassadors to such key posts as Prague,
Vienna and Ankara, were not members of the party. But they were
capable..
"Herr Schacht," he said, "we are assuredly in agreement on one point:
no other single task facing the government at the moment can be so
truly urgent as conquering unemployment. That will take a lot of
money. Do you see any possibility of finding it apart from the
Reichsbank?" And after a moment, he added: "How much would it take? Do
you have any idea?"
Wishing to win Schacht over by appealing to his ambition, Hitler
smiled and then asked: "Would you be willing to once again assume
presidency of the Reichsbank?" Schacht let on that he had a
sentimental concern for Dr. Luther, and did not want to hurt the
incumbent's feelings. Playing along, Hitler reassured Schacht that he
would find an appropriate new job elsewhere for Luther.
Schacht then pricked up his ears, drew himself up, and focused his big
round eyes on Hitler: "Well, if that's the way it is," he said, "then
I am ready to assume the presidency of the Reichsbank again."
His great dream was being realized. Schacht had been president of the
Reichsbank between 1923 and 1930, but had been dismissed. Now he would
return in triumph. He felt vindicated. Within weeks, the ingenious
solution to Germany's pressing financial woes would burst forth from
his inventive brain.
"It was necessary," Schacht later explained, "to discover a method
that would avoid inflating the investment holdings of the Reichsbank
immoderately and consequently increasing the circulation of money
excessively."
"Therefore," he went on, "I had to find some means of getting the sums
that were lying idle in pockets and banks, without meaning for it to
be long term and without having it undergo the risk of depreciation.
That was the reasoning behind the Mefo bonds."
What were these "Mefo" bonds? Mefo was a contraction of the
Metallurgische Forschungs-GmbH (Metallurgic Research Company). With a
startup capitalization of one billion marks - which Hitler and Schacht
arranged to be provided by the four giant firms of Krupp, Siemens,
Deutsche Werke and Rheinmetall-this company would eventually promote
many billions of marks worth of investment.
Enterprises, old and new, that filled government orders had only to
draw drafts on Mefo for the amounts due. These drafts, when presented
to the Reichsbank, were immediately convertible into cash. The success
of the Mefo program depended entirely on public acceptance of the Mefo
bonds. But the wily Schacht had planned well. Since Mefo bonds were
short-term bonds that could be cashed in at any time, there was no
real risk in buying, accepting or holding them. They bore an interest
of four percent-a quite acceptable figure in those days-whereas
banknotes hidden under the mattress earned nothing. The public quickly
took all this into consideration and eagerly accepted the bonds.
While the Reichsbank was able to offer from its own treasury a
relatively insignificant 150 million marks for Hitler's war on
unemployment, in just four years the German public subscribed more
than 12 billion marks worth of Mefo bonds!
These billions, the fruit of the combined imagination, ingenuity and
astuteness of Hitler and Schacht, swept away the temporizing and
fearful conservatism of the bankers. Over the next four years, this
enormous credit reserve would make miracles possible.
Soon after the initial billion-mark credit, Schacht added another
credit of 600 million in order to finance the start of Hitler's grand
program for highway construction. This Autobahn program provided
immediate work for 100,000 of the unemployed, and eventually assured
wages for some 500,000 workers.
As large as this outlay was, it was immediately offset by a
corresponding cutback in government unemployment benefits, and by the
additional tax revenue generated as a result of the increase in living
standard (sping) of the newly employed.
Within a few months, thanks to the credit created by the Mefo bonds,
private industry once again dared to assume risks and expand. Germans
returned to work by the hundreds of thousands.
Was Schacht solely responsible for this extraordinary turnaround?
After the war, he answered for himself as a Nuremberg Tribunal
defendant, where he was charged with having made possible the Reich's
economic revival:
I don't think Hitler was reduced to begging for my help. If I had not
served him, he would have found other methods, other means. He was not
a man to give up. It's easy enough for you to say, Mr. Prosecutor,
that I should have watched Hitler die and not lifted a finger. But the
entire working class would have died with him!
