Revisionism 105

Romanians and the Holocaust

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• Presented at the 1981 Revisionist Conference.

In the last decade, various stories appeared in books and newspapers relating to the Holocaust in Romania. The authors of these stories pretended that Romanians killed almost half a million Jews in WW II; they arrived at this figure in an awkward manner.

Firstly, long before this campaign, in 1957, two scholars, one Romanian and the other Jew, met together and published a paper on this subject in Rome, Italy, in which the figure was 15,000, but not of Jews exterminated by the Romanians; it related to the Jewish casualties in Romania, which makes a big difference. The title of the paper was Regional Development of the Jewish Population in Romania and the authors were Dr. Sabin Manuila, formerly General Director of the Institute for Statistics of Romania and Dr. W. Filderman, formerly President of the Jewish Community of Romania. In other words, one was a high level specialist in the very field of statistics and census, the other was the head of the minority that pretends today the above stated extermination. Furthermore, both authors had qualifications beyond the level stated above. Manuila was a Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the International Institute of Statistics. Filderman was a Rabbi, former Member of the Romanian Parliament, and President of the "Joint Distribution Committee" for Romania. In other words, both were intellectuals of a higher standard and knowledgeable, by their professions, in the development of the population in Romania. However, despite their scholarship, the figure set after their research work (15,000), was fully stretched in Jewish favor. I shall call this figure Stage I of denigration. They listed the largest figure mentioned in the statistical reports they made use of; for instance, if two reports came from the same village, one informing of 10 casualties and the other of 15, the researchers listed the largest figure, 15. Therefore, the real number of Jews who died in Romania in the war was between 10,000 and 15,000. Anyhow, after the publication of that paper, the two parties were more or less content with that figure, then they forgot about those tragic events, went back to their usual work, and the situation remained calm during almost 20 years.

Then, suddenly, in the mid 70's, the figure rose abruptly to Stage II of denigration: 250,000 killings. Before long it rose again to Stage III: 300,000 killings, and arrived lately to Stage IV: 450,000 Jews killed by Romanians in WW II!

It should be stressed that these new figures have been published by Zionists alone, without any contribution or investigation underwritten by the Romanians. While the documentation for Stage I is available to any researcher and can be checked for accuracy at any time, the figures relating to Stages II, III, and IV, had been set up without any official documentation. If some new evidence to support a figure other than 15,000 had been found somewhere, this new evidence would have been published in some official journal under the aegis of both parties, but nothing of this kind was published by an authorized or specialized organization. In other words, it seems that the authors of the last three stages of denigration have changed the number of the dead by simply crossing out one figure and replacing it with another. According to this method, even the last figure of 450,000 can be changed at any time.

As a former Romanian, I was shocked when I first became aware of the second stage of denigration. This was in the 70's and since then I have looked for whatever proofs they might have gotten. I found nothing but memories of old people, recollections of tragic war events, and declarations made in general terms which, under no circumstances, could be considered as documents in support of such a grave and precise accusation as the one charging the Romanians with the killing of 450,000 Jews.

My secretary was in touch with Dr. Jean Ancel of Yad Vashem Archives. Mr. Ancel became a doctor with a dissertation on this very subject, The Romanian Jewry, in which he ranges himself in the Stage III of denigration. The university which conferred to him a doctoral degree for such a dissertation was the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My secretary sent Dr. Ancel three letters asking for an abstract of his dessertion. and also for any available proof in support of his version of the events. The letters were sent to no avail. Dr. Ancel answered only one letter saying that his figures are only approximate. However, Dr. Ancel is one of the specialists in the field of Romanian Jewry who can understand the importance of a proof when making such a grave statement. He refused to give any proof of his statements.

I With the others who are much under Ancel's level of education, it is useless to start any discussion because they become excited after the first question. In general, they consider that they and they alone possess the truth. Whatever view does not conform to their views is by definition a lie, immoral, anti-Semite, racist, and neo-Nazi. When these people write about those events, their writings are so full of vague and general statements that it is almost impossible for the concerned reader not to suspect them of posing as victims.

Here is an example. Ms. Juliana Geran Pilon is a Jew born in Romania. She wrote a book, Notes from the Other Side of the Night, (South Bend, IN.: Regnery Gateway, 1979) in which she states (page 125) that "nearly 300,000 Jews had been killed in Romania before the Germans even got there!" When the Germans got there, Ms. Pilon says further, they killed 150,000 more. Now, in order to understand the absurdity of such an allegation I should bring back to mind what happened in Romania in 1940, the year when the Germans came.

In recalling the history of those days I will use some data from a book written by an outstanding Zionist scholar, Professor Lucy Dawidowicz of Yeshiva University, NY. In her book, The War Against Jews, (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975) Ms. Dawidowicz declares that there were 750,000 Jews. in pre-war Romania, of which 300,000 lived in Bessarabia and 150,000 in Northern Transylvania. These two provinces Bessarabia and Northern Transylvania, had been lost by Romania in August 1940 under the pro-Jewish regime of King Carol II, when organized killing of Jews was impossible. The loss of the national territory put a shameful end to the corrupt regime of King Carol who was obliged to abdicate. He was chased from Romania together with his Jewish lover, Ms. Magda Wolf-Lupescu, his mentor and counselor. In September 1940, King Carol's pro-Jewish regime was replaced with the nationalist regime of General Antonescu. and in November 1940 the German troops entered Romania. This is the period referred to by Ms. Pilon when she writes that Romanians and Germans killed altogether 450,000 Jews. This could only happen under Antonescu, not, of course, under Carol.

Now, by simple subtraction, if we deduct 450,000 (300,000 Jews of Bessarabia plus 150,000 of Northern Transylvania) from the total Jewish population of about 750,00, we can see that nationalist Romania (i.e. Romania from 1940 to the end of the war, 1944) had only 300,000 Jews. It was therefore impossible for the Germans and Romanians to kill 450,000 Jews out of 300,000.

But there is more than that in Ms. Pilon's story.

First, let's see how Romanians could kill 300,000 Jews before the Germans even got there, as Ms. Pilon proclaims. Under King Carol it was impossible to organize any action against the Jews simply because they were at the control of the administration through Ms. Magda Wolf-Lupescu, the king's lover. She had complete dominion over the king because of some unique sexual peculiarities, the description of which would be unfit for this report. In fact, she was the uncrowned queen of Romania and nothing could take place in that country without her permission. In proof of this fact was the wild crushing of a Christian and nationalist movement (the Iron Guard) in 1938, when several thousand youngsters and students had been killed without trial or judicial procedures simply because they rose against the Jewish influence, the corruption, the decay, and the abuses perpetrated in those days in t1rat country. The mass murder of Jews would have only been possible under the nationalist regime of General Antonescu which took over in Romania in September 1940. According to Ms. Pilon, the Romanians killed 300,000 Jews "before the Germans even got there," Le. between September 1940 (advent of the nationalist regime) and November 1940 (German troops enter Romania), that is, in two months. Now, could this be possible? Can one kill 300,000 people and then evaporate the corpses? Of course, not. One has to put the corpses somewhere. One has to dig a grave for them and a grave of this size cannot remain hidden forever. No grave of this size or smaller has yet been discovered in Romania. There are hundreds of Jewish cemeteries in Romania, but all are standard cemeteries, the people buried there died of natural or accidental death.

In contrast, there are thousands of cemeteries of Romanian war heroes. There is even an American hero cemetery near Bucharest, on the same spot with a British hero cemetery. There are thousands of such graves all over Europe, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic Ocean to Stalingrad. In Poland, it is impossible to cross one single district without coming upon a cemetery of Polish heroes. There are cemeteries of Jews, too, and even monuments. There are no such monuments or mausoleums for Jews in Romania, although Romania is the only communist country that has diplomatic relations with Israel. Moreover, Romania depends on the pro-Zionist votes of many American senators to get the Most Favored Nation clause. It would have been very easy for those influential American senators to cause President Ceausescu to erect a Jewish monument in Romania. However, neither American senators, nor Israelis have asked thus far for the erection of such a monument. The rationale? The Jews died in Romania because of various casualties inherent to any war, but not because of atrocities.

When 15,000 Polish officers and soldiers were killed at Katyn, the killers dug a huge grave and put the corpses there. If you went there at the time when the place was open for the public you could see the material proofs of what happened. You could see bones and skeletons and pieces of Polish uniforms and shoes and letters and photographs (damaged by the humidity of the soil) which were found in the pockets of the uniforms and even the bullets used in those killings. It had been impossible to hide 15,000 corpses; it had not been a matter of 15,000 matches or 15,000 pebbles; it had been a matter of 15,000 human bodies whose traces remain year after year after year. How could Romanians kill 300,000 Jews without leaving a trace? How could they hide almost half a million corpses, 30 times more than those of Katyn? Who can believe that Rabbi Dr. W. Filderman, the leader of Romanian Jews in WW II, was so indifferent as to leave unexplored a mass murder of such proportion if the least suspicion ever existed? He was far from being indifferent. He simply never even considered the possibility of a mass murder of Jews in Romania and therefore, being an honest Romanian Jew, signed a paper in which he put the largest number of dead at 15,000.

But let's analyze the second part of Ms. Pilon's assertion, that the Germans killed 150,000 Jews after they entered Romania. This again was impossible simply because at the end of the war the number of the Jews was as high as at the beginning of the war, i.e. in round figures about 300,000. This figure included the natural increase of the Jewish population during the war and of course did not comprise the dead from war casualties and those who emigrated clandestinely.

There were still two possibilities of killing Romanian Jews, one in Bessarabia (occupied by the Soviet Union) and the other in Northern Transylvania (occupied by the Hungarians). Neither one actually happened.

When the Romanian Troops entered Bessarabia in 1941 and reconquered that territory, very few Jews were found there. The majority had been either evacuated by the Soviets or had left by themselves in fear of reprisals. Many Jews had a criminal attitude toward the Romanians in retreat in 1940 when Bessarabia was ceded to Russia; they had gathered in armed bands and killed or disarmed many Romanian soldiers who had orders to retire without shooting. Therefore, in 1941, when the Romanians reconquered that territory, the Jews had already left in fear of reprisals.

As for the Jews of Northern Transylvania (occupied by Hungary) they had been put in camps by the Hungarians and very few returned after the war.

From the 300,000 Jews who were still in Romania after the war, about 130,000 emigrated to Israel (see the Statistical Bulletin of Israel, vol. 3, 1952-53) and about 140,000 to Western Europe and USA. There are still between 35,000 and 50,000 Jews in Romania today.

This is what remains, after analysis, of Ms. Pilon's imaginary charges. She is, however, considered a scholar in the U.S.A. and an expert in interpreting historical events. She has been recently promoted to the post of Assistant to Mr. Burton Pines, the Director of the United Nations Assessment Project, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation of Washington, DC. The purpose of this project is to condemn the United Nations Organization. When this organization was dominated by the Zionists, it was a good organization; but today, after the expulsion of Israel from the U.N.'s International Labor Organization and the condemnation of Israel for her attitude toward Arabs, U.N.O. is a bad organization and should be dissolved.

The suspicion of mass murders in Romania never existed before the 70's. All the humbug started in the 70's with articles in newspapers and books charging Romanians with the extermination of the Romanian Jewish population, but it was too late in the 70's, 30 years after the end of the war, to organize extermination camps in Romania in proof of mass murders. First, there appeared various attacks in small newspapers charging Romania with the killing of 250,000 Jews. Nobody protested. And then a big article was published by the New York Post, a newspaper of large circulation. A map was distributed by the Anti-Defamation League and the number of the alleged killings rose instantly to 300,000. The article and the map were given out in millions of copies. The map was published on the front page of a pamphlet and showed Europe and her different countries, each one with the amount of Jewish victims. Printed over Germany the accusation figure was 210,000. Over Romania, the figure was 300,000. Always on that map only the Jews were shown as victims. The text accompanying the map read clearly: 6,000,000 Jewish victims in total. No other victims.

However, if one took the time to add up the figures printed on that map, they would have arrived at a total of less than 6,000,000. It was therefore necessary to find somewhere another 150,000 victims to match the total of six million. The missing amount of victims was attributed to Romania. So there appeared the Stage IV of denigration, charging Romania with the killing of 450,000 Jews.

Another newspaper of large circulation, the Spectator of London, published the new figure in 1979. L'Express of Paris, a magazine of even larger circulation, published the same figure. This was because all these major newspapers of the United States, England and France were independent and arrived at the same precise conclusion, 450,000 victims, by mere coincidence.

Meanwhile, a spurious campaign against the Romanian Bishop of the U.S.A., Valerian D. Trifa, began with much noise and excitement and was conducted by Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, a Democrat of Brooklyn. Howard Blum, who was at that time on the staff of the pro-Zionist newspapers Village Voice and New York Times, edited a book aggressively titled Wanted: In Search of Nazis in America, charging Romania with the same figure. Many radio and TV programs were aired at about the same time whose slogan was more or less the same: Romanians murdered 450,000 Jews.

Now, you are entitled to ask-why this sudden campaign against Romania after 30 years of silence? The missing 150,000 from the worldwide publicized figure of 6 million did not justify such a virulent campaign. There must have been some other reason, perhaps monetary. This possibility deserves some attention.

Since the inauguration of the state of Israel in 1948, the German tax-payer has contributed to the welfare of Israel with an expiatory payment of about two billion dollars annually. In the last 30 years, the German contribution has amounted to over 60 billion dollars. During this same period the American taxpayer has contributed with friendly loans and endowments to Israel of a similar or bigger amount. Now, after 30 years of payments to Israel, expiatory or friendly, of about 4 billion dollars yearly, the taxpayer may get suspicious - mainly when we Americans cannot find funds for stringent national or local needs. In New York, for instance, the subway is a mess; the westside highway is closed because of its many potholes; public schools are a mockery because there are no funds to invest in education, and thousands of New-Yorkers are living in incredible conditions because the rent in New York is so high. However, there are always some billions to be sent to Israel for various purposes. But if the American taxpayer becomes aware of these many expenditures abroad, he may ask them to be stopped. It is therefore necessary for the Zionists to find new sources of incoming dollars or at least to preserve the existing ones. A denigration campaign against all European countries could very well serve this purpose; thus Romania was included in the campaign. One never can tell just how and when this inclusion has become fruitful.

It is true that many Jews were killed in Romania in the war; but also many Romanians, and Americans, and Germans, and Russians were killed in Romania at that time, as well as many other peoples. As we all know, what characterizes a war is cruelty and killing; killing not only by weapons, but by diseases too; by hunger, or simply by accidents. Soldiers and civilians, women and children, elders and youngsters, are killed in any war for many, many reasons, good or bad. Would it be fair if I made the chronicle of the war and complained of the tragic fate of one group only?

Let me put things an other way. I saw piles of corpses in that war. I saw a street full of corpses; various parts of bodies were spread over that street after a bombardment- feet, heads, hands and blood. I remember a pile of broken feet and arms on a sidewalk, a horrible pile. Who could tell what part belonged to whom in that pile? Who could tell what foot was Jewish, what arm Romanian, and what part of a body German? Nobody. But it would be an impiety to proclaim today that all those killed on that street were all Romanians and complain of the tragic fate of Romanians only.

Moreover, if I recall those times, what difference does it make whether 10,000 Russians were killed in an airstrike in Kiev, a city of Ukraine, or 10,000 Jews were killed in Transnistria because of typhus or hunger? What is the difference between 100,000 Germans killed at Stalingrad because of the freezing winter and hunger and 1,000 Russian Jews hanged in Odessa as guerillas? What difference is there between several hundreds of thousands of Romanian soldiers killed in Russia in the war and several thousands of Jews killed in Iasi, a city of Romania, because they shot to death Romanian soldiers? War is a madness in itself because the intelligent people of both sides cannot find other ways to settle their disputes. However, when the war and its horrors arrive at an end, a peace treaty is signed, debts are paid, borders are changed, and then we forget about it. Otherwise we would never finish a war. Not so with the Zionists. After 30 years they start another war-a war of words, and libels, and revenge, implying the Jews were the sole victims of the last war.

The social life in prewar Romania under the pro4ewish regime of King Carol was much like the social life in this country, almost the same decay. Pornography, adultery, blasphemy and all kinds of wicked attacks against Christianity were flourishing all over Romania. It happened that the two most influential newspapers, Adeverul and Dimineata, were under Jewish management and were the advocates of communism, the agents of demoralization among the youth, and the most powerful fighters against nationalism. Many Jews were law-abiding citizens, but it happened that the mistress of the king was a beautiful but vicious Jewish woman, Magda Wolf-Lupescu. Many political killings were perpetrated in Romania because of her bad influence upon the king. Of course, she never signed the actual order to kill, but the fact was that all nationalist activities and mainly those directed against the social decay, against the literature of filth, and against the strong Jewish influence in politics were prohibited and even punished. A youth movement against atheists, pornographers, and corrupt politicians emerged (called the Iron Guard) and it wanted to defend national values against the intruders and the agents of deception. In fact, the Iron Guard was fighting against all the agents of decay, whoever they might be. Many Jews were decent citizens and contributed to the advancement of culture, but some were the agents of decay; so, those students who fought against the latter were believed to fight against all Jews and the press ostracized them.

Some students who belonged to the Iron Guard in Iasi decided to build a student home, a Christian house for themselves, apart from the atheist student homes which existed at that time in Iasi. Well, the police of Iasi received the order to stop the building and all the Zionist newspapers began a vicious campaign against the Christian students. The charge was the same as today in this country: "they wanted to destroy the pluralism of Romania, they threatened to kill those who disagreed with their authoritarian position, they wanted to deny values in the name of Christianity, they were racists and assumed the right to divide the country in the name of patriotism."

In the opinion of many at that time, the Christian students had the same right to build their Christian house as the other students to have profane homes. However, the government was of another opinion. The government decided the students did not have that right and the chief of the police was sent on the spot to stop the building and disperse the students. Many students were harassed, some were arrested and some were summoned to court for the crime of trying to build a Christian home.

It was like today in this country: if some youngsters adhere to a Christian movement, they are considered sick, they must be deprogrammed and bills are sent to the legislators to curb them. Prayer is outlawed from schools and replaced with sex education. Christmas carols are considered disturbing by certain minorities. In contrast, the use of drugs, pornography and incest, sodomy and atheism, are presented by the influential mass media as acceptable standards of our culture, and all deceiving movements are free to spread in universities. Why? Because a depraved youth can be easily maneuvered. Depraved students today mean depraved leaders tomorrow; thus, a better opportunity for those who pull the strings today to take over tomorrow.

The same situation was in Romania and the agents who provoked that vicious situation in prewar Romania were the same as here. The students who wanted to stop the decay in Romania were sent to Court, the walls of their homes demolished, their families harassed-the newspapers cursed them. Many of those innocent students were barred from universities, sent to jail and their lives were spoiled forever. Years later, when the pro-Jewish regime of King Carol was replaced with a nationalist one, the students took revenge on those who spoiled their lives and killed them.

I do not approve of their actions even if I understand why they lost their heads and killed. My religion and theirs does not approve any murder, even if it is done in revenge. Were the students guilty of the killings? Of course, they were; but, at the same time, those who persecuted them were guilty as well.

However, the chroniclers of those events speak of the guilt of the students only, making the reader believe the persecutors were not guilty, and the same events take place in almost the same way in our days as half a century ago in Romania. There is nonsense in concealing the real meaning of the social movements and prevent people from drawing conclusions. History repeats itself whether we like it or not. This is in essence a very broad description of some thousand killings perpetrated in Romania in 1940-41. Other killings were due to other causes.

I was a high school student at that time. My father was a lawyer, and in 1941 he had to go to Iasi for some legal affairs. He took me with him to show me the city. It was a city of -- portance in Romanian history and a visit there was considereo. part of a boy's education. It was soon after the beginning of the hostilities between Romania and communist Russia. We took a room at a hotel in Iasi. I remember very well that on the street facing the window of our room there marched long columns of soldiers, carts with horses, trucks with military equipment going to the war front. The street was narrow and the columns very long. It was soon after sunset. My father and I were preparing for dinner when suddenly we heard explosions down in the street. We went cautiously to the window and looked outside. We saw people in the building across the street shooting at the soldiers; some others were throwing grenades from the roof. It was a crazy act in those days and what happened then was hell. An officer ordered the march to stop and the soldiers to surround the block. In a short while, the whole block was in flames and under the fire of submachine guns. Then the march resumed and continued through midnight. We learned that those who fired at the soldiers from the other building were Romanian Jews acting as communist guerillas. Several hundred people were killed that evening, Romanian soldiers as well as Jewish guerillas, together with innocent people who lived in that block. Who was guilty of those killings? We were at war and there was no time to sit down and decide who was and who was not guilty.

