- The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close
to events:
-
- Just consider the following:
-
- Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Britain during
the years immediately preceding WW2 was the father of the famous American
Kennedy dynasty. James Forrestal the first US Secretary of Defense (1947-1949)
quotes him as saying "Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister) stated
that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war".
(The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p129).
-
- Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington,
in a report to the Polish Foreign Office in January 1939, is quoted approvingly
by the highly respected British military historian Major-General JFC Fuller.
Concerning public opinion in America he says "Above all, propaganda
here is entirely in Jewish handswhen bearing public ignorance in mind,
their propaganda is so effective that people have no real knowledge of
the true state of affairs in Europe It is interesting to observe that in
this carefully thought-out campaign no reference at all is made to Soviet
Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner
and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic
group of countries Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous centre
in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also
succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike campsPresident Roosevelt
has been given the power.. to create huge reserves in armaments for a future
war which the Jews are deliberately heading for." (Fuller, JFC: The
Decisive Battles of the Western World vol 3 pp 372-374.)
-
- Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador in Berlin until
1938, the year before the war broke out, found anti-Semitism in Germany
'understandable'. This was because before the advent of the Nazis, "the
stage, the press, medicine and law [were] crowded with Jewsamong the few
with money to splurge, a high proportion [were] Jewsthe leaders of the
Bolshevist movement in Russia, a movement desperately feared in Germany,
were Jews. One could feel the spreading resentment and hatred." (Hugh
Wilson: Diplomat between the Wars, Longmans 1941, quoted in Leonard
Mosley, Lindbergh, Hodder 1976).
-
- Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin 'said
further that the hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews
and enemies of the Nazis, which was what Hitler thought himself' (Taylor,
AJP: The Origins of the Second World War Penguin 1965, 1987 etc
p 324).
-
- Is all of this merely attributable to terrible 'anti-semitism'?
-
- The economic background to the war is necessary for a
fuller understanding, before casting judgement on the originators of these
viewpoints.
-
- At the end of the First World War, Germany was essentially
tricked [see Paul Johnson A History of the Modern World (1983)
p24 and H NicholsonPeacemaking 1919 (1933) pp13-16] into paying massive
reparations to France and other economic competitors and former belligerent
countries in terms of the so-called Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the
liberal American President Woodrow Wilson. Germany was declared to be solely
responsible for the war, in spite of the fact that 'Germany did not plot
a European war, did not want one, and made genuine efforts, though too
belated, to avert one.' (Professor Sydney B Fay The Origins of the
World War (vol. 2 p 552)).
-
- As a result of these massive enforced financial reparations,
by 1923 the situation in Germany became desperate and inflation on an astronomical
scale became the only way out for the government. Printing presses were
engaged to print money around the clock. In 1921 the exchange rate was
75 marks to the dollar. By 1924 this had become about 5 trillion marks
to the dollar. This virtually destroyed the German middle class (Koestler The
God that Failed p 28), reducing any bank savings to a virtual zero.
-
- According to Sir Arthur Bryant the British
historian (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):
-
- 'It was the Jews with their international affiliations
and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such
opportunities.. They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938,
after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still
owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a
third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands
during the inflation.. But to those who had lost their all this bewildering
transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they
had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into
the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and
who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.
The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the
learned professions (in spite of constituting) less than one percent
of the population.
-
- The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private
banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade,
the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press all the normal
means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed..
The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of
four millions was a Jewish monopoly.. Every year it became harder and harder
for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation..
At this time it was not the 'Aryans' who exercised racial discrimination.
It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised
by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination..
It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed and lavishly displayed
by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native
Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the
new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with
those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle."
-
- Goodness gracious, Sir Arthur! What made you get out
of the wrong side of the bed?
-
- Strangely enough, a book unexpectedly published by Princeton
University Press in 1984, Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans and the
"Jewish Question") essentially confirms what Bryant says. According
to her, 'Jews were never a large percentage of the total German population;
at no time did they exceed 1% of the population during the years 1871-1933.'
But she adds 'Jews were over-represented in business, commerce, and public
and private service.. They were especially visible in private banking in
Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private Jewish banks, as opposed to only
11 private non-Jewish banks.. They owned 41% of iron and scrap iron firms
and 57% of other metal businesses.. Jews were very active in the stock
market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80% of the
leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating
Jews from prominent positions, 85% of the brokers on the Berlin Stock exchange
were dismissed because of their "race".. At least a quarter of
full professors and instructors (at German universities) had Jewish origins..
In 1905-6 Jewish students comprised 25% of the law and medical students..