Even Marxists recognized Hitler's success, and their own failure. In
the June 1934 issue of the Zeitschrift f�r Sozialismus, the journal of
the German Social Democrats in exile, this acknowledgement appears:
Faced with the despair of proletarians reduced to joblessness, of
young people with diplomas and no future, of the middle classes of
merchants and artisans condemned to bankruptcy, and of farmers
terribly threatened by the collapse in agricultural prices, we all
failed. We weren't capable of offering the masses anything but
speeches about the glory of socialism.
VI. The Social Revolution
Hitler's tremendous social achievement in putting Germany's six
million unemployed back to work is seldom acknowledged today. Although
it was much more than a transitory achievement, "democratic"
historians routinely dismiss it in just a few lines. Since 1945, not a
single objective scholarly study has been devoted to this highly
significant, indeed unprecedented, historical phenomenon.
Similarly neglected is the body of sweeping reforms that dramatically
changed the condition of the worker in Germany. Factories were
transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers,
with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields.
Hundreds of thousands of attractive houses were built for working
class families. A policy of several weeks of paid vacation was
introduced, along with week and holiday trips by land and sea. A
wide-ranging program of physical and cultural education for young
workers was established, with the world's best system of technical
training. The Third Reich's social security and workers' health
insurance system was the world's most modern and complete.
This remarkable record of social achievement is routinely hushed up
today because it is embarrasses those who uphold the orthodox view of
the Third Reich. Otherwise, readers might begin to think that perhaps
Hitler was the greatest social builder of the twentieth century..
Nevertheless, restoring work and bread to millions of unemployed who
had been living in misery for years; restructuring industrial life;
conceiving and establishing an organization for the effective defense
and betterment of the nation's millions of wage earners; creating a
new bureaucracy and judicial system that guaranteed the civic rights
of each member of the national community, while simultaneously holding
each person to his or her responsibilities as a German citizen: this
organic body of reforms was part of a single, comprehensive plan,
which Hitler had conceived and worked out years earlier.
Without this plan, the nation would have collapsed into anarchy.
All-encompassing, this program included broad industrial recovery as
well as detailed attention to even construction of comfortable inns
along the new highway network.
It took several years for a stable social structure to emerge from the
French Revolution. The Soviets needed even more time: five years after
the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, hundreds of thousands of Russians
were still dying of hunger and disease. In Germany, by contrast, the
great machinery was in motion within months, with organization and
accomplishment quickly meshing together..
Hitler personally dug the first spadeful of earth for the first
Autobahn highway, linking Frankfurt-am-Main with Darmstadt. For the
occasion, he brought along Dr. Schacht, the man whose visionary credit
wizardry had made the project possible. The official procession moved
ahead, three cars abreast in front, then six across, spanning the
entire width of the autobahn..
Hitler's plan to build thousands of low-cost homes also demanded a
vast mobilization of manpower. He had envisioned housing that would be
attractive, cozy, and affordable for millions of ordinary German
working-class families. He had no intention of continuing to tolerate,
as his predecessors had, cramped, ugly "rabbit warren" housing for the
German people. The great barracks-like housing projects on the
outskirts of factory towns, packed with cramped families, disgusted
him.
The greater part of the houses he would build were single story,
detached dwellings, with small yards where children could romp, wives
could grow vegetable and flower gardens, while the bread-winners could
read their newspapers in peace after the day's work. These
single-family homes were built to conform to the architectural styles
of the various German regions, retaining as much as possible the
charming local variants.
Wherever there was no practical alternative to building large
apartment complexes, Hitler saw to it that the individual apartments
were spacious, airy and enhanced by surrounding lawns and gardens
where the children could play safely.
The new housing was, of course, built in conformity with the highest
standards of public health, a consideration notoriously neglected in
previous working-class projects.
Generous loans, amortizable in ten years, were granted to newly
married couples so they could buy their own homes. At the birth of
each child, a fourth of the debt was cancelled. Four children, at the
normal rate of a new arrival every two and a half years, sufficed to
cancel the entire loan debt.
Once, during a conversation with Hitler, I expressed my astonishment
at this policy. "But then, you never get back the total amount of your
loans?," I asked. "How so?" he replied, smiling. "Over a period of ten
years, a family with four children brings in much more than our loans,
through the taxes levied on a hundred different items of consumption."
As it happened, tax revenues increased every year, in proportion to
the rise in expenditures for Hitler's social programs. In just a few
years, revenue from taxes tripled. Hitler's Germany never experienced
a financial crisis.
