Reflections on
German and American Foreign Policy, 1933-1945
Karl Otto Braun
During my career as a German
diplomat, I had three superiors. The first was Alfred
Rosenberg, head of the Foreign Political Office of the
National Socialist Party. The next was Foreign Minister
Freiherr Konstatin von Neurath, an "old school"
conservative. The last was Joachim von Ribbentrop. After
the war these men were condemned as criminals by the
Allied Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Rosenberg and von
Ribbentrop were sentenced to "death by hanging." I doubt
if many Americans have had a similarly tragic experience
with their superiors. The words "death by hanging" still
resound in my ears and dreams since the moment I first
heard them pronounced over the radio in late 1946 while
I myself was an "automatic arrest" inmate in the Dachau
concentration camp, then under U.S. Military Government
control.
All former German officials with
university degrees were subject to "automatic arrest"
according to Morgenthau's punitive directive JCS 1067,
regardless of whether or not they had been members of
the National Socialist Party. The infamous Morgenthau
Plan was originally drawn up by Harry Dexter White, the
right-hand man of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry
Morgenthau. White had been born in eastern Poland with
the name Weis. White died in suspicious circumstances in
1948 after it was discovered by the U.S.A. government
that he'd been a Soviet agent. Morgenthau's program was
thus indirectly drafted by Stalin!
Directive JCS 1067, which
determined the main lines of U.S. policy in occupied
Germany until July 1947, was itself a violation of the
Hague Convention of 1907 which prohibited the automatic
arrest of people in occupied territories. When I made
this point to my American interrogators, I received the
reply that the Germans had already violated the Hague
Convention much earlier. Those American officers did not
know that the Nuremberg International Tribunal had
expressly acknowledged the Hague Convention (and
especially section 6b) as the basis of its judgment
against the German defendants!
All the same, a bitter fate
always has a purifying effect in life. A man who, like
Hamlet, suffers "the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune" is forced to weigh his words carefully, must
maintain a sense of balance and, above all, must stick
to the facts. Revisionism has a mission. It is to find
facts. Historical fact-finding likewise has a purifying
effect because it embodies the struggle for truth.
History is reborn memory. Men with a rich memory have a
superior power. Consequently, nations should promote a
regard for history, thereby strengthening their memory
and their power. It's true that the history of the
United States is still comparatively young, but two
hundred years of memory are enough upon which to build a
respect for traditional values. Recalling the values of
your forefathers, of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln,
Cleveland and others, you have no reason to despair or
be timid. The dawn of another Renaissance is
approaching! Believe me: Moral values have a more
enduring life than shrewd tactics! If we stoop to the
level of Marxist lies and self-deception, as Franklin
Roosevelt did, eve fall into the hands of our more
cunning enemies; whereas if we keep ourselves on a
morally elevated plane, we will emerge victorious. When
all is said and done, our blue shining planet, our
universe, is in the hands of God-contrary to the
erroneous denials of Marxism.'
The great German historian
Leopold von Ranke worked on the principle of trying to
describe historical events truthfully, just as they
actually happened. I try to work in keeping with Ranke's
principle. All the same, I must admit that I see
everything through the eyes of my own experience. Please
consider and accept this limitation.
On that fateful 30th day of
January 1933-ironically, Roosevelt's 51st birthday-I was
reading Dutch books about Mount Kloet, a volcano in Java
which mixed its lava with the water of a lake, thus
creating the terrible "lahars" which ultimately created
fertile fields. Late that evening I left the
Geographical Institute of the University of Berlin and
stepped out into the crowded streets. Newspaper boys
were shouting that President von Hindenburg had
appointed Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor and that the
SA stormtroopers would soon be holding a torchlight
parade.
I was myself a simple
stormtrooper but my uniform was at home, too far away.
Therefore I decided to climb onto a linden tree at the
corner of the Unter den Linden boulevard and the
Wilhelmstrasse in central Berlin. All the trees were
packed with sightseers and the Unter den Linden was
crowded with thousands of people. The torchlight
procession soon passed through the Brandenburg Gate,
nowadays walled off by concrete by Communist tyranny,
thus ridiculing its purpose as a gate. When the
stormtroopers passed by the darkened French Embassy, I
wondered what the French Ambassador, Francois-Poncet,
might be feeling about all this. I can remember being
vividly struck by this thought.
The torchlight parade turned
right into the Wilhelmstrasse, just under my tree, and
headed towards the Reich Chancellery. There were 16 men
marching shoulder to shoulder in each row. Hitler
saluted the men from a window in the Chancellery
building. As the first rows passed by him, the words
"Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles" echoed through
the crowd like an organ. It seemed to be the outcry of a
nation humiliated by foreign oppression, occupation,
inflation and a scandalous treaty imbued with revenge
and contempt. The torchlight procession seemed to me
like the glowing, fertilizing lava of Mount Kloet! Then,
22 years of age, I wrote an enthusiastic report about
all this to my parents. They kept it until it was burned
with their belongings by British bombs in 1944.
The moral outcry of a humiliated
nation proved that Hitler's real historical birthplace
was Versailles. The punitive economic clauses of that
imposed treaty had been drafted by Bernard Baruch, who
later wrote: "President Wilson called me to Paris to
serve as one of his advisers on the economic section of
the treaty."2 Already in 1920 Baruch published The
Making of the Reparation and the Economic Sections of
the Treaty, in which he wrote: "I was intimately
concerned with the creation of these (economic)
sections... Serbia, Rumania and Poland had been victims
of merciless German agression."3 Baruch intentionally
ignored the murder at Sarajevo and the fact that Austria
and Germany had re-established Poland in November 1916
as a constitutional monarchy. Baruch supported the
popular slogan of the time, "Let Germany pay first," and
admitted in his 1920 book that "Many of the (Versailles
conference) participants preferred war with all its
horrors to any peace short of that which they demanded."
He conceded, "It is true that the (Versailles) treaty is
a severe treaty."4 It is thus not an exaggeration to say
that Baruch significantly helped Hitler to power.
History is full of such irony. Already in 1919 we can
recognize the genesis of a terrible confrontation, for
it was precisely the economic demands of the Versailles
conference that brought about the punitive Dawes Plan,
the Young Plan, Black Friday, seven million German
unemployed and six million German Communist votes. When
he came to power, Hitler was thus confronted with a
country in economic ruin. Again ironically, Franklin
Roosevelt faced a very similar economic catastrophe as
he assumed the presidency of one of the victor nations
that same year. It is worth noting that after six years
of Roosevelt's New Deal, there were still ten million
unemployed Americans, whereas Hitler's "New Deal" was
able to absorb all seven million unemployed Germans
without war. Roosevelt achieved the same result only
after the world had burst into flames. This contrast is
one of the main sources of Roosevelt's personal jealousy
and enmity towards his great adversary.
According to a May 1939 report
to Berlin by the German diplomatic representative in
Washington, Hans Thomsen, Roosevelt told the Senate
Military Committee that "It would be a good thing if
Hitler and Mussolini were murdered."5 To make this
situation more clear, consider these passages from
Hitler's important address of 28 April 1939 (four months
before the outbreak of war in Europe) which were
directed personally to President Roosevelt:
I have taken no step that
violated foreign rights, but I have restored the
rights which had been violated twenty years ago (at
Versailles}. Within the territory of the present
Greater German Reich there is no part which did not
belong to it since ancient times or was not subject
to its sovereignty. Long before the American
continent was discovered by the White Man, this
Reich existed. President Roosevelt believes that the
leaders of the great nations have it in their power
to protect the nations from the imminent disaster of
war. If this is correct, it is criminal rashness if
the leaders of nations who wield great power do not
curb their newspapers which agitate continuously for
war. It would be an honorable achievement if
President Roosevelt were to redeem the lofty
promises of President Wilson. That would certainly
be a practical contribution to the moral
consolidation of the world ...