Something similar happened a few months ago, in July 1981, when Israeli planes killed 300 people in Beirut; among those killed were a few PLO guerrillas, but the majority were civilians. Similar things happened several times in Iasi in those days of war when the Romanian Jews decided not to allow the Romanian army to go against their beloved Soviet Union. They were Romanian citizens, but many were communist first and then Romanian.

When my father finished his work in Iasi, we tried to go back to Bucharest, but we couldn't because the railway station had been bombed. In that bombing many people were killed, Romanians as well as Jews. Should I say that the pilot who dropped the bombs was anti-Semitic because he killed some Jews?

We stayed in Iasi several days until the station was fixed. During our sojourn there we learned of some other events. Jewish groups had organized underground communist cell structures, accumulated weapons and ammunition, fought as guerillas, and attacked the army of their country, Romania. They fought against the Romanian army not only in Iasi, but in many other cities. If reprisals were initiated against them, were the Romanians guilty?

A quarter of the city of Iasi was Jewish and the Jews lived in an area called "the Ghetto." They installed red electric bulbs in the chimneys of their houses, thus signaling to Russian planes when the blackout was on. From the street, the red light of the bulbs was invisible, but it was perfectly visible from above. So, when Soviet planes came at night, they knew where the city was and what area of the city to bomb. The Ghetto was never bombed, a miraculous thing until the police discovered the trick. Reprisals against the Jews were carried out again, and the question again arises: were the Romanian police guilty of the reprisals?

Dr. W. Filderman mentions in his Memoirs a letter dated 18 September 1940 (a few weeks after the nationalist regime took over in Bucharest) from General Antonescu in which the chief of state wrote: "... be assured, Mr. Filderman, (...) that, if your co-religionists will not sabotage openly Or furtively my regime on political or economic grounds, the Jewish population will have nothing to suffer (...). But the Jews-and I call your attention seriously to this matter without threatening you-the Jews must give up the methods they've used thus far (because this was the way of the former regime) of keeping down our economy, sapping our national identity, and exploiting our poverty."

It was a dialogue between the chief of state and the president of the Jewish communities soon after the inauguration of the nationalist regime in which the chief of state expressed his willingness to help the Jews, under the curcumstances, and asked the Jews to hold back from any acts of sabotage and diversion in order to avoid restrictive measures against them. However, the instructions to sabotage, spy, and divert came from far above Dr. Filderman's sphere: moreover, not all the Jews who populated Romania at that time were under Dr. Filderman's authority. The confrontation in World War II was of such a high level that the lives of some thousands of Jews and Romanians did not count. As a consequence, the Jews spied and the administration deported them to Transnistria. There were no hospitals there, food was scarce, the cities were in ruins, and many Jews who had been deported there died of different diseases and perhaps of hunger, much like today's Arabs who are chased into the desert from Palestine. The Russians who lived in Transnistria had the same fate, but I cannot confirm that they died because of Romanian anti-Russianism. Food and medicine were scarce everywhere in those days. Tens of thousands of Germans died at Stalingrad because of hunger and frost. In Bucharest we had no food, no gas, no medicine, and the casualties were numerous. All minorities as well as Romanians themselves suffered heavy casualties. We all took the situation as it was and buried the dead, even the Jews. However, after several decades, only the Jews recollect those events and complain to the world for their sufferings.

General Antonescu not only maintained a dialogue with the Jewish community, he even dismissed his Secretary of Cults, who closed some synagogues. This fact is also mentioned in Dr. Filderman's Memoirs. However, General Antonescu was labeled an anti-Semite and executed after the war.

Many feel happy to label Romanians as anti-Semites. Ms. Nicolette Frank, for instance, a Swiss newspaperwoman who was born in Romania as Nicolette Apotecker, edited a book in French, in 1977, La Roumanie dans Fengrenage (Romania in the Gearing). To the ordinary libel against her former country, Ms. Frank adds another which has the double advantage of striking at Romanians as well as at Christianity: she says that the Romanian Orthodox Church is the ferment of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Romania. However, she has the decency to mention something true: Adolph Eichman complained at one time of his difficulties in Romania because of General Antonescu's independent policies. Acting upon their own lines is indeed characteristic of Romanians and explains why their alliances have always been limited to needs. Hitler's Germany was very powerful in WW II. However, General Antonescu did not accept German interference in Romanian affairs. Today the Zionists are very powerful too, but few Romanians can accept their libel. One of these libels is that Romanians imitated Hitler's policies. In fact, Romanians curbed Jewish activities during the war not to imitate German policies, but because the Jews were more communist than Romanian at a time when Romania was at war with the Soviet Union.

To curb the Jews, Romania did the same thing that the United States did against her Japanese: she put them in camps. While in camps, the Jews had to work. In winter, they had to shovel the snow off of the streets. Sometimes they were sent to clean buildings or to remove debris. At night, they went home and stayed with their families until the next day. Our bread, meat butter and coffee were rationed. The Jews had no ration cards, so they organized their own food system using the free and black markets. They had to pay higher prices for food, it was true, but it was to their advantage: it was better to live that way than to die on the war front. They thus saved their fives at a time when hundreds of thousands of Romanians lost their lives in Russia.

As I mentioned before, I was a high school boy at the beginning of the war. One day, the boulevard in front of my school was full of Jews who shoveled the snow away. It was cold and they had slight means of warming themselves. Many shops on that boulevard were closed and those which were open were almost empty of food. But soon some wives and girls came over with thermos flasks of hot coffee, tea and snacks and nobody prevented them from distributing the food among the workers. They stopped their work, ate and drank, and then began their work again. When I finished my school that day and went home, there were no Jews on that boulevard; they went home, too. This was a so-called labor camp for Jews that I saw with my own eyes.

There were probably other camps where the work was harsher, but the Zionists speak today about the latter only, and never about the former. This is why their complaints appear doubtful to the concerned reader. If they were sincere, they would mention all aspects of their tribulations, good or bad, not only those which can be bargained for dollars.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

The Roosevelt Legacy and The Kent Case

Introduction by Mark Weber

In May 1940, a 29-year-old American code clerk at the U.S. embassy in London was arrested by British authorities in his apartment. Tyler Kent was charged with having violated the British Official Secrets Act. "For a purpose prejudicial to the safety and interests of the state," the charge stated, Kent had "obtained a document which might be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy." He was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released and returned to the United States after serving five.

Between June 1940 and December 1945, the Kent case was the subject of numerous American newspaper articles. Most were sensational or highly speculative, since reliable information was hard to come by. (At the time, the British press was strictly censored.) Many Americans wanted to know how a foreign government could secretly arrest and put on trial a U.S. citizen who held diplomatic immunity. Congressmen and newspapers speculated as to what the code clerk really knew about rumored secret arrangements between President Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill. Many wondered if Kent had been jailed to keep him from talking. But preoccupation with the war and official government statements satisfied the curiosity of all but a handful. When Kent returned to the United States in 1945 from British imprisonment, almost all interest in the case had evaporated in the general euphoria of Allied military victory. For many years the Kent story was virtually forgotten.

The passage of time and a more sober awareness of how American presidents operate have encouraged new interest in the case. Dramatic revelations of illegal Presidential actions that emerged from the Vietnam war and the Watergate affair shocked Americans into a bitter realization that their Chief Executive could lie and break the law. In recent years the Kent case has been the subject of several scholarly and semi-scholarly articles. Highly acclaimed author John Toland devoted several pages to the affair in his 1982 revisionist book on Pearl Harbor, Infamy. In December 1982 the British television program "Newsnight" examined the Kent case. The broadcast included excerpts from an interview with Kent filmed near his Texas home. Several books about the Kent story are reportedly in preparation. All this testifies to a healthy, growing readiness to critically re-examine President Roosevelt's fateful path into the Second World War.

Tyler Gatewood Kent was born on 24 March 1911 in Nowchwang (Yingkow), northern China, where his father, William P. Kent, was serving as the American Consul. The family had strong roots in Virginia. Kent's English forebears settled there in 1644. President John Tyler was a distant relative. A grandfather was Speaker of the Virginia Assembly and lieutenant governor.

Tyler Kent attended St. Alban's School in Washington, D.C., and received his higher education at Princeton (AB, 1931), George Washington University, the Paris Sorbonne, and the University of Madrid. From an early age he showed a remarkable aptitude for languages. Eventually he learned numerous ancient and modern languages. Like his father, Kent chose a career in the State Department foreign service.

His first assignment was to the American embassy in Moscow. From 1934 to 1939, Kent learned first-hand in the Soviet capital about life under Communism. His fluent command of the Russian language helped young Kent to know the Russian people and the realities of Soviet life much more intimately than most diplomats. He developed an intense hatred for the Soviet system and for those who had foisted this monstrous tyranny on Russia.

Like many Americans, Kent was appalled at Roosevelt's support for Stalin's cruel and despotic regime. Kent's personal experience and careful study convinced him that Communism represented a mortal danger to the world, and to the West in particular. President Roosevelt, though, considered the Soviet system a rougher but more progressive version of his own New Deal, both motivated by the same lofty humanistic ideals.

From Moscow Kent was transferred to the U.S. embassy in London. From October 1939 until that fateful 20th day of May, 1940, he served as a code clerk. This was an especially important position there because all diplomatic dispatches from American missions across Europe to Washington were routed through the London embassy's code room.

When Kent began work, war had already broken out in Europe. U.S. law and overwhelming public sentiment seemed to insure that America would avoid entanglement in the conflict. But from his special vantage point in London, Kent quickly learned that President Roosevelt was doing everything in his power to subvert the law and deceive the people in order to get America into war.

Kent decided to make copies or summaries of diplomatic dispatches documenting Roosevelt's secret policies and somehow bring them to the attention of sympathetic congressmen and senators. And so he took the course that led to his untimely arrest, briefly made him something of a celebrity, and cost him five years in prison. As he puts it, he got "tangled up in history." In fact he came very close to changing its course.

As code clerk, Kent intercepted hundreds of diplomatic dispatches between the embassies in Europe and the State Department in Washington. He made verbatim copies of most of the messages and paraphrased summaries of the rest. The most important and incriminating of these was the top secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which began with a letter from the President dated 11 September 1939.

Until 11 May 1940, Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty (or head of the British navy). Thus, the exchange of communications between him and Roosevelt until that date was highly irregular because it took place behind the back of the head of the British government, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Officially, heads of state communicate only with their counterpart heads of state, and any communications otherwise are understood to be for the ultimate attention of the counterpart head of state. In the case of the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence before 11 May 1940, not only was that exchange designed to be kept secret from Prime Minister Chamberlain, it was indeed something of a conspiracy against him. Churchill wanted to supplant Chamberlain, and Roosevelt himself desired this end. For this reason the exchange was kept especially secret. Until he became Prime Minister himself, Churchill signed his messages to Roosevelt simply, "Naval Person."

The public revelation of the mere existence of a secret Churchill-Roosevelt exchange behind Chamberlain's back would have been highly embarrassing to both correspondents. But if Kent had somehow succeeded in making the contents of the exchange known to the American public, there would have been loud demands for Roosevelt's impeachment.

Kent intercepted and made a complete copy of Churchill's message to Roosevelt of 25 December 1939 (Telegram 2720) in which Churchill informed the President that British warships would continue to violate American sovereignty to seize German ships within the U.S. three mile maritime territorial zone. However, in order to keep these violations secret, Churchill promised that the seizures would take place out of view from the American shore. "We cannot refrain from stopping enemy ships outside international three-mile limit when these may well be supply ships for U-boats or surface raiders, but instructions have been given only to arrest or fire upon them out of sight of United States shores."

In his message to Roosevelt of 28 February 1940 (Telegram 490), which was also intercepted and copied out by Kent, Churchill wrote that the British would continue to seize and censor U.S. mail from American and other neutral ships on their way to Europe. "All our experience shows that the examination of mails is essential to efficient control," Churchill told Roosevelt. This was, of course, a blatant violation of American neutrality and international law. There was considerable astonishment in the United States when the full extent of Roosevelt's connivance in the illegal British seizure and censorship of American mail to Europe became known many years after the war. If this message intercepted by Kent had been made public in 1940 or 1941, there would have been a first-rate scandal.

In the secret correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt intercepted by Kent, the two leaders conspired to insure that the United States government would secretly tolerate British violations of American territorial sovereignty and restrictions on neutral American shipping. The two men wanted to avoid any embarrassing incidents that would provoke public indignation in America over the illegal British actions. They also worked out procedures for joint British-American naval reporting of the location of German surface raiders and submarines which violated at least the spirit if not the letter of United States neutrality.

The fact that Kent's diplomatic immunity was waived by the U.S. government so that British authorities could throw him into prison is itself proof that the Roosevelt administration was neutral in name only. If Kent had been discovered intercepting dispatches at the American embassy in Berlin, it is inconceivable that the U.S. government would have waived his immunity so that German authorities could imprison him. To the contrary, the Roosevelt administration would have done everything it could to protect him from any possible prosecution and imprisonment by the German government.

In response to a growing clamor in the press and among the public about a possible official government cover-up in the Kent case, the State Department issued a lengthy public statement on 2 September 1944. The cleverly worded document implied, without ever actually making the charge, that Kent had been a German spy. The State Department in effect admitted, however, that it had put British interests ahead of American interests and law in the case. Kent's trial had been held in secret, the statement said, "because of the harmful effects to British counter-espionage efforts which were to be anticipated if certain of the evidence became public." Even more revealing was the official admission that Kent's extraordinary treatment was because "The interest of Great Britain in such a case, at a time when it was fighting for its existence, was therefore preeminent." At a time, it must be remembered, when the United States was publicly and legally neutral in the conflict between Britain and Germany, the State Department considered British, and not American, interests in the Kent case to be "preeminent."

In 1939 and 1940, the vast majority of the American people wanted to avoid involvement in the European war. They felt that U.S. participation in the First World War had been a catastrophic error and wanted to insure that the mistake would not be repeated. The Congress was likewise committed to a policy of firm neutrality and had passed the Johnson and Neutrality Acts to make sure that America kept out of war in Europe.

The President is constitutionally charged with the duty to execute the will of the American people as expressed through the Congress. The Constitution reserves the power to make war and peace exclusively to Congress. But with brazen contempt for the will of the people, the law and the constitution, President Roosevelt conspired with a small circle of confidants to incite war in Europe and bring the United States into the conflict. He broke his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Over the years, numerous lies have been invented and spread about Tyler Kent. The most slanderous is that he was a traitor to the United States and a spy for Germany. In fact, Kent was a genuine patriot who put the welfare of his nation above his own personal happiness and security. He was never charged with violating any American law. Kent acted on the traditional principle that for United States government officials, American interests (and not those of Britain or any other country) come first. He was sacrificed to foreign interests by his own government.

In London Tyler Kent faced a painful dilemma: What should a government official do when he discovers that his boss, the President of the United States, is breaking the law? Kent felt a greater loyalty to his nation and its laws than to President Roosevelt. His sense of honor moved him to collect documentary evidence of Roosevelt's treacherous crimes and try to bring it before the American people. Kent paid for his "crime" with five years in prison and a tarnished reputation for the rest of his life, while Franklin Roosevelt, who violated the Constitution and numerous laws, was re-elected President and praised as a hero.

If Tyler Kent had somehow succeeded in making public his collection of intercepted documentary evidence, he would have unleased an enormous public outcry for President Roosevelt's removal from office. At the very least he would have temporarily halted Roosevelt's campaign to get America into war. Roosevelt might well have been so discredited that Wendell Willkie would have defeated him in the 1940 presidential election. It is difficult to say whether the Kent disclosures would have been enough to bring about Roosevelt's impeachment. Certainly the documents provide proof of criminal activity sufficient to warrant removal from office. Congress would have been virtually compelled to begin at least preliminary impeachment proceedings. This much can be said with certainty: disclosure of the Kent documents would have dealt a powerful blow to Roosevelt's prestige and credibility. Tyler Kent might then have significantly altered the course of American and world history.

 

There are those who would have us believe that to dust off the mildewed pages of history is an exercise in futility. Those especially believe this who consider the events of forty years ago "ancient history." Many such persons are motivated by a wish to conceal from the rest of us the relatively recent events which have created the world as it is today. There can be no question that the events which led to World War II, and that war itself, have shaped the lives of all of us alive now. In the United States, the political figure who looms largest on the scene as creator, through this war, of the world we live in today is of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During his unprecedented 12 years as President, he was the arbiter of the fates of the hapless millions of his fellow citizens. Roosevelt became President at the beginning of a severe depression which found millions of Americans without work or the means of subsistence. Banks failed and factories shut their gates. Roosevelt inaugurated what he touted as a "New Deal." It consisted mainly of trying to solve the economic woes of the nation with make-work projects financed out of the public treasury. From previous administrations he had inherited a sound monetary system and virtually no national debt. He could therefore launch with impunity a policy of "spend and elect" as a permanent feature of his administration.

Unfortunately, this deficit-financed, government-sponsored program did not solve the problem of the Great Depression. As late as 1939, there was still 17% unemployment. I am wholly convinced that Roosevelt understood perfectly well that his stopgap measures were not going to achieve any lasting solutions to the economic problems of the nation and so, from the earliest days, covertly, and sometimes overtly, began laying the groundwork for a much more cynical approach. He knew that for the United States, protected as it was by two vast oceans, a nice, bloody and expensive war with foreigners doing most of the fighting and dying would be just the thing for the economy. This would seem to be the reason for the fact that all during the 1930s Roosevelt secretly aided and abetted the forces in Europe which were preparing for a war against National Socialist Germany. Such a war suited his domestic scenario perfectly. He had been elected by a coalition of Big Labor, the "Solid South" and the enormously powerful Jewish minority. All three elements saw in a war the answer to their prayers. Labor would have jobs as the factories hummed with armament production. The poorly educated, and thus somewhat gullible, common folk of the South were easily persuaded by their senators and congressmen that a war-oriented economy would mean high prices for cotton and hogs and other primary products. As for the Jews, they had already declared war on Hitler at the infamous meeting of World Jewry in Amsterdam in 1933. They with their control of the press, radio and the movie industry in the United States (there was as yet no television to add to their arsenal of propaganda) were avidly awaiting the opportunity to drag the United States into a war of unholy vengeance. Roosevelt was their willing lackey.

In 1936 Congress, reflecting the wishes and sentiments of the electorate, had enacted stringent neutrality laws which prevented the President from advancing his plans to embroil the United States lawfully in a European war. But Roosevelt believed himself to be above mere laws. The Gods had decreed his path and he had a divine mission to right the world's "wrongs" whatever might be the cost. Like most self-appointed "crusaders," he made a fool of himself and at the same time he jeopardized the whole future of his country and the world.

Plots have a way of coming most unexpectedly to light. And so it almost was with Roosevelt's illegal plot to embroil this country in a foreign war. In 1940, an obscure cypher clerk at the American Embassy in London came across documents which, in his judgment and that of many reputable historians subsequently, proved conclusively that Roosevelt both directly and through his agents was engaged in activities designed to foment a war and eventually to compel American participation in it.

I was that cypher clerk.

I was born in 1911, the son of a member of the United States Foreign Service who was stationed in China at that time. After returning to the United States, I pursued my advanced education at Princeton and then in various European universities. In 1933, I joined the staff of the new American Embassy in Moscow which had just been established as a result of the establishment of diplomatic relations with Bolshevik Russia by President Roosevelt. I already had some knowledge of the Russian language and as I have always been blessed with a natural aptitude for languages my tour of duty in Russia enabled me to become quite fluent very rapidly. I took the opportunity to meet and mingle with the ordinary Russian citizens in Moscow and learned first hand the beastly nature of Bolshevism, realizing what it would mean if this oriental barbarism were to spread further. My awareness grew also of the worldwide ideology of the soi-disant "liberals," who gushed over what they called the "new civilization" of the Soviet Union. I began to see, dimly, the power of Jewish propaganda in the United States which harped constantly on the alleged brutalities of the new National Socialist regime in Germany while simultaneously completely ignoring the far worse brutalities in the USSR. Yet the latter had antedated the Nazi regime by more than a decade. The reasons for this distorted and lop-sided picture soon became clear. In Germany, the burden of state action was falling upon Jews whereas in the Soviet Union, the secret police (NKVD) was almost entirely in Jewish hands until the very ate 1930s. The administration of the gulags ("labor camps" which were virtually extermination camps) was wholly Jewish and thus the Jews could wreak their vengeance on their age-old adversaries among the Russian people.

