Background to Treason
A Brief History Of U.S. Policy in the Middle East
Part 3: From 1933 to the Second World War[1]
By Dr. William Pierce
The almost simultaneous accession to power, early in 1933, of Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt is one of the great ironies of history.
Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin enjoying a laugh at Tehran Conference, 1943
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The time called for strong White leadership. The largest White nation on earth was prostrate under the heel of a Jew-inspired and still largely Jew-staffed terror-regime of extraordinary virulence and expansionist propensity.[2] In the 14 years of its existence the Jewish-Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union had murdered some 20 million Russians and Ukrainians. In 1932-33 alone 5 1/2 million anti-Bolshevik farmers and members of their families were exterminated in an artificial famine; while the commissars and the urban rabble on whom they depended for support dined well, armed Bolshevik gangs confiscated the crops and livestock of farmers who had resisted collectivization and left them to starve.[3]
Adolf Hitler pictured with young girl |
In the years since the end of the First World War the Jewish hold on the media of popular culture and public opinion, both in America and Europe, had tightened. During the same period the Jews had greatly increased their infiltration of educational institutions and the churches, labor unions and political parties. They were turning all of these institutions to their own purposes, leaving the host society less and less able to deal with its own problems and advance its own ends. And new problems were certainly brewing, not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe. In addition to the growing Bolshevik menace, there were other seeds of conflict which had been sown by the last war and by the disastrous treaty which followed it, and they were beginning to sprout.
A White champion was needed to crush Jewish Bolshevism wherever it had taken root; to extirpate the carriers of the Bolshevik virus; to free the news and entertainment media everywhere from Jewish control; to purge from the White consciousness the spiritual and cultural poison which already had been injected under that control; to raise from the dust the banner of White racial idealism and hold it aloft as a rallying standard for progressive Whites throughout the world; and to deal as ruthlessly as necessary with the vested interests, the mercenaries, and the spiritually corrupted, who would array themselves on the side of the Jews in opposing all of these things.
That was a tall order indeed, but in Germany's new chancellor it was met. In breadth of vision and depth of understanding, in commitment to the task at hand, in ability to accomplish it, and in willingness to be ruthless when necessary, Hitler stood far above every other political leader of the time -- indeed, of any time in the Modern Age. He was the man to free the race and lead it once again to the upward path.
He began in Germany: within months he had cleaned out the Communists, who had been on the verge of taking over the country during the administration of his democratic predecessors. The democrats had been at a loss as to how to cope with the Reds, but Hitler did such a thorough job on them that for the next 12 years the international Communist apparatus considered an undercover assignment to Germany tantamount to a death sentence.
Then he dealt with the Jews -- not by putting them into gas chambers as the popular mythology has it, but by freeing the German press, the German film industry, German radio, and the German educational establishment from their control and influence. The Jews in Germany prior to 1933 had followed their age-old pattern: shunning the manual occupations and creative work generally, they had established a strong beachhead in trade; from there they had begun infiltrating the professions. By 1933 nearly half of the lawyers in Berlin were Jews (1879 Jews out of a total of 3890 lawyers), and disproportions of similar magnitude were being established in the medical and teaching professions.
It was in the professions offering an opportunity to influence public opinion and shift cultural norms that Jews had sought and gained the strongest hold, however. They owned or controlled Germany's largest and most influential newspapers, such as the Berliner Tageblatt, the Vossische Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Zeitung. The Jewish Ullstein publishing conglomerate owned, in addition to the Vossische Zeitung, the Berliner Morgenpost (circulation 607,000), the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, B.Z. am Mittag, Das Tempo, the Montagspost, the Gruene Post (circulation 1,042,000), the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (circulation 1,603,000), and dozens of other newspapers and magazines.[5]
Hitler changed all of that in a radical way. Within a very short time after he took office, a Jew could no more determine what films Germans would see or what subjects German students would study than an Arab can do the same for Jews in Israel today. Jews in Germany could, of course, continue to write for one another, educate one another, and entertain one another; and they could still engage in those occupations and professions, including merchandising, which did not provide them the means to impose their own spirituality, morality, or ideology on the German people.