President Roosevelt, Hitler
continued, I understand that the vastness of your realm
and the immeasurable wealth of your resources make you
feel yourself responsible for the destiny of the entire
world. My scope, however, is much more modest. I have
assumed power in a country with 140 inhabitants per
square kilometer, not 15. Billions of German savings in
gold and foreign exchange were taken from us. We lost
all our colonies. In 1933 we had seven million
unemployed, as well as several million part-time
employed, and we faced ruin. In the past six and half
years I have devoted all of my effort to mobilizing the
energy of my people, who have been outlawed and
abandoned by the rest of the world. Furthermore I have
tried to remove, page by page, that (Versailles) treaty
which, with its 448 articles, represents the crudest
violation ever imposed on nations and individuals.
Anyone can easily check Hitler's
statements about U.S. press agitation for war by looking
through leading American newspapers, particularly from
the years 1938 to 1941. I was told by Germans returning
from visits to the U.S. in 1934 that anti-German
defamation was already running high even then. The
Zionists were clever enough to establish an
"Anti-Defamation League" in 1913 when Wilson became
President and their influence first reached the highest
level of government. They feared growing opposition. In
contrast, Americans of German descent neglected to take
any similar defensive measures. As a result, the image
of the brutal, militant German still haunts American
movies to this day. The question arises whether a
pro-German American group should not establish its own
"Anti-Defamation League" for the sake of a free America.
My Turn to East Asia
In 1932 I was in England
preparing my dissertation on Shakespeare in the library
of the British Museum. I continued my studies of
English, history, and geography at the University of
Berlin in 1933. At the same time I attended lectures at
the Hochschule fuer Politik (Higher School for Political
Studies) located across from the Imperial Palace, which
was torn down in 1945 by German Bolsheviks. I was
occupied with lectures on international law by Professor
Friedrich Berber and geopolitics by Professor Albrecht
Haushofer, and I participated in a seminar on the
British press by Professor Karl Boemer. I wrote a study
on background forces behind leading English papers for
the seminar. Professor Boemer took it with him when he
accompanied Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels on his
September 1933 trip to the League of Nations in Geneva.
Boemer later told me that my survey helped the Minister
in his appearance before the League.
The following year I received a
postcard from Professor Boemer asking me to visit him at
his office in the Foreign Political Office of the
National Socialist Party (Aussenpolitisches Amt der
NSDAP). To my great astonishment, Boemer immediately
introduced me to Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, a
pre-eminent party official and chief editor of the main
party paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, since 1922. As
a second surprise Rosenberg asked me if I would join his
office in the recently planned East Asia Section. I
replied that although I knew Britain well, I knew East
Asia only geographically. Rosenberg, a Baltic German
from Riga, replied: "You are young enough to be
trained." We arrived at a compromise. I offered to work
afternoons in his office while learning Japanese
mornings at the Institute of Oriental Languages, which
had been founded by Bismarck. Rosenberg accepted my
proposal.
I found him a noble,
broad-minded and modest superior. His modesty was
crowned with some shyness or restraint. He had the gift
of being able to present his views convincingly. In
practical conflicts, however, he was much too soft. I
considered him more of a philosopher than a politician.
When I began my first job in
August 1934 I found an unfinished manuscript on my desk
entitled "The Amau Declaration and Its Echo in the World
Press." I was asked to add up-to-date observations and
comment on it. Amau was the speaker of the Japanese
Foreign Office, the Gaimusho. He had announced that
Japan considered China as a sphere of her special
interest. Already in 1917 Viscount Kikujiro Ishii,
Ambassador in Washington, had concluded an agreement
with the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing,
which conceded Japan's special relationship with
neighboring China. But this liberal trend changed under
Secretary of State Henry Stimson to the inflexible "Open
Door Policy" of unrestricted international trade with
China. This policy was first introduced by Britain
during the last century as part of her imperialistic
design based on her world naval supremacy. British
political imports have often proved disadvantageous to
the United States! There have sometimes been great
contrasts between the declared independence of the
United States and an American foreign policy still
directed by the former "mother country."
In 1931 Japan proclaimed the
formation of the state of Manchukuo from the three
ancient Manchurian provinces of northern China. Japan
was condemned by the League of Nations for this act and
Japan consequently left the League. Then Secretary of
State Stimson was an advocate of war against Japan but
this view was rejected by President Herbert Hoover, a
statesman of German-Swiss descent. In this respect
Hoover was a forerunner of General Douglas MacArthur,
who warned his country against participation in any land
war on the Asian continent. The Amau study returned to
my desk a few weeks later with the words stamped on it
in green "Hat dem Führer vorgelegen," showing that
Hitler had read it. I felt then that my decision to
learn the awesomely difficult Japanese language had not
been a false step.
The following year we had a
minor success. The first public short wave radio
telephone service between Germany and Japan was
inaugurated by Alfred Rosenberg. It was followed by a
setback. Rosenberg's internal political adversary,
Joachim von Ribbentrop (then Ambassador in London and a
close advisor to Hitler) moved ahead of Rosenberg by
concluding the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan on 25
November 1936. The Pact was a response to the new
policies of the Seventh Congress of the Communist
International (Comintern) of 25 July to 21 August 1935
in Moscow. Ribbentrop declared: "The Comintern intends
to establish a new Soviet Republic in Spain in order to
extend its subversive activity in Europe. Who will be
the next victim?" Don't those words sound very up to
date? Between 1936 and 1939 a fierce civil war raged in
Spain until Stalin was defeated by Francisco Franco with
military aid from Germany and Italy. Stalin's defeat was
costly for Spain because he had arranged for the entire
Spanish gold reserve to be shipped to Moscow!
The signing of the
Anti-Comintern Pact had several remarkable features:
- Ribbentrop had initiated it
without the knowledge of the Wilhelmstrasse (the
German Foreign Office). In this respect Hitler's
tactics resembled those of Roosevelt, who always
relied on intimate advisers such as Felix
Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau and the pro-Soviet
Harry Hopkins rather than on his State Department.
The negotiations for the Pact were carried out by
Herr von Raumer of the "Bureau Ribbentrop" and the
Japanese Military. The Japanese liaison officer was
the Military Attache Hiroshi Oshima. The Japanese
Foreign Office and the Wilhelmstrasse were informed
only at the last minute. This was the internal
feature, so to speak.
- Hitler's move was a blow to
Great Britain which then aided the Red government in
Spain on the grounds that it was the only legal
government. Britain was legally correct but
politically wrong. If Britain had fought Communism
in Spain with Franco, Soviet influence would not
reign today in Aden, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Japan
had been England's ally in the First World War. The
Pact had now blocked this road to partnership.
- There were other reasons
for Hitler's approach to Japan. In Mein Kampf he
wrote: "When I was 16 years old I followed the
Russian-Japanese war (of 1905) with great interest.
For national reasons I immediately sided with Japan.
A Russian defeat automatically meant a defeat of the
Slavs within the Austrian empire."8 Even more
revealing, Hitler observed that Great Britain was
reluctant to weaken her alliance with Japan after
the war because that would have weakened her
position vis a vis the United States or, in Hitler's
words, "the gigantic colossus of the United States
with her enormous resources." Nevertheless, the
entire Jewish press had definitely turned against
Japan. Hitler argued: "How is it possible that the
Jewish Anglo-Saxon papers which had faithfully
backed England's war against Imperial Germany
suddenly committed a breach of faith and pursued
different aims? The annihilation of Germany was not
so much a British interest as a Jewish one, just as
the annihilation of Japan does not serve the
interests of Britain, but rather the long range
goals of the advocates of Jewish world domination.
