The Great Conspiracy: the secret war against soviet Russia (by Albert E. Kahn and Michael Sayers) PART IV

Book Four: From Munich to San Francisco

CHAPTER XXII – The Second World War

1. Munich

“Take me to the Duke of Hamilton,” said Hess, speaking in English. l have come to save humanity!” Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler’s Deputy

“The fateful decade 1931-1941,” the U. S. State Department declared in its official publication Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, “began and ended with acts of violence by Japan. It was marked by the ruthless development of a determined policy of world domination on the part of Japan, Germany and Italy.”

The Second World War began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on the pretext of saving Asia from Communism. Two years later, Hitler overthrew the German Republic on the pretext of saving Germany from Communism. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia to save it from “Bolshevism and barbarism.” In 1936 Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland; Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Agreement; and German and Italian troops invaded Spain on the pretext of saving it from Communism.

In 1937 Italy joined Germany and Japan in their Anti-Comintern Agreement; Japan struck again in China, seizing Peiping, Tientsin and Shanghai. The following year, Germany seized Austria. The Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was formed “to save the world from Communism.”.

Addressing the Assembly of the League of Nations in September 1937, the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov said: –

We know three states which in recent years have made attacks on other states. With all the difference between the regimes, ideologies, material and cultural levels of the objects of attack, all three states justify their aggression by one and the same motive – the struggle against Communism. The rulers of these states naively think, or rather pretend to think, that it is sufficient for them to utter the words “anti-Communism,” and all their international felonies and crimes will be forgiven them!

Under the mask of the Anti-Comintern Agreement, Germany, Japan and Italy were marching towards the conquest and enslavement of Europe and Asia.

Two possible courses faced the world: unity of all nations opposed to the Nazi, Fascist and Japanese aggression and the halting of the Axis war menace before it was too late; or disunity, the piecemeal surrender to aggression, and inevitable Fascist victory. The Axis Propaganda Ministries, the agents of Leon Trotsky, French, British and American reactionaries all combined in the international Fascist campaign against collective security. The possibility of unity against aggression was attacked as “Communist propaganda”; dismissed as a “utopian dream”; assailed as an “incitement to war.” In its place was offered the policy of Appeasement, the scheme of turning the inevitable war into a united onslaught against Soviet Russia. Nazi Germany made the most of this policy.

The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, the hero of appeasement, said collective security would divide Europe into “two armed camps.”

The Nazi newspaper Nachtausgabe declared in February 1938: –

We know now that the English Premier, like ourselves, regards Collective Security as nothing but nonsense.

Speaking in Manchester on May 10, 1938, Winston Churchill replied: –

We are told that we must not divide Europe into two armed camps. Is there then to be only one armed camp? – the Dictators’ armed camp and a rabble of outlying peoples, wandering around its outskirts, wondering which of them is going to be taken first and whether they are going to be subjugated or merely exploited?

Churchill was called a “war-monger.”…

In September 1938, the policy of Appeasement reached its culmination. The Governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Great Britain and France signed the Munich Pact – the anti-Soviet Holy Alliance of which world reaction had been dreaming since 1918.

The Pact left Soviet Russia without allies. The Franco-Soviet Treaty, cornerstone of European collective security, was dead. The Czech Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany. The gates of the East were wide-open for the Wehrmacht.(1)

“The Munich Agreement,” wrote Walter Duranty in The Kremlin and the People, “seemed to mark the greatest humiliation which the Soviet Union had suffered since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.”

The world awaited the Nazi-Soviet war.

Returning to England, waving a scrap of paper in his hand, with Hitler’s signature on it, Neville Chamberlain cried: –

“It means peace in our time!”

Twenty years before, the British spy Captain Sidney George Reilly had cried: “At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed… Peace with Germany! Yes, peace with anybody!… Peace, peace on any terms – and then a united front against the true enemies of mankind!”

On June 11, 1938, Sir Arnold Wilson, Chamberlain’s supporter in the House of Commons, declared: –

Unity is essential and the real danger to the world today does not come from Germany or Italy… but from Russia.

But the first victims of the anti-Soviet Munich Pact were not the Soviet peoples. The first victims were the democratic peoples of Europe. Once again, the anti-Soviet facade covered a betrayal of democracy.

In February 1939, the British and French Governments recognized the Fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Franco as the legitimate government of Spain. In the last days of March, after two and a half years of epic, agonizing struggle against overwhelming odds, Republican Spain became a Fascist province.

On March 15, Czechoslovakia ceased to be an independent state. Nazi Panzer divisions rumbled into Prague. The Skoda munitions works and twenty-three other arms factories, comprising an armaments industry three times as great as that of Fascist Italy, became Hitler’s property. The pro-Fascist General Jan Sirovy, one-time leader of the Czech interventionist armies in Soviet Siberia, handed over to the German High Command the arsenals, storehouses, a thousand planes and all the first-rate military equipment of the Czechoslovakian Army.

On March 20, Lithuania surrendered its only port, Memel, to Germany.

On Good Friday morning, April 7, Mussolini crossed the Adriatic and invaded Albania. Five days later, King Victor Emmanuel accepted the Albanian crown.

From Moscow, even as Hitler was moving into Czechoslovakia, Stalin warned the appeasement politicians of England and France that their anti-Soviet policy would end in a disaster for themselves. Stalin spoke in Moscow on March 10, 1939, before the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The undeclared war, said Stalin, which the Axis powers were already waging in Europe and Asia, under the mask of the Anti-Comintern Pact, was directed not only against Soviet Russia but also, and now in fact primarily, against the interests of England, France and the United States.

“The war is being waged,” said Stalin, “by aggressor states, which in every way infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily England, France and the U.S.A., while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors… without the least attempt at resistance and even with a certain amount of connivance. Incredible but true.”

The reactionary politicians in the Western democracies, particularly in England and France, said Stalin, had rejected the policy of collective security. Instead, they still dreamed of an anti-Soviet coalition camouflaged by diplomatic phrases like “appeasement” and “non-intervention.” But this policy, said Stalin, was already doomed. Stalin added: “… certain European and American politicians and newspaper writers, having lost patience waiting for `the march on the Soviet Ukraine,’ are themselves beginning to disclose what is really behind the policy of nonintervention. They are saying quite openly, putting it down in black and white, that the Germans have cruelly `disappointed’ them, for instead of marching farther east, against the Soviet Union, they have turned west, you see and are demanding colonies. One might think that the districts of Czechoslovakia were yielded to Germany as the price of an undertaking to launch war on the Soviet Union, and that now the Germans are refusing to meet their bills…

“Far be it from me,” said Stalin, “to moralize on the policy of non-intervention, to talk of treason, treachery and so on. It would be naive to preach morals to people who recognize no human morality. Politics is politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say. It must be remarked, however, that the big and dangerous political game started by the supporters of the policy of non-intervention may end in a serious fiasco for them.”

The Soviet Union still wanted international co-operation against aggressors and a realistic policy of collective security; but, Stalin made clear, such co-operation must be genuine and wholehearted. The Red Army had no intention of becoming a cat’s-paw for the appeasement politicians of England and France. Finally, if the worst came, the Red Army was confident of its own strength and of the unity and loyalty of the Soviet people. As Stalin put it: –

“… in the case of war, the rear and front of our army… will be stronger than those of any other country, a fact which people beyond our border who love military conflicts would do well to remember.”

But Stalin’s blunt, significant warning was ignored.