Such restrictions were intolerable to the Jews, however. For them it was the whole cake or nothing, and from the day Hitler took office they set their international machinery of disinformation and coercion into motion against the new Germany. One of their first moves was the imposition of an economic boycott. The word went out to Jewish leaders in every country: no German goods could be sold, no German vessels could be used for shipping, and no loans could be made to the German government or to German businessmen. Gentiles who refused to comply with the boycott were themselves to be boycotted.
The initial results were mixed: Germans retaliated by boycotting the large department stores in Germany, which were virtually a Jewish monopoly, taking their trade instead to the smaller shops owned by Germans; German businessmen who were engaged in international trade found that they could get by without foreign loans, if necessary, by turning to barter; and the boycott was far from airtight, with many international businessmen -- including some prominent Jews -- ignoring it altogether and continuing their trade and financial dealings with Germany as before.
To plug the leaks the World Jewish Economic Federation held an International Jewish Boycott Conference in Amsterdam in July 1933. Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy and prominent lawyer long active in Zionist affairs in the United States, presided. An Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was formed to coordinate the economic pressure on Germany, and Untermyer was chosen to head it.[6]
ANL declared a total economic and political war against Germany, and the propaganda tactics it used in that war immediately manifested all of the viciousness and brazenness of which the Jews were capable. The lies about conditions in Germany and the actions of the German government which Untermyer and others began disseminating as early as the summer of 1933, at a time when Jews were free to come and go in Germany, to use their wealth as they wished, or to leave and take it with them, gave a foretaste of the mendacious "gas chamber" propaganda which was to come later.
Untermyer returned to New York on August 6 and announced the Jewish declaration of war against Germany in a radio speech that evening. The complete text of his speech appeared in the New York Times the following day. World Jewry's war against Germany, said Untermyer, is a "holy war... a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds of bigotry, race hatred, and fanaticism that have descended upon what was once Germany, but is now medieval Hitlerland, have been dispersed." Germany, he asserted, had been "converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts."
The only Jews who were in any danger in Germany in 1933 were those who were active in Communist subversion or some other criminal activity. Those who minded their own business (admittedly, always a difficult matter for Jews) were not molested, but the Jews who had manned the Communist Party apparat were forced to flee or face the likelihood of concentration camp. But Untermyer was hardly concerned with truth when he spoke of "the slaughter, starvation, and annihilation, by a country that has reverted to barbarism, of its own innocent and defenseless citizens without rhyme, reason, or excuse."
He went on to claim that the Germans were herding the Jews of Germany into "vile concentration camps, starving and torturing them, murdering and beating them without cause and resorting to every other conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception, until suicide has become the only means of escape, and all solely because they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object of exterminating them."
Thus was born in Samuel Untermyer's fertile imagination the lie which, with much added embroidery, was to emerge 12 years later as the full-blown "Holocaust" hoax. In his August 6 speech he hinted so clearly at this future invention that one can hardly fail to suspect that the Zionists were already banking on the sympathy to be milked from future claims of six million gassed and cremated Jews:
I have seen and talked with many of these terror-stricken refugees who have had the good fortune to escape over the border, though forced to leave their property behind them, and I want to say to you that nothing that has seeped through to you over the rigid censorship and lying propaganda that are at work to conceal and misrepresent the situation of the Jews in Germany begins to tell a fraction of the frightful story of fiendish torture, cruelty, and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women, and children, or the terrors worse than death in which they are living.