England exerts every effort to maintain her
predominant position in this world, whereas the Jews
are organizing to attack her."7 A few lines later
Hitler wrote: "A stable national monarchy like Japan
is a thorn in Israel's eye. Japan will suffer the
fate of Imperial Germany." In short, the 1936 German
pact with Japan was less anti-British than it was
anti-Jewish. Do not forget that Hitler's Mein Kampf
was written sixty years ago-sixty years in a rapidly
changing century. r suggest that you draw your own
conclusions from this fact and consider that since
the Second World War America has become the heir of
the outworn British Empire. Could America not face
the same fate? Are you really convinced that your
country is run only by your President and an
independent Congress? Hitler certainly cannot be
considered a statesman like Bismarck, who was far
superior. Like Napoleon, Hitler ultimately failed as
a statesman and military leader. But Hitler was a
prophet-a political prophet with a logical outlook.
- Hitler's policy towards
Japan resembled his approach to the Poland of
Marshal Josef Pilsudski when he concluded a ten-year
Non-Aggression Pact with Poland on 26 January 1934.
A new phase in German-Polish relations was opened.
Hitler sought an effective German-Polish bloc
against the Soviet Union in Europe and a similar
alliance with Japan against the USSR in Asia. Hitler
considered the detachment of Pilsudski's Poland from
the Anglo-French alliance as a personal triumph over
the German Foreign Office which still stubbornly
clung to Gustav Stresemann's anti-Polish and
pro-Soviet policy. I can assure you that if
Pilsudski had not died in 1935, Britain would never
have succeeded in trapping Poland into the
unilateral anti-German alliance which forced Hitler
to cancel the German-Polish pact on 28 April 1939.
Polish-French Freemasonry played an important role
in this.8 This was the beginning of Poland's
demise-a twilight which, thanks to Roosevelt and
Churchill, has lasted until today.
In 1937 my Japanese study course
was coming to an end. From the outset I had told
Rosenberg that I intended to enter the Foreign Office by
passing all the required examinations. When the time
arrived, Rosenberg begged me to stay on with his party
office, promising me a higher career in the Foreign
Office later on. But I insisted on my idealistic
intention to start right at the bottom in order to avoid
any criticism of party favoritism. I now know that I was
mistaken because I fell into the net of a hidden
anti-Hitler conspiracy. In your State Department at
least three different gangs of pro-Soviet agents
flourished, culminating in Alger Hiss.9 Similarly,
Staatssekretaer (Under Secretary) Ernst von Weizsaecker
headed the secret opposition within the German Foreign
Office. Under the tutelage of Harry Hopkins, atomic
material and designs were shipped from the U.S. to the
Soviet Union during the war. Colonel Curtis B. Dall
considered Hopkins a creature of Bernard Baruch.10 On
the other hand, Under Secretary von Weizsaecker, aided
by Wilhelm Canaris, frustrated Hitler's effort for a
joint German-Spanish action against Gibraltar in 1940 by
telling Franco that Germany would ultimately lose the
war. If Franco had decided to join with Germany, an
American landing in North Africa would have been
prevented. These two examples prove that the faithful
officials in both Berlin and Washington might well
complain of "the spurns that patient merit of the
unworthy takes." (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)
I was fortunate to be assigned
to the East Asia Section of the Foreign Office's
Political Department. It was headed by Herr von
Schmieden who did not belong to any gang. Thanks to his
recommendation I was allowed to accompany the
professional diplomatic courier to Tokyo at
Christmas-time 1937. The courier spoke Russian and I
could assist him with Japanese. The journey via Siberia
took two weeks, then the quickest route. It was a unique
experience which made me realize that German propaganda
about Soviet Russia did not exaggerate. On the contrary,
what I observed was worse than i had expected. When we
deposited our diplomatic luggage at the German Embassy
in Moscow, we saw a revolver on the desk of an official
who told us that an attempt had been made to break into
the code room the previous night. The intruders did not
know that it was guarded round the clock and they had to
flee. While escaping over the garden wall, one of the
NKVD (Soviet secret police) men lost his revolver, which
would now serve as evidence for an official protest.
Another surprise came when the Military Attache, General
Koestring, confessed that he did not specifically know
whether or not the second track of the trans-Siberian
rail line had been completed. We later found that,
except for five bridges, it had been. On the longest
bridge, which spanned the Yenisei River, men worked even
at three o'clock in the morning in a temperature of
minus 35 degrees Celsius. We passed by numerous freight
trains loaded with prisoners-Soviet prisoners in peace
time. Stalin was then waging an internal war against the
supposed conspiracy of the Chief of the General Staff,
Marshal Michael Tukhachevsky. The German General Consul
in Novosibirsk told us that thousands were arrested
every morning, between three and five o'clock, who had
never even heard of his name. Terror reigned at its
height. The front page of Pravda was packed with names
of high ranking "traitors" who had been liquidated. Many
brownish icicles dripped from drains in the rail cars,
indicating that the poor prisoners had been locked up
for weeks. With a sigh of relief we passed beneath a
wooden, redflagged border gate with the slogan
"Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!" We were then
kindly received by Manchurian-Japanese border guards. We
enjoyed the clean Manchurian train and celebrated the
last night of 1937 with a hospitable Sino-Japanese
dining car crew. It was my good fate indeed to go to
East Asia for the first time after experiencing
something of the Soviet nightmare. Arriving at Manchuli
I had the feeling of being welcomed again by an ancient
civilization after a period of complete lawlessness. My
conviction that Germany must work together with Japan as
a factor for stabilization was reinforced.
There is no denying the fact
that the Marxist revolution of Lenin and Stalin was the
belated child of the French Revolution of 1789. The cry
for unrestricted liberty in Paris had similarly ended in
Robespierre's terrorism. However, it was superseded by a
new European order under Napoleon. The Soviets, in
contrast, enforced their rule by perpetuating
institutionalized terror. Despite the stigma of
terroristic rule, the Soviets were remarkably successful
at exporting their ideology, not so much through sheer
power but more because of the whitewashing policy of the
ultraliberal western press. The distorting journalists
of the New York Times and other leading papers bear an
enormous historical guilt. It is remarkable that U.S.
Ambassador William Bullitt's reports from Moscow to
Franklin Roosevelt which compared Stalin with Tsar Ivan
the Terrible had been sent as secret dispatches while
the controlled German press openly reported on the
Soviet terror. Communism cannot exist without terror,
just as the teachings of Karl Marx cannot prosper
without cultivating hatred and envy.
In 1938 I was assigned to the
cultural section of the German Embassy in Tokyo. This
timed traveled to Asia by ship from Genoa to Yokohama by
way of Ceylon, Singapore and Hong Kong. This journey was
not a nightmare, but a sunny tropical dream.
Unfortunately, the old-style but patriotic ambassador,
Herbert von Dirksen, was no longer in Tokyo. The
Military Attache, General Eugen Ott, was chosen as his
successor. In my view, this was one of Hitler's
far-reaching mistakes. Ott had been the adjutant of
General Kurt Schleicher for at least a decade.
Schleicher had been involved in a conspiracy against
Hitler and was executed without trial in the SA revolt
of June 1934. It was only natural that Ott remained an
adversary, regardless of whatever assurances he may have
given to Hitler to obtain the appointment as ambassador
to Tokyo. From the very beginning Ott considered me a
National Socialist supervisor, particularly since my
career had begun with Alfred Rosenberg. I can assure you
that this was not the case, but Ott's bad conscience
nourished this suspicion. After 18 months I was
transferred to the German Consulate in Kobe-Osaka. I did
not regret the move because my new superior, Consul
General August Balser, was a loyal official and an
expert in Chinese affairs who spoke Chinese and Russian.