To stimulate the moribund economy demanded the nerve, which Hitler
had, to invest money that the government didn't yet have, rather than
passively waiting-in accordance with "sound" financial principles-for
the economy to revive by itself.
Today, our whole era is dying economically because we have succumbed
to fearful hesitation. Enrichment follows investment, not the other
way around..
Even before the year 1933 had ended, Hitler had succeeded in building
202,119 housing units. Within four years he would provide the German
people with nearly a million and a half (1,458,128) new dwellings!
Moreover, workers would no longer be exploited as they had been. A
month's rent for a worker could not exceed 26 marks, or about an
eighth of the average wage then. Employees with more substantial
salaries paid monthly rents of up to 45 marks maximum.
Equally effective social measures were taken in behalf of farmers, who
had the lowest incomes. In 1933 alone 17,611 new farm houses were
built, each of them surrounded by a parcel of land one thousand square
meters in size. Within three years, Hitler would build 91,000 such
farmhouses..
Everywhere industry was hiring again, with some firms-like Krupp, IG
Farben and the large automobile manufacturers-taking on new workers on
a very large scale. As the country became more prosperous, car sales
increased by more than 80,000 units in 1933 alone. Employment in the
auto industry doubled. Germany was gearing up for full production,
with private industry leading the way.
The new government lavished every assistance on the private sector,
the chief factor in employment as well as production. Hitler almost
immediately made available 500 million marks in credits to private
business.
This start-up assistance given to German industry would repay itself
many times over. Soon enough, another two billion marks would be
loaned to the most enterprising companies. Nearly half would go into
new wages and salaries, saving the treasury an estimated three hundred
million marks in unemployment benefits. Added to the hundreds of
millions in tax receipts spurred by the business recovery, the state
quickly recovered its investment, and more.
Hitler's entire economic policy would be based on the following
equation: risk large sums to undertake great public works and to spur
the renewal and modernization of industry, then later recover the
billions invested through invisible and painless tax revenues. It
didn't take long for Germany to see the results of Hitler's recovery
formula.
Economic recovery, as important as it was, nevertheless wasn't
Hitler's only objective. As he strived to restore full employment,
Hitler never lost sight of his goal of creating a organization
powerful enough to stand up to capitalist owners and managers, who had
shown little concern for the health and welfare of the entire national
community.
Hitler would impose on everyone-powerful boss and lowly wage earner
alike-his own concept of the organic social community. Only the loyal
collaboration of everyone could assure the prosperity of all classes
and social groups.
Consistent with their doctrine, Germany's Marxist leaders had set
class against class, helping to bring the country to the brink of
economic collapse. Deserting their Marxist unions and political
parties in droves, most workers had come to realize that strikes and
grievances their leaders incited only crippled production, and thus
the workers as well.
By the of 1932, in any case, the discredited labor unions were
drowning in massive debt that realistically could never be repaid.
Some of the less scrupulous union officials, sensing the oncoming
catastrophe, had begun stealing hundreds of thousands of marks from
the workers they represented. The Marxist leaders had failed:
socially, financially and morally.
Every joint human activity requires a leader. The head of a factory or
business is also the person naturally responsible for it. He oversees
every aspect of production and work. In Hitler's Germany, the head of
a business had to be both a capable director and a person concerned
for the social justice and welfare of his employees. Under Hitler,
many owners and managers who had proven to be unjust, incompetent or
recalcitrant lost their jobs, or their businesses.
A considerable number of legal guarantees protected the worker against
any abuse of authority at the workplace. Their purpose was to insure
that the rights of workers were respected, and that workers were
treated as worthy collaborators, not just as animated tools. Each
industrialist was legally obliged to collaborate with worker delegates
in drafting shop regulations that were not imposed from above but
instead adapted to each business enterprise and its particular working
conditions. These regulations had to specify "the length of the
working day, the time and method of paying wages, and the safety
rules, and to be posted throughout the factory," within easy access of
both the worker whose interests might be angered and the owner or
manager whose orders might be subverted.
The thousands of different, individual versions of such regulations
served to create a healthy rivalry, with every factory group vying to
outdo the others in efficiency and justice.