When the tale is told, as it will be some day... the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, and cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people who love and have shed their blood for their Fatherland, and to whom Germany owes in large part its prosperity and its great scientists, educators, lawyers, physicians, poets, musicians, diplomats, and philosophers, who are the backbone of its past cultural life.[7]
But why dwell longer upon this revolting picture of the ravages wrought by these ingrates and beasts of prey, animated by the loathsome motives of race hatred, bigotry, and envy. For the Jews are the aristocrats of the world. From time immemorial they have been persecuted and have seen their persecutors come and go. They alone have survived. And so will history repeat itself, but that furnishes no reason why we should permit this reversion of a once great nation to the Dark Ages or fail to rescue these 600,000[8] human souls from the tortures of hell, as we can with the aid of our Christian friends, if we have the will to act.
Well, no one has ever accused the Jews of being modest. Clever, yes; avaricious, yes; vindictive, yes; but not modest and not truthful. Nevertheless, Untermyer was quite forthright in stating the Jews' aim. It was to "undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends." He also stated the Jews' demands on "our Christian friends" plainly enough:
Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping. To our shame be it said that there are a few Jews among us, but fortunately only a few, so wanting in dignity and self-respect that they are willing to travel on German ships where they are despised and meet with the just contempt of the servants who wait on them and of their fellow passengers. Their names should be heralded far and wide. They are traitors to their race.
In conclusion, permit me again to thank you for this heartening reception and to assure you that, with your support and that of our millions of non-Jewish friends, we will drive the last nail in the coffin of bigotry and fanaticism that has dared raise its ugly head to slander, belie, and disgrace 20th-century civilization.[9]
Economic warfare is warfare, and a declaration of economic war is a declaration of war. Throughout history a deliberate act or policy by one nation intended to injure the economic welfare of another has been regarded as a casus belli(I), justifying a warlike response as surely as does a territorial invasion. The Jewish boycott policy was certainly deliberate, and it was certainly intended to injure Germany.
As ANAL's propaganda intensified and began to take hold, the boycott became more of a problem for Germany. The German response was remarkably restrained, however. Instead of lashing out at the Jews, Hitler's government increased its effort to blunt the boycott by achieving economic autarchy.
Foreign journalists and writers were also invited to Germany, so that they could, by reporting the truth to their readers back home, counter the lies being spread by Untermyer and company. A few did this. H.G. Wells, for example, reported that Jews were not being mistreated in Germany and that impressions to the contrary in England, the United States, and elsewhere were entirely due to the "incessant propaganda of the world's most charming but incurably nationalistic race."
Several widely read periodicals, such as the National Geographic Magazine, also reported truthfully on conditions in Germany.[10] And, of course, the 1936 Olympic Games, which were held in Berlin, gave tens of thousands of American tourists and sports enthusiasts an opportunity to visit Germany and witness the truth for themselves.
Even some Jews found good in what Hitler was doing in Germany, although they would not praise him openly. They were mostly Zionists of the Jabotinsky stripe, who welcomed the barriers to cultural assimilation and intermarriage erected by the National Socialists. It would be good for their fellow Jews, they said to one another, to follow the German example and assert their own Jewish nationalism proudly and openly, instead of preaching internationalism to the Gentiles while practicing Jewish nationalism quietly among themselves; the Jews could only be accepted as equals when they dropped their deceitful approach to other peoples.
Ultrazionist hero Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born in Russia |
The same Zionists also advocated the formation of Jewish gymnastic clubs to encourage physical fitness among young Jews, and they urged Jewish parents to steer their children toward careers in farming or handicrafts instead of the traditional law, trade, or finance. Needless to say, such Jews were a very small minority; most chimed in with Untermyer, spewing hate-inspired slander against all things German.
All Zionists, however, whether Revisionists or in the mainstream, and whether they secretly admired Hitler's policies or not, realized that what was happening in Germany was necessary for the achievement of their goal of a Jewish Palestine. Hitler was making Germany a thoroughly inhospitable country for the Jews, forcing them to set up shop elsewhere. Jewish immigration to Palestine consequently skyrocketed, reaching a new record of 61,854 for the year 1935.