I vividly remember when he invited me to our first
breakfast together on 4 September 1939. Two declarations
of war-by Britain and France-lay on our table. Have you
ever had morning coffee with two war declarations?
The Ott problem was a very
delicate one. As an old line military conservative he
constantly had to hide his anti-Hitler leanings. But his
negative attitude fatefully meshed with that of the
infamous Richard Sorge, which came from the opposite
ideological side. Officially Sorge was a correspondent
for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, but he was actually
an agent of the Chief of the Soviet General Staff,
Marshal B.M. Shaposhnikov. Sorge portrayed himself as an
upright democrat who opposed the Japanese monarchy,
which he considered "antiquated." He always had a ready
supply of good Göring and Goebbels jokes. I often saw
him drunk at Lohmeyer's, a German restaurant, something
quite unusual for a secret agent. His Bohemian behavior
completely disarmed our suspicions. Despite his hard
drinking, he was on a very familiar basis with our
Ambassador and furnished him with valuable details on
Japanese domestic policy. This friendship made him a
permanent guest of our three military attaches. I am
still proud that I never invited him to my house. It
remained a "Sans Souchi" house, "Ohne Sorge" in German,
or "without worry" in English!
In spite of these unfavorable
conditions, we in the cultural section succeeded in
concluding a bilateral cultural agreement with Japan on
25 November 1938. We chose that date because it was the
second anniversary of the Anti-Comintern Pact, an
achievement, as already mentioned, of von Ribbentrop,
who had become our Foreign Minister the year before. Our
efforts were decisively helped by Hitler's spectacular
success in Munich in solving the Bohemian Sudetenland
problem. The new agreement with Japan was designed to
gradually weaken the still formidable pro-British and
pro-American sentiments in the Japanese Foreign Office,
and even more so, in the Navy. Meanwhile, the so-called
"China Incident" of 1937 had grown into a major war. It
brought about greater economic difficulties and
sacrifices. Many urns, wooden boxes wrapped in silk
containing the ashes of fallen soldiers, were delivered
to the mourning relatives. I often saw them at railway
stations bowing reverently to the flag and the
accompanying officers. Not a tear fell. It was a moving
sight!
Prince Fumimaro Konoe resigned
as Prime Minister on 4 January 1939 because he could not
fulfill his promise to end the war in China. His
successor was Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma, but Konoe's
Anglophile Foreign Minister, Hachiro Arita, remained in
office. We Germans did not have much confidence in him.
Many years after the war I read that Arita had sent a
note to President Roosevelt in May 1939 pleading for "a
closer cooperation between Japan and America." Arita
was, so to speak, a forerunner of President Reagan! At
the time this offer was concealed from the American
people, but it leaked out in 1943. Hiranuma felt that
-with American help Japanese moderates might prevent a
world war, with its dangerous consequences for Japan.
However, Roosevelt demanded that Japan must first
withdraw entirely from China, and he added more fuel to
the fire by giving six months notice that the United
States was terminating the Commercial Treaty of 1911
with Japan. In contrast to Roosevelt's cold shoulder,
the Axis offered an alliance at that time. Japan was on
the brink of joining the Axis. Percy L. Greaves Jr.
deals with this in greater detail in his excellent
essay, "Was Pearl Harbor Unavoidable?''
And then something unexpected
happened: The British "blank check" guarantee to Poland
in March 1939 suddenly forced Hitler to seek a way to
break out of the threatening encirclement of Germany on
the East and West. Dark clouds arose on all sides. A
cunning Stalin offered temporary relief in return for
half of Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia.
British and French delegations were negotiating in
Moscow at the same time under rather humiliating
circumstances. For example, they had to take notes on
their knees because Molotov denied them tables! Two
years later, when Hitler attacked Stalin, the Allies
voluntarily humiliated themselves by giving the Kremlin
everything it wanted without any conditions.
Unbelievable! Was this due to a lack of intelligence or
a lack of character? And by whom: Roosevelt, Harriman,
or the "Brain Trust"?
But to return to 1939. Only
after desperate resistance by Poland did the British and
French concede-too late-to Molotov that the Red Army
could march through Poland against Germany. Hitler was
the highest bidder in the "Fourth Partition" of Poland.
He thus signed a Ten Year Non-Aggression Pact with
Japan's traditional enemy, Soviet Russia. When the news
of the agreement reached our embassy in Tokyo, it was as
if a bomb had exploded. Secrecy had been a top priority.
Ambassador Ott was informed only at the last minute,
thereby deeply offending the Japanese. Our Japanese
friends, who supported close collaboration with Germany,
were especially upset. Serious border clashes with the
Red Army had been going on since May at the Mongolian
frontier. General Grigorii Zhukov, who would later
conquer Berlin, was victorious against the Japanese
because of a superiority in tanks and heavy artillery.
It is easy to imagine the
opportunities that Washington could have had if it had
not cancelled the U.S.-Japanese Commercial Treaty during
that critical August of 1939-a month crammed with
fateful events! But as a result the Hiranuma cabinet
fell only three days later. Under the two succeeding
cabinets Japan followed an independent course between
the Great Powers. On 15 September 1939 she signed an
armistice with Moscow. Japan's bad experience with the
USSR had a long-range deterring effect. Alfred Rosenberg
wrote these significant sentences in his diary on 25
August 1939:
I have the feeling that this
Pact with Moscow will one day turn out to be a
tragedy for National Socialism. It was not a step of
free decision, but was rather an action taken in an
emergency. The National Socialist Revolution had to
beg for help from the head of another revolution
which it has been our ideal to fight for the last
twenty years. How can we speak in the future of the
rescue and renaissance of Europe when we had to
plead for help from the destroyer of Europe?
Hamilton Fish was perfectly
correct when he observed that Hitler wanted to move
East, but Roosevelt and the British war party forced him
to turn against the West.o2 So it happened that while
Hitler carried out his 18-day victory over Poland, he
had already lost half of the country to his one-time and
future enemy! American author Benjamin Colby gave his
analysis of Roosevelt's foreign policy the ironic title
'Twas a Famous victory.13 We should also ask: Was
Hitler's victory over Poland so famous? Stalin reaped
his harvest without any noteworthy loss, and deported
the resisting Poles along with many thousands of
"Holocaust" Jews into the vast interior of his empire. "Vae
\!ictis!" Remember Katyn! We honor the memory of twelve
Polish Generals, 58 Colonels, 72 Lieutenant Colonels and
9, 217 officers.
It took more than a year to
repair our damaged relations with Japan. Hitler's
amazing and convincing victories over Norway, Holland,
Belgium and France helped our ongoing efforts.
Ribbentrop was intelligent enough to send an envoy to
Tokyo whom he trusted and respected, Ambassador Heinrich
Stahmer, to assist Ott. Within 18 days Stahmer
successfully worked out the Tripartite Pact. It was
officially signed in Berlin on 27 September 1940. The
negotiations were conducted under Foreign Minister
Yosuke Matsuoka of Prince Konoe's second cabinet. The
Pact had two main goals: (1) We hoped that it would help
to deter Roosevelt's provocative policy, but it turned
out that we were in error about this. (2) The door was
left open for a fourth partner. Our Foreign Office hoped
that Soviet Russia might ultimately also join with us.