In April 1939, a poll of British public opinion showed that 87 per cent of the English people were in favor of an Anglo-Soviet alliance against Nazi Germany. Churchill saw the Anglo-Soviet rapprochement as “a matter of life or death.” In a speech on May 27, Churchill sharply declared: –

If His Majesty’s government, having neglected our defenses, having thrown away Czechoslovakia with all that Czechoslovakia means in military power, having committed us to the defense of Poland and Roumania, now rejects and casts away the indispensable aid of Russia, and so leads in the worst of ways into the worst of wars, they will have ill deserved the generosity with which they have been treated by their fellow countrymen.

On July 29 David Lloyd George backed up Churchill’s pleas with these words: –

Mr. Chamberlain negotiated directly with Hitler. He went to Germany to see him. He and Lord Halifax made visits to Rome. They went to Rome, drank Mussolini’s health and told him what a fine fellow he was. But whom have they sent to Russia? They have not even sent the lowest in rank of a Cabinet minister; they have sent a clerk in the Foreign Office. It is an insult… They have no sense of the proportion or of the gravity of the whole situation when the world is trembling on the brink of a great precipice…

The voices of the British people and of English statesmen like Churchill and Lloyd George went unheeded.

“A hard and fast alliance with Russia,” observed the London Times, “would hamper other negotiations.”…(2)

As the summer of 1939 drew to a close and war in Europe loomed ever nearer, William Strang, a minor Foreign Office official whom Chamberlain had sent to Moscow, remained the only British representative carrying on direct negotiations with the Soviet Government. Public pressure forced Chamberlain to make another show of negotiations with Russia. On August 11, a British military mission arrived in Moscow to conduct joint staff talks. The British mission had traveled from London on a thirteen-knot vessel, the slowest possible means of transport. When the mission arrived, the Russians learned it had no more authority than Strang to sign any agreement with the Soviet Government…

Soviet Russia was to be isolated and left alone to face a Nazi Germany passively, if not actively, supported by the Munich minded governments of Europe.

Joseph E. Davies later described the choice that the Soviet Government was forced to make. Writing to President Roosevelt’s advisor, Harry Hopkins, the former Ambassador to the Soviet Union stated on July 18, 1941: –

From my observations and contacts, since 1936, I believe that outside of the President of the United States alone no government in the world saw more clearly the menace of Hitler to peace and the necessity for collective security and alliances among non-aggressive nations than did the Soviet government. They were ready to fight for Czechoslovakia. They cancelled their non-aggression pact with Poland in advance of Munich because they wished to clear the road for the passage of their troops through Poland to go to the aid of Czechoslovakia if necessary to fulfill their treaty obligations. Even after Munich and as late as the spring of 1939 the Soviet government agreed to join with Britain and France if Germany should attack Poland or Roumania, but urged that an international conference of non-aggressor states should be held to determine objectively and realistically what each could do and then serve notice on Hitler of their combined resistance… The suggestion was declined by Chamberlain by reason of the objection of Poland and Roumania to the inclusion of Russia…

During all the spring of 1939 the Soviets tried to bring about a definite agreement that would assume unity of action and co-ordination of military plans to stop Hitler.

Britain… refused to give the same guarantees of protection to Russia with reference to the Baltic states which Russia was giving to France and Britain in the event of aggression against Belgium or Holland. The Soviets became convinced, and with considerable reason, that no effective, direct and practical, general arrangement could be made with France and Britain. They were driven to a pact of non-aggression with Hitler.

Twenty years after Brest-Litovsk, the anti-Soviet politicians of Europe had again forced Soviet Russia into an undesired, self-defensive treaty with Germany.

On August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union signed a Non-aggression Pact with Nazi Germany.

2. World War II

On September 1, 1939, Nazi mechanized divisions invaded Poland at seven points. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Within two weeks, the Polish regime, which under the influence of the anti-Soviet “Colonels’ clique” had allied itself with Nazism, refused Soviet aid and opposed collective security, fell to pieces, and the Nazis were mopping up the scattered remnants of their former ally.

On September 17, as the Nazi columns raced across Poland and the Polish Government fled in panic, the Red Army crossed the prewar Polish eastern border and occupied Byelorussia, the western Ukraine and Galicia before the Nazi Panzers could get there. Moving swiftly westward, the Red Army occupied all the territory which Poland had annexed from Soviet Russia in 1920.

“That the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. ” declared Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast on October 1. “An Eastern Front has been created which Nazi Germany does not dare assail. When Herr yon Ribbentrop was summoned to Moscow last week it was to learn the fact, and accept the fact, that the Nazi designs upon the Baltic states and upon the Ukraine trust come to a dead stop.”

The advance of the Red Army to the west was the first of a series of moves by the Soviet Union counterbalancing the spread of Nazism and designed to strengthen Soviet defenses in preparation for the inevitable showdown with the Third Reich…

During the last week in September and the first days in October, the Soviet Government signed mutual assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These agreements specified that Red Army garrisons and Soviet airports and naval bases were to be established in the Baltic States.

There began immediately a wholesale deportation of the Nazi Fifth Column in the Baltic area. Within a few days 50,000 Germans had been deported from Lithuania, 53,000 from Latvia and 12,000 from Estonia. Overnight, the Baltic Fifth Columns so laboriously built up by Alfred Rosenberg suffered a devastating blow, and the German High Command lost some of its most strategic bases for the contemplated attack on the Soviet Union.

But to the north, Finland remained as a potential military ally of the Third Reich.

The most intimate working relationship existed between the German and the Finnish High Commands. The Finnish military leader, Baron Karl Gustav von Mannerheim, was in close and constant communication with the German High Command. There were frequent joint staff talks, and German officers periodically supervised Finnish army maneuvers. The Finnish Chief of Staff, General Karl Oesch, had received his military training in Germany, as had his chief aide, General Hugo Ostermann, who served in the German Army during the First World War. In 1939, the Government of the Third Reich conferred upon General Oesch one of its highest military decorations…

Political relations between Finland and Nazi Germany were also close. The Socialist Premier Risto Ryti regarded Hitler as a “genius”; Per Svinhufrud, the wealthy Germanophile who had been awarded the German Iron Cross, was the most powerful behind-the-scenes figure in Finnish politics.

With the aid of German officers and engineers, Finland had been converted into a powerful fortress to serve as a base for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Twenty-three military airports had been constructed on Finnish soil, capable of accommodating ten times as many airplanes as there were in the Finnish Air Force. Nazi technicians had supervised the construction of the Mannerheim Line, a series of intricate, splendidly equipped fortifications running several miles deep along the Soviet border and having heavy guns at one point only twenty-one miles from Leningrad. Unlike the Maginot Line, the Mannerheim Line had been designed not only for defensive purposes but also for garrisoning a major offensive force. As the Mannerheim Line neared completion in the summer of 1939, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Halder, arrived from Germany and gave the massive fortifications a final inspection…

During the first week of October, 1939, while still negotiating its new treaties with the Baltic States, the Soviet Government proposed a mutual assistance pact with Finland. Moscow offered to cede several thousand square miles of Soviet territory on central Karelia in exchange for some strategic Finnish islands near Leningrad, a portion of the Karelian Isthmus and a thirty-year lease on the port of Hango for the construction of a Soviet naval base. The Soviet leaders regarded these latter territories as essential to the defense of the Red naval base at Kronstadt and the city of Leningrad.