The Jews in America and their "liberal" allies soon took up the hue and cry for the destruction of Germany -- which, of course, implied the strengthening of the Soviet Union as a future ally. Roosevelt naively believe that he could control Stalin as long as he gave him everything he wanted. He was encouraged in this opinion by such "learned" Kremlinologists as George Kennan, Charles Bohlen and Joseph E. Davies. These pundits actually learned nothing of Soviet aims and policies while in Russia. Their pronouncements were simply the expression of liberal ideology as developed in American universities. For example: the much touted Kennan doctrine of "containment" proclaimed by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1948 so far from "containing" the Soviet Union or Communism, resulted in the spread of the latter over 40% of the planet and the establishment of a Soviet bastion in Cuba -- a mere go miles from our shores. Not until 1948 did it appear that the United States government had any real comprehension of what Soviet Communist aggression would mean for the world and for civilization. With all due modesty, I believe I have the right to claim that I did understand the realities at least ten years earlier than the recognized Kremlin "experts."

I arrived in London in September of 1939 to assume duties at the United States embassy there. My duties included access to sensitive documents dealing with matters of policy. Almost immediately, I became aware that the clandestine activities of the Roosevelt administration were at variance with the public statements of its spokesmen. This included Roosevelt himself and the lesser figures around him. The Neutrality Acts passed by Congress were being cynically flouted. It seemed to me at the time that it was my inescapable duty to try to inform the right persons in the United States of what was going on. It should always be borne in mind that at this time there was no unanimity either in Congress or among the general public with regard to either passive or active participation of the United States in a European conflict. Opinion polls had, in fact, shown a huge majority-83% -opposed to such involvements. On the other hand, Jewish opinion was violently hostile to Germany and great use was made of their control of the media to whip up pro-war sentiments. It seemed hard to understand why the desires of an alleged 3% of the population should prevail over those of 83%.

As a corollary to his war policy, it was quite obviously necessary for Roosevelt to develop a system of alliances and coalitions against the Third Reich since no single Power could successfully challenge the German military. Aside from Roosevelt's collaboration with British agents in Washington, the President had two henchmen in Europe whose function it was to make sure that war would be declared against Germany. These were William C. Bullitt in Paris and Anthony Drexel Biddle in Warsaw. Bullitt had been ambassador in Moscow and had originally gone there full of enthusiasm for the "new civilization." That was in 1934. By 1936 he left, much disillusioned by what he had seen and by the way he had been treated. Bullitt was the quintessential Anglo-American-Fabian-Liberal. He was the wealthy playboy scion of a Philadelphia banking family who early in life took up "liberal" causes. As early as 1919, he was strongly urging Woodrow Wilson to extend recognition to the new Soviet regime lest "some more radical regime might take over." Whomever he had in mind as "more radical" than Lenin and Trotsky and company, he did not identify. Bullitt was not a Communist but he married Louise Bryant, a Communist newspaperwoman and the widow of the Communist John Reed. As is widely known, John Reed's remains are buried in the Kremlin wall in grateful appreciation of his services to the infant Communist regime in Russia. It is not my intent to impute to a husband all the views of his wife but in the case of William Bullitt and Louise Bryant, it would seem that birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

Bullitt, from his vantage point in Paris, became one of the most virulent anti-German war-mongers in the Anglo-American camp. Possibly his partly Jewish ancestry (Hurwitz) blinded him from recognizing where the true interests of America lay. He was intelligent enough, if somewhat lacking in judgment. He should have known that the only winner in a war which eliminated Germany as a military power would be Soviet Russia. No doubt it was difficult for a lifetime Fabian to admit that he had been wholly wrong about the "new civilization."

The "Potocki Papers," the gist of which I learned in London, clearly and accurately reflected the views of both Bullitt and Biddle: British interests first, American interests last. (Subsequent American Presidents would seem to have learned nothing from the lessons of World War II. Ronald Reagan demonstrated in 1982 that British interests take precedence over those of his own country when he sided with the British in the Falklands-Malvinas dispute, choosing to destroy whatever good relations this country had with Latin America for the sake of British prestige.)

Only the passage of time and the unfolding of history can definitively settle matters of historical dispute. Sufficient time has elapsed -- some 45 years -- since the formulation of Roosevelt's disastrous pre-war and wartime policies so that any impartial observer of the contemporary world scene could now evaluate for himself the concrete results of those policies in terms of the specific interests of the United States. America has gained no advantage whatsoever from "winning" World War II. Thus the war must be considered a net loss -- a failure. The very virulence of the "crusade against evil" propaganda which still today fills the air waves and the press is witness to the fact that there really is nothing else to say when assessing the effects of the war. The security of this continent was not enhanced. American trade advantages were ephemeral and transient. Only the Jews profited insofar as they gained their revenge on Nazi Germany as well as spreading Soviet Communism over 40% of the world, not to mention moving great numbers of European Jews into Palestine.

How odd it is that the statesmen of the Western world did not appear to grasp the truth that a defeated and crushed Germany would mean the emergence of Soviet Russia as a major military power inimical to our interests. But so it has come to pass. The modern United States is unable to implement the Monroe Doctrine which had, for more than a century, protected the Americas from European aggression and alien ideologies. We must swallow the bitter pill of Dr. Castro, the Soviets' proconsul. in the Western hemisphere, and stand impotently by as Communist regimes wax and flourish in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America. My "crime" was in foreseeing some of this when I was a cypher clerk in the American embassy in London, and in trying to do something to forestall it.

Much of the vicious slander that has been directed against me over the years has centered around the allegation of "disloyalty." The Department of State's press release of 2 September 1944 hammers away at this. Yet to whom and to what was my loyalty due? It was claimed that I owed loyalty to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and to President Roosevelt. Under most circumstances I would agree. But a government employee takes an oath to "support the laws and Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic." (My italics.) Events have now proven that as regards the damage done to the interests of this country no foreign enemy could have done more than Roosevelt. He was the greatest "domestic enemy" and no subordinate owed him any loyalty whatsoever in the furtherance of his illegal activities. No court of law has convicted Franklin Delano Roosevelt but the court of history will do so in time. This is the essence of the "Tyler Kent incident" and the justification for my actions in London in 1939 and 1940.

No one -- least of all myself -- is ever going to claim that the 20th of May, 1940, will go down in history on a par in importance with Roosevelt's "date that will live in infamy." But the former date may well be of interest to those who entertain some respect for constitutional and international law. It was on the morning of that date -- 10 a.m. if my memory serves me accurately -- that the government of the United States took a rather drastic step when it permitted -- and in fact cooperated in allowing -- the British police to arrest and incarcerate a member of the staff of the American embassy in London, a person who was the bearer of a diplomatic passport and officially protected by the provisions of "diplomatic immunity." In so doing, the government of the United States set an unusual precedent the nature of which we shall examine below. It would be an error to claim that the arrest and imprisonment of embassy officials had never previously occurred in history, but the incidence of such cases is very rare indeed.

This particular day in May was rare for another reason. In a city noted for many things but certainly not for the delights of its climate, this happened to be a quite beautiful day. I was not fated to enjoy it. At 10 a.m. I was startled to hear the smashing of wood and the snapping of locks as a burly goon squad from Scotland Yard, accompanied by an officer of British Military Intelligence and an official of the American embassy, burst into my apartment. My visitors could most certainly have arrived in a more conventional manner and I would certainly have admitted them had they simply knocked and requested admission in the normal polite manner. But they evidently preferred the dramatic smashing of doors. Looking back on it all now, I have become convinced that such tactics were and are used by the police precisely in order to surprise and intimidate. If the wretched object of all this is not only cowed and overawed but is also, perhaps, in. his pyjamas, so much the better for the police.

Why then, one must ask, would the United States government have been a party to this very rare kind of violation of all the normal rules and conventions governing diplomatic personnel? Surely the circumstances which gave rise to such an act must themselves have been quite extraordinarily wicked or dangerous. And why, after 42 years, have the circumstances not been brought out into the clear daylight? Above all: why have I waited so long to present the facts to the American public?

The answer is that there is a right time and a wrong time for everything. November 1945, the time when I finally returned to the United States after a period of incarceration in England which lasted the entire duration of the war, was certainly not the right time. This country was in a state of euphoria occasioned by its "victory" over the dastardly enemy. Any attempt to point out that the "victory" just achieved might turn out to be Pyrrhic and more costly to the general welfare than any other event in American history would not only have fallen on deaf ears, but might well have led to the actual physical lynching of anyone expressing such a view. It certainly did entail the moral and psychological lynching of a number of people by the vicious, alien-controlled press and electronic media. No, 1945 was not the time. Certain friends of mine and my family made it possible for me to travel about the country and take a sounding of the mood of the people. I found them, in the main, totally unreceptive to any criticism of Franklin the Great, of America's participation in the war or of the methods used to involve us in that conflict. So it was then; today, things have changed somewhat. There are facts which can no longer be successfully covered up even by the most virulent propaganda of the alien-controlled media. Even the least politically-minded citizens are beginning to ask why, today, after our greatest war and greatest final victory, we are faced with the greatest threat to our national security we have ever known. Someone is responsible; after all, it was Roosevelt himself who said, "Things don't just happen; they are planned that way." Well then, who planned what and why? Who planned to turn over 40% of the world to Bolshevism? Who planned to set up the Bolshevik's advanced bases only ninety miles from our coasts? And if the answer is that no one "planned" these things then the only alternative explanation is that someone committed the most colossal political errors in our history. Is it wrong to try now to assess the blame? Some would call it mere muckraking and inappropriate in such critical times as we now face. But there are enormous vested interests in preserving the Roosevelt myth. For starters, there is the entire Democratic party. There was a time when they invoked the ghost of Thomas Jefferson as their patron saint. Since the 1930s, Roosevelt has largely taken Jefferson's place. To cast doubts on Roosevelt's sagacity and good judgment is, for some, like doubting the existence of God. Then there are the veterans with their huge organizations. Is it to be supposed that they would take kindly to being told that they were "suckered in" or "taken for a ride," or that the war they fought was ultimately disastrous for their country? As for organized American Jewry, its interests lay entirely in seeing Germany destroyed regardless of the long-term interests of the America in which the Jews hang their shingles.

Let it be posed that there are only two reasons for a State to mobilize its people into armed forces to fight another State: 1) the acquisition of booty in,the form of territory or other forms of wealth and 2) to defend the nation from external threats. The "booty" theory is irrelevant in modern times, especially as Roosevelt repeatedly renounced during the war any American claims upon the territory of the enemy. (That, he would relinquish to his partner Joseph Stalin.) In innumerable public statements, Roosevelt argued that this country was compelled to take part in the war, either as a belligerent or as "the arsenal of democracy" supplying war materials (illegal under domestic and international law), in order to "guarantee the security of this country in the future." His constant theme was that if Britain were defeated, the immense Royal Navy would fall into German hands. Germany would then be able to invade South America and would do so. A fake map was circulated which purported to show the areas of South America to be taken over by the Nazis. The map was later revealed as a clever forgery by British intelligence which Roosevelt had knowingly cooperated in disseminating in order to frighten the American public. We know this from British sources; the whole matter is very clearly set forth in the biography of William Stephenson, the principal British agent in the United States engaged in bringing about American participation in the shooting war. Slowly, we are beginning to learn more and more about the intimate cooperation between Britain and the United States in the pre-war epoch. The purpose was allegedly to improve the security of the United States. Thus even though Roosevelt's activities have been shown subsequently to have been illegal, the justification was and is offered that he acted in the overriding national interest.

We return to that Spring day in London, the 20th of May 1940, and the interruption of the Scotland Yard goon squad into my apartment. They were accompanied by one Franklin Gowen, a Second Secretary at the American embassy of whom more anon. Questions were put to me as to whom I knew and what I did. I gave non-committal answers. While this interrogation was going on, other of the officers were looking into a clothes closet in which they quickly discovered a leather suitcase full of American embassy documents. It has been alleged that there were 1500. I do not know. I never counted them. I was only interested in the contents. I was then whisked away to the embassy in a police car and brought before Ambassador Joseph Kennedy with whom I had a short but acrimonious interview. I could well understand his anger but I believed myself to have been presented with a moral dilemma. On the one hand I wished before it was too late to lay the evidence before the America First Committee and certain non-interventionist Senators. On the other hand, it would be quite useless to me -- an unknown person with no political "clout" -- to have returned to the United States expecting hard-boiled politicians to give any credence to my story unless I had positive documentation of my charges. I knew that taking documents from the embassy was, under all normal circumstances, a most reprehensible action. On the other hand I did not begin to do so until I had become convinced beyond any further possibility of doubt that Roosevelt and his diplomatic agents were going to embroil us in a war against the wishes of a vast majority of the American people whose opinions on that score had been made very plain in numerous opinion polls in the months just prior to the war and during the "phony war" period. Even the liberal-interventionists admit the accuracy of these polls; what they most vociferously deny is that President Roosevelt deliberately tried to circumvent public opinion. I knew different. From my vantage point in the embassy, I was able to see the dispatches from there to the State Department and to and from other embassies around Europe. From every place the picture was the same: war and intervention. "I hate war," said Roosevelt, but he was planning it. On 3 September 1939, just after the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt said in a radio address: "We seek to keep war from our own fireside by keeping war from coming to the Americas.... This nation will remain a neutral nation." At the same time, William C. Bullitt, United States ambassador to France and one of the principal implementers and architects of Roosevelt's interventionist policy, was bringing the strongest pressure to bear on the French prime minister, Edouard Daladier and on his foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, to reject out-of-hand a last minute proposal by Benito Mussolini to organize another summit meeting of European heads of state to head off the impending war. Bullitt -- fully in concurrence with Roosevelt -- wanted the war to begin, the sooner the better. Any concession to peace-making efforts would only raise the unwelcome possibility that the war could be staved off. Accordingly, Bullitt resisted any such efforts with all his powers of persuasion. In this he was aided greatly by Jules Lukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador, whose country had just been invaded and who was demanding French-and therefore also British- intervention. Bullitt and Lukasiewicz between them were able to dissuade the Daladier government from accepting Mussolini's initiative and thus ensured the outbreak of a major European war right on schedule.

At this point it is useful to mention that the Potocki papers which the Germans discovered in the Polish foreign office and which shed considerable light on other interventionist activities of Bullitt, are all quite genuine; their substance was reflected in dispatches which passed through the London embassy and were read by me in plain English. But when they were discovered and published by the Germans they were all declared by Roosevelt and the State Department to be impudent forgeries. Today, most reputable historians, though minimizing their importance, recognize that they are quite genuine. Their significance, however, is much better appreciated when they are studied in conjunction with other documents bearing on the American foreign policy of that period. Of especial interest are the conversations which Biddle, America's ambassador to Poland, had with the Polish foreign minister, Colonel Beek, and General Rydz-Smigly, head of the Polish army, during the Summer of 1939. The conversations were duly reported to the State Department.

It must be remembered that until the Germans demonstrated the efficacy of the blitzkrieg, all of the Allies and the United States as well believed that the coming war would be one of attrition and trench warfare. The Poles were expected to hold out for weeks or even months. And so we find Biddle assuring the Polish authorities that American military assistance would be forthcoming just as soon as Roosevelt could put the concept over on Congress. This was rather cold comfort for the Poles but they had, perforce, to put as good a face on it as possible and accept whatever crumbs fell their way.

Shortly after these interviews between Biddle and the high-ranking Poles, President Roosevelt had the sublime hypocrisy to address a letter to President Moscicki of Poland offering to mediate the dispute with Germany. So the picture is thus: on the one hand the American ambassador is urging the Poles to fight and promising military assistance if they do; on the other hand Roosevelt is offering himself as a mediator, olive branch in hand. Take your choice. It should be remembered that much of the warmongering engaged in by Roosevelt's diplomatic agents in the late 1930s, particularly in France and Poland, was in the form of verbal exhortations and promises of aid and support of all kinds, including direct military intervention. Every head of state in Europe, and especially in England, recognized perfectly well that if the United States were to become sufficiently involved in an economic and political sense, military intervention would inevitably follow soon thereafter. Much of the American activity was never committed to paper in the exact manner in which it transpired. Thus, to the chagrin of historians, it will never appear in the National Archives as available "hard facts." Bullitt in France and Biddle in Poland did not commit to paper blunt promises of almost immediate military aid in the event of war but such was the gist of their private conversations. The record of them is to be found in the Potocki papers. But that is not the only source. There are records and memoirs of persons active at that time and memoranda which, though subsequently destroyed, passed among various embassies and remained in the memories of those who had seen them. Nor were all the details always officially and duly dated and numbered and sent to the State Department whence they could only with the greatest difficulty have been abstracted and destroyed. There is also the fact that much diplomacy is carried on at diplomatic receptions. One ambassador buttonholes another and behind a potted palm with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the two settle the fate of the world without the knowledge of the politicians or the public which elects them. Such contacts and negotiations might be reported by, say, Ambassador Bullitt directly to the White House by means of a scrambled telephone or in private letters which never pass through the records of the State Department. Such will clearly never appear in the National Archives. In these circumstances it may be asked how I could ever have had much knowledge of the schemings and plottings. Well, it happened that the London embassy served as a sort of unofficial clearing house for most of the diplomatic activities of the United States, at least in the European theater. Thus there was much flotsam and jetsam floating around in the form of memoranda and inter-departmental communications. Conversations were often overheard and they afforded insights into attitudes and activities which were a legitimate part of diplomacy but which ordinarily could only be gleaned from personal memoirs and seldom found their way into official records. Many memoranda were circulated to a few foreign service officers with instructions to read and then destroy.

Would it be reasonable to expect that a written record exists of the commitment to provide military aid which Roosevelt gave to Neville Chamberlain prior to the latter's announcement to Parliament in March 1939, that Britain and France would provide military assistance to Poland if she were attacked? Such a commitment was in fact given by Roosevelt to the British ambassador in Washington and a telephonic confirmation was sent to Ambassador Kennedy in London. Next, a memorandum to this effect was circulated among some of the higher ranking foreign service officers and there the matter ended. Subsequent correspondence is quite clear on this point: there would have been no Franco-British guarantee to Poland and no World War II without the previous American commitment. Chamberlain and Daladier were fully aware of the limitations placed on the President by the Constitution with respect to the use of the armed forces, but such were the powers of persuasion of the ambassadors Biddle and Bullitt that the Polish and French governments were convinced Roosevelt could do whatever he wished. The British end of it was taken care of in Washington in direct communications between Roosevelt and the British ambassador.

The exclusive reliance on archival material is the essential weakness in the position taken by two historians who have written on the "Kent case." Warren Kimball and Bruce Bartlett in the fall 1981 issue of Diplomatic History wrote an account which purports to deal with the pre-war commitments of Roosevelt to Churchill. Pre-war, in this case, relates to the entry of the United States into World War II, not the beginning of hostilities in September 1939. These two academicians have poked around in the National Archives and looked at the Roosevelt-Churchill exchange of cables which have so far been published, and have come to the conclusion that there is nothing much there worth making a fuss over. But who has been making a fuss? Not I. This is the first time I have made any public statement on the subject. I do so now because the dire consequences of Roosevelt's "errors of judgment" (if indeed they were "errors" and not deliberate policies) are now so obvious that even egg-head academics like Kimball and Bartlett can no longer ignore their realities.