At my urging I was called back
to Berlin at the end of 1940. The only route left open
was through Siberia. At Otpor the Soviets had
established a strict quarantine zone on the pretext of a
single case of pestilence in a dentist's practice in
Hsinking, the capital of Manchuria, more than one
thousand kilometers from the border. We were interned
for eight days in badly heated third-class sleeping cars
and had to turn over all our clothing and belongings to
the Soviets for disinfection. Disinfection is a
marvelous excuse for people to humiliate others. An NKVD
agent interned together with us distributed anti-German
books in violation of the existing agreements on
propaganda. I realized right there that the hope by the
Wilhelmstrasse of winning the USSR as a fourth partner
for the Tripartite Pact was an idle dream. In Berlin I
reported to Foreign Office Assistant Secretary (Unterstaatssekretaer)
Ernst Woermann, a loyal official. He told me: "We have
decided to transfer you to the East Asia Section of the
Political Department, but, frankly speaking, the
important political decisions are taken outside of the
Foreign Office in the Führer's and Ribbentrop's
headquarters." I suppose that if I had been an American
diplomat returning to Washington, Under Secretary of
State Sumner Welles might well have explained to me that
the important U.S. political decisions were made
exclusively by Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust" of
Frankfurter, Morgenthau, Baruch, and so forth, but not
by the State Department. The fate of a diplomat in a
distorted democracy such as Roosevelt's is not unlike
the fate of a diplomat in a dictatorship.
The next major event was the
visit of Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka to Berlin,
Rome and Moscow. I accompanied Matsuoka in Hitler's
special train from Berlin to the Italian border. We had
dinner together. Matsuoka was deeply impressed by his
conversation with Hitler and spoke enthusiastically of
"the Führer." Hitler had urged Matsuoka to attack
Singapore while strictly avoiding any steps against the
United States. Matsuoka was unable to give any military
assurances, but he hinted that Japan would be ready for
action in May.l5 The Japanese Ambassador in Berlin,
Hiroshi Oshima, traveled with Matsuoka on his return
journey to Malkinia, the new German-Soviet border
crossing. Confidentially I learned from Oshima that
Hitler had not mentioned the strained relations with
Stalin to Matsuoka, but he (Oshima) had warned his
superior not to sign a neutrality agreement with the
USSR, as Molotov had been urging. Through the train
window Oshima pointed out the long German trains at
Posen transporting weapons. But Matsuoka had his
instructions and Hitler, whom he had informed about the
forthcoming agreement, avoided contradicting him. And so
the Soviet-Japanese neutrality agreement was signed. The
Soviets promised 100,000 tons of crude oil from North
Sakhalin as an added inducement. Matsuoka had been
Americanized from his youth and was a talkative
character. Hitler was also understandably fearful of
revealing his secret plan to attack the USSR. And yet,
long after the war I learned, to my great embarrassment,
that Hitler had revealed-four weeks before Matsuoka's
visit-to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia that he would attack
the Soviet Union in early summer.16 Paul was Anglophile
and had a Russian mother. The American Ambassador in
Belgrade, Arthur Bliss Lane, immediately reported the
news of Hitler's plan to Washington. Washington informed
Moscow at once! This contrast proves that the
German-Japanese Pact was in reality not a functioning
alliance. Poisonous sacro egoismo prevailed on both
sides. In this respect Roosevelt treated his allies much
better. Morgenthau was very generous to Britain with
American taxpayers' money because he was always afraid
that Britain might be seduced by German peace proposals
or that Stalin might change sides again. Even today most
Germans are convinced that Hitler's attack against the
Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was a serious blunder. I do
not share that view. In his memoirs, Malaya Zemlya,
Leonid Brezhnev openly admitted Soviet intentions to
attack a weakened Germany.o7 But apart from that, the
best proof of Soviet intentions is the fact that the
attacking German armies encountered an enormous
concentration of Soviet forces being mobilized against
the West. That's the reason for the enormous numbers of
Soviet prisoners taken in the summer of l941.t8 It is
ironic that Hitler's armies crossed the Soviet border
exactly 129 years after Napoleon began his campaign
against Russia. The overthrow of the pro-German
government in Belgrade, which was well organized by
Roosevelt and Donovan with Stalin's help, delayed
Hitler's original timetable against the USSR for five
weeks. This was perhaps Roosevelt's greatest triumph
during the war. He saved Stalin! *
Hitler failed in Russia
primarily because he waged war only militarily and not
politically. In Norway, Holland, Belgium and France he
had carefully observed the golden rule of Alexander the
Great in Asia and Egypt-magnanimity towards the
vanquished. However, against the Bolsheviks Hitler was
blind with a rage that resembled Roosevelt's hatred of
him. It was Hitler's error to occupy the Soviet Embassy
in Berlin instead of having it put under the protection
of a neutral power. It was Hitler's error not to have
formed national Russian and Ukrainian governments. It
was Hitler's error not to have abolished collectivized
agriculture and given land to the peasants. If he had
done these things, a fire of popular insurrection would
have swept away Stalin's tyranny. Russian armies
shoulder to shoulder with the German forces would have
smashed Bolshevism forever.
In 1983 I discovered a lengthy
report by Felix Frankfurter in the Manuscript Division
of the Library of Congress. Roosevelt sent Frankfurter
to the USSR in 1941. He visited the retreating Soviet
front near Rostov in October 1941 and, along with Allied
military specialists, speculated that Hitler's armies
might reach the Ural mountains, leaving only Vladivostok
as the last American supply line to the Reds. Therefore
he considered Japan a "stumbling block" between
California and Siberia. Frankfurter argued for an
American war of aggression against Japan. He wrote: "In
Japan we have a 'dagger in the back' type of enemy
waiting and anxious only for the place and moment when
it can sink that dagger to the best advantage. In this
show-down war, reasons multiply for annihilating this
kind of enemy."t9 Annihilating a whole nation is
genocide. Remember Hitler's prophesies regarding Japan
and about whom her annihilation would serve best. If the
standards applied to the defeated Axis leaders at
Nuremberg and Tokyo had been applied to Frankfurter, I
doubt if he would have escaped death by hanging.
Another "bomb" exploded when a
top secret telegram from Ambassador Ott landed on my
desk in October 1941. It reported that Richard Sorge had
been arrested for espionage on behalf of the Soviet
government. Further Japanese investigation in the
following days revealed that Sorge had been the editor
of a Communist paper published near Cologne in 1924,
that he had participated in Comintern congresses, and
that he had collaborated with Asahi newspaper
correspondent Hotsumi Ozaki, who was close to Prince
Konoe. Sorge's mother was a Russian. His great-uncle,
Friedrich Albert Sorge, had been General Secretary of
the Marxist First International and a friend of Karl
Marx. And we had to learn all of this from the Japanese!
I felt ashamed. The dreaded Gestapo, the German FBI,
suddenly bustled with activity. They finally found a
dusty file in the records of the old Prussian democratic
police which they had acquired in 1933, but never read.
The file label read "Richard Sorge." The agent was so
bold that he didn't even change his name. To make
matters worse, Sorge had transmitted two fateful
messages to Vladivostok shortly before his arrest. The
first reported a Japanese cabinet decision to refrain
from any attack against the Soviet Union. As a result of
that information, 200,000 fresh Siberian troops were
quickly transferred westwards to the German advance
front. On 5 December 1941 the Tenth Motorized Infantry
Division leading a pincer movement around Moscow under
General Heinz Guderian was forced to retreat for the
first time.20 Hitler's "blitz" came to an end. This was
the consequence of Sorge's treason and the five summer
weeks lost in Yugoslavia. Sorge's second message
informed Stalin that Pearl Harbor might be attacked
within the next 60 days if war should break out between
Japan and the U.S. The Soviets thanked Sorge, replying
that "they had informed Roosevelt, Marshall, Admiral
Stark, et al.''21 In this way Stalin returned his thanks
for the priceless "Prince Paul message" of spring. "For
Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all
honorable men." Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II)
A few weeks later Under
Secretary von Weizsaecker reached me by telephone while
I was away visiting in Nuremberg. He asked me about
relations between Ott and Sorge. I replied: "They were
extremely intimate. Unfortunately, the Japanese knew
this. Therefore the Ambassador should be recalled
immediately." Von Weizsaecker replied: "He should stay
on there." Along with the Japanese, I was very
disturbed. A few months later they tactfully demanded
his recall. After the war I learned the context. I was
taught that because Weizsaecker was an honorable man who
resisted a dictator, his oath of allegiance did not
count. At the end of the war America discovered that the
Sorge connection was only half of the story. Major
General C.~A. Willoughby, who served under MacArthur,
found out that the head of Soviet espionage was based in
Shanghai from where the eager American Marxist, Agnes
Smedley, organized her footholds in high-level positions
in Washington.22 The Sorge-Smedley ring was thus a
threat to the United States as well as to Germany.