The negotiations between the Soviet Union and Finland dragged on into the middle of November without results. In order to reach some agreement, the Soviet Government made a number of compromises. “Stalin tried to teach me the wisdom of Finnish as well as Soviet interest in compromise,” declared the Finnish negotiator, Juho Passikivi, upon his return to Helsinki. But the pro-Nazi clique dominating the Finnish Government refused to make any concessions and broke off the negotiations.

By the end of November, the Soviet Union and Finland were at war. “The Finnish nation,” declared the Finnish Government, “is fighting for independence, liberty and honor… As the outpost of Western civilization, our nation has the right to expect help from other civilized nations.”

The anti-Soviet elements in England and France believed that the long-awaited holy war was at hand. The strangely inactive war in the west against Nazi Germany was the “wrong war.” The real war lay to the east. In England, France and the United States, an intense anti-Soviet campaign began under the slogan of “Aid to Finland.”

Prime Minister Chamberlain, who only a short time before had asserted his country lacked adequate arms for fighting the Nazis, quickly arranged to send to Finland 144 British airplanes, 114 heavy guns, 185,000 shells, 50,000 grenades, 15,700 aerial bombs, 100,000 greatcoats and 48 ambulances. At a time when the French Army was in desperate need of every piece of military equipment to hold the inevitable Nazi offensive, the French Government turned over to the Finnish Army 179 airplanes, 472 guns, 795,000 shells, 5100 machine guns and 200,000 hand grenades.

While the lull continued on the Western Front, the British High Command, still dominated by anti-Soviet militarists like General Ironside, drew up plans for sending 100,000 troops across Scandinavia into Finland, and the French High Command made preparations for a simultaneous attack on the Caucasus, under the leadership of General Weygand, who openly stated that French bombers in the Near East were ready to strike at the Baku oil fields.

Day after day the British, French and American newspapers headlined sweeping Finnish victories and catastrophic Soviet defeats. But after three months of fighting in extraordinarily difficult terrain and under incredibly severe weather conditions, with the temperature frequently falling to sixty and seventy degrees below zero, the Red Army had smashed the “impregnable” Mannerheim Line and routed the Finnish Army.(3)

Hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union ended on March 13, 1940. According to the peace terms, Finland ceded to Russia the Karelian Isthmus, the western and northern shores of Lake Lagoda, a number of strategic islands in the Gulf of Finland essential to the defense of Leningrad. The Soviet Government restored to Finland the port of Petsamo, which had been occupied by the Red Army, and took a thirty-year lease on the Hango peninsula for an annual rental of 8,000,000 Finnish marks.

Addressing the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on March 29, Molotov declared: –

The Soviet Union, having smashed the Finnish Army and having every opportunity of occupying the whole of Finland, did not do so and did not demand any indemnities for expenditures in the war as any other Power would have done, but confined its desires to a minimum… We pursued no other objects in the peace treaty than that of safeguarding Murmansk and the Murmansk railroad…

The undeclared war of Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia went on…

On the day that Finnish-Soviet hostilities ceased, General Mannerheim declared in a proclamation to the Finnish Army that “the sacred mission of the army is to be an outpost of Western civilization in the east.” Shortly afterwards, the Finnish Government began to construct new fortifications along the revised frontier. Nazi technicians came from Germany to supervise the work. Large armament orders were placed with Sweden and Germany. German troops began arriving in considerable numbers in Finland. The Finnish and the German commands set LP joint headquarters and held joint army maneuvers. Scores of Nazi agents swelled the staffs of the German Embassy at Helsinki and the eleven consulates around the country..

The lull in the west came to a sudden end in the spring of 1940. On April 9 German troops invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark was occupied in a single clay without resistance. By the end of the month the Nazis had crushed organized Norwegian resistance, and the British troops, which had come to aid the Norwegians, were abandoning their few precarious footholds. A puppet Nazi regime was set up in Oslo under Major Vidkun Quisling.

On May 10, Chamberlain tendered his resignation as Prime Minister, having brought his country to possibly the most desperate situation in its long history. That same day, as the King asked Winston Churchill to form a new cabinet, the German Army invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. By May 21, the Germans had smashed their way through crumbling opposition, reached the Channel and cut off the Allies in Flanders.

Panic swept through France. Everywhere, the Fifth Column was at work. French troops were deserted by their officers. Whole divisions found themselves without military supplies. Paul Reymud told the Senate that French Army chiefs had committed “unbelievable errors.” He denounced “traitors, defeatists and cowards.” Dozens of top-ranking French officers were suddenly arrested. But the arrests came too late. The Fifth Column was already in control of France.

The former French Minister of Aviation, Pierre Cot, later wrote in Triumph of Treason: –

… the Fascists had their own way in the country at large and in the Army. The anti-Communist agitation was a smoke screen behind which was being prepared the great political conspiracy that was to paralyze France and facilitate Hitler’s work… The most efficient instruments of the Fifth Column… were Weygand, Petain and Laval. At the Council of Ministers which was held at Cange, near Tours, on June 12, 1940, General Weygand urged the government to end the war. His principal argument was that a Communist revolution had broken out in Paris. He stated that Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the Communist Party, was already installed in the Presidential Palace. Georges Mandel, Minister of the Interior, immediately telephoned to the Prefect of Police in Paris, who denied Weygand’s statements; there was no disturbance in the city, the population was quiet… As soon as they had seized power amid the confusion of the collapse, Petain and Weygand, with the help of Laval and Darlan, hastened to suppress all political liberties, gag the people, and set up a Fascist regime.

With every hour, confusion mounted and the debacle grew, as the French soldiers fought on desperately, hopelessly, and the world watched the betrayal of a nation on a scale never witnessed before…

From May 29 through June 4, the British Army evacuated its troops from Dunkirk, heroically rescuing 335,000 men.

On June 10, Fascist Italy declared war on France and England.

On June 14, Paris fell, and Petain, Weygand, Laval and the Trotskyite Doriot became the Nazi puppet rulers of France.

On June 22, an armistice between Germany and France was signed in the Compiegne Forest in the very same railroad car in which Marshal Foch had dictated the terms of surrender to the defeated Germans twenty-two years before.

As France crumbled, the Red Army again moved swiftly to strengthen the defenses of the Soviet Union.

In the middle of June, forestalling an imminent Nazi Putsch in the Baltic States, Soviet armored divisions occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On June 27, the Red Army moved into Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which Rumania had snatched from the Russians after the Revolution.

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany now faced one another on their future battle lines.

Toward the end of July, the Nazis launched mass air raids over London and other English cities, pouring down tons of explosives upon the civilian population. The raids, which increased in ferocity throughout the next month, were intended to terrify and paralyze the whole nation, and swiftly bring an already gravely weakened England to her knees.

But with Churchill as Prime Minister profound changes were taking place within Great Britain. The confusion and division which had resulted from Chamberlain’s leadership had given way to determination and growing national unity. Across the narrow Channel the British people saw the workings of the Fifth Column. Churchill’s Government acted swiftly and with resolution. Scotland Yard and British Intelligence swooped down on Nazi agents British Fascists and leaders of secret Fifth Column intrigues, In, a sudden raid on the London headquarters of the British Union of Fascists, the authorities seized important documents and arrested many Fifth Columnists. The leader of the British Fascist Party, Sir Oswald Mosley, was arrested in his own apartment, sensational arrests followed. John Beckett, a former Member of Parliament and founder of the anti-Soviet and pro-Nazi People’s Party; Captain A. H. Ramsay, Tory Member of Parliament for Peebles; Edward Dudley Elan, an official in the Ministry of Health, his wife Mrs. Dacre Fox, and other prominent Pro-Nazis and Fascists were arrested. A Treachery Bill was passed, providing the death penalty for traitors.