One of the first reforms to benefit German workers was the
establishment of paid vacations. In France, the leftist Popular Front
government would noisily claim, in 1936, to have originated legally
mandated paid vacations-and stingy ones at that, only one week per
year. But it was actually Hitler who first established them, in 1933
-- and they were two or three times more generous.
Under Hitler, every factory employee had the legal right to paid
vacation. Previously, paid vacations had not normally exceed four or
five days, and nearly half of the younger workers had no vacation time
at all. If anything, Hitler favored younger workers; the youngest
workers received more generous vacations. This was humane and made
sense: a young person has more need of rest and fresh air to develop
his maturing strength and vigor. Thus, they enjoyed a full 18 days of
paid vacation per year.
Today, more than half a century later, these figures have been
surpassed, but in 1933 they far exceeded European norms.
The standard vacation was twelve days. Then, from the age of 25 on, it
went up to 18 days. After ten years with the company, workers got a
still longer vacation: 21 days, or three times what the French
socialists would grant the workers of their country in 1936.
Hitler introduced the standard forty-hour work week in Europe. As for
overtime work, it was now compensated, as nowhere else in the
continent at the time, at an increased pay rate. And with the
eight-hour work day now the norm, overtime work became more readily
available.
In another innovation, work breaks were made longer: two hours each
day, allowing greater opportunity for workers to relax, and to make
use of the playing fields that large industries were now required to
provide.
Whereas a worker's right to job security had been virtually
non-existent, now an employee could no longer be dismissed at the sole
discretion of the employer. Hitler saw to it that workers' rights were
spelled out and enforced. Henceforth, an employer had to give four
weeks notice before firing an employee, who then had up to two months
to appeal the dismissal. Dismissals could also be annulled by the
"Courts of Social Honor" (Ehrengerichte).
This Court was one of three great institutions that were established
to protect German workers. The others were the "Labor Commissions" and
the "Council of Trust."
The "Council of Trust" (Vertrauensrat) was responsible for
establishing and developing a real spirit of community between
management and labor. "In every business enterprise," the 1934 "Labor
Charter" law stipulated, "the employer and head of the enterprise
(F�hrer), the employees and workers, personnel of the enterprise,
shall work jointly toward the goal of the enterprise and the common
good of the nation."
No longer would either be exploited by the other-neither the worker by
arbitrary whim of the employer, nor the employer through the blackmail
of strikes for political ends.
Article 35 of the "Labor Charter" law stated: "Every member of an
enterprise community shall assume the responsibility required by his
position in said common enterprise." In short, each enterprise would
be headed by a dynamic executive, charged with a sense of the greater
community-no longer a selfish capitalist with unconditional, arbitrary
power.
"The interest of the community may require that an incapable or
unworthy employer be relieved of his duties," the "Labor Charter"
stipulated. The employer was no longer unassailable, an all-powerful
boss with the last word on hiring and firing his staff. He, too, would
be subject to the workplace regulations, which he was now obliged to
respect no less than the least of his employees. The law conferred the
honor and responsibility of authority on the employer only insofar as
he merited it..
In the Third Reich, the worker knew that "exploitation of his physical
strength in bad faith or in violation of his honor" was no longer
tolerated. He had obligations to the community, but he shared these
obligations with every other member of the enterprise, from the chief
executive to the messenger boy. Finally, the German worker had clearly
defined social rights, which were arbitrated and enforced by
independent agencies. And while all this had been achieved in an
atmosphere of justice and moderation, it nevertheless constituted a
genuine social revolution..
Factories and shops, large and small, were altered or transformed to
conform to the strictest standards of cleanliness and hygiene:
interiors, so often dark and stifling, were opened up to light;
playing fields were constructed; rest areas where workers could unbend
during break, were set aside; employee cafeterias and respectable
locker rooms were opened. The larger industrial establishments, in
addition to providing the normally required conventional sports
facilities, were obliged to put in swimming pools!
In just three years, these achievements would reach unimagined
heights: more than two thousand factories refitted and beautified;
23,000 work premises modernized; 800 buildings designed exclusively
for meetings; 1,200 playing fields; 13,000 sanitary facilities; 17,000
cafeterias.
To assure the healthy development of the working class, physical
education courses were instituted for younger workers. Some 8,000 were
eventually organized. Technical training was equally emphasized.