It is significant that
Matsuoka's negotiations in Europe were not coordinated
with the Japanese negotiations being conducted in
Washington at the same time. There was considerable
disagreement about policy in Tokyo. Although Prince
Konoe was fully aware of Hiranuma's failure, he thought
that the Tripartite Pact had strengthened his position
and would allow him to take a chance on the United
States. He even sacrificed the pro-German Matsuoka in
July in favor of retiring Vice Admiral Teijiro Toyoda,
who was opposed to any attack against the United States.
The Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Nomura, met forty
times with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and nine
times with President Roosevelt. But Roosevelt's attitude
was so uncompromising that it was he who saved the
Tripartite Pact. To be quite clear, I must confess that
it was not German diplomatic skill, but rather Roosevelt
who alone forced the reluctant Japanese to stick to the
alliance with Germany. At virtually the last minute
Tokyo asked if we would join them in case of war with
America. On 5 December 1941 Hitler gave the Japanese
this assurance and, following the Pearl Harbor attack,
he complied with it, even though Germany was not legally
bound to do so because it was the Japanese who had
struck first. On 11 December 1941, long after Roosevelt
had issued shooting orders against German warships,
Germany declared war against the United States.23 Hitler
delivered an epochal speech on that occasion. After
reading it one has to admit that Hitler, citing
documents found in Prague and Warsaw, indicted Roosevelt
in such a way that he may be called a pioneer of
historical revisionism. I personally witnessed this
speech and will never forget the experience. "The
American President has labeled our three nations as
'have nots'," Hitler declared. "That is correct!
But the 'have nots' also wish to
live and they will keep from being robbed of even their
modest share by the 'haves'."24
There is no need to dwell here
on the background to the Pearl Harbor attack. This
subject is dealt with in detail in Admiral Theobald's
The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, John Toland's Infamy:
Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, and Hamilton Fish's
latest book Tragic Deception. It's worth recalling
Thomas Dewey's remark of 26 September 1944 to General
George Marshall's messenger, Col. Carter W. Clarke. In
reply to Clarke's plea to suppress the whole issue
during the election campaign, Dewey said: "From what I
know of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, instead of
being reselected, ought to be impeached."25 This is also
not the place to discuss the Pacific War. The history of
that conflict has to be re-written. In his top secret
letter to then Republican presidential nominee Dewey,
George Marshall credited the U.S. victories at Midway
and in the Coral Sea to the intelligence ability to
eavesdrop on Japanese High Command communications. It
took nearly forty years for these documents to be
declassified. Many years of painstaking research will be
needed to properly evaluate this library of some 700,000
pages!26 They will open new horizons.
The question arises: If there
was so much suspicion and selfish distrust between
Germany and Japan, when was the alliance productive?
Here are two cases: One fruitful result was Hitler's
presentation of two German submarines together with all
patent papers and technical information to the Japanese
Navy. This proved to be of great help in rebuilding
Japanese industry after the war. But there is another
and more important achievement of the German-Japanese
alliance. This was the contribution to the Indian
National Liberation movement headed by Subhas Chandra
Bose. (I delivered a lecture on this remarkable man and
his place in history at American University in
Washington, D.C. in late 1983.) Bose was President of
the All-India Congress and a major figure in the
struggle for Indian independence. Shortly after the
outbreak of war in Europe he was imprisoned by the
British in Calcutta, but he escaped and made his way to
Germany via Kabul and Moscow. After a period of speaking
to his country over the short wave radio station "Azid
Hind" ("Free India") from Germany, Bose wanted to go to East Asia to organize
an Indian National Army. The Foreign Office appreciated
his goal and we arranged a submarine voyage in
coordination with the Japanese Navy. The remarkable
journey was successful and Bose was well received in
Tokyo by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. Bose raised an
Indian army in Singapore and Malaya which fought with
Japanese forces against the British at the India-Burma
border area. Years after the war the British Prime
Minister Clement Atlee confessed to the Indian Chief
Justice in Calcutta that it was Bose's Indian National
Army which had shattered the loyalty of the British
colonial troops. The British could no longer rely on
them and were forced to quit India forever.27 Bose
perished in an air accident in Taiwan at the end of the
war and did not live to see Indian independence. But his
struggle survived his death! History is a human affair.
It is therefore not barren Marxist materialism but the
human spirit that is decisive. Bose, a remarkable
orator, had appealed to patriotic spirit. The
German-Japanese alliance could not prevent the military
defeat of their own countries, but their support for
Bose and his movement contributed substantially to the
fall of the mighty British empire.
Retrospect and
Conclusion
In politics nothing happens
by accident. If something happens, you can be sure
that it was planned that way. -- Franklin Roosevelt
The Second World War turned the
world into a slaughterhouse. Altogether some 55 million
died and two atomic bombs were dropped in order to force
some 90 million Japanese and 75 million Germans to
submit to the "unconditional surrender" proclaimed by
Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943.29
William C. Bullitt, who was
later Roosevelt's first Ambassador to Moscow, broke with
President Wilson in 1919. He considered the Versailles
Peace Treaty a disaster which would ultimately bring on
another war. Ironically, twenty years later, Bullitt, by
order of Roosevelt, did everything possible to incite
the Poles to war. He had become an eager supporter of
war against Germany! This policy ended in catastrophe
for his own country because Roosevelt gave away all his
cards to Stalin without demanding anything in return.
Stalin received considerable Lend-Lease aid amounting to
more than $11 billion.30 Roosevelt delivered twice as
many tanks to Stalin as Hitler employed at the outset of
his invasion. In May 1943 even atomic materials (black
uranium oxide and uranium nitrate) and secret technical
information were loaded on to Soviet planes in Canada.
The orders for this astonishing transfer came from the
White House!3l In the final analysis, Yalta and Potsdam
meant catastrophe for Germany and Japan, as well as
tragedy for the United States, Korea, China and the rest
of the Western world. Only two powers emerged triumphant
from the conflagration, one old and one new: the Soviet
Union and the Zionists.
The First World War was
concluded with the Versailles Treaty which, as unjust
and fragile as it was, was still a signed treaty. In
contrast, there has not been any European peace treaty
to conclude the Second World War. Europe's central
power, Germany, was beheaded and, as a result, her two
primary wartime enemies, the U.S. and the USSR, still
confront each other on the territory of divided Germany
under the conditions of a precarious armistice. Western
access to divided Berlin remains literally "in the air.'
After forty years, this is the longest standing
armistice in world history. American sons and grandsons
have inherited from their fathers the need to keep watch
across Soviet mines at the fortified border through
Central Europe. They must also guard the last German
prisoner, Rudolf Hess, who spends his 50th birthday in
Spandau. The high cost of vengeance, it seems, will
never end. As the English poet Alexander Pope put it:
"Now Europe's balanced, neither side prevails. For
nothing's left in either of the scales.' The nervous
military build-up on both sides of the Iron Curtain (a
term first popularized by Dr. Goebbels) entails the
deadly risk that one of the opposing superpowers may act
out of fear that the military balance has been broken.