Showing that it had learned well the lesson of France and of the Moscow Trials, the British Government in July 1940 announced the arrest of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, former Director of Naval intelligence. Domvile, a friend of Alfred Rosenberg and of the late General Max Hoffmann, had been involved in most of the anti-Soviet conspiracies since 1918. At the time of his arrest, Domvile was the head of a secret pro-Nazi society in England called The Link which was organized with the aid of Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the Gestapo…

Assured against treachery from within, the British people faced the ordeal of the Nazi air blitz without flinching, and defended themselves. On the single day of September 17, 1940, the RAF downed no less than 185 German planes over England.

Meeting such fierce and unexpected resistance, and mindful of the Red Army on his eastern borders, Hitler paused at the Channel. He did not invade the British Isles…

The year was 1941. An air of tense expectancy hung over the whole of Europe as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the two greatest military powers in the world, prepared to lock in battle.

On March 1, the Germans entered Sofia, and Bulgaria became a Nazi base.

On April 6, after a popular revolt had overthrown Regent Prince Paul’s Yugoslavian regime and Nazi agents were forced to flee the country, the Soviet Government signed a non-aggression pact with the new Yugoslavian Government. That same day, Nazi Germany declared war on Yugoslavia and invaded it.

On May 5, Stalin became Premier of the U.S.S.R.(4)

At four o’clock on the morning of June 22, 1941, without any declaration of war, Hitler’s tanks, air force, mobile artillery, motorized units and infantry were hurled across the borders of the Soviet Union on a stupendous front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Later that morning Goebbels broadcast Hitler’s war proclamation. It read in part: –

German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as regards extent, compares with the greatest the world has hitherto seen. United with their Finnish comrades, the fighters of the victory of Narvik are standing in the Northern Arctic. German divisions commanded by the conqueror of Norway, in co-operation with the heroes of Finnish freedom, under their marshal, are protecting Finnish soil. Formations of the German eastern front extend from East Prussia to the Carpathians. German and Rumanian soldiers are united under Chief of State Antonescu from the banks of the Pruth along the lower reaches of the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of Europe and thereby the salvation of all.

Italv, Rumania, Hungary and Finland joined the Nazi war on Soviet Russia. Special Fascist contingents were raised in France and Spain. The united armies of a counterrevolutionary Europe had launched a Holy War against the Soviets. The Plan of General Max Hoffmann was being tested in action…

On November 11, 1941, the American Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, said in a speech at Washington: –

Twenty-three years ago today, Woodrow Wilson addressed the Congress of the United States in order to inform the representatives of the American people of the terms of the Armistice which signalized the victorious conclusion of the First World War… Less than five years later, shrouded in the cerements of apparent defeat, his shattered body was placed in the grave beside which we are now gathered…

The heart-searching question which every American citizen must ask himself on this day of commemoration is whether the world in which we have to live would have come to this desperate pass had the United States been willing in those years which followed 1919 to play its full part in striving to bring about a new world order based on justice and on “a steadfast concert for peace.”… A cycle in human events is about to come to an end… The American people… have entered the Valley of Decision.

On December 7. 1941, without warning, Japanese bombing planes and battleships attacked the United States of America. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declared war on the United States…

On December 9, in an address to the American people, President Roosevelt said: –

The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has paralleled the course of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and Africa. Today, it has become far more than a parallel. It is collaboration so well calculated that all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one gigantic battlefield.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchukuo -without warning.

In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia – without warning.

In 1938, Hitler occupied Austria – without warning.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia – without warning. Later in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland -without warning.

In 1940, Hitler invaded Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg – without warning.

In 1940, Italy attacked France and later Greece – without warning.

In 1941, Hitler invaded Russia – without warning.

And now Japan has attacked Malaya and Thailand – and the United States – without warning.

It is all of one pattern.

The masks were off. The secret war of the Axis Anti-Comintern against Soviet Russia had merged with the world war against all free peoples.

On December 15, 1941, in a Message to Congress, President Roosevelt declared: –

In 1936 the Government of Japan openly associated itself with Germany by entering the anti-Comintern Pact. This pact, as we all know, was nominally directed against the Soviet Union; but its real purpose was to form a league of fascism against the free world, particularly against Great Britain, France and the United States.

The Second World War had entered its final decisive phase as a global conflict between the forces of international Fascism and the united armies of progressive mankind.

Notes:

1. On September 24, 1938, with the Nazis moving on Czechoslovakia, the leading editorial in the Socialist Appeal, New York Trotskyite newspaper declared: “Czechoslovakia is one of the most monstrous national abortions produced by the labors of the infamous Versailles conference… Czechoslovakia’s democracy has never been more than a shabby cloak for advanced capitalist exploitation… This perspective necessarily entails the firmest revolutionary opposition to the Czechoslovakian bourgeois state, under any and all circumstances.”

Under such pseudo-revolutionary slogans, the Trotskyites throughout Europe and America carried on an incessant campaign against the defense of small nations from Axis aggression and against collective security. As Abyssinia, Spain, North and Central China, Austria and Czechoslovakia were invaded one after another by Germany, Italy and Japan, the members of Trotsky’s Fourth International spread throughout the world the propaganda that collective security was an “incitement to war.” Trotsky asserted “the defense of the national State” was really “a reactionary task.” In his pamphlet, The Fourth International and the War, which was used as basic propaganda material by the Trotskyites in their fight against collective security, Trotsky wrote: –

“The defence of the national State, first of all in Balkanized Europe – is in the full sense of the word a reactionary task. The national State with its borders, passports, monetary system, customs and the army for the protection of customs has become a frightful impediment to the economic and cultural development of humanity. Not the defence of the national State is the task of the proletariat but its complete and final destruction.”

Trotsky’s followers and sympathizers in Europe and America conducted a bitter struggle against the Popular Front in France, the Spanish Republican Government and other patriotic, anti-Fascist mass movements which were trying to achieve national unity within their own countries and collective security agreements with the Soviet Union. The Trotskyite propaganda declared these movements would only involve their countries in war. “The Stalinist version of the United Front,” declared C. L. James, a leading British Trotskyite, “is not unity for action but unity to lead all workers into imperialistic war.”

Trotsky himself ceaselessly “warned” against the “dangers” involved in an Axis defeat at the hands of the nonaggressor nations. “A victory of France, of Great Britain and the Soviet Union… over Germany and Japan,” Trotsky declared at the Hearings in Mexico in April 1937, “could signify first a transformation of the Soviet Union into a bourgeois state and the transformation of France into a fascist state, because for a victory over Hitler it is necessary to have a monstrous military machine… A victory can signify the destruction of fascism in Germany and the establishment of fascism in France.”

In this way Trotsky and his fellow propagandists worked hand-in-glove with the appeasers and with the Axis Propaganda Ministries to persuade the people of Europe that collective security was war-mongering and that these agencies attempting to achieve it were “Stalinist” tools.

2. On the day that the Nazi Army entered Prague, a delegation of the Federation of British Industries was in Dusseldorf drawing up the final details of a comprehensive agreement with German big business.

In July the British press carried the sensational disclosure that Robert S Hudson, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, had been with Dr. Helmuth Wohlthat, Hitler’s economic adviser, to discuss the possibility of a British loan of 51,000,000 pounds to Nazi Germany.