For far too long academics have been hypnotized by the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence and have ignored everything else in the diplomatic correspondence between the United States and foreign countries during this time-period. They have ignored, too, statements by quite prominent persons who were privy to the facts. The Forrestal Diaries was published several years ago and the editors, Walter Millis and E.S. Duffield, were at liberty to edit out or to keep in anything they wished. No one would have been any the wiser had they omitted to include the direct quotation of a remark made by Neville Chamberlain to Joseph Kennedy to the effect that "America and the world Jews" had forced Britain into the war. This of course is a very accurate statement but it is not to be found in the numbered telegrams and dispatches from the London embassy to Washington. The record is most probably in the private papers of Joseph Kennedy and it is unlikely that these will see the light of day until such time as politicians and historians no longer fear to tell the truth because of the menaces of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. In the meantime I am making use of the incident to illustrate my contention that not all accurate history is to be located in government files and archives. To aver that it is so is to declare that governments do not lie- at least that democratic governments do not. The fact is, while they may possibly lie less often, and certainly less crudely, than the Bolsheviks, they nevertheless lie when it suits them to do so. One has only to consider the case of the Potocki papers mentioned earlier. The White House and the State Department declared them to be forgeries. Today, all reputable historians recognize them to be genuine.

What do Kimball and Bartlett know about the British plans to invade Norway or about the manner in which the United States government encouraged these plans on the grounds that some thing had to be done to raise the morale of allied troops in garrisons whose unrelieved idleness might eventually lead to insubordination and even mutiny? The "phony war" had been on for over half a year. The British plan was to draw out the German fleet for battle. Churchill and others believed that the best way to do this would be to challenge the Germans in an open competition to invade Norway. Churchill was typical of that breed of wartime leaders who always fight the previous war. He had a fanatical and absolute conviction that the British fleet could solve an of Britain's problems if only the Germans could be induced to come out and give battle. He was to be proven wrong in this as in so much else.

The plan connived between Britain and the United States was for the British to make overt and easily detectable plans for the invasion of Norway. The United States diplomatic service would assist in spreading the news all over Europe in such a way that the Germans could not possibly fail to learn about it. The Germans did take the bait and organized their own expedition to take Norway before the British could get there. There was a naval engagement in the Skagerrak, the body of water which separates Denmark from Norway, and a number of warships of Germany's rather small navy were sunk. But not enough to prevent the troopships from landing their contingents and taking over the country while meeting very little resistance.

The United States' role in this British ploy was certainly not consistent with neutrality either under domestic or international legal definition. But Roosevelt had already told the American public that they were not required to be "neutral in thought." So perhaps the diplomatic service was authorized to be one jump ahead of the public and to be un-neutral in deed as well. I do not know of any actual written instructions on record. By this, I mean direct instructions from the State Department. I personally saw, however, some of the numerous memoranda sent out from the London embassy to various heads of missions around Europe. These gave very specific instructions to make known as widely as possible, without arousing suspicion, the British plan to invade Norway. Some of the envoys "not in the know" actually queried these instructions as they could not understand why they were required to make public supposedly secret British military plans. I do not know how their doubts were resolved but the scheme did work. Perhaps in addition the scrambled telephone from the White House was used to tell the ambassadors what to do. The professors will probably ignore this little item as being "undocumented" since they have a naive confidence in what the State Department says as "fact," and their blind reliance on the National Archives is tantamount to saying "We only publish what the State Department says we can." But then one wonders why they have gone beyond the department's press release of 2 September 1944 which purports to be the last word on the "Kent Case," although it is actually a hodge-podge of innuendo, smears and lies. It is the sort of thing that is made to order for the Anti-Defamation League. It could have been composed by one of their agents "planted" in the State Department. For example: it alleged that I had come to the attention of the British because of my acquaintance with Anna Wolkoff, a refugee from Bolshevik Russia. According to the police, this woman had a channel of communication with Germany of which she was making use. The implication was clear: I was supposed to be transmitting information to Germany through Wolkoff. At the time that the State Department issued the press release referred to above, it already had at its disposal a copy of the transcript of my trial which had been held in 1940. In that transcript the Director of Public Prosecutions stated: "Kent did not have any knowledge of the transmission (of a certain document) nor does the prosecution contend that he acted in concert with his co-defendent, Anna Wolkoff, in this matter." But even when possessed of this information, the State Department still disseminated the innuendo that I had contacts with Germany and some vaguely defined "confederates" who were attempting to communicate with Germany, with which Britain was then at war. But the British prosecuted me only for having in my possession "documents which might be useful to an enemy"-not for transmitting them knowingly to any foreign power. This, of course, did not prevent the American "free" press from printing banner headlines about me such as "He Helped The Nazis." In this connection, I have in my possession the sworn testimony of a certain Nathan Perlmutter, dated 6 November 1963, taken as a deposition in a libel suit filed by me against the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times. Perlmutter had taken to the two newspapers some material which the Anti-Defamation League had about me, and was instrumental in having the Miami Herald print a defamatory article which occasioned the libel suit. Incidentally, Perlmutter did such a good job that he is now National Director of the Anti-Defamation League at its headquarters in New York. At the time I had dealings with him, he was head of the Florida chapter of that organization.

Professors Kimball and Bartlett in their article on the "Kent Case" have argued that, as regards the question of Roosevelt's role as a warmongering conspirator, there was "nothing in it." I would reply that Roosevelt was probably the most shameless liar ever to occupy the White House and that his lies have done what is probably irreparable harm to this nation. Curiously enough, those who were on the spot at that time in London-namely, British Military Intelligence, Scotland Yard, and others-held an opinion different from Kimball and Bartletts'. Otherwise, there would never have been a "Kent Case" at all.

On 8 June 1940, a couple of weeks after my arrest, Ambassador Kennedy informed the State Department by cable that:

The appropriate authorities inform me that investigation of the case in which Kent is involved is being carried out with great care and has involved an enormous amount of labor. A final decision as to whether Kent is to be prosecuted may be expected within the next ten days at the latest.

On 11 June these same British authorities informed Kennedy that:

Those who have investigated the matter say that these papers disclose the existence of a traitorous and dangerous conspiracy to assist the enemy. The persons concerned as defendants are Miss Wolkoff, Capt. Archibald Ramsay, M.P., his wife Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Christbel Nicholson (wife of an admiral) and Mr. Tyler G. Kent. All except the last named are British subjects. It is of the greatest importance, if indeed not essential, to the presentation of this case that a representative of the United States Embassy should attend the trial to give certain formal evidence.

The following significant words are something to which the two professors might usefully give attention before concluding that the "Kent Case" is a non-story.

It is appreciated that neither the State Department nor the Foreign Office would be prepared to contemplate at the present time the public discussion of the documents in question. It is thought, however, that some documents could be selected from the whole which, while sufficiently proving the case against the defendants, could properly be produced in court.

But if Kimball and Bartlett are correct, why all the secrecy? Why was the consent of Prime Minister Winston Churchill required before the proceedings could be initiated? As Kennedy informed the State Department on 6 July 1940: "The British prosecutors further inform [Kennedy] that the proposed defendents take the view that they are safe from trial and punishment because neither of the governments concerned dare have these matters discussed in public."

What was it that they dared not discuss in public? That is really the crux of the case. The real reason why I was tried and sentenced to a prison term in England and not tried in the United States is clear from the following statement of the British authorities, made to Joseph Kennedy: "The documents in question would certainly be produced only behind locked doors in a cleared court. Not only would the press be ordered not to publish their contents. No press man would be present."

There you have it in a nutshell. The British, like the Bolsheviks, still have secret trials -- a relic from medieval times when an absolute monarch was able to dispose of his enemies on the quiet without any public outcry being possible, since the facts would not be known until it was too late to do anything about it. In 1776, the thirteen colonies revolted against Britain precisely to do away with such Star Chamber proceedings as well as much else repulsive in the form of British government. Nonetheless, the United States government in the year 1940 was very glad to make use of Britain's Star Chamber practices against one of its own citizens -- for reasons of "cover-up" and secrecy.

In September 1944, in response to a certain interest in my case which had been aroused in Congress and led to questions being addressed to the Secretary of State concerning my imprisonment, the State Department issued a lengthy press release which purported to be the final word on the subject. I shall quote that part which deals with the reasons for turning me over to the British for a secret trial, since that action is prohibited by the 6th Amendment to the Constitution. The 6th Amendment requires that a criminal trial be "speedy and public." My trial was neither. This is what the State Department had to say: "The interest of Great Britain was pre-eminent ... and all the evidence, witnesses, et cetera, were available to the British Courts." The true reasons were set forth in messages to and from the embassy and the State Department during the weeks following my arrest. I have already indicated what they were. So dense, in fact, were the clouds of secrecy around my case (in the "pre-eminent interest of Great Britain") that when the New York Times applied to see the transcript of the stenographic notes of the trial they were informed by the London embassy in these terms:

The British Government is unable to give its consent in writing for an inspection by the New York Times of a copy of the transcript in our possession or in the possession of any other. It would require an Act of Parliament and not even the Home Secretary could waive the restriction.

Such an elaborate web of secrecy cast over an incident by the government principally involved and whose "interests are preeminent," (Great Britain) has a tendency in the long run to defeat its purposes because it piques the curiosity of historians to get at the facts. The case must be recognized as truly extreme when even the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had to give his consent before the trial could proceed, and the records could not be made public without an Act of Parliament.

And now I should like to discuss the case of Franklin Gowen, Second Secretary of the American Embassy in London. I call him a Knight of the Table Round, for he demonstrated such devotion to the British-above and beyond the call of duty-that if the British did not reward him with (at least) a knighthood then they were remiss in their duty to one of their best agents in the United States foreign service. I have already mentioned that he accompanied the police whey they broke into my flat and arrested me. He was later to appear in court and give testimony against me which he did with enthusiasm and evident glee. On the day of my arrest, Gowan undertook to impersonate me and accept any telephone calls which were made to me at the Embassy. He would then pass on the names and addresses of the callers to the British police, more specifically to Sir Norman Kendall, head of Scotland Yard. Sir Norman said to Ambassador Kennedy:

In cases of this kind we cannot take anything for granted. To ascertain who were Kent's friends and their friends, where they met and what they did, is of the utmost importance. We can't thank Ambassador Kennedy enough for his invaluable help in this case.

On the same day, Galahad-Gowan undertook what must rate as one of the most bizarre activities in the history of the United States Foreign Service. During the afternoon he intercepted a phone call from a certain person who asked that I come to Number "X," Chesham. Street. Gowan immediately recruited a Scotland Yard police detective and they both went to the address given. There, in the darkness of the blackout, he was handed a note by an unknown person which asked that Kent go to a certain restaurant to meet some people. Gowan gave the note to the police and then, later that night, returned to the Chesham Street address "to keep watch on the house itself" and to report the numbers of the license plates of any cars that might stop there.

Before the interception of the note, Gowan had taken off his overcoat and lent it to the policeman so that it would cover his uniform and thus not alarm the person being talked to. Here we have the extraordinary spectacle of an American Foreign Service officer working with the British police and even providing one of them with a disguise in order to entrap British subjects. Gowan had long since done all that could be required of him in the matter of my arrest. Now he was extending his sleuthing to the possible arrest of Britons whom he did not know and with whom he had no connection whatsoever. Although the foregoing is mainly of anecdotal interest, it does serve to illustrate how closely Americans and British officials worked together before America entered the war, and to what extent they were willing to ignore legality in such cooperation. I am quite sure the Foreign Service regulations do not include a requirement that an officer of that service do the dirty work of the police of a foreign country with regard to the citizens of that country.

It must have been Sir Galahad-Gowan's "finest hour." This paunchy, balding non-entity of a Second Secretary savored it to the last drop and no doubt regales his grandchildren with the account of how he, single-handedly, broke up a dangerous spyring in London during the war. This alleged spy-ring to which I was supposed to have belonged was headed by Captain Archibald Ramsay, a Member of Parliament. Ramsay was subsequently described by the very prosecutor himself, SolicitorGeneral Sir William Jowitt, as an honorable man who would not knowingly do anything to harm his country. That did not prevent Ramsay being interned for a long period during the war although never convicted of any offense. These facts are public knowledge, yet they did not stop the New York Times from printing and circulating in the United States and in England libelous statements to the effect that I gave Ramsay certain vital defense information which Ramsay then took to the German embassy in Dublin for transmission to Germany. Ramsay sued the New York Times for libel as he was easily able to prove that he had never left Britain during the period alleged, much less visited any German embassy in Dublin or anywhere else. He won the suit. Both the New York Times and the author of the article, a certain Raymond Daniels, were shown up as liars.

By the time the Ramsay suit came to trial, I had already been languishing in a cell in the almost medieval Wandsworth prison in London, I had gone on a hunger strike and was at that time in the prison infirmary. One morning, I was informed that some lawyers wished to see me. Supposing them to be my own, I agreed to see them. It turned out that they represented the London offices of the New York Times and they wanted my help in defending the newspaper against Ramsay's suit. They showed me the defamatory article and I saw immediately that it was a tissue of lies. I promptly told them to get out-which they did. Later, I learned that the article had been inspired by a Colonel William Donovan. Donovan was later appointed head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the behest of Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy. Knox was one of those turncoats from the Republican Party who had leaped on the Roosevelt bandwagon. I was, of course, deprived of civil rights as a convicted person and could not sue on my own behalf, but the New York Times studiously avoided commenting on the "Kent Case" thereafter.

One thing that the embassy correspondence made abundantly clear was the truly desperate situation of the British after the Norwegian fiasco and on the eve of their tremendous defeat at Dunkirk whence the entire British army fled for their lives, leaving their weapons in the hands of the enemy. The British knew where they stood and told Roosevelt all about it. They knew that without direct military participation by America, they were finished in the war. All the pompous talk about "give us the tools and we'll finish the job" was pure Churchillian bluff and the British knew it. But it provided Roosevelt with the propaganda weapon which enabled him to induce Congress to pass the "Lend-Lease" bill making the United States, in contravention of international law and our neutrality statutes, the "Arsenal of Democracy." After the Norwegian fiasco, Winston Churchill became prime minister. This he did primarily because he could boast of his American connections and was able to convince those hidden powers behind the scenes that he was the best bet to get America into the war. Embassy correspondence left no room for doubt that after Dunkirk the policy of the British was to hang on by the skin of their teeth until Roosevelt could get America into the war. He did his best in the Atlantic but Hitler declined to take the bait. The British had, perforce, to wait until Roosevelt could get us in by the back door at Pearl Harbor. On several occasions we find Churchill threatening Roosevelt with the prospect of British surrender or, at least, some compromise with the Germans unless America came to the rescue and soon. These messages are in sharp contrast to the public image of Churchill in his jump suit, cigar cocked in one corner of his mouth, prating that "We shall never surrender. We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them in the streets," etc. All that was for the public morale and we must all admit that Churchill was a fine actor. Perhaps he took lessons from Vic Oliver, his Jewish son-in-law who was a vaudeville comic.

The British had not forgotten the role played by the sinking of the Lusitania in getting the United States into the earlier war. We now know the real story from British sources. A well-researched book entitled The Lusitania published in England a few years ago proved that the ship with its American passengers was deliberately sent to its doom by the British authorities. They knew positively that a German submarine was lying in wait for the liner off the south coast of Ireland, and purposely failed to inform the Lusitania's captain. The hulk of the Lusitania lies in comparatively shallow water and divers have examined it. Its holds have been shown to have been filled with contraband of war and its decks equipped with defensive weapons. This made it a warship and a legitimate target for the German submarine. Knowing the psychological effect that the sinking of the Lusitania had on public opinion in the United States and how the loss of American lives helped so greatly in gaining support for intervention, the British lost no time in contriving a similar incident very early in World War II. This was the sinking of the liner Athenia on 4 September 1939 when the war was only twenty-four hours old. Some thirty American lives were lost. However, the anti-war sentiment was so strong this time that the ploy failed in its object. The public more or less shrugged off the incident, saying in effect: "Stay out of the war zones if you don't want to get hurt."

Now some very mysterious correspondence came to my notice at that time. It was from the office of the Naval Attache, a Captain Kirk. By close questioning, Captain Kirk had been able to ferret out of the British an admission that the Athenia might have been sunk on their own orders. Not that it was sunk by a torpedo from a British submarine. Rather, it was done by one of the two Polish submarines which escaped from the Germans and had come to England where they were under the command of the British Admiralty. It is true that a German U-Boat commander was forced by torture and intimidation to confess at the Nuremberg trials that he sank the Athenia. But such a confession is as credible as all the other confessions extorted by similar means.

By now it should be obvious to the reader that the screen of secrecy which surrounded my case was for a long time virtually impenetrable. Were the "Kent documents" of a vital military nature? Did they involve information about troops or armaments? The answer is provided by the words of the judge, Mr. justice Tucker. judge Tucker, in passing sentence, said: "I am taking into consideration that the documents in question did not involve any military matters." But if not military matters, then what? Obviously, there remained only political matters. And these were then so sensitive that the British told Kennedy that there could be no public discussion of the documents in question. What then was their nature, which could justify my trial and imprisonment? The United States was not at war at that time. The people of this country were overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality. This, in fact, was the great frustration which Roosevelt had to suffer. He had been a rabid Anglophile all his life. As early as 1915, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he expressed great anxiety in his personal correspondence lest he should commit some unneutral act. His more limited authority at that time compelled him to put a tight rein on his natural sympathies which were entirely pro-British. This is the key to understanding the diplomatic activity of the United States in the immediate pre-war period-this, and a certain mental disease which had become endemic in the English-speaking world. I shall call this disease "Fabianism." Its symptoms are a total inability to assess correctly the true nature of Marxism and the aims, purposes and methods of Marxist countries, which at that time meant the Soviet Union.

The Fabian Society was founded in England in 1884 principally by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. It was a group of intellectuals whose declared purpose was to correct the evils of British industrial society such as child labor, slave wages for women and very bad living conditions for workers in general: all very worthy aims. But these high-minded reformers all lost their senses when the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917. They made utter fools of themselves by holding up before the world this bloody, Jewish-inspired and -led regime as an example for all humanity. It was the characteristic failure of the intellectuals everywhere and in most fields, but especially in the socio-political. Intellectuals rely on the printed word and disparage common-sense conclusions based on direct observation of the facts.

The Webbs authored a ponderous tome entitled Soviet Russia: A New Civilization. For all the time it took putting it together, it was worse than useless as a guide to understanding Bolshevik Russia. The Webbs amassed millions of words from official Soviet reports, from the laws and the 1936 Constitution ("the most democratic in the world") and presented this to the public as the definitive account of modern Russia. Anyone who, like myself, had resided even for short time in the "Workers' Paradise" knew perfectly well that laws and constitutions meant absolutely nothing there as far as protecting human rights was concerned. That nation was-and is-ruled by a power elite which is outside and above the law much as its predecessor the Tsarist regime was. They do whatever they wish without the least regard for what the law might say. Yet even now, when the truth about Russia is widely known throughout the world, thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others, there are many academics in this country who still teach the Marxist line to the young and vulnerable. Harvard University is a hotbed of such teaching. Did Roosevelt become enamoured of Fabianism at Harvard? After all, he said to Congressman Martin Dies:

There is nothing wrong with Communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists. I do not regard the Communists as any present or future threat to our country. In fact I look upon Russia as our strongest ally in the years to come.

He said the same thing to Cardinal Spellman, as recorded in the prelate's biography. This unadulterated Fabianism is the key to Roosevelt's mentality and explains his mishandling of our foreign relations. It also explains his legacy with which we are now burdened.

Americans are a pragmatic people, or so they like to regard themselves. That is to say, they prefer to look at the world with a practical eye rather than through the colored glasses of ideology. Most readers will know something about the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is a sort of extra-governmental, semi-secret organization having on its membership list many leaders in the fields of education, finance, communications, politics, etc. Its purpose is to formulate policy and then pass that on to the government for implementation. To this end, it is able to place many of its members in high offices in various departments of government. What better source for an authoritive statement on America's attitude to the European war of 1939, then, than the CFR? This is what the CFR had to say:

The German strategical objective in this war is the destruction of the power of the British Navy. To maintain communications with Dominions, to insure the food supply, and to save herself from becoming literally a third-rate power, Britain must maintain the supremacy of that fleet. No compromise between these alternatives is possible. For the British Commonwealth of Nations this war is a matter of life or death ... It is an important fact, however, that in protecting its own interests it [the British Navy] has simultaneously served to protect American interests too....