The Jews' duplicity in their prewar anti-German propaganda is perhaps nowhere better revealed than in the fact that while they were wailing about the need to wage war "unremittingly" against "medieval Hitlerland" -- a "sacred war," in fact -- the same Jews were busily committing sacrilege by breaking their own boycott against Germany. From 1933 through 1939 the Zionists secretly promoted a flourishing trade in agricultural equipment between Germany and the Jewish settlements in Palestine. Germany exported manufactured goods to Palestine -- 37 million marks worth in 1937 alone -- and was paid in Jewish gold.[11]
The same duplicity later was reflected in the efforts in 1941, in the midst of the war between Germany and Britain which had been provoked largely by Jews, of Jabotinsky's Revisionists to negotiate an alliance with the Germans against the British forces in Palestine. These efforts, just like the trade between Germany and the Jews in Palestine, were strictly under the table, and they had no effect on the Jewish propaganda effort against Germany. They do illustrate the point, however, that Jewish leaders were playing a much more complex game than was evident to most observers in the 1930's and 1940's. They wanted to destroy Germany, which they regarded as a deadly threat to Jewish ambitions of world rule, but at the same time they welcomed the effects on their fellow Jews of German policies, and they were not averse to secret collaboration with the Germans whenever that seemed to offer some advantage.
For several years the average American was exposed to two contradictory sources of information about Germany. Unfortunately, the readers of the National Geographic Magazine were outnumbered by housewives who read nothing but movie magazines and men who read only the sports sections of their daily newspapers. And everyone listened to the radio and went to the movies, media which were already heavily Jewish in the 1930's.
Since voting was not restricted to citizens who were intelligent and well informed, and since the politicians could count, the Jewish propaganda against Germany very soon was echoed by ambitious Gentile legislators, bureaucrats, and office seekers. Publicity-hungry "celebrities," Jew-worshiping Christian ministers, and leftist academics were not far behind them. All of these were sought out by the Jews and persuaded to lend their names to public statements denouncing Hitler, his government, German policies, and the German people. Thus, the lies and the hatred were given an aura of respectability.
Hitler, at least, was aware of this danger, and he had warned of it in 1925. The common people, he noted, lack the imagination of the Jews, just as they lack the Jews' shamelessness:
Therefore... the masses more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. They will never invent a real whopper themselves, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others. Even when presented with the facts they will doubt and waver and continue to accept parts of the lie. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick, a fact which all of the great virtuosos of lying know only too well and of which they make the most treacherous use.
The foremost connoisseurs of this fact regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews...."[12]
The Jewish response to this warning was typical. Knowing that not one American in a hundred would have the gumption to find a copy of Mein Kampf and read for himself what Hitler actually had written, they brazenly turned Hitler's words against him, charging that he had boasted in Mein Kampf that he, not the Jews, swayed the masses by telling them the biggest lies possible; therefore, Hitler was an admitted liar, and nothing that he or his sympathizers said was to be believed.
And, just as Hitler had warned, this whopper stuck. Even today one hears half-educated academics prattle knowingly about Hitler being the inventor and advocate of the "big lie" propaganda technique. Opening a copy of Mein Kampf to the place where Hitler warns of the Jewish use of this trick and rubbing such a savant's nose on the page will not cure him of his folly; he has heard Hitler blamed so often that he simply cannot believe, even when presented with the evidence in black and white, that it is all a matter of Jewish deceit.
If Untermyer's lies in August 1933 were outrageous, the lies the Jews and their collaborators subsequently told about Germany, after they had shifted their propaganda machine into high gear, surpassed all previous bounds of mendacity. They did not limit themselves to inventing spurious atrocity stories, spurious statistics, spurious statements attributed to Hitler and other German leaders, which were passed off as "news"; they also played expertly on the average American's emotions and instincts with undisguised fiction. Anti-German novels, anti-German short stories, anti-German stage plays, anti-German comic strips, anti-German nightclub acts, anti-German posters, and anti-German motion pictures were all used effectively. The Jews, as born salesmen, realized instinctively that the opinions and attitudes of most people are formed at a very primitive, sub-rational level, where facts and reason are of little importance, and they made the most of their realization.