By no means all British big businessmen were in sympathy with the policy of appeasing the Nazis. On June 8, the banker and coal magnate Lord Davies declared in the House of Lords: “The Russian Government know perfectly well that in certain quarters in this country there is lurking a hope that the German Eagles would fly eastwards and not westwards, as it was apparently intended they should do at the time when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.”… Regarding Chamberlain’s negotiations with the Soviet Government, Lord Davies said, “Sometimes I wonder whether, even now, the Cabinet are really in earnest or whether these negotiations are not merely another sop to public opinion.”

3. In June 1940 the institute for Propaganda Analysis in New York City reported: “The American press told less truth and retailed more fancy lies about the Finnish war than about any recent conflict.”

4. At 10:30 P.M. on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, a German Messerschmitt plane plummeted earthward over Lanarkshire, Scotland, and buried its nose in a field near Dungavel Castle, property of the young Duke of Hamilton. A former employee on the Duke’s estate saw the fallen plane and then the slow, white plume of a descending parachute- Armed with a pitchfork he ran out to find a man lying on the ground with a broken ankle. The man was Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler’s Deputy.

“Take me to the Duke of Hamilton,” said Hess, speaking in English. l have come to save humanity!”

Hess hoped through Hamilton and his friends to gain British Tory backing for the Nazi attack on Soviet Russia.

Sir Patrick Dollan, Lord Provost of Glasgow, Scotland, said on June 11, 1911: “Hess came here… in the belief that he could remain in Scotland two days, discuss his peace proposals with a certain group and be given a supply of petrol and maps to enable him to return to Germany and tell them the results of his conversation.”

Referring to the Hess Mission in his speech of November 6, 1941, Stalin declared: “The Germans knew that their policy of playing upon the contradictions between the classes in separate states, and the contradictions between these states and the Soviet Union, had already produced results in France, the rulers of which had allowed themselves to be intimidated by the spectre of revolution, had refused to resist, and terror-stricken had placed native land under the heel of Hitler. The German-fascist strategists thought the same thing would occur with Great Britain and the United States of America. The notorious Hess was sent to Britain by the German fascists for this very purpose, in order to persuade the British politicians to join the general campaign against the U.S.S.R. But the Germans gravely miscalculated. Rudolph Hess became a prisoner of the British Government.”

CHAPTER XXIII – American Anti-Comintern

1. Heritage of the Black Hundreds

The chief aim of Axis secret diplomacy after June 22, 1941, was to prevent at all costs the United States from joining the Anglo-Soviet Alliance against Nazi Germany. The isolation of America was vitally essential to the master plan of the German and Japanese High Commands.

America became a focal point of Axis anti-Soviet propaganda and intrigue.

Ever since 1918, the American people had been subjected to a continuous stream of false propaganda about Soviet Russia. The Russian Revolution was portrayed as the work of “wild, unruly mobs” incited by “cutthroats, criminals and degenerates”; the Red Army was an “undisciplined rabble”; Soviet economy was “unworkable” and Soviet industry and agriculture were “in a hopeless state of anarchy”; the Soviet people were just waiting for war to rise in rebellion against their “ruthless masters in Moscow’

The moment Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia, a chorus of voices in the United States predicted the immediate collapse of the U.S.S.R. Here are some typical statements made by Americans following the invasion of Soviet Russia: –

Hitler will be in control of Russia in thirty days. – Congressman Martin Dies, June 24, 1941

It will take a miracle bigger than any seen since the Bible was written to save the Reds from utter defeat in a very short time. – Fletcher Pratt, New York Post, June 27, 1941

Russia is doomed and America and Great Britain are powerless to prevent her swift destruction before the Blitzkrieg hammering of the Nazi Army. – Hearst’s New York Journal-American, June 27, 1941

… in staff work and leadership, in training and equipment they [the Russians] are no match for the Germans; Timoshenko and Budyenny and Stern are not the same caliber as Keitel and Brauchitch; Purges and politics have hurt the Red Army. – Hanson W. Baldwin, New York Times, June 29, 1941

There need be no excuses and no explanations, except that incompetence, despotism, lack of managerial capacity, lack of initiative, government by fear and purge left the giant helpless and incapacitated. Soviet Russia had bluffed the world for a quarter of a century and the bluff has been called.

We must be prepared for the shock of the elimination of Soviet Russia from the war altogether; George E. Sokolsky, July 26, 1941

On November 20, 1941, an editorial entitled “Ignorance of Russia appeared in the Houston Post. It posed a question that was uppermost in many American minds. The editorial stated: –

Something that has not been satisfactorily explained is why the people of the United States for the last twenty years have been kept largely in ignorance of the material progress of Soviet Russia.

When Hitler attacked Russia, the almost unanimous opinion in this country was that Stalin could not last long. Our “best minds” had no hope for Russia. They looked forward to a quick conquest of the country by the Nazis. .. Russia was expected by most Americans to fold up as the Nazis advanced…

How and why was this information kept from the American people for so long?

A barrier had been raised between the American people and the people of Soviet Russia ever since 1918. Artificial hatred and fear of Soviet Russia had been stimulated in America by reactionary politicians and businessmen, by White Russian émigrés and counterrevolutionary agents, and, finally, by representatives of the Axis Propaganda Ministries and Intelligence Services.

Immediately after the Russian Revolution, White Russian émigrés began flooding America with anti-Soviet forgeries and stirring up suspicion and hostility against Soviet Russia. From the start, the anti-Soviet campaign of the Czarist émigrés in the United States merged with a fascist secret war against America itself.

The first Nazi cells were formed in the United States in 1924. They operated under Fritz Gissibl, head of the Nazi Teutonia Society in Chicago. That same year Captain Sidney George Reilly and his White Russian associates formed a branch of his International League against Bolshevism in the United States. Throughout the nineteen-twenties, Nazi agents like Fritz Gissibl and Heinz Spanknoebel, operating under orders from Rudolph Hess and Alfred Rosenberg, carried on their anti-democratic and anti-Soviet work in America in ultimate collaboration with the anti-Soviet White Russians.

The White Russian Peter Afanassieff, alias Prince Peter Kushubue, alias Peter Armstrong, arrived in San Francisco in 1922, aided in the American distribution of The Protocols of Zion, and, in collaboration with the former Czarist officer Captain Victor de Kayville, began publishing a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic propaganda sheet, The American Gentile. In this work, Afanassieff was associated with the Nazi agents Fritz Gissibl and Oscar Pfaus.

Nicolai Rybakoff, a former colonel in the Japanese-controlled White Russian Army of Ataman Grigori Semyonov, arrived in the United States in the early nineteen-twenties and carried on anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic propaganda. In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Rybakoff founded Rossiya, a pro-Nazi Russian newspaper in New York City. The Japanese agent Semyonov and his aide-in-chief, Rodzaevsky, maintained contact with Rybakoff from Manchukuo, where they commanded a Japanese-financed army of White Russians. Japanese propaganda from Manchukuo was regularly featured in Rossiya, along with Nazi propaganda. In 1941, after Hitler’s attack on Russia, Rybakoff’s New York paper described the Nazi Wehrmacht as “a fiery sword of the justly-punishing Providence, the Christian patriotically anti-bolshevik white victorious legions of Hitler.”(1)

The chief liaison between the Nazis and the White Russians in the United States was James Wheeler-Hill, national secretary of the German-American Bund. Wheeler-Hill was not a German; he was a White Russian, born in Baku. He had gone to Germany after the defeat of the White armies in Russia, and then came to the United States. In 1939, Wheeler-Hill was arrested as a Nazi spy by the FBI.