The existence of Nazi Germany, with its power, its ambition and its momentum is the fundamental factor in the foreign relations of the United States. Against it the defenses of this country must be expanded; against it diplomacy must be turned; against it friends must be won and kept. And against the possibility of its success on the continent of Europe the unity of the United States must be re-established.

These words were written in 1938 and 1939. It could not be put more plainly. These peace-time statements were not made by some two-bit journalist. They came from the government behind the government; from the people who plan and (albeit in slightly veiled language) call for war and make it happen. Come what may, says the CFR, a German victory cannot be tolerated. First of all diplomacy must be used against Germany, which is what I saw happening. Surely, the drastic action of the authorities in the "Kent Case" is a little more comprehensible in the light of these CFR statements. But even now, after 43 years, the veil of secrecy has not been entirely stripped away. What element of national security needed such drastic protection? No doubt nothing but the personal reputations of some of the protagonists.

I have spoken heretofore of the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In fact, he left several. There is the legacy of Keynesian inflationary economic philosophy-a long subject which merits a separate study. I am concerned here with the legacy of foreign policy and its conduct, and in that field I can claim some small but special knowledge.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. The ostensible reason was to honor a pledge made to Poland; the real reasons were to preserve a precarious balance of power in Europe and the dominance of the British Navy in the Atlantic. This navy, according to the CFR, was also protecting America. The CFR stated publicly in 1939 that "Nazi Germany could not under any circumstances be allowed to win in Europe." As a part of this CFR guarantee to not allow the Nazis to win, Roosevelt thought up the Lend-Lease program which had been the subject of discussion between Roosevelt and Churchill in their private correspondense for many months. Roosevelt kept stressing that he needed time to overcome the objections of Congress, and Churchill was insisting that unless something were done soon, Britain would be forced to her knees. How Roosevelt got away with the transfer of fifty destroyers to the British fleet is one of the great mysteries of the period. But he did. And this was his most overt and un-neutral interventionist action in the prewar period. It, too, had been discussed for months between himself and Churchill. Various subterfuges were suggested by one or the other and had to be rejected as impractical. All the time, the emphasis was on how to circumvent Congress and the neutrality laws. Eventually, Congress was successfully browbeaten or cajoled into agreeing to Lend-Lease, which meant giving away billions of dollars worth of American wealth. The destroyer deal, however, was done without the participation of Congress at all and the government of laws went out the window.

Before this, the slow work of diplomacy had been pursued for months, even years, lining up coalitions by promises of aid which was not forthcoming in time to be of any use to those to whom it had been promised, namely Poland, France and Britain.

Nobody in a position of authority in this country expected the rapid and early military defeats of France and England. Dunkirk changed the whole picture. The United States government had been expecting a nice, leisurely trench war of attrition with the British fleet gradually blockading Germany to death. Hence Lend-Lease and the destroyers deal. These were the tools with which the British were going to "finish the job" according to Churchill. But the loss of the British army at Dunkirk really threw the Anglo-American ranks into a panic. The unbelievable had happened. Germany had won the war in Europe -something the CFR said must never be allowed to happen.

Within a few days after the British debacle at Dunkirk I was arrested; I stayed in jail until November 1945. The impression was given that I and my friends were in some measure responsible for the collapse at Dunkirk. In retrospect, it now seems as if the drastic action taken against me, Captain Ramsay and several others might well have been for propaganda purposes as much as anything else. The British had suffered one of the worst military defeats in their history and their troops were straggling back across the Channel without as much as a rifle. Under such circumstances it is good for home-front morale to attribute disasters to the activities of a fifth column. Ramsay, myself and the others seemed to the British to constitute some sort of "fifth column." The stolid British can become hysterical at times and at this point they did so with good reason. Later, as the hysteria died down, Captain Ramsay was released from detention although I was incarcerated to the bitter end-and beyond. The SolicitorGeneral who prosecuted Ramsay said (as already quoted) that Ramsay was an honorable man who would never willingly have done anything which might harm his country. Since Captain Ramsay was my principal contact in London in the 1940s, an impartial observer might reasonably suppose that my motives were also honorable.

Some people have asked the quite legitimate question: Why, if my motive was to keep the United States out of the war, did I show the documents to British subjects? The answer is simple and straightforward. Ramsay and the members of his Right Club all knew that the principal warmongers in Britain were the Churchill-Eden-Duff Cooper-Vansittart gang, and it was our joint intention in our amateurish way to undermine Churchill's position in Parliament by making use of some of the American documents I had in my possession. This, it was hoped, could be done through the assistance of Captain Ramsay who was, after all, a Member of Parliament. We all understood that the Western democracies could not emerge from this war as genuine winners. The only real winner would be Bolshevik Russia. The British Empire would be no more and England would sink to the level of a third class power-as it has. I also felt sure that the threat to the security of the United States would be magnified a hundredfold. Curiously, our great leader Roosevelt did not understand this. But a lowly employee of the Foreign Service did; like Cassandra, he prophesied never to be believed. Americans are supposed to prefer hard facts to theories. Here is a hard fact. In 1939, the United States defense budget stood at slightly over one billion dollars. The 1983 budget calls for expenditures for defense amounting to 221.1 billion dollars. If we halve the last figure to allow for inflation we still have expenditures one hundred times greater today than before World War Il. Since it is to be assumed that the United States does not now plan to launch a major war of aggression against any power, this 221 billion dollar sum is to defend ourselves against attack by the only plausible external enemy-Soviet Russia. By demanding the total destruction of Germany and "unconditional surrender," Roosevelt established Soviet Russia as a world power without any counter-balance on the vast Eurasian heartland. But he had said that he saw nothing wrong with Communists or Communism and that Russia was our natural ally. Was it deliberate or was it only a colossal error of judgment? Most people would feel that a man who occupies the White House is not entitled to make mistakes on such a grand scale nor to play fast and loose with his nation's security. Lesser mortals can plead ignorance but the President has information on the world situation pouring into his office twenty-four hours a day. He cannot legitimately plead that he didn't know, that nobody told him.

How then did my friends and I know, in the tumultuous months of 1940?
History, not I, will answer that.

Today, the ruling circles in this country recognize that none of the touted war aims were achieved. Hence they are not discussed. Instead there is a constant harping on the moral triumphs allegedly achieved. Hence the incessant ravings about the supposed Nazi atrocities, about the Belsens and Dachaus, the Buchenwalds and Auschwitzes- above all, the "Holocaust." These are all deliberate diversions-red herrings dragged across the trail to obfuscate the facts of life. And those facts are that this country is in constant mortal danger from the overwhelming power of Soviet Russia. This is the Frankenstein monster created by Roosevelt and loosed upon the world. We live with this Roosevelt legacy each and every day. A Soviet base ninety miles from our shores is only one of the negative strategic incursions we have to deal with. Any possible moral basis for World War II was completely destroyed when Americans allied themselves with Soviet Russia, of which it may well be said that there has never been a viler regime in modern history. If the existence of concentration camps within a country is a sound basis for waging war against that country, then we should have been at war with Soviet Russia since about 1922, and with Britain since the turn of the century for it was the British who first employed them during the Boer War, interning thousands of civilians, many of them women and children who died in large numbers due to the unsanitary conditions within the camps.

The hoax of the twentieth century, as the title of Dr. Butz's book on the "Holocaust" goes, is the smoke-screen to conceal the utter failure to achieve the professed war aims of Roosevelt, Churchill and the CFR. Now the Zionist Establishment will continue to have a free hand to commit genocide in the Near East and smear any person in this country who dares to dispute the orthodoxy or point out the real results of World War II. And the Establishment is so besmirched with the responsibility of failure that it needs the Jewish publicists and news media to destroy anyone who has the temerity to ask awkward questions. The horrid prospect looms of having to say: "Maybe we were wrong." A further prospect then looms: "Maybe Hitler was right." But such confessions buttered no parsnips in the harsh judgements of the post-war world. They were not accepted as excuses at Nuremberg under the new ex-post-facto "law" worked out by the United States and their Soviet allies. The new basic law of nations requires only one clause, very simply: "It pays to be on the winning side."

Bibliography of Works on the Tyler Kent Affair and the Roosevelt-Churchill Exchanges

Harris, Robert. "The American tearoom spy." The Times (London) (4 December 1982), p. 6.

[Irving, David]. "Tyler Gatewood Kent: The Many Motives of a Misguided Cypher Clerk." Focal Point (23 November 1981), pp. 3-10.

Kimball, Warren F. "Churchill and Roosevelt: The Personal Equation." Prologue Vol. 6 (Fall 1974), pp. 169-82.

Kimball, Warren F., and Bartlett, Bruce. "Roosevelt and Prewar Commitments to Churchill: The Tyler Kent Affair." Diplomatic History Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 1981), pp. 291-312.

Lash, Joseph P. Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941. New York: Norton, 1976.

Leutze, James. "The Secret of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence: September 1939-May 1940." Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 10 (1975), pp. 465-91.

Loewenheim, Francis L., Langley, Harold D., and Manfred Jonas (eds.). Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975.

Snow, John Howland. The Case of Tyler Kent. New York: Domestic and Foreign Affairs, 1946; New Canaan, Conn.: The Long House, 1962

Whalen, Richard. "The Strange Case of Tyler Kent." Diplomat (November 1965), pp. 16-19, 62-64.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Roosevelt's 'Secret Map' Speech

Franklin Roosevelt often lied to further his goals. In a radio address broadcast to the nation on 23 October 1940, for example, he gave "this most solemn assurance" that he had not given any "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." But American, British and Polish documents (mostly released many years later) proved that this "most solemn assurance" was a bald-faced lie. Roosevelt had, in fact, made numerous secret arrangements to involve the U.S. in war.

Of all his speeches, perhaps the best example of Roosevelt's readiness to lie is his 1941 Navy Day address broadcast over nationwide radio on 27 October.

A lot had happened in the months preceding that address. On 11 March 1941 Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into law, permitting increased deliveries of military aid to Britain in violation of U.S. neutrality and international law. In April Roosevelt illegally sent U.S. troops to occupy Greenland. On 27 May he proclaimed a state of "unlimited national emergency," a kind of presidential declaration of war that circumvented a power constitutionally reserved to Congress. Following the Axis attack against the USSR in June, the Roosevelt administration began delivering enormous quantities of military aid to the beleaguered Soviets. These shipments also blatantly violated international law. In July Roosevelt illegally sent American troops to occupy Iceland.

The President began his Navy Day address by recalling that German submarines had torpedoed the U.S. destroyer Greer on 4 September 1941 and the U.S. destroyer Kearny on 17 October. In highly emotional language, he characterized these incidents as un- provoked acts of aggression directed against all Americans. He declared that although he had wanted to avoid conflict, shooting had begun and "history has recorded who fired the first shot." What Roosevelt deliberately failed to mention was the fact that in each case the U.S. destroyers had been engaged in attack operations against the submarines, which fired in self-defense only as a last resort. Hitler wanted to avoid war with the United States, and had expressly ordered German submarines to avoid conflicts with U.S. warships at all costs, except to avoid imminent destruction. Roosevelt's standing "shoot on sight" orders to the U.S Navy were specifically designed to make incidents like the ones he so piously condemned inevitable. His provocative efforts to goad Hitler into declaring war against the U.S. had failed and most Americans still opposed direct involvement in the European conflict.

And so, in an effort to convince his listeners that Germany was a real threat to American security, Roosevelt continued his Navy Day speech with a startling announcement: "Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government-by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it." This map, the President explained, showed South America, as well as "our great life line, the Panama Canal," divided into five vassal states under German domination. "That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well."

Roosevelt went on to reveal that he also had in his possession "another document made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a detailed plan to abolish all existing religions -- Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike" which Germany will impose "on a dominated world, if Hitler wins."

"The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be for- bidden. The clergy are to be ever liquidated. In the place of the churches of our civilization there is to be set up an international Nazi church, a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi government. And in the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in the place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols: the swastika and the naked sword."

Roosevelt emphasized the importances of his "revelations" by declaring: "Let us well ponder these grim truths which I have told you of the present and future plans of Hitlerism" All Americans, he said, "are faced with the choice between the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of world which Hitler and his hordes would impose on us." Accordingly, "we are pledged to pull our own oar in the destruction of Hitlerism." The German government immediately responded to Roosevelt's speech by denouncing his "documents" as preposterous frauds. The Italian government declared that if Roosevelt did not publish his map "within 24 hours, he will acquire a sky high reputation as a forger." At a press conference the next day, a reporter rather naturally asked the President for a copy of the "secret map." But Roosevelt refused, insisting only that it came from "a source which is undoubtedlv reliable "

As has often happened, the truth about the map did not emerge until many years after the war: It was a forgery produced by the British intelligence service, most probably at its technical laboratory in Ontario, Canada. William Stephenson (code name: Intrepid), chief of British intelligence operations in North America, passed it on to U.S. intelligence chief William Donovan, who gave it to Roosevelt. In a memoir published in late 1984, war- time British agent Ivar Bryce claimed credit for thinking up the "secret map" scheme. Of course, the other "document" cited by Roosevelt, purporting to outline German plans to abolish the world's religions, was just as fraudulent as the "secret map."

Some U.S. officials were concerned about British wartime ef- forts to deceive the American government and people. In a 5 September 1941 memorandum forwarded to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle warned that British intelligence agents were manufacturing phony documents detailing supposed German conspiracies. Americans should be "on our guard" against these British-invented "false scares," Berle concluded.

It's doubtful if any of Roosevelt's great contemporaries, including Stalin, Hitler and even Churchill, ever delivered a speech as loaded with falsehoods as brazen as those in his 1941 Navy Day address. On at least one occasion, Roosevelt privately admitted his willingness to lie to further his goals. During a conversation on 14 May 1942 with his close Jewish adviser, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the President candidly remarked: "I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I maybe entirely inconsistent, and further- more, I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help us win the war '

Sources

Bratzel, John F., and Leslie B. Rout, Jr., "FDR and The 'Secret Map'," The Wilson Quarterly (Washington, DC), New Year's 1985, pp. 167-173.

"Ex-British Agent Says FDR's Nazi Map Faked," Foreign Intelli- gence Literary Scene (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America), December 19-84, pp. 1-3.

"President Roosevelt's Navy Day Address on World Affairs," The New York Times, 28 October 1941.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Sebastian Haffner's 1942 Call for Mass Murder

One of postwar Germany's most influential writers has been Sebastian Haffner. This successful wordsmith has written half a dozen books on political and historical issues, several of which have been translated into English. His most recent is a highly critical review of Adolf Hitler's life and place in history. The American edition, The Meaning of Hitler, received very favorable reviews in the American press. For many years Haffner contributed a regular column of political commentary to West Germany's leading general-circulation illustrated weekly, Stern.

Haffner's persuasiveness lies in his ability to present liberal-democratic, egalitarian ideas in apparently detached and objective prose. His sober and confident style reassures many otherwise skeptical readers.

But Haffner's real character came through in an extraordinary article published during the Second World War while he was living as an emigré in Britain. In the August 1942 issue of the reputable London monthly World Review, Haffner called for the mass murder of at least half a million young Germans by the victorious Allies at the end of the war. According to his article "The Reintegration of Germany into Europe," the National Socialist revolution of 1933 had divorced Germany from Christian European civilization. An Allied victory in the World War would make it possible to restore the prewar order.

Fortunately, Haffner wrote, the "hard core" of Nazi revolutionaries were concentrated in the SS and could therefore be easily liquidated. The SS had become "for all practical purposes the human integration of Nazism. It is Nazism incarnate. With its elimination Nazism may not yet be dead as an idea, but it will be dead as an active political force for the decisive next ten years. Thus the road will be clear for the reconstruction of a Europe embracing Germany. But it must be eliminated first."

Haffner did not shrink from spelling out just how that would be accomplished. "Now this is a stark and gruesome matter. In all probability it amounts to the killing of, upwards of 500,000 young men, whether by summary court-martial (no such mass-justice can be other than summary) or without even that ceremony. Even if one wants to avoid the actual killing and instead to convert the SS into a number of life-serving mobile forced-labor divisions for international use, it would mean not much more than a living death."

The mass killing, Haffner exclaimed, would be "a resounding act of international justice." After all, "it would be criminal sentimentality to leave the terrorists alive and abroad when dearly-bought victory at last makes it possible to dispose of them."

A comprehensive "re-education" program would also be necessary to make sure that defeated Germany stayed in line permanently. But since the vast majority of the German people obviously backed its National Socialist leadership, only a small group of anti-Nazi Protestant clergy and Roman Catholic priests could be entrusted with this important task. "Thank God Christianity is still a very vital supranational force in Europe, a nucleus not only of spiritual but even of structural unity." A network of Christian schools would be responsible for "re-educating German youtheradicating Nazism as an idea-making Germany a Christian country again and reintegrating Germany into Europe."

Haffner's article is not the first call for genocide in the name of Christianity made in history.

Haffner's murderous proposal was only partially implemented. Many tens of thousands of young SS men, not only from Germany but from across Europe, were in fact murdered by the victorious Allies in both the East and West.

I learned about Haffner's article by accident while going through back issues of the leading German National Socialist newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on a microfilm machine at the Library of Congress. A lengthy front page report in the 11 December 1942 issue publicized the bloody Allied proposal for "pacifying" Europe. It was hard for me to believe that one of West Germany's most influential political writers could have once authored such a plan. But it didn't take long to locate the original article in a bound volume on an obscure, dusty shelf of the world's largest library.

A year before the appearance of Haffner's article, American Jewish attorney Theodore Kaufman proposed a similar final solution to the German problem. In Germany Must Perish, Kaufman called for the sterilization of all fertile adult Germans, and the total partitioning-off of Germany among neighboring countries. But unlike Kaufman, who fell into obscurity after the war, Haffner's star rose to great heights. He was able to play a major role in re-educating and remaking defeated Germany into the kind of tractable, "civilized" country he wanted.

In 1946, the victorious Allies executed newspaper publisher and former Nazi party district leader Julius Streicher at Nuremberg for "crimes against humanity." He had been found "guilty" of disseminating anti-Jewish writings, particularly in his monthly paper Der Stürmer. That is, Streicher was killed for actions which were illegal neither under German nor U.S. law at the time they were carried out. And at no time did Streicher ever call for the killing of Jews or anyone else on the basis of race, religion or membership in an organization.

Sebastian Haffner, in contrast, openly called for the killing of at least half a million young men simply on the basis of membership in an organization-an act which he conceded would be a "stark and gruesome matter." If Haffner were to be judged according to the standards applied by the Allies at Nuremberg, he would be punished for "crimes against humanity."

But Haffner has never been called to account for his genocidal call. To the contrary, he has been richly rewarded in postwar democratic Germany. How many of Sebastian Haffner's millions of readers would think differently of him and his views if they knew about his wartime call for mass murder?

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran

Swiss Revisionist Forced Into Exile for Thought Crime

A prominent Swiss revisionist author who fled his homeland rather than serve a 15-month prison sentence for "Holocaust denial" has been welcomed in Iran.

Rather than begin serving the politically-motivated prison term that was to commence in October, Jürgen Graf is staying in Tehran at the invitation of a group of Iranian scholars and university professors who are sympathetic to Holocaust revisionism. (Contrary to some reports, he has not been given political asylum in Iran, nor has he requested it.) He has written an 80-page overview of the history and impact of Holocaust revisionism that is being translated into Persian and Arabic for distribution to scholars, journalists and religious and political leaders. Graf will also be giving lectures at Iranian universities. He learning Persian (Farsi) in an intensive study course.

Graf arrived in Tehran on November 17, 2000, concluding a journey that had taken him to Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. He is impressed with the hospitality and helpfulness of his hosts, as well as with the orderliness, cleanliness and sense of security in the Iranian capital.

At the conclusion of his trial in July 1998, a court in the Swiss town of Baden sentenced Graf to 15 months imprisonment and imposed a heavy fine because of his writings. (See "Swiss Court Punishes Two Revisionists," July-August 1998 Journal.)

Graf does not intend to return to Switzerland until normal rights of free speech and free intellectual inquiry are restored. However, he has not yet decided where he will settle and make a new home.