Despite their overwhelming propaganda superiority, the Jews continued to worry that their opponents might succeed in getting their act together and begin countering the Jewish influence on American public opinion effectively. To head off such a possibility the Jews did not hesitate to use raw, physical intimidation. In 1938, for example, they had a group of their Gentile stooges lend their names to a statement warning Americans of German descent not to show any signs of sympathy for Hitler's programs in Germany or to help spread National Socialist ideas in the United States.
If pro-German propaganda is tolerated, the statement threatened, "it cannot fail to create a cyst in the body politic of the American people. It will result in setting apart a large group of inhabitants of the United States whose duty it would be to render primary allegiance to the ruler of a foreign power. Friction between this group and the rest of the American people might result in unrest and possible bloodshed."[13]
One can easily imagine the screams of indignant outrage which would be heard from the same people who cooked up this statement, if a group of prominent politicians, academics, and church leaders had offered the far more plausible suggestion that the toleration of Zionist propaganda would induce Jews to render a primary allegiance to a foreign power, Israel, with the possible consequence that the rest of the American people would regard them as traitors and shed their blood.
The Roosevelt government also engaged in physical intimidation to silence the critics of the Jews. The Federal Bureau of Investigation harassed authors, editors, publishers, and lecturers who attempted to warn the American people that the Jews were brewing up a new war for their own ends. J. Edgar Hoover sent out his "black bag" squads to burglarize the homes and offices of law-abiding citizens and to steal their private papers and research materials, all without the slightest worry that the news media would cry "foul!," as they did in the Vietnam era, when the shoe was on the other foot.
He had mailed thousands of copies of his booklet to legislators, educators, writers, and other influential persons, and he had sold tens of thousands of copies to the public. In it he argued persuasively that the intense Jewish propaganda campaign being waged against Germany and Japan was intended to provoke a war, that a war was not in the best interests of most Americans, and that the propagandists were liars. Townsend began his booklet thus:
What is behind the campaigns of organized hate in America now?
No nation is attacking the United States. No nation is menacing a single inch of territory over which the American flag flies. Every one of the important nations seems eager for friendly relations with us. Every nation in the world wants to trade with us.
Why, then, are our papers so full of hate toward others? ...
Hatred of others is not natural among average Americans. The campaign to promote American hatred of other nations now is strictly a minority movement. There are among us people who have never become fully American... They are now trying to get America involved in their foreign quarrels.
To gather support for this minority aim they are conducting a tremendous publicity campaign to stir American hatred of nations they want us to fight.
Many of these alien-minded people are important advertisers. Newspaper and magazines depend on advertising revenue. Thus, many editors seek to please them by running hate campaigns against any and all nations which the alien-minded advertisers don't like. They have deceived many sincere, loyal Americans. That is one of the influences -- the main influence -- behind the campaigns of hate and war talk in America now....
A powerful minority in America, well organized and well financed, wants us to fight three nations -- Germany, Italy, and Japan....
Note that the majority of American editors, though they pretend peaceful ideals, are promoting this war hate drive in every way possible. Once enough hate is achieved the rest is easy.
The truth would not serve this war hate objective. Deception is being employed as abundantly now as in 1915-17....
Only two characteristics mark the three nations our papers want us to hate and fight. First, these three nations are strongly anti-red. Second, they manage their own money and resources, free from any international financial bondage....
To state the case briefly, our press hates every nation run strictly by its own people -- where neither international Bolshevism nor international finance is allowed a grip....
Townsend went on to present a clear and persuasive analysis of the motivations of the hatemongers, of the deceptions they were using, and of the harmful and dangerous effects of their hate on the American people. It is easy to understand why the Jews wanted to shut him up.
It was hardly necessary, however, to drag him to Washington in handcuffs and leg irons for a show trial; that was merely a bit of Jewish spite, akin to that manifested these days each time some elderly German who played a role in the last war is hounded to his death. For the sad fact was that, by the time President Roosevelt's anti-Japanese policies had finally provoked the Pearl Harbor attack, the Jews were holding nearly all the cards.