In 1931, 50% of the 234 theatre directors in Germany were Jewish, and in
Berlin the number was 80%.. In 1929 it was estimated that the per capita
income of Jews in Berlin was twice that of other Berlin residents..' etc
etc.
-
- Arthur Koestler confirms the Jewish over-involvement
in German publishing. 'Ullstein's was a kind of super-trust; the largest
organization of its kind in Europe, and probably In the world. They published
four daily papers in Berlin alone, among these the venerable Vossische
Zeitung, founded in the eighteenth century, and the B.Z. am Mittag,
an evening paper.. Apart from these, Ullstein's published more than a dozen
weekly and monthly periodicals, ran their own news service, their own travel
agency, etc., and were one of the leading book publishers. The firm was
owned by the brothers Ullstein - they were five, like the original Rothschild
brothers, and like them also, they were Jews.' (The God that Failed (1950)
ed. RHS Crossman, p 31).
-
- Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily
News, wrote an anti-German tract called Germany Puts the Clock Back (published
as a Penguin Special and reprinted five times between December 1937 and
April 1938). He nevertheless notes 'In the all-important administration
of Prussia, any number of strategic positions came into the hands of Hebrews..
A telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial offices could
result in the suspension of any periodical or newspaper in the state..
The Jews came in Germany to play in politics and administration that same
considerable part that they had previously won by open competition in business,
trade, banking, the Press, the arts, the sciences and the intellectual
and cultural life of the country. And thereby the impression was strengthened
that Germany, a country with a mission of its own, had fallen into the
hands of foreigners.'
-
- Mowrer says 'No one who lived through the period from
1919 to 1926 is likely to forget the sexual promiscuity that prevailed..
Throughout a town like Berlin, hotels and pensions made vast fortunes by
letting rooms by the hour or day to baggageless, unregistered guests. Hundreds
of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting
acquainted and acquiring the proper mood..' (pp. 153-4). Bryant describes
throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels
and restaurants. He adds 'Most of them (the night clubs and vice-resorts)
were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews.. among the promoters
of this trade who were remembered in after years.' (pp. 144-5).
-
- Douglas Reed, Chief Central European correspondent before
WWII for the London Times, was profoundly anti-German and anti-Hitler.
But nevertheless he reported: 'I watched the Brown Shirts going from shop
to shop with paint pots and daubing on the window panes the word "Jew",
in dripping red letters. The Kurfürstendamm was to me a revelation.
I knew that Jews were prominent in business life, but I did not know that
they almost monopolized important branches of it. Germany had one Jew to
one hundred gentiles, said the statistics; but the fashionable Kurfürstendamm,
according to the dripping red legends, had about one gentile shop to ninety-nine
Jewish ones.' (Reed Insanity Fair (1938) p. 152-3). In Reed's
bookDisgrace Abounding of the following year he notes 'In the Berlin
(of pre-Hitler years) most of the theatres were Jewish-owned or Jewish-leased,
most of the leading film and stage actors were Jews, the plays performed
were often by German, Austrian or Hungarian Jews and were staged by Jewish
film producers, applauded by Jewish dramatic critics in Jewish newspapers..
The Jews are not cleverer than the Gentiles, if by clever you mean good
at their jobs. They ruthlessly exploit the common feeling of Jews, first
to get a foothold in a particular trade or calling, then to squeeze the
non-Jews out of it.. It is not true that Jews are better journalists than
Gentiles. They held all the posts on those Berlin papers because the proprietors
and editors were Jewish' (pp238-9).
-
- The Jewish writer Edwin Black notes 'For example,
in Berlin alone, about 75% of the attorneys and nearly as many of the doctors
were Jewish.' (Black,The Transfer Agreement (1984) p58.
-
- To cap it all, Jews were perceived as dangerous enemies
of Germany after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish
Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The
Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third
Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, 'The one
man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.'
(p 369). This was the culmination of a worldwide boycott of German goods
led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on
March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany.
The boycott was particularly motivated by the German imposition of the
Nuremberg Laws, which ironically were similar in intent and content to
the Jewish cultural exclusivism practiced so visibly in present-day Israel
(Hannah ArendtEichmann in Jerusalem p 7).
-
- Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by
Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat,
a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations
and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After
all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed
less than five percent of Russia's population, they formed more than fifty
percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant
in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):
-
- 'It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries
who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first
decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were
perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after
the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were
everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia,
Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all,
Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.