Jürgen Graf, born in 1951, is an educator, researcher and author of several books, including "Holocaust on the Test Stand," which has appeared in more than half a dozen languages. In March 1993, following publication of the 112-page German edition, he was summarily dismissed from his post as a secondary school teacher of Latin and French. (See "Swiss Teacher Suspended for Holocaust Book," Sept.-Oct. 1993 Journal.) In December 1994 the French-language edition, L'Holocauste au scanner, was banned in France by order of the country's Interior Ministry. Some 200,000 copies of an expanded edition of this work have been published and distributed in Russia under the title "The Myth of the Holocaust." (See "A Major Revisionist Breakthrough in Russia," July-August 1997 Journal.)

In recent years Graf has examined the sites of numerous wartime German camps, and has carried out historical research at archives in Poland, Russia, and other countries. (See, for example, "Important Documents Found in Moscow Archives," Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal.) During the coming months he intends to bring out, in collaboration with Carlo Mattogno and Richard Krege, a book about Treblinka, the wartime German camp in Poland where, it is widely alleged, more than 750,000 Jews were killed between July 1942 and April 1943.

Since 1997 Graf has been a member of this Journal's Editorial Advisory Committee. His addresses at the Twelfth and 13th IHR Conferences appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 1995 and July-August 2000 Journal issues.

In several countries, including Germany, France, Israel, Austria and Switzerland, it is a crime publicly to dispute standard "Holocaust" claims that six million Jews were systematically killed during World War II, most of them in gas chambers. Numerous writers and publishers have been fined or imprisoned for "Holocaust denial." These one-sided "thought crime" laws are the result of a well-organized campaign by the World Jewish Congress and other powerful Jewish organizations.

Growing Support

Awareness of the importance of the Holocaust story as a key propaganda tool of Israeli-Zionist interests is growing throughout the world, especially in Muslim countries. This was manifest, for example, during the 1998 trial in Paris of the prominent French scholar Roger Garaudy, who was fined $40,000 for his book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, which presents compelling evidence refuting the orthodox Holocaust story and other historical legends. (An attractive American edition is published by the IHR.)

Religious and political leaders, scholars and journalists in Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and other countries expressed support for Garaudy and Holocaust revisionism. (See T. O'Keefe, "Origin and Enduring Impact of the 'Garaudy Affair'," July-August 1999 Journal, pp. 31-35.) A professor at Cairo University, Dr. Amina Rashid, for example, declared: "Zionist propaganda, well entrenched in France, is exploiting the guilt complex among the French for the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis ... The Zionist lobby keeps concentrating on the 'Six Million victims' in spite of the corrections to this figure." In Iran, 600 journalists and 160 members of parliament signed petitions backing Garaudy, and during a visit to the country, he was received by the nation's chief of state, Ayatollah Khamenei, who congratulated the French scholar.

Iran's official radio voice to the world, IRIB, has in recent years expressed support for Holocaust revisionism by broadcasting sympathetic interviews with leading revisionist scholars and activists. Several interviews with IHR Director Mark Weber have been aired on the English-language service, and similar interviews have been broadcast with Ernst Zundel in German and with Ahmed Rami in Arabic. IRIB short-wave radio reaches millions in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

An editorial, "Myth of the Holocaust," in the English-language Iranian paper Kayhan International, Dec. 6, 1999, commented sympathetically on Holocaust revisionism, and criticized German government persecution of Dr. Fredrick Töben and others who dispute Holocaust claims. The paper called Töben an "Australian historian of German origin who is known for his authoritative research on the myth of the Holocaust ... He was jailed and he was fined for having exposed the fabrications of the gas chambers where, Zionist propaganda says, six million Jews perished ..." The paper referred to the "preposterous figure of six million," and praised revisionist scholars for their "courageous research and highlighting of facts of the Second World War."

On May 1, 2000, the Iranian embassy in Vienna granted refuge to an Austrian engineer, Wolfgang Fröhlich, who had been hounded for expressing dissident views on history. At Graf's 1998 trial, Fröhlich had testified that, for technical reasons, mass gassings with Zyklon could not have been carried out in the German wartime camps as alleged. In his request for asylum, he reported that he had been offered $5 million to repudiate his expert testimony in the Graf trial, and instead state that mass killings with Zyklon could somehow have happened as claimed.

Since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, which overthrew the repressive and pro-Zionist regime of Shah Pahlavi, the Islamic republic has steadfastly opposed Zionist oppression and aggression. United States policy toward Iran has accordingly been hostile, and includes a ban on trade and investment. This belligerent policy, which reflects America's subservience to Zionist interests, is hypocritical. By any objective standard, Iran is today a much more "democratic" state than many with which the US has cordial relations, including Israel, China, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. US efforts to isolate the nation of some 65 million people have been a failure. Reflecting its good relations with the rest of the world (apart from the US and Israel), Iran's popular President, Mohammed Khatami, has in recent years made successful state visits to Italy, France, Germany and Britain.

The warm welcome being given to Jürgen Graf in Iran is not only a dramatic expression of support for intellectual freedom and human rights, it further refutes the often-made claim that Holocaust revisionism has no significant public or scholarly support.

Switzerland in the Grip of the 'Traditional Enemy'

Our country is today involved in the greatest foreign policy crisis since the Second World War. It faces a powerful enemy who, paradoxically, hardly anyone dares to name because in the western world he enjoys a kind of state protection, and because he portrays itself in the image of the eternally persecuted. In this situation, the blackmailer has been able to appear as the poor, persecuted victim, and to take advantage of most people's good nature and sense of fair play.

How could it have come to this? To recapitulate a few things: In 1991 the Swiss confederation celebrated its 700th anniversary. On this occasion there appeared in the year book (Jahrbuch) of Migros, Switzerland's largest chain store, an interview with labor union secretary Ruth Dreifuss. At the time this Jewish woman, and a former Zionist youth movement member, was not very well known. In this interview she expressed herself with disarming openness about our country's future. She said that, as far as she was concerned, it is not important whether Switzerland survives as a sovereign country, but that, in any case, she certainly wishes to see Switzerland as a colorful country, that is of people of mixed race with many mixed marriages. A short time later Dreifuss was appointed, under unusual circumstances, to a high-level post on the governing Federal Council (Bundesrat).

Then came a bustle of activity, most notably the introduction of a so-called anti-racism law, which makes it a crime to "deny or whitewash the genocide," and a campaign to encourage guilt feelings among the Swiss regarding their role during the Second World War.

It should be kept in mind that Switzerland stayed out of the conflict as a neutral country, even though during the war years it was completely surrounded by Axis countries. For this small mountainous country without natural resources, import and export is a matter of survival -- and naturally this was true during the war as well. Among the goods routinely traded were military supplies and gold. Everywhere this has always been the case, and it's not likely to change much in the future. There was no reason under international law why Switzerland should have stopped its trade with the Third Reich.

As it had in earlier times of war, Switzerland once again took seriously its role as a humanitarian country. The International Committee of the Red Cross, headquartered in Geneva, was very active everywhere it was permitted to operate. Some 300,000 refugees were given shelter in Switzerland, of whom almost 30,000 were Jews. By percentage of population this was far more than any other country.

But let us return to Federal Council member Dreifuss. She and her Social Democratic Party, with the help of the largely cooperative or coordinated media, did not tire of maligning Switzerland. At the same time, and parallel with this, Jewish circles in the United States began a massive campaign of accusations against Switzerland, with fantastic demands for money. At this same time, a Jewish woman, May Kunin, was coincidentally named as the US ambassador to Switzerland. International Jewish community leaders Edgar Bronfman, Israel Singer and Avraham Burg joined in, increasing the pressure on Switzerland to such an extent that Federal Council president Jean-Pascal Delamuraz spoke of a campaign of "blackmail," and the Swiss ambassador in the United States, Carlo Jagmetti, even referred, in a confidential paper, to this as a "war." (Jagmetti promptly resigned, and Delamuraz was condemned to silence.)

Even though some resistance to this campaign has been developing around the out-spoken businessman and parliamentary deputy Christoph Blocher, these recent developments suggest that very probably Switzerland will submit to the pressure and pay up.

How was all this possible? The reason is quite simple. All discussions of this matter are based on two axiomatic premises, and an associated conclusion:

First, the Third Reich gassed six million Jews,

Second, so many people can't be killed without the neighboring countries taking notice, and

Third, therefore the Swiss must have known and thereby are also co-guilty.

While a number of revisionist historians have effectively discredited the first premise, recently two prominent Swiss historians of contemporary history have specifically repudiated the conclusion: Prof. J. R. Salis and Prof. E. Bonjour confirm that knowledgeable Swiss authorities had no solid evidence of any mass extermination before the end of the war (Recht und Freiheit, Oct. 2, 1995; Thurgauer Zeitung, June 2, 1997). [See also: Arthur R. Butz, "Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust' Controversy," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1982, pp. 371-405.]

But to say such a thing can bring a thinking person into trouble with the law: if the third sentence is not correct, the first or second premise must not be true. The second cannot be doubted because it corresponds with basic common sense. Logically the Allied secret services would have promptly learned of mass gassings, and the Allied political leaders certainly would not have ignored such an opportunity for propaganda against Germany. Therefore the first premise must be dubious. But that's something no one dares to think because it's not permitted. As a result, Frau Dreifuss can claim with no fear of contradiction that Switzerland's wartime Federal Council "knew that Jews were being annihilated" (Nouveau Quotidien, May 9, 1995). Hardly anyone dares seriously to contradict this, much less to make the revisionist argument in a forceful way.

In this catastrophic situation, which points up Switzerland's laughable and humiliating subordination to world Jewry, the question arises: why now, more than half a century after the events in question?

In answering this question, it should be stressed that this campaign is concerned with something quite different than historical justice. Accordingly, the accusations are not made against specific individuals or institutions, but rather involve a propaganda campaign against an entire country. Moreover, it should be noted, the accusations are not made by a foreign country or government, but rather entirely by individual persons and private institutions (especially the World Jewish Congress), which, under international law, our federal government is under no obligation even to answer. To the contrary, the Swiss government would be justified in formally calling on Washington to curtail the impertinent Senator Alphonse D'Amato. But nothing like that is happening.

If it's not historical justice that our adversaries are concerned about, what is it?

Switzerland is in some ways a troublesome country. It is the world's only direct democracy, which means that our government must submit every major decision or policy to a referendum of the people. This is what Swiss people understand by freedom, and why the half-historical, half-mystical figure of Wilhelm Tell is a national symbol.

Switzerland is also a neutral country, a status rooted in an ancient conception of self that goes back to the sacred national figure Niklaus von Flüe. In the 15th century this mystic gave this piece of advice to his warlike Swiss compatriots: "Don't involve yourself in foreign affairs. But if someone attacks you, defend yourselves bravely." Since that time the idea of armed neutrality has been a basic Swiss principle.

These two basic principles of the Swiss Confederation help explain why Switzerland has not joined any international organizations. The Swiss have rejected membership in the United Nations organization, NATO, and the European Union because they fear a loss of sovereignty and do not want to send their men to war on behalf of foreign powers. At the same time no one can accuse Switzerland of narrow-minded nationalism. Alongside the majority German-speaking population, people of French and Italian culture live here unthreatened and with complete equal rights. It is no wonder that prominent thinkers and influential statesman time and again have cited Switzerland as a model for European unification. Recently, for example, the deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the German Bundestag, Heiner Geissler, said: "Switzerland is a prototype for what the European Union should look like politically" (Brückenbauer, March 5, 1997).

It seem paradoxical, but therein lays the deeper reason for the on-going campaign against Switzerland: it is a fight against the Swiss idea. And one must remember that this idea is based on a very solid foundation. Our country may be geographically small, but it is the seventh most important industrial country in Europe, and one of the world's most important financial centers.

If such a country defies what is called the "New World Order," then in spite of its apparent small size it is a factor of intellectual and economic importance to be taken seriously in the calculation of the "one worlders."

This "New World Order" is not to be directly democratic, nor will it respect developed cultures. To the contrary, it will be, as Winston Churchill once warned, "an authoritarian, almighty world order" (Speeches of Winston Churchill, New York, 1974). As the founder of the Paneuropa Union, Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, spelled out in his book, Praktischer Idealismus ("Practical Idealism"; Vienna/Leipzig, 1925), its population will consist of a "Eurasian-Negroid mixed race."

This "one world" will also require a common spiritual foundation, a religious basis. According to an official of the Canadian B'nai B'rith organization, Ian J. Kagedan, this will be the Holocaust faith (Toronto Star, Nov. 26, 1991). It is characteristic that the term for the alleged mass gassing of Jews is a Greek word that comes from the language of the ancient religions.

Thus, this truly "New World Order" will be: one world, with one government, one (mixed) race, ruled by one "chosen" people, one god (Yahweh), and one cult -- the Holocaust.

The Switzerland idea is the antithesis of this, and therefore must be destroyed. To accomplish this, bombs are not necessary. It will suffice to discredit the Swiss idea in the world, and among the Swiss themselves -- to disparage it so that people will reject it and turn to the arms of the "New World Order."

To morally destroy an adversary, nothing works better than to accuse him of complicity with the Third Reich. This task was taken up by Senator D'Amato as the instrument of the New York Zionists. Today the same tried and true method is being used against Switzerland that for years has successfully worked against Germany. Accusations without basis are made according to the notion that people are more inclined to accept a big lie than a small one. At the same time the claim is made that these accusations can be proven with countless documents. Eventually the public begins to believe that such documents actually exist because newspapers, radio and television all say so. In this campaign, the largest circulation magazines of our country even use doctored photographs (as the conservative middle class opposition periodical Schweizerzeit recently revealed [March 7, 1997]).

The most diverse accusations are made in this masterful campaign of deliberate confusion, so that the hapless media consumer has no idea what the real situation is. The goal here is not to honestly inform the people, but rather to confuse the public in a fog of guilt feelings.

Let's take a look at the most important of the accusations. The most serious is that Swiss banks have kept for themselves enormous sums of money deposited by Jews, instead of turning over this money to the rightful heirs. American Jews speak of 30 billion Swiss Francs. There is also talk of hoarding stolen art treasures, of laundering gold to the advantage of the Third Reich, and from time to time there's mention of the infamous gold teeth of gassed Jews.

The Swiss are also accused of welcoming too few Jewish refugees during the war, thereby condemning tens of thousand of Jews to "certain death". Swiss Jews who gave support to Jewish refugees in Switzerland during the war are now suddenly demanding that the Swiss government compensate them for their expenditures. And, predictably, the Gypsies are now also speaking up and demanding money as well.

This entire absurd comedy might be simply laughed off if one did not understand that our contemporaries have been thoroughly impregnated with the Holocaust religion. As a result, even patriotic groups in Switzerland argue that we should attempt to discredit these accusations rather than turn the tables around and come to grips with the fundamental issues of contemporary history.

The commission of historians set up by the Swiss government therefore should not merely investigate our trade and refugee policy during the war, but, more to the point, deal with the question of the supposed destruction of the Jews. In this regard they could cite the statement by the Freiburg historian Ulrich Herbert, who recently said: "Historians have so far only interpreted the Holocaust. The task now is to investigate it" (Frankfurter Rundschau, Feb. 13, 1997).

It is high time to transform this conflict from one of morally vulnerable sentiment to one of intelligent, clear-headed analysis. For the time being this may be little more than a lonely call in the desert. One is also justified in fearing legal repercussions for reaching conclusions in this controversial subject different than the officially permitted ones. By the same token no one dares to shed light on the dark history of Zionism, and thereby to go on the counterattack.

Meanwhile, bowing to "international" pressure, Swiss banks and businesses have established a fund of 150 Million Swiss francs to help Holocaust victims. This was done even though originally everyone was supposed to wait for the release (in the summer of 1997) of the report of the already-mentioned historians' commission. But in the meantime New York and world Jewry were threatening a boycott of Swiss financial institutions, and this is something the Swiss banks could not dare risk. They much preferred to pay something right away. A short time later the Swiss Federal Council decided to establish a "solidarity foundation," based on our gold reserves with a starting capital of seven billion.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Senator D'Amato triumphantly spoke of a "admission or acknowledgment of guilt." This is reminiscent of the dictated Versailles treaty of 1919, whereby Germany was obliged to sign a guilt clause or face military occupation. Switzerland is today experiencing its own Versailles Diktat. It is being forced to pay reparations, and one day it may likewise endure its own Nuremburg. At a press conference last last year, Jewish attorney Edward D. Fagan stated: "Germany was brought to court in Nuremburg, and Switzerland will be brought to court in Brooklyn" (Tagesanzeiger, Nov. 29, 1996.)

This campaign is by no means finished. Its goal will be reached only when little Switzerland and all of Europe are finally forced into submission.

-- March 12, 1997

Bernhard Schaub, was born in 1954 in Bern, Switzerland. He taught history and German at a private school in Zurich until January 1993, when he was fired without notice. This termination was a consequence of his 1992 book, Adler und Rose, on the history of German-speaking Central Europe. Because passages in this book call wartime "gassings" into question, the author was subjected to media smears. Since January 1993 he has worked as an independent teacher of adult education courses. He is the father of two daughters. (Adler und Rose is available from: Postfach 386, 8105 Regensdorf, Switzerland.)

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Switzerland's Anti-Racism Law

For many years Swiss law has prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, similar to provisions of the 1964 and 1968 federal "civil rights" laws in the United States. But Switzerland's new "anti-racism" law, which is a revision of Article (Section) 261 of the criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch), goes far beyond this. It also criminalizes dissident or revisionist scholarship on the fate of Europe's Jews during the Second World War -- that is, it bans Holocaust revisionism.

With the backing of the country's leading political parties, the new law was approved by the lower house of the Swiss parliament in December 1992, and by the upper house in March 1993. In a nationwide referendum on September 25, 1994, it was narrowly ratified by 54.6 percent of those who voted. Half of the country's cantons rejected it.

In effect since January 1, 1995, Switzerland's new Anti-Racism Law reads as follows:

Whoever publicly incites hatred or discrimination against a person or a group of persons on the basis of their race, ethnicity or religion,

or whoever publicly promotes an ideology that systematically disparages or slanders members of a race, ethnic group or religion,

or whoever organizes, supports or participates in a propaganda action with this same goal,

or whoever publicly through word, writing, illustration, gesture, act of violence, or in any other way disparages or discriminates against a person or a group of persons on the basis of their race, ethnicity or religion, in a way that offends their human dignity or, for any one of these reasons, denies, flagrantly whitewashes [gröblich verharmlost] or seeks to justify, genocide or other crimes against humanity,

or whoever withholds, on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion, a service or product from a person or a group of persons that is offered to the public at large,

will be punished by [up to three years] imprisonment or a fine.

This law's imprecise or ambiguous wording opens the door to selective, and hence unjust, enforcement. For example, just who or what qualifies as a "racial, ethnic or religious" group? Do the Swiss qualify? Apparently not. In that case, is it therefore legal in Switzerland to disparage or slander the Swiss, but not the Jews?

What constitutes a "crime against humanity"? Does Israel's repressive treatment of Palestinian Christians and Muslims count? And if so, does the new Anti-Racism Law criminalize writings by Jewish or Zionist historians that "seek to justify" Israel's repression of Palestinians?

What, precisely, is "genocide"? Is it "genocide" if two percent of a group is killed, or must it be 20 or 50 or 70 percent? And apart from the wartime treatment of Europe's Jews, just what historical cruelties qualify as "genocidal"? How about the extermination of various native Palestinian peoples by the ancient Israelites, as related in the Bible (see, for example Deuteronomy 20:16-17 and Joshua 10:26-40)? Or how about the dispossession and slaughter of native Indians of North America?

What precisely is "flagrant whitewashing" (or "gross trivializing") of the Holocaust story? If one estimates the number of Jewish Holocaust victims at four million, is that "whitewashing" or "trivializing"? How about one million? Is it "whitewashing" or "trivializing" to contend that German wartime gas chambers were not as important as historians have been claiming? For example, is Harvard historian Daniel Goldhagen guilty of "whitewashing" for having written in Hitler's Willing Executioners (p. 523) that "gassing was really epiphenomenal to the Germans' slaughter of Jews."

A particularly ominous feature of the new Anti-Racism Law, as even Switzerland's respected weekly Weltwoche acknowledges (July 23), is that under its provisions a witness who testifies in court on behalf of a "Holocaust denier," or an attorney who represents one during a trial, risks indictment, fines and imprisonment for "publicly" expressing revisionist views.