Hundreds of work schools, and thousands of technical courses were
created. There were examinations for professional competence, and
competitions in which generous prizes were awarded to outstanding
masters of their craft.
Eight hundred departmental inspectors and 17,300 local inspectors were
employed to conscientiously monitor and promote these improvements.
To provide affordable vacations for German workers on a hitherto
unprecedented scale, Hitler established the "Strength through Joy"
program. As a result, hundreds of thousands of workers were now able
to make relaxing vacation trips on land and sea each summer.
Magnificent cruise ships were built, and special trains brought
vacationers to the mountains and the seashore. In just a few years,
Germany's working-class tourists would log a distance equivalent to 54
times the circumference of the earth! And thanks to generous state
subsidies, the cost to workers of these popular vacation excursions
was nearly insignificant..
Was Hitler's transformation of the lot of the working class
authoritarian? Without a doubt. And yet, for a people that had grown
sick and tired of anarchy, this new authoritarianism wasn't regarded
as an imposition. In fact, people have always accepted a strong man's
leadership.
In any case, there is no doubt that the attitude of the German working
class, which was still two-thirds non-Nazi at the start of 1933, soon
changed completely. As Belgian author Marcel Laloire noted at the
time:
When you make your way through the cities of Germany and go into the
working-class districts, go through the factories, the construction
yards, you are astonished to find so many workers on the job sporting
the Hitler insignia, to see so many flags with the swastika, black on
a bright red background, in the most densely populated districts.
Hitler's "German Labor Front" (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), which
incorporated all workers and employers, was for the most part eagerly
accepted. The steel spades of the sturdy young lads of the "National
Labor Service" (Reichsarbeitsdienst) could also be seen gleaming along
the highways.
Hitler created the National Labor Service not only to alleviate
unemployment, but to bring together, in absolute equality, and in the
same uniform, both the sons of millionaires and the sons of the
poorest families for several months' common labor and living.
All performed the same work, all were subject to the same discipline;
they enjoyed the same pleasures and benefited from the same physical
and moral development. At the same construction sites and in the same
barracks, Germans became conscious of what they had in common, grew to
understand one another, and discarded their old prejudices of class
and caste.
After a hitch in the National Labor Service, a young worker knew that
the rich man's son was not a pampered monster, while the young lad of
wealthy family knew that the worker's son had no less honor than a
nobleman or an heir to riches; they had lived and worked together as
comrades. Social hatred was vanishing, and a socially united people
was being born.
Hitler could go into factories-something few men of the so-called
Right would have risked in the past-and hold forth to crowds of
workers, at times in the thousands, as at the huge Siemens works. "In
contrast to the von Papens and other country gentlemen," he might tell
them, "in my youth I was a worker like you. And in my heart of hearts,
I have remained what I was then."
During his twelve years in power, no untoward incident ever occurred
at any factory he visited. Hitler was at home when he went among the
people, and he was received like a member of the family returning home
after making a success of himself.
But the Chancellor of the Third Reich wanted more than popular
approval. He wanted that approval to be freely, widely, and repeatedly
expressed by popular vote. No people was ever be more frequently asked
for their electoral opinion than the German people of that era-five
times in five years.
For Hitler, it was not enough that the people voted from time to time,
as in the previous democratic system. In those days, voters were
rarely appealed to, and when they expressed an opinion, they were
often ill-informed and apathetic. After an election, years might go
by, during which the politicians were heedless and inaccessible, the
electorate powerless to vote on their actions.
To enable the German public to express its opinion on the occasion of
important events of social, national, or international significance,
Hitler provided the people a new means of approving or rejecting his
own actions as Chancellor: the plebiscite.
Hitler recognized the right of all the people, men and women alike, to
vote by secret ballot: to voice their opinion of his policies, or to
make a well-grounded judgment on this or that great decision in
domestic or foreign affairs. Rather than a formalistic routine,
democracy became a vital, active program of supervision that was
renewed annually.
The articles of the "Plebiscite Law" were brief and clear:
1.The Reich government may ask the people whether or not it approves
of a measure planned by or taken by the government. This may also
apply to a law.