Father Coughlin, the populist priest who regularly opposed Roosevelt and the Jews on his radio broadcasts, continued reaching large numbers of people until ordered by the Pope in 1942 to shut up. But most men who, like Bob Townsend, were attempting to alert the American people and counter the Jews' war propaganda were effectively denied access to the mass media. They distributed pamphlets and leaflets, but the Jews, who controlled most radio broadcasting, virtually all of the cinema, and a substantial majority of the big-city daily press, swamped them.[14]
Not only did the Jews wage a hate-propaganda campaign of unprecedented magnitude in the years 1933-1941, but they simultaneously strengthened and expanded their capability for waging future campaigns. What began with Samuel Untermyer's half-hour tirade of lies over New York radio station WABC on August 6, 1933, had become by December 7, 1941, a non-stop flood of poison into the mind of every American. And the propaganda apparatus which enabled the Jews to send millions of Americans overseas, with hate in their hearts, to kill the Jews' enemies in the years 1942-1945 was the same apparatus which, with the addition of the medium of television, enabled them to paralyze the will of Americans to resist the scrapping of their immigration laws and the racial mongrelization of their society in the postwar years. [15]
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Next in this series: Capitalizing on the "Holocaust."
NOTES
1 - This is the third article of a series. Originally intended to be complete in two parts, it has expanded as research turned up additional relevant material, and it is now anticipated that it will consist of four articles [actually five] altogether. The first, covering the period from biblical times to the First World War, appeared in the December 1982 issue of National Vanguard, and the second appeared in the March 1983 issue. This segment is from the April, 1983 issue.
2 - In 1933 approximately half of those in the higher leadership strata of the Soviet Union were Jews. (A study done in 1965 by the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress determined the figure for 1939 with more precision: "Before World War II, 41.1 per cent of the deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. were Jewish ..." [The Soviet Empire (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), p.63.])
3 - This was a "Holocaust" -- a real one -- about which the controlled media remain as silent today as they did then, while they continue to serve up almost daily their Second World War gas-chamber tales about the mythical "six million." The facts are known; Alexander Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the genocidal activities of the Bolsheviks or to reveal their Jewish roots and leadership during the 1930's. Yet Christian Priests and Christian politicians and Christian educators collaborate today with the Jewish masters of the controlled media in the promotion of the Jews as a race of martyrs deserving the world's sympathy. Hardly anything else illustrates as well as does this servile and hypocritical collaboration the moral decadence of the present leadership stratum of the West.
4 - Bela Kun (1886-1937) and Kurt Eisner (1867-1919) were both Jews, as were most of their lieutenants. Both seized the opportunity presented by the social and political chaos at the end of the First World War to organize short-lived Communist regimes.
Hungarian patriots rose against Kun in July 1919. He fled to the Soviet Union, while the Hungarians meted out hemp justice to his Jewish accomplices who were unable to get out of the country soon enough. He perished in 1937 in Stalin's first purge of the Soviet Union.
Eisner was executed by a German patriot on February 21, 1919, in Munich, and the German Army subsequently dealt with Eisner's followers in an appropriate way.
5 - Die Juden in Deutschland (Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., 1935).
6 - Samuel Untermyer (1858-1940) made his fortune as an organizer of corporate conglomerates and a manipulator of stocks before 1910. Then he switched sides and became a trustbuster, working closely with anti-business elements in the Congress. He was counsel to the Pujo Committee (1912-1913), a subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, and he was responsible for much of the content of its report (issued on February 28, 1913), which paved the way for both a Federal income tax and the setting up of the Federal Reserve System. Untermyer was a strong advocate of both, and his behind-the-scenes efforts during 1913 led to the passage of the Owen-Glass Act on December 23, 1913. Woodrow Wilson later appointed him chairman of a commission to set income-tax and excess-profits-tax rates.