The most important German and Japanese agent among the White Russians in the United States was “Count” Anastase A. Vonsiatsky. On September 25, 1933, the Nazi agent Paul A. von Lilienfeld-Toal wrote in a letter to William Dudley Pelley, chief of the pro-Nazi American Silver Shirts: –

This is to give you a report about my contacts with the White Russians… I am in touch with the “General Staff of the Russian Fascists” (Box 631, Putnam, Conn.). Their leader, Mr. A. A. Vonsiatsky, is abroad just now, but his assistant, Mr. D. I. Kunle, wrote me a nice letter and mailed me several copies of their paper Fascist.

“Count” Vonsiatsky of Thompson, Connecticut, was an ex-Czarist officer who had fought in Denikin’s White Army. After Denikin’s defeat, Vonsiatsky headed a White terrorist band in the Crimea which kidnaped Russian citizens, held them for ransom, and tortured them to death if the money was not forthcoming. Vonsiatsky came to the United States in the early nineteen-twenties and married Mrs. Marion Buckingham Ream Stephen, an American multimillionairess who was twenty-two years older than himself. Vonsiatsky became an American citizen and settled down on the luxurious Ream estate in Thompson.

With his wife’s fortune at his disposal, Vonsiatsky began to entertain grandiose visions of creating an anti-Soviet army which he would personally lead into Moscow. He started traveling extensively in Europe, Asia and South America, meeting with representatives of the Torgprom, the International League against Bolshevism, and other anti-Soviet agencies.

In August 1933, Vonsiatsky founded the “Russian Fascist National Revolutionary Party” in the United States. Its official emblem was the swastika. Its headquarters was at the Ream estate in Thompson, where Vonsiatsky set up a private arsenal of rifles, machine guns and other military equipment and began drilling squads of uniformed, swastika-wearing young men.

In May 1934, Vonsiatsky visited Tokyo, Harbin and other Far Eastern centers, and conferred with members of the Japanese High Command and fascist White Russians, including Ataman Semyonov. From Japan, Vonsiatsky went to Germany where he met with Alfred Rosenberg, Dr. Goebbels and representatives of the German Military Intelligence. Vonsiatsky undertook to keep Germany and Japan regularly supplied with espionage data from the United States.

Branch offices of Vonsiatsky’s party were established in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, in Sao Paulo, Brash and in Harbin, Manchukuo. These branch offices worked directly under the supervision of the German and Japanese Military Intelligence Services.

In addition to its espionage operations in the United States, the, organization financed and headed by Vonsiatsky carried on a campaign of sabotage and terror against the Soviet Union. The February 1934 issue of Vonsiatsky’s The Fascist, published in Thompson, Connecticut, reported: –

On October 7 the Fascist Trio No. A-5 caused the crash of a military train. According to information received here about 100 people were killed.

In the Starobinsk district, thanks to the work of the “brothers,” the sowing campaign was completely ‘sabotaged’. Several Communists in charge of the sowing campaign mysteriously disappeared!

On September 3, in the District Ozera Kmiaz, the Communist Chairman of a collective farm was killed by “brothers” Nos. 167 and 168!

In April 1934 the Fascist stated that its editorial office was “in receipt of 1,500 zlotys to be delivered to Boris Koverda when he is discharged from prison. The money is a present from Mr. Vonsiatsky.” At the time, Boris Koverda was serving a prison sentence in Poland for having assassinated Soviet Ambassador Voikov in Warsaw.

The official program of the Russian National Fascist Revolutionary Party stated: –

Arrange the assassination of Soviet military instructors, military correspondents, political commanders, as well as the most outstanding Communists… Assassinate, first of all, the Party secretaries…

Sabotage all orders of the Red authorities… Hamper communication of the red power… Hack down telegraph poles, cut wires, interrupt and destroy all telephone communications.. .

Remember firmly, brother fascists: We have been wrecking, we still ‘wreck and in the future we shall continue to wreck! (2)

Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Count” Anastase Vonsiatsky was arrested by the FBI. He was tried for violation of the Espionage Act, found guilty of divulging United States military information to the German and Japanese Governments, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.(3)

2. “Saving America from Communism”

An atmosphere of intense hostility toward the Soviet Union was fostered in the United States by an influential minority of reactionary Americans who feared social and economic progress at home and abroad.

On August 13, 1931, Herbert Hoover, then President of the United States, stated in an interview with the San Francisco News: –

To tell the truth, the ambition of my life is to stamp out Soviet Russia.

In 1931, at the time Hoover made his statement to the San Francisco News, a “Plan for an International Movement to Combat the Red Menace” was sponsored in the United States by an organization called the National Civic Federation. The founder and head of this organization, which specialized in anti-Communist and anti-labor agitation, was a former Chicago newspaperman, Ralph M. Easley. In 1927, Norman Hapgood wrote an exposé of Easley’s “professional patriotism” in which he declared: –

Soviet Russia is, of course, Mr. Easley’s chief abomination. He has freely sponsored the cause of the Czarists, with Mr. Boris as his chief adviser.

The membership of Easley’s National Civic Federation included Representative Hamilton Fish of New York; Harry Augustus Jung, a former labor spy and anti-Semitic propagandist in Chicago; George Sylvester Viereck, the ex-agent of the Kaiser and future Nazi agent; Matthew Woll, reactionary vice-president of the American Federation of Labor and acting president of the National Civic Federation, who publicly referred to Soviet Russia as “this Red Monster – this Madman”; and a number of other prominent Americans interested in the anti-Bolshevik crusade.

Early in 1933, Easley became chairman of an organization called the American Section of the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism. The international headquarters of this organization was in Europa House, Berlin. Many members of the National Civic Federation joined Easley in the new organization.(4)

The American Section of the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism sponsored the first official Nazi propaganda document to be circulated in the United States. it took the form of an anti-Soviet book, printed in English, and entitled Communism in Germany. The book was published in Germany by the firm of Eckhart-Verlag. Thousands of copies were shipped across the Atlantic for distribution in America.

Through extensive mailings and at “patriotic” rallies in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities, the book was widely circulated free of charge. A nationwide campaign of newspaper articles, lectures, meetings and form letters was arranged to promote the book in the United States.

The book was prefaced by this quotation: –

At the beginning of this year there were weeks when we were within a hair’s breadth of Bolshevist chaos!

Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in his proclamation of the 1st September, 1933.

The next page of the book featured the following statement: – WHY AMERICANS SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

The question of Communist propaganda and activities is of immediate importance to the American people in view of the consideration now being given to the question of recognition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by the Government of the United States.

Here is a challenging book. It should be read by every thoughtful citizen because it presents the history of the life-and-death struggle Germany has been waging against Communism. It reveals that the subversive methods and destructive objectives of the Communists in Germany are the same as are employed in the United States by those enemies of civilized nations…

The value of this German expose as an object lesson to other countries has led our committee to place it in the hands of leaders of public opinion throughout the United States.