2. A measure submitted to plebiscite will be considered as established
when it receives a simple majority of the votes. This will apply as
well to a law modifying the Constitution.
3. If the people approves the measure in question, it will be applied
in conformity with article III of the Law for Overcoming the Distress
of the People and the Reich.
The Reich Interior Ministry is authorized to take all legal and
administrative measures necessary to carry out this law.
Berlin, July 14, 1933.
Hitler, Frick..
From the first months of 1933, his accomplishments were public fact,
for all to see. Before end of the year, unemployment in Germany had
fallen from more than 6,000,000 to 3,374,000. Thus, 2,627,000 jobs had
been created since the previous February, when Hitler began his
"gigantic task!" A simple question: Who in Europe ever achieved
similar results in so short a time?..
In his detailed and critical biography of Hitler, Joachim Fest limited
his treatment of Hitler's extraordinary social achievements in 1933 to
a few paragraphs. All the same, Fest did not refrain from
acknowledging:
The regime insisted that it was not the rule of one social class above
all others, and by granting everyone opportunities to rise, it in fact
demonstrated class neutrality-These measures did indeed break through
the old, petrified social structures. They tangibly improved the
material condition of much of the population. (J. Fest, Hitler, pp.
434-435.)
Not without reason were the swastika banners waving proudly throughout
the working-class districts where, just a year ago, they had been
unceremoniously torn down.
Michael Ejercito
> Leon Degrelle
>
> "We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins."
> Those were Hitler's words on the night of January 30, 1933, as
> cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the
> windows of the Chancellery in Berlin.
>
Michael
chingang
I'm sure Hitler is more concerned that he was dead. After all, he was
more important than human beings.
Hitler 1 dead
World 20,000,000 dead.
So by his calculations he was worth about 20,000,000 lives.
Dictators don't come cheap, so I doubt we can afford another one.
Topaz
Obviously losing the war didn't prove they were wrong. It only proved
they were outnumbered. Hitler made Germany great. Of course the Jew
parasites couldn't stand that. Unfortunately the bad side won the war.
Compare the size of Germany to the size of the Jewish controlled
countries, the USA and the USSR.
An article by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, January 21, 1945
The Creators of the World's Misfortunes
by Joseph Goebbels
One could not understand this war if one did not always keep in mind
the fact that International Jewry stands behind all the unnatural
forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and
keep humanity in the dark. It is so to speak the mortar that holds the
enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class,
ideology and interests. Capitalism and Bolshevism have the same Jewish
roots, two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same
fruit. International Jewry uses both in its own way to suppress the
nations and keep them in its service. How deep its influence on public
opinion is in all the enemy countries and many neutral nations is
plain to see that it may never be named in newspapers, speeches and
radio broadcasts. There is a law in the Soviet Union that punishes
anti-Semitism - or in plain English, public education about the Jewish
Question - by death. The expert in these matters is in no way
surprised that a leading spokesman for the Kremlin said over the New
Year that the Soviet Union would not rest until this law was valid
throughout the world. In other words, the enemy clearly says that its
goal in this war is to put the total domination of Jewry over the
nations of the earth under legal protection, and to threaten even a
discussion of this shameful attempt with the death penalty.
It is little different in the plutocratic nations. There the struggle
against the impudent usurpation of the Jewish race is not punished by
the executioner, rather by death through economic and social boycott
and by intellectual terror. This has the same effect in the end.
Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were made by the Jewry. They enjoy its
full support and reward it with their full protection. They present
themselves in their speeches as upright men of civil courage, yet one
never hears even a word against the Jews, even though there is growing
hatred among their people as a result of this war, a hatred that is
fully justified. Jewry is a tabu theme in the enemy countries. It
stands outside every legal boundary and thus becomes the tyrant of its
host peoples. While enemy soldiers fight, bleed and die at the front,
the Jews make money from their sacrifice on the stock exchanges and
black markets. If a brave man dares to step forward and accuse the
Jews of their crimes, he will be mocked and spat on by their press,
chased from his job or otherwise impoverished, and be brought into
public contempt. Even that is apparently not enough for the Jews. They
want to bring Soviet conditions to the whole world: to give Jewry
absolute power and freedom from prosecution. He who objects or even
debates the matter gets a bullet in the back of his head or an axe
through his neck. There is no worse tyranny than this. This is the
epitome of the public and secret disgrace that Jewry inflicts on the
nations that deserve freedom.