-
- 'To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked
like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led
revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the
Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the
Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein),
Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.' Other
authors agree with this:
-
- "There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply
ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist
Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons
for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War 1.. The prominence
of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and
this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism
in post-war years.. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists
and communists.. led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a
whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation." (Sarah Gordon Hitler,
Germans and the 'Jewish Question' Princeton University Press (1984)
p 23).
-
- "The second paroxysm of strong anti-Semitism came
after the critical role of Jews in International Communism and the Russian
Revolution and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 30s Anti-Semitism
intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived
and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.. Such feelings
were not restricted to Germany, or to vulgar extremists like the Nazis.
All over Northern Europe and North America, anti-Semitism became the norm
in 'nice society', and 'nice society' included the universities."
(Martin Bernal, Black Athenavol. 1 pp. 367, 387).
-
- "The major role Jewish leaders played in the November
(Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor
in confirming (Hitler's) anti-Semitic beliefs." (J&S Pool, Who
Financed Hitler, p.164).
-
-
-
- Hitler came to power in Germany with two main aims, the
rectification of the unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the
destruction of the Soviet/ Communist threat to Germany. Strangely enough,
contrary to the mythology created by those who had an opposing ethnic agenda,
he had no plans or desire for a larger war of conquest. Professor AJP Taylor
showed this in his book The Origins of the Second World War, to the
disappointment of the professional western political establishment. Taylor
says, "The state of German armament in 1939 gives the decisive proof
that Hitler was not contemplating general war, and probably not intending
war at all" (p.267), and "Even in 1939 the German army was not
equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior
to the French in everything except leadership" (p104-5). What occurred
in Europe in 1939-41 was the result of unforeseen weaknesses and a tipping
of the balance of power, and Hitler was an opportunist 'who took advantages
whenever they offered themselves' (Taylor). Britain and France declared
war on Germany, not the other way around. Hitler wanted peace with Britain,
as the German generals admitted (Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side
of the Hill 1948, Pan Books 1983) with regard to the so-called Halt
Order at Dunkirk, where Hitler had the opportunity to capture the entire
British Army, but chose not to. Liddell Hart, one of Britain's most respected
military historians, quotes the German General von Blumentritt with regard
to this Halt Order:
-
- "He (Hitler) then astonished us by speaking with
admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and
of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked,
with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been
achieved by means that were often harsh, but 'where there is planing, there
are shavings flying'. He compared the British Empire with the catholic
Church saying they were both essential elements of stability in the
world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge
Germany's position on the Continent. The return of Germany's colonies would
be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain
with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere.."
(p 200).
-
- According to Liddell Hart, "At the time we believed
that the repulse of the Luftwaffe in the 'Battle over Britain' had saved
her. That is only part of the explanation, the last part of it. The original
cause, which goes much deeper, is that Hitler did not want to conquer
England. He took little interest in the invasion preparations, and for
weeks did nothing tospur them on; then, after a brief impulse to invade,
he veered around again and suspended the preparations. He was preparing,
instead, to invade Russia" (p140).
-
- David Irving in the foreword to his book The Warpath (1978)
refers to "the discovery.. that at no time did this man (Hitler)
pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire."
-
- This gives a completely different complexion, not only
to the war, but to the successful suppression of this information during
the war and afterwards. Historians today know only too well where the boundaries
lie within which they can paint their pictures of the war and its aftermath,
and the consequences of venturing beyond those boundaries, irrespective
of the evidence. Unfortunately, only too few of them have been prepared
to have the courage to break out of this dreadful straitjacket of official
and unofficial censorship.
-
- E-mail comment received:
-
- I worked and studied in Berlin for three years, have
an MA in International Relations and a BA in Government with a minor in
History. I am embarrassed to say that until I read this article, I had
no idea of the scope and cause for the anti-Semitism in Germany before
WWII. The Halt Order at Dunkirk was never mentioned in my studies, nor
was the ownership of the media, banks and businesses.
-
- Thank you for the excellent article. It certainly gives
me a new perspective. I have always questioned the actual numbers of Jewish
victims of the concentration camps, as the numbers didn't make sense based
upon Germany's population. Perhaps it was fear of failing or being labeled
an anti-Semite by my history professors (all but two were Jewish) and classmates
that I refrained from demanding an honest discussion during my classes.
-
- I once said that the only reason Israel existed was out
of Holocaust guilt, and I was immediately labeled a terrorist sympathizer.
-
- I see what is now happening in Israel and I am aghast.
The parallels to WW II are frightening. Even today, one cannot bring up
this subject without being labeled a Holocaust denier or white supremacist.
-
- Thanks again for an excellent article. I am forwarding
it to several friends.
-
- JBP
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