As Jürgen Graf has aptly observed, the threat and intimidation inherent in Switzerland's Anti-Racism Law smacks of the unjust "justice" of Stalinist Russia.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

To the Mannheim Jail:
Justice and Truth in Contemporary Germany

My seven months' imprisonment in Mannheim, Germany in 1999 was quite a physical and mental experience for me, and I shall attempt to contextualize this within a personal historical narrative that may shed some light on the persecutors' mind-set.

I can ask you: which version of my story do you want to hear? The good one or the bad one? The good story is all about my making the most of a difficult situation. But afterwards you may say: Hey, I don't have to feel sorry for you anymore. The bad story is all about the pain of being deprived of personal freedom -- and it will make you feel very sad, not only for me, but also for anyone who in some way has lost the physical and mental freedom that we normally take for granted.

Of course, there really is nothing new in this. During the same year I was jailed, German historian Ingrid Weckert was fined 3,000 marks for having written an article published in the German journal Sleipnir in which she contrasted diary entries -- one positive, the other negative -- written by two men who spent time in Dachau.

For me personally, it was interesting to meet members of Germany's judiciary and legal profession, and to find out what made them tick. For example, what makes people such as German public prosecutor Hans-Heiko Klein pursue revisionists fifty-five years after the end of the Second World War?

Soon after my arrest, on April 8, 1999, rumor had it that I had deliberately gone into the lion's den to sacrifice myself for the cause. The only truth to this is that I have tried to lead by example, and for years I have proclaimed that we must be prepared to go to prison in order to defend free speech.

I talked and talked about it, and still consider my approach to be based on reason -- to speak to friend and foe alike. Why? Well, if we stop talking to one another, then other forms of communication emerge not based on reason.

While in prison I had a lot of time to think, and I formulated the following: "If you deny me my freedom to think and speak, then you take away my humanity, and you commit a crime against humanity. Truth is my defense." It's elementary, but so is our human nature -- and we take for granted the freedom to think and to speak without realizing that there are forces that wish to take it from us.

Linked to the freedom concept, and vital in any human enterprise, is the moral value of truth-telling. Who today wants to hear the word Truth? It is a rare commodity, particularly in any government agency.

Work to Do

Let me briefly go back to the beginning of my second revisionist tour. On February 22, 1999, the day of my departure from Australia, our local Wimmera Mail-Times newspaper in Horsham accurately reported my intentions in visiting Germany: to discuss this Holocaust business with lawyers, public prosecutors, and judges -- something I subsequently did, both before my arrest and after my release on November 11, 1999.

During my imprisonment, information about the outside world became vitally important for me. More than a hundred people worldwide wrote and offered their support. For that I am forever grateful to them. I never formally thanked the IHR for supporting me -- I do that now.

It was also important for me to know that our work at Adelaide Institute was continuing. While I was in prison, Richard Krege -- our associate in the Australian Capital Territory -- led an expedition to the site of the wartime German camp of Treblinka in Poland, where he carried out an investigation using a sophisticated Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) device. The GPR images did not confirm the official Treblinka story. [See the May-June 2000 Journal, p. 20.] Although this research is still not complete, we can safely say that yet another Holocaust myth has been destroyed with the help of state-of-the art technology.

The aim, it must be stressed, is not to destroy myths for the sake of destroying myths. We all need our myths. The worry begins when some insist that their myths rest on some physical reality. When such a claim is clearly wrong, it becomes a lie. Greek and Egyptian myths, for example, do have some connection with reality, as archeologists illustrate when they confirm elements of them through their investigations. The Holocaust homicidal gas chamber extermination myth, on the other hand, has no such connection with physical reality, and hence legal means are used to prevent public expression of such dissident skepticism.

The Feverish Mind

The mind that creates and upholds the Holocaust myth is a feverish one, abandoning any cherishing of truth-telling as a moral virtue. Here is an example of what I mean, written by a professed Holocaust survivor:

I grew up and became an adult in a time and in a society that didn't want to listen, or perhaps was incapable of listening. "Children have no memories, children forget quickly, you must forget it all, it was just a bad dream." These were the words, endlessly repeated, that were used on me from my school days to erase my past and make me keep quiet. So for decades I was silent, but my memory could not be wiped clean. Very occasionally I would make timid attempts to share at least some parts of it with someone, but these attempts always went wrong. A finger tapping against the forehead or aggressive questions in return soon made me fall silent, taking back what I'd revealed. It is so easy to make a child mistrust his own reflections, to take away his voice. I wanted my own certainty back, and I wanted my voice back, so I began to write....

Legal accredited truth is one thing -- the truth of a life another. Years of research, many journeys back to the places where I remember things happened, and countless conversations with specialists and historians have helped me to clarify many previously inexplicable shreds of memory, to identify places and people, to find them again and to make a possible, more or less logical chronology out of it. I thank them all.

This rather moving account of a child finding his identity within the Holocaust mythology, of pain and suffering endured, comes from the afterword of Binjamin Wilkomirski's book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. [See the September-October 1998 Journal, pp. 15-16.] We now know that this work, which is still sold in book stores, is a total fabrication. It is fiction sold as fact.

Wilkomirski's "memoir" is a prime example of the level of ruthless emotional exploitation to which the Holocaust racket has sunk. Historical revisionists are not the only ones who are critical of the Holocaust myth makers. Peter Novick, in his 1999 study The Holocaust in American Life, says of Wilkomirski's book: "When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly praised for its authenticity, might have been completely invented, Deborah Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged that if this turned out to be the case, it 'might complicate matters somewhat,' but insisted that it would still be 'powerful' as a novel."

I may ask: With what kind of moral framework is Professor Deborah Lipstadt imbuing her students? With impunity she is still defaming and inciting hatred against the German people -- which is a crime against the Germans' human rights. Lipstadt is thus committing a crime against humanity. Then again, the Germans are letting it happen!

Natural Justice: From the 'Educators'

Let's go back 15 years, to February 1985, when Ernst Zündel began his legal battle with the world Holocaust lobby. The first "great Holocaust trial" was beginning in Toronto.

In Australia, I had just been dismissed from my teaching post, and was beginning an eight-year legal battle against the Victorian Education Department, ultimately to succeed in having the dismissal reversed. How did I manage that? The issue in court was whether I had been given "natural justice," that is, the right of reply to an allegation. The principle of natural justice is, of course, not a part of statute law but rather of common law. The Crown solicitor stated in the interrogatories -- the question and answer section of the proceedings where preliminary matters are tested to find out how strong each side's case is -- that I "was given every opportunity to respond to the allegations -- and in fact did so" during the formal hearing in the director-general's office. This legal opinion rested on documentary evidence: during the formal hearing on February 7, 1985, a legal officer had taken notes when my witnesses and I talked with the director-general. This legal officer had written that I "was given every opportunity to respond to the allegations, and in fact did so." My legal counsel of one year -- I had already been rejected by four legal firms -- threw in the towel, claiming that I could not win the case because "you have been given natural justice."

What to do next? I insisted that I had not been given the opportunity to respond to the allegations leveled against me -- seven allegations of incompetence and five allegations of disobedience (the latter all alleged to have happened during a time-span of less than five minutes).

On the day of the formal hearing -- February 7, 1985 -- I attempted to hand to the director-general my written response to the eleven allegations. I still recall his words: "Dr. Töben, it is not a matter of you responding to these allegations point-by-point. Give me a reason why I should not act on the legally constituted enquiry's recommendation that your services be dispensed with."

Luckily I had secretly recorded this whole interview, and a young barrister to whom I played the tape listened intently: "I think your case has stumps, not yet legs, but certainly stumps. I think we can run this case." He then had the whole tape transcribed. At the end of the trial, the judge found that because the official inquiry looked into my competence, but not into the disobedience allegations -- that were no doubt simply added to give weight to the former allegations -- I had not been given natural justice, that is, the right of reply. The judge also said something about the director-general "shifting ground" -- that's a euphemism for lying.

It was only a technical victory because I was not reinstated. But in 1992 I presented my case to the South Australian Teachers' Registration Board, and was given permission to teach in South Australian schools.

Complicated court cases rarely produce outright winners or losers. Knowing this, lawyers shrug their shoulders with a cynical attitude, "win some, lose some." In my case, the concept of natural justice -- a right of reply -- thus defeated outright lying.

Natural Justice: Before the 'Human Rights Commission'

In 1996, I encountered the same unprincipled legal framework. When the Adelaide Institute set up its own Internet website, Australia's leading Zionist, Jeremy Jones, was quick to act -- following a signal sent around the world by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who had designated our website a "hate site." Jones -- vice-president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) -- brought us before a "Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission" (HREOC), bitterly complaining on behalf of all Australian Jews that our work violated the recently enacted Racial Discrimination Act.

Like many similar tribunals, this commission was meant to provide low-cost conflict resolution, outside of the normally much more expensive and time-consuming regular court system. Parties before a commission tribunal are encouraged to first resolve their conflicts through conciliation meetings, before coming to a formal hearing. Our case was different, though. Jones refused to attend any conciliation meetings, and instead pressed hard to bring the matter to a formal hearing.

The lady who initially prepared our case, before any formal hearing date had been set, advised me before leaving the HREOC that our case was an international political matter. With this revelation, I was slowly beginning to understand those individuals who spoke of a "Jewish conspiracy," a notion I had rejected outright. I still do. I simply demand to be given the names of those who are doing the persecuting.

When it was time for the hearing, it was not held in Adelaide, where the alleged offense occurred, but rather in Sydney. This was a tactical move on the part of Jones and the ECAJ, and the HREOC commissioner -- who hails from Adelaide -- granted Jones' request, thereby placing additional financial hardships on me.

The formal hearing began in Sydney with Jones trying to pull a fast one on the commissioner, who was already biased against me. He claimed to represent all of Australia's Jews on this matter. I protested that Mr. Jack Selzer -- Adelaide Institute's associate in New South Wales -- was Jewish, and certainly would not have Jones representing him before the commission. The application was suitably amended.

Then came my twenty-seven witness statements in support of our work. (Those of you whom I asked for help with this will recall my request.) What happened? Sifting through the statements, the commissioner quickly deemed most of them to be irrelevant.

I then turned to her with a question: "Is truth a defense in these proceedings?" She pussyfooted about, saying something about having to follow the wording of the Racial Discrimination Act. I continued with words to the effect: "If truth is not a defense in these proceedings, then lies will flourish. Where lies flourish an immoral situation occurs because truth is a moral virtue. These proceedings are immoral and I cannot continue to participate in them any further." With that I left the room.

[On October 10, 2000, the Australian government's "Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission" (HREOC) ordered the Adelaide Institute to remove from its Internet website material that "denies the Holocaust," and to issue an abject written apology to the country's Jews. To date the Adelaide Institute's website ( www.adelaideinstitute.org  ) continues to challenge the gas chamber myth.]

The Hayward Thesis

In each hearing we submitted a copy of Dr. Joel Hayward's 1993 master's thesis, wherein he endorses the revisionist view that the alleged homicidal gas chambers did not exist. [See the May-June 2000 Journal, pp. 21-23.] Dr. Hayward had sent me a copy of his original along with a written authorization to use it however I wished. This written consent was later withdrawn, but by then the damage had already been done.

Hayward's recent recantation does not worry me at all. He is just a good revisionist who has changed his mind. He has done so, he says, after studying the trial transcript and judgment in the London Irving-Lipstadt defamation case. Of course, it is his right to change his opinion, but I'd like to know his reasoning in detail, because that is what he, as a scholar, owes the world. Otherwise his intellectual integrity is shot to pieces.

After I returned home from prison, Hayward rang me and we had an hour-long conversation. He informed me that threats had been made against him by a staff member of the Israeli embassy in Auckland, New Zealand. He told me that he had been advised that he would never be allowed to travel to Israel, but that if, by some chance, he did get in, he would never get out. If that is not a threat, I don't know what is. Hayward dutifully made a public apology (very much in the style of David Cole) to New Zealand's Jewish community for the hurt, pain, and suffering his research, thesis, and held opinion on the Holocaust had caused them.

I consider historical writings to be professional opinion based on a specific store of information, and on the author's moral values. This store of information waxes and wanes -- often influenced by outright political constraints, as, for example, when Marxist regimes ban scholars who fail to toe the party line.

During a visit in the 1970s to then-Communist East Berlin, I met with a historian at the Humboldt University. He had nothing to do. As he explained to me, the process of exclusion had been a gradual one. First his lectures were vetted to make sure nothing he said violated Marxist dogma, then he was assigned to menial work, and finally he was removed entirely from contact with students. He turned up at the university with nothing to do. (I don't know what subsequently happened to him.)

So, now I embrace two concepts.

First: Natural Justice -- the right of reply, or talking with someone instead of someone talking about me, because the latter is persecution, and,

Second: Truth as a Defense in Court Proceedings -- carrying on discussion with reference to truth-content.

Asking Questions

It has always been important for me to speak to friend and foe alike. In 1997, when I undertook my first revisionist world trip, I met many like-minded persons, as well as a few not so like-minded, such as public prosecutor Hans-Heiko Klein in Mannheim, and Rabbi Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Cooper had labeled our website a "hate site." Why did he do it? During our meeting, he complained that our site was linked with those of non-historians such as that of Arthur Butz. I reminded him that we were linked even with the Simon Wiesenthal Center's own site because we believe it is important to have a free flow of information. He agreed that this is important, and even agreed that questioning things is essential for our mental development. Then he asked me: "Do you question the gassings?" I replied that, of course, I wanted to know what the murder weapon looked like. That was enough for him. He rose and said this ended our meeting.

Likewise with Klein, that first time. I had a cordial discussion in his office. While showing me a Leitz file folder packed with material, he said: "I know all about Adelaide Institute." He also asked the gassing question, and I indicated to him that I am aware of the German law that prohibits such questioning. He muttered something about my being like Leuchter on this free speech issue.

So, for Cooper and Klein, merely asking questions is an offense. This is a crime against humanity, because without asking questions we become mental slaves, dependent on someone else interpreting life for us. We thus never develop our own worldview, and that is bad.

To Know, Not to Believe

In August 1998 Adelaide Institute held Australia's first International Revisionist Symposium, something that upset Jeremy Jones. [See the November-December 1998 Journal, pp. 6-10.] We had the pleasure of hosting, as a visitor, His Excellency, the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates.

We also had John Sack as a speaker, and some individuals were upset when he began his talk with the words: "I believe in the Holocaust." I pointed out that holding such a belief is, of course, John's right, and his participation shows how tolerant Holocaust revisionists really are. However, if he were to assert, "The Holocaust is an historical fact," then I would take issue with him, asking him to provide detailed proof supporting his assertion.

I want to know, not to believe.

The Arrest

In March 1999, some months after Jürgen Graf had participated in our revisionist symposium, I joined him and Carlo Mattogno on their archival research tour in former Communist countries. On April 8, 1999, I visited prosecutor Klein's office, and was subsequently arrested. Because a couple of versions of the arrest are floating about, let me briefly tell you what happened.

After arriving that morning at the local Mannheim police station, I inquired where state prosecutor Klein's office was located. An officer rang Klein and confirmed that my meeting with him was set for 2:00 p.m. I had other things planned for later in the afternoon, including travel to Bielefeld to meet, next day, with Judge Luetzenkirchen, the jurist who had confirmed Udo Walendy's earlier prison sentence.

So, around 9:30 a.m. I walked into Klein's office and asked whether he could bring forward the time of our meeting. He agreed to meet at 11 a.m. When I later walked into his personal office, I saw Klein sitting at his desk and another man sitting in a chair in front of me. I was introduced to Herr Mohr. Sensing something, I spontaneously asked Mohr: "You're not here for me, are you?" Mohr responded -- and this was corroborated by Klein almost in unison -- "No, I'm here just by chance."

Klein then invited me to present the information I had, and among other things, I mentioned that a new sign had gone up at Auschwitz-Birkenau Krematorium II telling visitors about the alleged gas induction holes at the top of the Krema morgue roof. He asked me a few questions designed to trap me into denying the gas chamber's existence, which I avoided answering. But it was no help to me, and Klein then informed me that he was arresting me, and that Mr. Mohr would be taking me to the police station. Mohr began fiddling with his handcuffs, and I said that that would not be necessary because I would not attempt to run away. I had come here to study German justice, I said, and this would help me to learn more about it.

In Germany an arrested person must, by law, be brought before a judge within twenty-four hours. I was, and the arrest warrant that was issued against me reflected the haste with which it had been written up. I didn't recognize myself in what was said about me. I was seemingly the author of most of Ernst Zündel's works and of Germar Rudolf's publications. (It also appeared from my correspondence with Professor Gerald Fleming that he had lodged a complaint against me with the German authorities. Andreas Röhler, publisher of Sleipnir, soon established contact with Fleming, who assured Röhler that my imprisonment had nothing to do with him, and that he opposed it.)

Jail

This arrest warrant (Haftbefehl) was enough to send me to jail. Bail was refused, citing the experience with Fred Leuchter. [The American gas chamber specialist, author of the 1988 "Leuchter Report," was arrested in Cologne on October 28, 1993, just before he was to appear as a guest on a television program, and held for thirty-four days until his release on November 30, 1993. See the November-December 1993 Journal, pp. 22-23.] Klein alleged that Leuchter had skipped the country after he had been let out on bail. Later a confidential prison source informed me that the German authorities had, in fact, wanted Leuchter to leave Germany and return to the United States.

It is common practice to challenge an arrest warrant, and a week later this was done. By that time, though, Klein had gotten his act together, and a second arrest warrant was issued on May 3 that listed five allegedly criminal writings, all taken from Adelaide Institute's website.

Let me just clarify; I was held on remand, or in detention, while awaiting trial, or, in German, Untersuchungshaft, literally "investigative custody." Imprisonment, that is, a prison term following sentencing for a crime, is Haft in German. However, I tend not to differentiate between detention, house arrest, imprisonment, or jail, because each amounts to a loss of personal freedom.

During my seven months in prison I had a dream every night -- but not once did I have one that unsettled me. Nor did I suffer from depression, as many prisoners do during their first few weeks in jail.

It was obvious to me that my case was an attempt by Klein to play world policeman over the Internet, something opposed even by German jurists (such as Prof. Ulrich Siebert of Würzburg University, who wrote a detailed paper in July 1999 about my case).

The day after the second arrest warrant was issued, a local radio station broadcast a news item about my further detention in Mannheim prison. It also reported that the State of Israel had sent good wishes to the Mannheim public prosecutor's office. When I head that, I knew that I had become a political prisoner.

My attorney, Ludwig Bock, and I had decided not to mount a defense, because any revisionist evidence offered by either of us in our own defense would itself constitute an additional violation of law. Bock also informed the judge he would no longer act as my attorney because he, Bock, was facing a similar charge. (At the time I accepted Bock as my lawyer in this case, I did not know that Klein had charged Bock with inciting racial hatred for having, two years earlier, too vigorously defended yet another German "thought criminal," Günter Deckert. Three weeks before my arrest, Bock was found guilty and fined 9,000 marks. His conviction was later upheld.)

Rejecting Bock's plea, the court ordered him to continue to represent me. But to protect himself, on the first day of my trial, November 8, Bock read out a statement saying this court case was like a witch trial, and that he and I would remain silent throughout the proceedings because evidence is not privileged in such cases.

In addition to the five allegations listed in the arrest warrant, Klein introduced a number of items of evidence that the two judges, Kern and Schmetzer, each read aloud in turn. One was a letter to me in prison from Jürgen Graf, who admonished me for having visited Klein. Graf wrote that he, along with Carlo Mattogno, Robert Faurisson, and so forth -- the list was a lengthy "Who's Who" of revisionists -- had all warned me not to visit this madman. Klein cited this letter to prove that I was one of the world's leading revisionists, and therefore as evidence of my criminal mindset.