That is all long behind us. Yet it still threatens us in the distance.
We have, it is true, entirely broken the power of the Jews in the
Reich, but they have not given up. They did not rest until they had
mobilized the whole world against us. Since they could no longer
conquer Germany from within, they want to try it from without. Every
Russian, English and American soldier is a mercenary of this world
conspiracy of a parasitic race. Given the current state of the war,
who could still believe that they are fighting and dying at the front
for the national interests of their countries! The nations want a
decent peace, but the Jews are against it. They know that the end of
the war would mean the dawning knowledge of humanity of the unhealthy
role that International Jewry played in preparing for and carrying out
this war. They fear being unmasked, which has in fact become
unavoidable and must inevitably come, just as the day follows the
night. That explains their raging bursts of hatred against us, which
are only the result of their fear and their feelings of inferiority.
They are too eager, and that makes them suspicious. International
Jewry will not succeed in turning this war to its advantage. Things
are already too far along. The hour will come in which all the peoples
of the earth will awake, and the Jews will be the victims. Here too
things can only go so far.
It is an old, often-used method of International Jewry to discredit
education and knowledge about its corrupting nature and drives,
thereby depending on the weaknesses of those people who easily confuse
cause with effect. The Jews are also masters at manipulating public
opinion, which they dominate through their network of news agencies
and press concerns that reaches throughout the world. The pitiful
illusion of a free press is one of the methods they use to stupefy the
publics of enemy lands. If the enemy press is as free as it pretends
to be, let it take an open position, for or against, on the Jewish
Question. It will not do that because it cannot and may not do so. The
Jews love to mock and criticize everything except themselves, although
everyone knows that they are most in need of public criticism. This is
where the so-called freedom of the press in enemy countries ends.
Newspapers, parliaments, statesmen and church leaders must be silent
here. Crimes and vices, filth and corruption are covered by the
blanket of love. The Jews have total control of public opinion in
enemy countries, and he who has that is also master of all of public
life. Only the nations that have to accept such a condition are to be
pitied. The Jews mislead them into believing that the German nation is
backward. Our alleged backwardness is actually proof of our progress.
We have recognized the Jews as a national and international danger,
and from this knowledge have drawn compelling conclusions. This German
knowledge will become the knowledge of he world at the end of this
war. We think it our primary duty to do everything in our power to
make that happen.
Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull
and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the
incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has
guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as
noble, beautiful and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews
hate it. They despite our culture and learning, which they perceive as
towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and
social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives, They
are the enemy of our domestic order, which has excluded their
anarchistic tendencies. Germany is the first nation in the world that
is entirely free of the Jews. That is the prime cause of its political
and economic balance. Since their expulsion from the German national
body has made it impossible for them to shake this balance from
within, they lead the nations they have deceived in battle against us
from without. It is fine with them, in fact it is part of their plan,
that Europe in the process will lose a large part of its cultural
values. The Jews had no part in their creation. They do not understand
them. A deep racial instinct tells them that since these heights of
human creative activity are forever out of their reach, they must
attack them today with hatred. The day is not distant when the nations
of Europe, yes, even those of the whole world, will shout: The Jews
are guilty for all our misfortunes! They must be called to account,
and soon and thoroughly!
International Jewry is ready with its alibi. Just as during the great
reckoning in Germany, they will attempt to look innocent and say that
one needs a scapegoat, and they are it. But that will no longer help
them, just as it did not help them during the National Socialist
revolution, The proof of their historical guilt, in details large and
small, is so plain that they can no longer be denied even with the
most clever lies and hypocrisy.
Who is it that drives the Russians, the English and the Americans into
battle and sacrifices huge numbers of human lives in a hopeless
struggle against the German people? The Jews! Their newspapers and
radio broadcasts spread the songs of war while the nations they have
deceived are led to the slaughter. Who is it that invents new plans of
hatred and destruction against us every day, making this war into a
dreadful case of self-mutilation and self-destruction of European life
and its economy, education and culture? The Jews! Who devised the
unnatural marriage between England and the USA on one side and
Bolshevism on the other, building it up and jealously ensuring its
continuance? Who covers the most perverse political situations with
cynical hypocrisy from a trembling fear that a new way could lead the
nations to realize the true causes of this terrible human catastrophe?