Directly underneath this announcement there followed a list of names of leading members of the American Section of the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism: –

Walter C. Cole (chairman, Council of National Defense, Detroit Board of Commerce)
John Ross Delafield (commander-in-chief, Military Order of the World War)
Ralph M. Easley (chairman, National Civic Federation)
Hamilton Fish (United States Congressman)
Elon Huntington Hooker (chairman, American Defense Society)
F. O. Johnson (president, Better America Federation)
Orvel Johnson (Lieutenant-Colonel, R.O.T.C. Association of the United States)
Harry Jung (chief, American Vigilante Intelligence Association)
Samuel McRoberts (banker)
C. G. Norman (chairman, Building Trades Employers’ Association)
Ellis Searle (editor, the United Mine Worker)
Walter S. Steele (editor, National Republic)
John B. Trevor (chairman, American Coalition)
Archibald E. Stevenson (former member, United States Military Intelligence) For the American Section of the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism

These are the records of some of the American sponsors of the Nazi propaganda book, Communism in Germany:-

Harry Augustus Jung, former labor spy, headed the anti-democratic Chicago organization called the American Vigilante Intelligence Federation. Its organ the Vigilant was listed as recommended reading by the official Nazi propaganda agency, World Service. Among Jung’s early associates in anti-Soviet activities was the White Russian Peter Afanassieff, who supplied Jung with a translated version of the Protocols for distribution in “quantity lots” throughout the United States. Jung was subsequently befriended by Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the isolationist and violently anti-Soviet Chicago Tribune, and set up offices in the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Walter S. Steele, editor of the National Republic, carried on an incessant anti-Soviet propaganda campaign intended to influence American businessmen. Steele collaborated with Jung in the distribution of The Protocols of Zion.

James B. Trevor was head of the American Coalition, an organization which in 1942 was listed by a Department of Justice indictment as an agency which had been used in a conspiracy to undermine the morale of the United States armed forces. Trevor was intimately associated with anti Soviet White Russians, and his organization constantly spread anti-Soviet propaganda.

Archibald E. Stevenson, a onetime member of the Military Intelligence Division of the United States Army, was one of the leading instigators of anti-Soviet agitation in the United States throughout the period prior to the Second World War. A close associate of Ralph M. Easley, Stevenson subsequently became public relations counsel for the New York State Economic Council, an anti-labor and anti-democratic propaganda agency whose chairman was Merwin K. Hart, a notorious propagandist for the Spanish Fascist dictator, Generalissimo Franco.

Representative Hamilton Fish, of New York, visited Soviet Russia in 1923, when he was head of the firm Hamilton Fish & Company, Exporters and Importers. After his return to the United States he introduced a resolution into Congress calling for the establishment of commercial relations with Soviet Russia. Subsequently, he became one of the most bitter anti-Soviet propagandists in the United States. In the early 1930’s, as chairman of a Congressional committee to investigate “American communism,” Fish was the chief spokesman of the White Russian anti-Soviet émigrés in the United States and other inveterate foes of Soviet Russia. Among the “experts” who supplied Fish’s committee with material were the former Okhrana agent, Boris Brasol, and the German propagandist, George Sylvester Viereck. After Hitler came to power in Germany, Fish hailed the Nazi leader as the man who had saved Germany from Communism. As a key exponent of isolationism and appeasement, Fish shared platforms with notorious American pro-Nazis and inserted their propaganda in the Congressional Record. In the fall of 1939 Fish conferred in Nazi Germany with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Foreign Minister; Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister; and other Axis leaders. Fish toured Europe in a German plane, urging a second Munich and claiming that “Germany’s claims” were “just.” In February 1942 it was disclosed at the trial of the Nazi agent Viereck that Fish’s Washington office had been used as the headquarters of a Nazi propaganda ring and that Fish’s secretary, George Hill, was one of the key members of the German propaganda network in the United States.

At the time of America’s entry into the Second World War, scores of American fascist organizations describing themselves as “anti-Communist” were active throughout the United States. These organizations had received guidance and, many of them, financial support from Berlin and Tokyo. Paid agents of Nazi Germany had founded a number of the organizations. Some of the organizations, like the German-American Bund and the Kyffhauser Bund, made little attempt to conceal their foreign affiliation; others, like the Silver Shirts, the Christian Front, American Guards, American Nationalist Confederation, and the Crusaders for Americanism masqueraded as patriotic societies which were “saving America” from the “menace of Communism.”

By 1939, no less than 750 fascist organizations had been formed in the United States, and were flooding the country with pro-Axis, anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet bulletins, magazines, newsletters and newspapers. In the name of saving America from Communism, these organizations and publications called for the overthrow of the Government of the United States, the establishment of an American fascist regime, and an alliance with the Axis against Soviet Russia.

On November 18, 1936, William Dudley Pelley, chief of the Nazi-inspired Silver Shirts, declared: –

Let us understand thoroughly that if a second civil war comes to this country, it will not be a war to overthrow the American government, but to overthrow the Jew-Communist usurpers who have seized the American government and bethought themselves to make it a branch office of Moscow…

After the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia, Father Charles E Coughlin, leader of the pro-Nazi Christian Front, declared in the July 7, 1941, issue of his propaganda organ Social Justice. –

Germany’s war on Russia is a battle for Christianity… We remember that atheistic Communism was conceived and brought to birth in Russia chiefly through the instrumentality of godless Jews.

The same propaganda was disseminated throughout the United States by Gerald B. Winrod’s Defender of Wichita, Kansas; William Kullgren’s Beacon Light of Atascadero, California; Court Asher’s X-Ray of Munice, Indiana; E. J. Garner’s Publicity of Wichita, Kansas; Charles B. Hudson’s America in Danger! of Omaha, Nebraska; and many similar pro-Axis, anti-Soviet publications.

After Pearl Harbor, a number of these persons were indicted by the Department of justice on charges of spreading seditious propaganda and plotting with Nazi agents to overthrow the United States Government. Nevertheless, throughout the war, they continued to spread the propaganda that the Axis Powers were waging a “holy war” and that the United States had been tricked into the conflict by the connivance of “Jewish Communist conspirators in Washington, London and Moscow.”

3. Paul Scheffer: A Case History

A few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, agents of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested a dapper, middle-aged German journalist who was living in a fashionable apartment house in New York City. His name was Paul Scheffer. He was listed in the State Department files as the American correspondent for Das Reich, the official publication of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

The career of Paul Scheffer is a striking illustration of how Nazi agents were able to operate in the United States under the mask of anti-Sovietism…(5)

At one time, Paul Scheffer had been a journalist of international renown. As the Moscow correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt from 1922 until 1929, Scheffer acquired the reputation of being “the best-informed man on Soviet Russia.” His colorfully written dispatches from the Soviet Union were reprinted in a dozen languages. His friends and admirers included eminent statesmen, celebrated literary figures and leading industrialists and financiers in Europe and America.

In the fall of 1929 Scheffer’s career as a Moscow correspondent came to an abrupt, unexpected conclusion. During one of his periodic visits to Germany, the Soviet authorities suddenly forbade him to return to the U.S.S.R. There was a furor of indignant protests among Scheffer’s many distinguished friends. They demanded to know what possible reason there could be for such action on the part of the Soviet Government. The answer to that question was locked in the files of the Soviet secret police.

Some of the facts were made public eight years later, on March 2, 1938, when Mikhail Chernov, the Right conspirator and former Commissar of Agriculture of the Soviet Union, testified before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R.

Chernov admitted he had received 4000 rubles a month from the German Military Intelligence for providing them with Russian military and trade secrets and for organizing extensive sabotage. He named the German agent under whose supervision his first espionage-sabotage assignments had been carried out. The German agent, Chernov said, was “Paul Scheffer, correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt.”