During the 1920's he was president of the Palestine Foundation Fund (for aiding the colonization of Palestine by Jews) and vice-president of the American Jewish Congress. In 1927 Untermyer handled the lawsuit (by Herman Bernstein) against automaker Henry Ford which frightened the latter into ceasing publication of his exposes of Jewish activities and withdrawing and destroying all available copies of his book, The International Jew.
7 - Untermyer refers to the British atrocity propaganda of the First World War. In order to drum up public enthusiasm for the war, British authorities and their helpers in the press invented and circulated outlandish stories of German bestiality. Lindley Fraser, a British economics professor who served as the BBC's chief of psychological warfare during the Second World War, later wrote of the tricks pulled by his predecessors:
"The 'Belgian Atrocities' stories provide a curious and unsavoury chapter in the history of war propaganda.... What is not true, so far as later researches have been able to discover, is that the Germans were guilty of any of the horrifying atrocities freely attributed to them by their enemies and widely believed in Great Britain and among Allies and friendly neutrals. Priests used as clappers in cathedral bells, crucified prisoners of war, children with their hands cut off: these and many other stories were common gossip in the Western world and doubtless helped those people on the Allied side who already hated the Germans to hate them still more.
"Where did such stories originate? Some of them... were deliberately invented; thus shortly after the war a well-known British journalist claimed, with some pride, to have been the author of the story about the chopped-off hands." (Propaganda [Oxford University Press, 1957], pp. 34-35).
Another well-known Briton who invented some of the "Belgian Atrocities" stories was historian Arnold J. Toynbee. He finished writing The German Terror in Belgium (George H. Doran Co., 1917) in March 1917, a few weeks before Woodrow Wilson's call for war. The book was intended for American readers who still needed to be persuaded that the United States should enter the war against Germany.
8 - Untermyer's figure is 20 per cent too large. There were 499,682 Jews living in Germany in 1933, according to the census taken that year. Before the outbreak of the Second World War six years later, Hitler had achieved the peaceful reunification of Austria (191,481 Jews in 1934) and the Sudetenland with Germany, but Jews had been emigrating in large numbers from all German territory, so that in 1939 there were only 240,000 Jews left in the Third Reich (including Austria and the Sudetenland), according to The American Jewish Year Book for 1940-41 (v.42, p.602). One can only wonder whether Untermyer's somewhat inflated figure of 600,000 Jews in Germany in 1933 was later simply inflated again, by a factor of ten, to yield the famous 6,000,000 figure for the number of Jews supposedly done away with by Hitler.
9 - It is interesting to compare Untermyer's lurid claim, in one breath, that the Germans were executing a "campaign for the extermination" of the Jews with his complaint, in the next breath, that some Jews were still in the habit of traveling on German ships and being waited on by German servants. It is true, as Untermyer notes, that Jews traveling on German ships, just as Jews remaining in Germany, were exposed to the "just contempt" of the German people, but as long as they obeyed German laws they were not harmed physically by anyone or persecuted by the authorities.
10 - See, for example, the article "Changing Berlin," in the February 1937 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, which gives a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated, 47-page survey of life in the capital city of National Socialist Germany.
11 - See "The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement," by David Yisraeli, in the April 1971 issue of Journal of Contemporary History. A description of the related agreement worked out between the German government and Jewish leaders, so that all Jews wishing to leave Germany and settle in Palestine could take their wealth with them, is given in The Zionist Movement (Zionist Organization of America, New York, 1946), by Israel Cohen (pp. 210-211).
12 - Mein Kampf, v. I, chap. 10.
13 - The German Reich and Americans of German Origin, Oxford University Press, 1938. Among the worthies sponsoring this statement was Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950), later to become Roosevelt's secretary of the War Department.
14 - Ralph Townsend told this editor that he had distributed 150,000 copies of The High Cost of Hate before Pearl Harbor. The Jewish-owned Washington Post alone reached that many people each day.
15 - See, for example, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, by Robert A. Theobald (Devin-Adair, 1954); and Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, by John Toland (Doubleday, 1982).