Court Fight

At the end of the first day of trial I had time to think about my situation. I came to the view that instead of going down with barely a whimper, I should put up a fight. So on the second day of my trial, before the proceedings commenced, I read out the following statement:

1. It would be painful for me if I let myself be forced to be silent, especially if it concerns seeking clarification or solving problems.
2. I regard this trial as a state-sanctioned mental rape of my person.
3. Through a lifetime of philosophical studies I have liberated myself from my own ignorance, thereby not shying away from becoming a citizen who voices his concerns and who takes a moral-ethical stand against injustices.
4. After I left the court Monday afternoon I reflected a lot on what was happening in court. I also saw a television news item in which reporter Volker Hurrle insulted me and incited hatred against me. Yesterday morning I read articles by Ulrich Willenberg in the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung that also offered an ideologically distorted picture of my endeavors, and thereby defamed and incited hatred against me.
5. Every thinking human being is a revisionist. Revisionism is nothing but a method, a heuristic principle, with which to construct one's world view. Opinions are constantly revised through a free flow of information. Only encrusted minds cannot absorb new information, preventing moral responsibility from coming to the fore. Then citizens such as myself are arrested during a private discussion and thrown into prison.
6. I revised my plans last night when I heard German president Johannes Rau's address, given on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rau said that no one is expelled from Germany for disagreeing with the government's opinions. He also talked about freedom, and how justice requires it. I now add that in Germany there is a basic law that protects my human rights. I therefore request that I may defend myself in this court with a new lawyer, Dr. Thor von Waldenstein.
7. I am now in my eighth month in Mannheim jail, and I have gained many impressions of the German justice system. I was elected spokesperson for the 250 prisoners on remand, and I hear many prisoners insult prosecutors and judges as "racists" and "Nazis." Public prosecutor Klein -- that's the irony -- also defames me with these words. He even decorates his office wall with a swastika!
8. I see prosecutors and judges order prisoners on remand placed in their cells for twenty-three hours a day. They are treated like convicted prisoners, and not as innocent persons. Convicts are better off than prisoners on remand, who are not even allowed to participate in the church service and in the Bible study group. This is human rights abuse -- the prevention of exercising one's religious belief. Why do Hurrle and Willenberg not focus on such injustices?
9. I have no criticism to make of the staff of the Mannheim jail. They attempt to do their best in coping with a difficult situation, but they can do only so much, and they are often just overburdened.

A Free Man

Judge Klaus Kern refused my request to remove my silent lawyer, Ludwig Bock, from my case, and to order a new trial with proper legal representation.

In his summation, prosecutor Klein demanded a sentence of two years and four months for me because, he said, "it is obvious that the seven months in prison have had no effect on him." He also claimed that my criminal intent was evident in my revisionist mindset, and that this makes me a hard-core revisionist, an anti-Semite, and a racist.

After adjourning for about an hour, the judges returned. Judge Kern read out the sentence: three months for allegations one through three; six months for an open letter I had written to Judge Clapiér-Krespach (violating section 130 of the criminal code, which outlaws "popular incitement," because I had mailed it, and several copies, to persons in Germany); and three months for allegation five. The judge rounded this down to ten months, and then set bail at six thousand marks. Because I had already spent seven months behind bars, and had been well behaved during my imprisonment, the "two-thirds" rule applied. I was therefore released for time served in custody.

This deprivation of my mental freedom rests on the Holocaust myth, the Holocaust dogma. The dogma is all-pervasive and gaining in strength, but the stronger it becomes, the more resistance will grow against it. These are interesting times. The United States of America, with its free speech guarantee, will continue to play a leading role in keeping the controversy alive.

[On December 12, 2000, the federal German appeals court in Karlsruhe criticized the Mannheim court for its leniency, and ordered that Fredrick Töben be retried. The appeals court upheld the principle that German courts may try foreigners for actions which are lawful in the countries in which they are committed.]

About the author

Fredrick Töben was born in June 1941 in Germany, and emigrated to Australia when he was ten. He studied at Melbourne University in Australia, as well as at universities in Heidelberg, Tübingen and Stuttgart in Germany, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy. He is the founder and director of the Adelaide Institute, an important revisionist research and publishing center (P.O. Box 3300, Norwood 5067, Australia. Web site: www.adelaideinstitute.org ). This essay is adapted from his address at IHR's Thirteenth International Conference, May 28, 2000. This essay is adapted from Robert Faurisson's foreword to Fredrick Töben's forthcoming book, When Truth is No Defence: I Want to Break Free.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Powerful Jewish Dynasty Profiled

• The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, by Ron Chernow. New York: Random House, 1993. Hardcover. 820 pages. Photographs. Bibliography. Reference notes. Index.

Ron Chernow has written a detailed and sometimes tedious history of one of the world's most prominent international banking families. While he began this as an independent work, Chernow eventually received extensive help from members of the German-American Warburg clan. "I am humbled by the courtesy and generosity shown by the Warburg family," he writes in the acknowledgments section, "and hope that my book repays their efforts." So sympathetic is Chernow's portrayal that it can rightly be regarded as an authorized version of events.

While it also contains a lot of material I consider superfluous, this is not to say that The Warburgs isn't worth reading. Chernow provides insight into how Jewish patricians operate in society, and how their roles changed during the turbulent twentieth century.

Yet when addressing critically important events, Chernow's explanations are sometimes less than satisfying. Consider, for instance, his fuzzy explanation of Paul Warburg's crucial role in establishing the Federal Reserve Bank.

Intimately acquainted with European central banks, especially the Reichsbank, Paul didn't claim to originate new banking principles so much as import European practices. As with Max [Paul's older brother] in Hamburg, Paul meshed spectacularly with his historical moment. Once again, a Warburg succeeded because of his contradictory status. As a Jew in a gentile world, a German immigrant confronting a new country, Paul was able to spot flaws in American finance to which native bankers had been blinded by familiarity.

Along with many other bankers, Chernow explains, Paul Warburg was unhappy with the risk inherent in America's decentralized banking system. The central bank he envisioned for the United States would insure against future "panics" and do away with much of the risk of banking. To this end, he played a key but secretive role in this project:

In November 1910, [Senator] Aldrich [of Rhode Island], Paul [Warburg], and four other experts sneaked off to discuss bank reform at a secret hideaway on Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast. With Democrats now in control of Congress and Progressives railing against Wall Street, the bankers had to travel incognito, lest they be accused of hatching a cabal.

As part of the elaborate charade, the conference participants pretended to be sportsmen, outfitting themselves as duck hunters.

What Chernow does not adequately explain is why such secrecy was necessary if a central bank was really such a great idea. We are told, in effect, that Warburg and others hatched a cabal to avoid being accused of hatching a cabal.

Because it was the product of a furtive conclave, and secrecy still surrounds many central bank decision-making activities, it is hardly surprising that there are so many dark suspicions and "banking conspiracy" theories involving the Federal Reserve Bank.

According to Chernow, Paul Warburg was the only person in America who understood how a central bank works. In 1912 and 1913, he drew up the basic plan for the Federal Reserve banking system, and he drafted the Federal Reserve Act. In December 1913 President Wilson signed the Act establishing the new central bank. If anyone can be called the father of the Federal Reserve Bank, the New York Times has rightly noted, it is Paul Warburg.

The new central bank's board of governors -- which for several years included Paul Warburg -- became top-heavy with political appointees whose policy of loose credit set the stage for the Great Depression. America's economic collapse of the 1930s can be traced to the Federal Reserve's operation by incompetents and self-serving hacks.

Back in Germany

While Paul Warburg was making America safer for financiers, his older brother, Max, was busy in Hamburg helping finance construction of Germany's new merchant fleet through the HAPAG company. Because the Warburg family fortune was built on financing international trade, Max Warburg naturally sought to encourage the growth of such trade. For the same reasons, international bankers encouraged the removal of tariffs and other trade barriers.

The HAPAG company -- headed by another German Jew, Albert Ballin -- played a major role in building Germany's mighty merchant and military fleets. Britain regarded the German challenge as a grave threat to its naval hegemony, and it was this rivalry that was a major contributing factor to the First World War. This was not the intent of the participants, of course, just as economic collapse was not the intent of the Federal Reserve governors. Max Warburg and Albert Ballin foresaw the catastrophe of world war in Germany's naval expansion, just as Paul Warburg saw that his creation was pursuing an unsound monetary policy. In each case, Chernow writes, the Warburgs were unable to avert disaster.

Max Warburg's meshing with his historical moment cost the Hamburg branch of the family dearly. The Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War severely hurt the Warburg family bank, M. M. Warburg and Co. This, along with the disastrous postwar inflation, nearly ruined the firm, which was saved only with a large loan from Max's American brothers.

Because Max Warburg was so familiar with international finance, the postwar "Weimar Republic" government asked him to represent the German Treasury as a delegate in the war reparations negotiations. However, Max "explained that a Jew shouldn't undertake the mission, 'for without doubt, if the conditions of the [Allied] Entente were dreadfully hard ... the consequence would surely be anti-Semitic attacks'."

He suggested that his legal counsel, another Jew named Carl Melchior, should instead take the job. Chernow has some difficulty explaining this: "Yet one wonders whether Max was entirely candid with Schiffer in declining the finance chairmanship for himself. After all, as a Jew and Warburg partner, Melchior was no less vulnerable to anti-Semitic smears than Max."

Jews in German Society

Anti-Semitism, or the fear of it, comes up repeatedly in this book an as explanation for action or inaction on the part of the Warburgs. In spite of this, though, the Warburg family itself did very well for itself in Germany until the mid-1930s. Indeed, Germany's Jews generally prospered until the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist coming to power in 1933. During the interwar era, three-quarters of German Jewry was middle-class or richer. There were no legal barriers to Jewish advancement in any field, and Jews were rapidly assimilating through intermarriage. In the year just before Hitler came to power, Chernow reports, more than half of Jews who married took non-Jewish spouses.

None of this means, of course, that there weren't barriers to social mobility for Jews. But similar restrictions affected many non-Jews as well. Class barriers were a major feature of pre-Hitler Germany.

International Network

What is remarkable is not the degree of intolerance, but the extent to which Jews were tolerated and even encouraged in Germany. Jews were permitted to wield tremendous power and influence even though so many of them -- with the Warburgs at the forefront -- were part of a mighty, supra-national Jewish network that was dedicated above all to its own particular interests.

Members of this international Jewish elite cemented its ties through marriage. For example, Felix Warburg married Frieda Schiff, daughter of probably the most powerful Jew in America, the German-born Jacob Schiff. Felix's brother Paul married Nina Loeb, daughter of another prominent Jewish banker, Solomon Loeb.

An international network of Jewish organizations and charities devoted to the well-being of Jewish communities around the world operated as a shadow government for this scattered, stateless population. As leading members of the "Jewish royalty," the Warburgs played an important role in resettling hundreds of thousands of Russian and eastern European Jews in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, underwriting the development of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine, and other projects. They also played an major role in domestic and international politics. During the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905), Felix Warburg's father-in-law, Jacob Schiff, a fierce enemy of Tsarist Russia, helped finance the Japanese war effort. Driven by intense hatred of Russia's conservative, anti-Jewish government, Schiff kept Russia from obtaining Wall Street financing prior to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and American entry into World War I.

A little-known but very ambitious Warburg project between the wars was the "Agro-Joint." Established in 1924 and financed by Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald (of Sears, Roebuck), and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the "American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation" funnelled millions of dollars into Soviet Russia to transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews to 215 farming colonies on two and a half million acres. "Agro-Joint" money purchased land, livestock, agricultural machinery and more than a thousand tractors. Four hundred trade schools were established to train Jews in metal, woodworking, printing and other skills. (Regrettably, Chernow provides little information about the Soviet officials who dealt with the Warburgs in this venture.)

In 1927 Felix Warburg toured the Soviet republic, visiting 40 of the Jewish agricultural colonies in Ukraine and Crimea (including two named after him). At meetings in their community halls, an elated and inspired Warburg praised the colonists and their pioneering work. Back in United States, he responded to critics with a vigorous defense of the Communist regime. Felix Warburg was, writes Chernow, "quick to note that the Soviet government was improving the economic lot of the Jews."

The utopian scheme lasted until 1937 when the Soviets double-crossed the American capitalists and absorbed the Jewish colonies into local Soviet agencies. The last "Agro-Joint" assets were transferred to the Soviet government in 1940.

This channeling of money to Soviet Russia greatly upset Zionist leaders such as Stephen Wise and Chaim Weizmann, who grumbled that the millions should have been directed instead to building a Jewish presence in Palestine. Weizmann worked very hard to win Warburg family support for the establishment of a Jewish state there. The Warburgs were skeptical of Zionism, though, fearing that a Jewish state would supplant the traditional organizations, which they headed, as the nexus of Jewish political power. To reassure the reluctant Warburgs, Weizmann told them that the term "Jewish state" was only meant metaphorically.

Hitler Comes to Power

Back in Hamburg, Max Warburg was even less impressed than his American relations with Weizmann's efforts. Regarding himself as a German patriot, he felt that Germany's Jews should stay put, even though World War I had crippled his business and the ascension of the National Socialist party was driving away many of his clients. As the secular head of German Jewry (he once referred to himself as the "god" of the Jews) much of his social status would be lost if the Jews emigrated.

Even the Warburgs were not entirely immune from the infectious enthusiasm of Hitler's movement. In 1930 Siegmund Warburg told his cousin Karl that, the anti-Semitism aside, he saw some redeeming qualities in the National Socialist cause. "The Nazis are doubtless in part dreadfully primitive in human and political terms," he wrote in a letter. "On the other hand, one finds among a large part of them valuable, typically German strengths, which are indeed incredible in a political connection, but show strong feeling for social and national duties ..."

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Max Warburg was Germany's most prominent Jewish banker. He headed the most important private banking firm, and was a member of the "general council" of the nation's central bank. In March 1933 he approved Hitler's decision to name Dr. Hjalmar Schacht as president of the Reichsbank. The document naming Schacht to this post is signed by Chancellor Hitler and President von Hindenburg as well as the eight members of the Reichsbank "general council," including the Jews Mendelssohn, Wassermann and Warburg.

Schacht's skill during the 1920s in curing runaway inflation and getting the German economy back on an even keel earned him world renown as a financial wizard. A conservative, old-school banker, he never joined the National Socialist party. (Tried by the Nuremberg Tribunal as a "major war criminal," he was acquitted.)

At a meeting in July 1934, Hitler asked Schacht if he would also head up the German Economics Ministry. "Before I take office I should like to know how you wish me to deal with the Jewish question?," Schacht asked. "In economic matters, the Jews can carry on exactly as they have done up to now," replied Hitler. And so it was -- at least for a few years.

In 1936, for example (three years after Hitler took power), the M. M. Warburg bank in Hamburg was still profitable. Among other lucrative connections, it was still disbursing interest payments to bondholders for the giant Friedrich Krupp company of Essen. As Siegmund Warburg wrote in July 1936: "M. M. W. and Co. are still remarkably untouched by the Nazi situation and the business is doing well." Even in 1938, notes Chernow, the Warburg bank was turning a profit.

Max Warburg opposed the international Jewish boycott of German goods, particularly because his bank derived most of its income from international trade. Regrettably, Chernow fails to name the Jews behind this anti-German campaign, nor does he mention that the infamous 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was a limited, one-day response to the sustained worldwide Jewish boycott against Germany.

M.M. Warburg and Co. played an important role in facilitating the "Haavara" or "transfer" agreement. Through this remarkable arrangement, concluded in 1933 between Hitler's government and the Zionist leadership, property of Jews emigrating to Palestine was used to purchase German-made goods, which were shipped to Palestine and sold there. Money from the sale of these goods went to the migrating Jews. About ten percent of German Jewry emigrated through the "Haavara" deal, which benefited Jewish emigrants, helped overcome the anti-German boycott, and immensely strengthened the Zionist community in Palestine. Moreover, it enriched Max Warburg's bank, which served as conduit for three-fourths of "Haavara" funds. [See "Zionism and the Third Reich" in the July-August 1993 Journal.]

Until 1938, Max Warburg benefited from his cordial personal relationship with Dr. Schacht. But as Schacht's influence with Hitler waned, so did Warburg's position in German business. As German corporations were "Aryanized," Warburg was forced to substitute a trusted non-Jewish company employee for himself on the hundred or so corporate boards on which he held a seat.

When the Warburg bank itself was Aryanized in May 1938, an era that began in 1798 came to an end. The firm was turned over to a non-Jewish employee, Rudolf Brinckmann, and Max Warburg left his Hamburg office for the last time. (A short while later he left Germany forever, dying in 1946 in the United States.) The firm's traditional name lingered until 1941, when it was changed to Brinckmann, Wirtz and Co.

Survivors

At least two family members remained in Germany throughout the Third Reich era. Marietta Warburg lived unmolested and in relative comfort in a suburb of Hamburg with her non-Jewish (and anti-Nazi) husband. "There were many such cases of Jews who eked out a subterranean life in Germany during the war," comments Chernow. (In Hamburg alone, for example, 600 Jews survived the war years, "mostly those in mixed marriages.")

More remarkable is the case of Otto Warburg, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1931 for physiology and medicine. In spite of his Jewish ancestry and outspoken hostility to the Hitler regime, he was permitted to continue his work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Because of his Jewish ancestry, in 1941 he briefly lost his post at the Institute, "but a few weeks later received a personal order from Hitler's Chancellery to resume work on his cancer research." Otto Warburg's decision to collaborate with the regime, writes Chernow, "incensed colleagues outside Germany." The scientist "justified his decision to stay in Nazi Germany by claiming that he was performing extremely important cancer research that would save lives and that he couldn't transfer his research operation abroad."

After the War

On this side of the Atlantic, Max's son, Eric, played an important role in the American military. After joining the Army, Eric quickly became a Lt. Colonel. Upon spotting a map showing the dismemberment of Germany into occupation zones, he argued successfully to have his native Hamburg transferred from the Soviet zone to the British zone. When Hermann Göring was captured in May 1945, the critical task of interrogating the Reichsmarshall fell to Eric Warburg.

"Göring's economic bureaucracy had spearheaded the Aryanization of M. M. Warburg, and now fate, with a commendably poetic sense of style, created a fine opportunity for revenge," comments Chernow. "Eric would call it 'the grand finale' of his wartime work."

Upon defeated Germany the Americans imposed a version of the draconian "Morgenthau plan," which kept the economy in ruins for several years. In Hamburg (where 118,000 people had perished in Allied bombing raids) people wandered the ruins of what had been one of Europe's proudest and most magnificent cities. Food rations in occupied Hamburg dwindled to one thousand calories per person per day. As part of the occupation program, the Allies set about dismantling what was left of German industry. In mid-1949 occupation authorities began dynamiting the cement slipways in Hamburg that had launched the giant HAPAG ocean liners.

Rudolf Brinckmann welcomed Eric back to a shattered Hamburg in 1945, and offered to hand the destitute banking firm back to the Warburg family. Eric refused. Following the implementation of drastic monetary reform in 1948, the German economy -- and Brinckmann, Wirtz and Co. -- revived. With this turnaround, both Brinckmann and Warburg changed their minds about transferring control of the bank.

What followed was a decades-long battle between Brinckmann and Warburg for control of the firm. It ended in 1989 when the Brinckmann family withdrew, and two years later the firm's name was changed back to M. M. Warburg and Co. By this time both Rudolf Brinckmann and Eric Warburg were dead. (Eric's son, Max, now heads his grandfather's business.)

This book also covers the lives of many other members of the Warburg clan. Like other prominent Jewish families, the American Warburgs wielded great influence not only in domestic and foreign politics, but in cultural life as well. Feeling alienated from America's WASP establishment and high society, some Warburg family members sought to displace the seemingly inhospitable traditional culture.

According to an art historian quoted by Chernow, Eddie Warburg (Felix's son) and his wealthy Jewish friend Lincoln Kirstein "embraced modernism in part because, knowing that they were out of the mainstream anyway, they elected to foster rather than mitigate their sense of difference." Along with Nelson Rockefeller, Eddie Warburg was the youngest trustee of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was also a patron of avant garde sculptor Gaston Lachaise, and (together with Kirstein) imported "modern" Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine to the United States.

All the same, with each new generation the American Warburgs become ever more assimilated into the country's gentile upper class. This branch of the family has produced no one of note in the last generation. Jimmy Warburg, who made a mint off Polaroid, is the last American Warburg to build a fortune of his own.

Money is the engine of art, education and politics, and the philanthropic and business endeavors of super-wealthy families dramatically affect all three. International banking depends on international trade, which in turn is dependent on international policy. Bankers with international ties work to influence political leaders for the benefit of their business and personal interests. This detailed history of the Warburg family shows how this relationship operates to produce both positive and harmful consequences.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

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