The Jews, only the Jews! They are named Morgenthau and Lehmann and
stand behind Roosevelt as a so-called brain trust. They are named
Mechett and Sasoon and serve as Churchill's money bags and order
givers. They are named Kaganovitsch and Ehrenburg and are Stalin's
pacesetters and intellectual spokesmen. Wherever you look, you see
Jews. They march as political commisars behind the Red army and
organize murder and terror in the areas conquered by the Soviets. They
sit behind the lines in Paris and Brussels, Rome and Athens, and
fashion their reins from the skin of the unhappy nations that have
fallen under their power.
That is the truth. It can no longer be denied, particularly since in
their drunken joy of power and victory the Jews have forgotten their
ordinarily so carefully maintained reserve and now stand in the
spotlight of public opinion. They no longer bother, apparently
believing that it is no longer necessary, that their hour has come.
And this is their mistake, which they always make when think
themselves near their great goal of anonymous world domination.
Thoughout the history of the nations, whenever this tragic situation
developed, a good providence saw to it that the Jews themselves became
the grave diggers of their own hopes. They did not destroy the healthy
peoples, rather the sting of their parasitic effects brought the
realization of the looming danger to the forefront and led to the
greatest sacrifices to overcome it. At a certain point, they become
that power that always wants evil but creates good. It will be that
way this time too.
The fact that the German nation was the first on earth to recognize
this danger and expel it from its organism is proof of its healthy
instincts. It therefore became the leader of a world struggle whose
results will determine of fate and the future of International Jewry.
We view with complete calm the wild Old Testament tirades of hatred
and revenge of Jews throughout the world against us. They are only
proof that we are on the right path. They cannot unsettle us. We gaze
on them with sovereign contempt and remember that these outbursts of
hate and revenge were everyday events for us in Germany until that
fateful day for International Jewry, 30 January 1933, when the world
revolution against the Jews that threateend not only Germany, but all
the other nations, began.
It will not cease before it has reached its goal. The truth can not be
stopped by lies or force. It will get through. The Jews will meet
their Cannae at the end of this war. Not Europe, rather they will
lose. They may laugh at this prophecy today, but they have laughed so
often in the past, and almost as often they stopped laughing sooner or
later. Not only do we know precisely what we want, we also know
precisely what we do not want. The deceived nations of he Earth may
still lack the knowledge they need, but we will bring it to them. How
will the Jews stop that in the long run? They believe their power
rests on sure foundations, but it stands on feet of clay. One hard
blow and it will collapse, burying the creators of the misfortunes of
the world in its ruins.
Michael Ejercito
> Obviously losing the war didn't prove they were wrong. It only proved
> they were outnumbered. Hitler made Germany great. Of course the Jew
> parasites couldn't stand that. Unfortunately the bad side won the war.
> Compare the size of Germany to the size of the Jewish controlled
> countries, the USA and the USSR.
>
> An article by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, January 21, 1945
A Nazi nithing who murdered his children.
> The Creators of the World's Misfortunes
> by Joseph Goebbels
Age of consent laws are your misfortune.
You are a Nazi.
As a Nazi, you are, above all else, a craven coward.
You are afraid to compete with others as equals because you know
you can not measure up.
You are afraid of your own inadequacy, so you want to murder your
betters.
You are afraid of the truth, so you want to murder those who would
tell it.
You are afraid of history, so you want to murder the past, to wipe
out the knowledge of the degeneracy, cowardice and failure of
National
Socialism.
Finally, you are afraid of the power of educated, informed adults.
Freedom of choice terrifies you... which is why you choose minor
children as sexual partners. You can not interact with competent
adults in a consensually sexual
way. You need to be able to impose yourself on a helpless victim, be
it a prepubescent
boy, or a patient in a mental hospital.
That is what you are, a Nazi, and there is nothing polite or
honest about it.
Michael
Topaz
By Mark Weber
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.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html
These documents clearly establish Roosevelt's crucial role in bringing
on the Second World War.
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.
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.'
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...
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.
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
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...
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...
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]
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
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.
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]
"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]
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]
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.