The British "balance of power" was destroyed and has
been replaced by a "balance of terror."
Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo have
long since disappeared, but the injustices they opposed
and the problems they sought to overcome, which caused
their emergence, remain unresolved to this day. Nearly
one quarter of Weimar Germany was placed under Polish
Communist administration. Twelve million Germans were
driven from their homes, of whom more than two million
were slain in an orgy of hatred.32 Genghis Khan seemed
to come to life. For this reason the explosive charge of
unresolved problems has become more dangerous than ever.
New, explosively dangerous borderlines were created:
Korea and Vietnam were divided by Stalin, India was torn
asunder, Germany was cut up, Austria was again amputated
from her, Poland was doomed, three Baltic states were
sentenced to death, Japan was mutilated.... The Middle
East has been engulfed in turmoil. This conflict was
fostered at Versailles in 1919 when the British and
French violated numerous solemn pledges and betrayed the
Arabs. The last great British defender of the Arabs, T.E.
Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") was killed in a
motorcycle accident in 1935 shortly before a planned
meeting with Hitler. The evidence strongly suggests that
Lawrence was murdered by British officials.33 The
AngloAmerican partition of Palestine provoked a new
Islamic fervor which bears the spark of a Third World
War. The American officials who were taken hostage in
their own Embassy in Teheran dramatically experienced
this Islamic renaissance. There is an imminent danger
that the Middle Eastern conflict may erupt into a third
world conflagration. This must be avoided at all costs!
The NATO and Warsaw Pact armies should therefore be
withdrawn from German soil. In addition to sound
long-range political considerations by both Washington
and Moscow, the development of new long-range weapons
can facilitate such a move. America should take the lead
in this. The two artificially created states on German
soil have no weight. People in America and Europe, often
misled by sinister forces, shout for peace. Nobody
shouts for the prerequisite of real peace: A European
Peace Treaty. A consistent and conscientious effort by
the super powers leading to a European Peace Treaty must
have priority over new armaments. With the implacability
of the classical Roman statesman Cato, all Germans
should demand ("Ceterum censeo") that the "enemy clause"
in the United Nations Charter must be abolished. Above
all, the White House should earnestly work for such a
peace treaty, which would be more effective and less
costly than any armaments race. An active peace policy
should have priority over Secretary Weinberger's purely
military campaign. Today we seem to be witnessing the
squaring of the circle, but in politics nothing is as
permanent as change. A bold and courageous step by the
United States may one day overcome Roosevelt's fatal
decision, expressed to Francis Cardinal Spellman in 1943
that "there will be no peace treaty."34 As history has
shown, no peace treaty means perpetual danger.
Historians have the duty to ask:
What was behind the catastrophe of Yalta and Potsdam?
Colonel Curtis B. Dall wisely entitled his book FDR, My
Exploited Father-in-Law. Exploited by whom? We Germans
found the answer in captured Polish documents. In
January 1939, scarcely four months after the Munich
Agreement, Polish Ambassador Jerzy Potocki reported from
Washington to Warsaw:
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.
In this action various Jewish intellectuals
participated: for instance, Bernard Baruch; the
Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly
appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix
Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau;
and others who are personal friends of President
Roosevelt... 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... . 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 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. 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. 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.35
The father of this international
"Brain Trust" cabal was Wilson. Under blackmail
pressure, he was forced to appoint Louis Dembitz
Brandeis, an ardent Zionist, as Chief Justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court in 1916.36 Along with President
Wilson, Brandeis bears a major responsibility for
pushing America to join Britain's war in order to obtain
from her the fateful Balfour Declaration of 1917. In
1939, a year just a crucial as 1916, Roosevelt nominated
Felix Frankfurter, Brandeis' intimate friend, as his
successor on the Supreme Court. A secret state within a
state was gradually developing. University of
Pennsylvania Professor Bruce Allen Murphy is the author
of the 1982 work, The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection,
which is significantly subtitled "The Secret Political
Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices."37 Based on
300 previously unpublished letters from Brandeis to
Frankfurter, Murphy reveals that these men clannishly
placed their sympathizers in influential positions
throughout the U.S. government. As Murphy put it, this
made it possible for them to "pull the invisible
wires."38 Among Frankfurter's "extrajudicial successes,"
Murphy noted that "he (Frankfurter) had helped to
prepare the nation for its entry into the (Second World)
war and had secured assistance, both material and
monetary, for Great Britain."39 This was, of course, a
blatant violation of the U.S. Neutrality Law of 1935. A
Supreme Court Justice thus subverted the law. Worst of
all, however, was the ideological influence of these
men, which differed radically from the Western tradition
of the Founding Fathers. Zionism is an Oriental
nationalism based on the spirit of the Old Testament,
the pre-Christian Torah and the Babylonian Talmud.40 It
has nothing in common with our civilization, which is
rooted in Occidental Hellenic and Roman thinking. Recall
what I wrote about the magnanimous treatment of the
vanquished by Alexander the Great. His teacher was
Aristotle, a disciple of Plato. In a way, Alexander's
policy resembled Wilson's slogan, "a war to end all
war." However, the President unfortunately abandoned
this path by entrusting Bernard Baruch with the
preparation of the Versailles conference. It is no
accident that it was the Zionists who introduced the
spirit of hatred and revenge into Anglo-American foreign
policy. Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of
England, called the Versailles settlement "economic
lunacy."4s In 1944 Morgenthau issued his devastating
plan for Germany's ruin.
The "unconditional surrender"
concept grew from the same spiritual root. Dr. Nahum
Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress,
proudly claimed for himself and his Congress the honor
of first expounding the idea of a tribunal to punish
Nazi war criminals.42 Robert Oppenheimer, the famous
Communist-inclined physicist, nearly succeeded in having
the first atomic bomb dropped on Kyoto, the cultural
heart of Japan. An atomic attack on Kyoto, which is
surrounded on three sides be high hills, would have cost
many more lives than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,
which faces the open sea. Secretary of War Henry Stimson
had to use all of his authority to frustrate two
attempts by Oppenheimer to have Kyoto selected as the
target for the first atomic bombing.43 Satanic hatred
also manifested itself in books. In Germany Must Perish,
Theodore Nathan Kaufman proposed the compulsory
sterilization of all German men and women after
victory.44 Germany was to disappear completely and would
be totally partitioned off among neighboring countries.
Holland would absorb Hamburg, Poland would acquire
Berlin, and Munich would become part of France. Goebbels
arranged for widespread distribution of a German
translation of Kaufman's book. You can imagine the
effect this had on the public! In a 1942 issue of a
prominent British magazine, a Jewish emigree who wrote
under the pen name of Sebastian Haffner urged the
summary killing of at least 500,000 young SS men 45 This
murderous proposal surpassed even Stalin's suggestion at
the 1943 Teheran conference that 50,000 German officers
should be murdered.46 Finally, at a mass meeting with
New York Mayor La Guardia in 1945, Jewish newspaper
mogul Joseph Pulitzer called for the killing of one and
a half million Nazis, the German General Staff,
industrialists and bankers "with army bullets through
their heads." The New York Times of 23 May 1945 reported
at length on this rally and Pulitzer's proposal without
any criticism whatsoever. The contemptible Times editors
had completely abandoned George Washington's noble
sentiment, expressed in his Farewell Address: "It will
be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant
period, a great Nation, to give mankind the magnamimous
and too novel example of a people always guided by an
exalted justice and benevolence."
One of America's greatest
generals, George Patton, declared: "We fought the war of
1776 for independence. We fought the Civil War to free
the slaves. We fought the war of 1812 to make the world
safe for democracy. We fought this war to lose
everything owe had gained from the other three."47 Did
Patton die for making this critical but accurate
statement, in circumstances very similar to those
surrounding the death of Lawrence of Arabian Dr. James
J. Martin once stated that the policy of the Allied "Big
Three" is "unequaled in the history of devious
statecraft." This policy has led the super powers into a
maze. There is no way out, unless they abandon
Roosevelt's road to Yalta, a road paved by subversives.
Between 1871 and 1918 the French kept a ribbon of
mourning on the statue of "lost" Alsace-Lorraine at the
Place de la Concorde in Paris. In the same spirit,
should not the Statue of Liberty veil her head to mourn
the mockery that Roosevelt had made of this noble, proud
and venerated symbol? In the search for new horizons of
honesty, devotion and love of country, we must
courageously oppose those who preach hatred, Marxist
class straggle or hollow internationalism. Hope is
dawning ... Let us not forget that although
Anglo-American bombers killed many hopeful specialists
at the German rocket center of Peenemuende, fruitful
German-American collaboration since the war at Cape
Canaveral has brought us to the moon! Columbus would
envy us!
Notes
- See: Ludwig Klages, Der
Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 2 vols. (1929).
Klages was a German philosophical pioneer.
- Bernard M. Baruch, My Own
Story (London: Oddhouse Press, 1958), p.276. '
- New York: Harper & Bros.,
1920. New edition: New York: 1970.
- Baruch (1920,1970), pp. 5,
8.
- Akten zur deutschen und
auswaertigen Politik, (Baden Baden: 1956), Serie D
(1937-1945), Band VI, Dokument 403 (17 May 1939),
p.441. Cited in: David L. Hoggan, Der erzwungene
Krieg (Tuebingen: 1974), p.520.
- A. Hitler, Mein Kampf
(German edition of 1930), p.173.
- Hitler, pp. 722-724.
- Chain Leon, Wolnomularstwo
w lI RzeezypospoXitet (Warsaw: Cytelnik, 1975).
- Earl Jowitt, The Strange
Case of Alger Hiss (London: 1953).
- Curtis B. Dall, FDR, My
Exploited Father-in-Law (1972).
- The Journal of Historical
Review, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1983-84), pp. 391-395.
- H. Fish, Tragic Deception
(Old Greenwich, CN: Devin Adair, 1983), p.94.
- New Rochelle, NY: Arlington
House, 1974 and 1979.
- This listing of prisoners
was published in the Moscow army daily Krasnaya
Zvezda ("Red Star") of 17 Sept. 1940. All
correspondence between the Polish prisoners and
their relatives was cut off in the spring of 1940.
General Sikorski was unable to get any information
about their whereabouts from Stalin on 3 Dec. 1940.
See also: Louis FitzGibbon, Katyn.
- Helmut Suendermann,
TagesparoZen: Deutsche Presseweisungen 193á1945,
(Leoni: Druffel Verlag, 1973), pp. 186, 209ff.
- Konstantin Fotitch,
Yugoslavia's Tragedy and the Failure of the West
(New York: 1948). Fotitch, a Serb, was the Yugoslav
Ambassador in Washington. See the record of his
conversation with Prince Paul of 1 March 1941.
- Moscow: 1978. (Russian
edition, pp. 6-7?)
- Erich Helmdach,
Ueberafa11?, (Neckargemuend: 1975).
- F. Frankfurter to William
J. Donovan, 20 October 1941, p. 14. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division, Container Z43, File
004234 Miscellany.
- Personal information by
eyewitness Dr. Josef Jindrich, Munich. See also:
Paul Carell, Unternehmen Barbarossa, (Berlin:
Ullstein, 1968), Vol. 1, p. 167, Map 9, and Vol. 2,
p. 284.
- Sorge Jiken ("The Sorge
Case"), (Tokyo: 1962).
- C.A. Willoughby, Sorge:
Soviet Master Spy (London: Wm. Kimber, 1952).
Published in the U.S. by Dutton as Shanghai
Conspiracy. See also: Freda Utlev. Last Chance in
China [Indianapolis: Bobbs Merits 1947).
- Peter Herde, Pearl Harbor:
7. Dez. 1941, (Darmstadt: 19801, Kanitel II, pp.
42-273.
- Friedrich Berber, Die
Amerikanische NeutraZitaet im Kriege, 1939-1941,
(Essen: 1943) Dokumentenanhang, pp. 163-190.
- Congressional
Investigation, Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 3, pp.
1132-1133.
- Index of NSA/CSS
Crypto1Ogic^Documents Offered to and Accepted by The
National Archives of the United States as of 30
November 1981. (Record Group 457, Modern Military
Branch, Military Ar chives Division)
- Ranjan Borra, "India's War
of Liberation," The Journal of Historical Review,
Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 407-439.
- Quoted in: Gary Allen, None
Dare Call it Conspiracy, (German edition, 1971, p.
10)
- Meyers Enzyklopaedisches
Lexikon (Mannheim: 1979), Vol. 25, p. 215.
- Twenty-Second Report to
Congress on Lend-Lease Operations [for period ending
31 December 1945] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1946), pp. 17, 26.
- The dealer was "Raznoimport,"
USSR. Sent by "Amtorg," New York. Order No.
21-73/043058. Facsimile in: Peter Kleist, Die
europaeische Tragoedie (Pr. Oldendorf: K.W. Schuetz,
1971), p. 65. See also: George R. Jordan, From Major
Jordan's Diaries (Boston: Western Islands, 1965).
- P. Kleist, p. 311.
- Desmond Hansen, "The Enigma
of Lawrence," The Journal of Historical Review, Vol.
2, No. 3 (Fall 1981), pp. 286-287.
- R.I. Gannon, The Cardinal
Spellman Story. Quoted in: Leon De Poncins, State
Secrets, p. 91.
- Potocki dispatches of 12
and 16 January 1939. Mark Weber, "President
Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe," The
Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer
1983), pp. 147, 148, 149.
- Conrad Grieb, American
Manifest Destiny and the Holocausts, (New York:
Examiner Books, 1979), pp. 39-40.
- New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 473pp.
- B.A. Murphy, p. xi.
- B.A. Murphy, p. 302.
- M. Schloessinger, Rashi:
His Life and His Work (Baltimore: 1905). Rashi,
which means "learning," was the most authoritative
interpreter of the Talmud.
- James Pool and Suzanne
Pool, Who Financed Hitler? (New York: Dial Press,
1979, pb.), p. 309.
- Nahum Goldmann, Memories,
pp. 216-217.
- Martin J. Sherwin, A World
Destroyed (New York: A Knopf, 1975), pp. 230-231.
- Newark, NJ: Argyle Press,
1941.
- World Review (London),
August 1942. See also: M. Weber, "Sebastian
Haffner's 1942 Call for Mass Murder," The Journal of
Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Fall 1983), pp.
380-382.
- Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw
It, (New York: 1946), pp. 188-191.
- C. Grieb, an 138.
Bibliographic information
|
Author:
|
Braun, Karl Otto |
|
Title:
|
Reflections on German and American Foreign
Policy, 1933-1945 |
|
Source:
|
The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org) |
|
Date:
|
Spring 1986 |
|
Issue:
|
Volume 6 number 1 |
|
Location:
|
Page 41 |
|
ISSN:
|
0195-6752 |
|
Attribution:
|
"Reprinted from The Journal of Historical
Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA
92659, USA. Domestic subscriptions $40 per year;
foreign subscriptions $60 per year." |
|