On March 13, 1938, a Soviet firing squad executed Mikhail Chernov. Only a few days before the execution, Paul Scheffer arrived in the United States as the American correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt…

After being barred from the Soviet Union in 1929, Scheffer had become one of Europe’s most prolific and highly paid anti-Soviet propagandists. Scarcely a week elapsed without one of his articles, fiercely attacking the Soviet Government and predicting its imminent collapse, appearing in some out European or American periodical.

In 1931, Scheffer, who had married a former Russian countess visited the United States to campaign against American recognition of the Soviet Government. “If America decides upon recognition,” Scheffer gravely warned in an article in Foreign Affairs which was reprinted in the Reader’s Digest, “it may hereafter be said that in 1931 she made her deliberate choice between bourgeois Europe and the Soviets… recognition by America could only provoke Communist Russia to greater aggressiveness and enterprise in its attacks on bourgeois European countries.”

When Hitler came to power, Scheffer was the London correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt. He immediately returned to Germany and was appointed editor-in-chief of the paper, which had now come under the supervision of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.(6)

In the winter of 1937, Scheffer was ordered to take up residence in the United States. He was soon cabling dispatches to the Berliner Tageblatt from New York City, which were a skillful mixture of anti-American propaganda and information which might be of interest to the German military authorities. Before long Scheffer was promoted to the position of American correspondent for Das Reich, the official organ of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. In this capacity, Scheffer was Dr. Goebbels’s special representative in the United States. One of his chief functions was to stir up sentiment against Soviet Russia in the United States. Anti-Soviet articles by “the Russian expert” Scheffer appeared regularly in well-known American magazines and news-papers. One of Scheffer’s favorite subjects was the Moscow Trials. For his numerous American readers Scheffer interpreted the trials, at which he himself had been exposed as a German agent, as “gigantic frame-ups.” He described Bukharin, Pyatakov, Radek and the other Russian fifth columnists as “the real Bolshevik leaders.” His most extravagant praise, however, was reserved for Leon Trotsky.

In a typical article, “From Lenin to Stalin,” which appeared in the April 1938 issue of the well-known American quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Scheffer explained that Stalin was a “cunning Oriental” motivated by greed, jealousy and lust for power, and that he had arranged the execution of the Trotskyites only because they stood in the way of his personal ambitions.

Scheffer’s propaganda work in the United States did not end with his arrest after Pearl Harbor. On September 13, 1943, the Sunday edition of the New York Times featured on the front page of its magazine section an article on Germany carrying the byline, “Conrad Long.” The author was described in an editorial note as “a close student of German affairs in the present war.” The article contained the information that “the crops of the Ukraine” had been “allegedly doubled this summer by German methods.”

In reality, there was no “Conrad Long.” That was a pseudonym. The author of the Times article was Paul Scheffer. Following Scheffer’s arrest, certain of his influential American friends had managed to secure his release from internment. They arranged for him to write under a pen name for the Times. They even obtained employment for Scheffer as an expert adviser on German affairs, in the U. S. Office of Strategic Services.

In the spring of 1944 Scheffer was rearrested by agents of the Department of Justice. It was understood that this time Dr.Goebbels’s former special representative would be kept in confinement for the duration of the war.

4. The Dies Committee

In August 1938, just before the signing of the Munich Pact, a Special Congressional Committee to investigate un-American activities was formed in the United States. The Chairman of this Committee was Representative Martin Dies of Texas.

When the Dies Committee was formed, it was assumed the Committee would combat Axis intrigue in the United States.

Instead, the “investigation” carried on by Congressman Dies concentrated on one thing: convincing the American people that their chief and most deadly enemy was Soviet Russia.

The first Chief Investigator appointed by the Dies Committee was a little-known former labor spy and anti-Soviet propagandist named Edward F. Sullivan. Before coming to work for Dies, Sullivan had been associated with the anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist movement in America, which took its directives from Hetman Skoropadski and other White Ukrainian émigrés in Berlin. As a young, penniless newspaperman in Boston, Sullivan had been hired to help build anti-Soviet sentiment among Ukrainian-Americans. Although he could not speak one word of Ukrainian, Sullivan began spreading propaganda for an “independent Ukraine.”

Martin Dies’s future Chief Investigator soon became an outstanding figure in the fascist Ukrainian-American movement. As spokesman for the movement, he came into close association with Nazi agents and propagandists, collaborated with them and even publicly identified himself with their cause. On June 5, 1934, Sullivan addressed a meeting of German-American Bund members and uniformed Storm Troops at Thurnhall, Lexington Avenue and 85th Street, New York City. Sullivan was reported to have shouted, “Throw the lousy Jews into the Atlantic Ocean!”

In August 1936, Sullivan was featured as a main speaker at a national conference attended by leading American anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi propagandists which was held at Asheville, North Carolina. Other speakers at the conference were William Dudley Pelley, chief of the Silver Shirts; James True, who was publisher of a fascist bulletin in collaboration with Sullivan; and Ernest F. Elmhurst, alias E. F. Fleischkopf, a Bund member and Nazi agent. The speakers violently attacked Soviet Russia and denounced the Roosevelt Administration as part of a “Jewish Communist plot.” The Asheville press reported that Sullivan’s speech was “what Hitler would have said had he been speaking.”(7)

When liberal America organizations uncovered some of the facts about Sullivan’s unsavory record, Congressman Dies reluctantly dropped Sullivan as his Chief Investigator. “For reasons of economy, said Dies. Sullivan then rejoined the fascist Ukrainian movement and founded the Ukrainian-American Educational Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This organization, which specialized in promoting anti-Soviet agitation among the one million Ukrainian-Americans, was in touch with the German Embassy in Washington. Sullivan continued to co-operate with pro-Nazi and anti-Soviet propagandists throughout the country. “July fourth will be a good date for your party,” wired Coughlin regarding an affair he and Sullivan were arranging together. Despite his official separation from the Dies Committee, Sullivan remained in touch with it as one of its “anti-Communist experts.” On July 27, 1939, Sullivan received a letter from his friend Harry Jung, anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic propagandist in Chicago. Jung wrote: –

One of the Committee investigators has been here for some little while and he has been spending some time with us and we have loaded him up with a lot of startling information.

I really hope that the co-operation between our respective offices will be complete, satisfying and reciprocal…

Sullivan’s place as Dies’s chief aide and adviser on the Committee to investigate un-American activities was taken by J. B. Matthews, a renegade from the American radical movement. Matthews’s writings were widely publicized and distributed by leading American fascists and Axis agents. The Nazi Propaganda Ministry recommended his work. Articles by Matthews appeared in Contra-Komintern, an organ of Alfred Rosenberg’s Aussen-politisches Amt.

Week after week, in the marble-columned caucus room in the old House Office Building in Washington, a macabre procession of ex-convicts, labor spies, foreign agents and racketeers were solemnly paraded before the Dies Committee as “expert witnesses” to testify that Moscow agents were plotting to overthrow the government of the United States. These were some of the “anti-Communist” witnesses: –

Alvin Halpern: on the second day of his testimony, a District of Columbia Court sentenced him to a term of two years’ imprisonment for the crime of larceny; his testimony was included nevertheless in the public records of the Dies Committee.

Peter J. Innes: a labor spy who had been expelled from the National Maritime Union for stealing $500 from the union treasury; he was subsequently sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for attempted rape of a small child.

William C. McCuiston: an organizer of strong-arm squads for attacking trade-unionists; he testified before the Dies Committee while under indictment for the murder of Philip Carey, a labor leader who was shot and clubbed to death in New Orleans; subsequently acquitted on murder charge.

William Nowell: a labor spy, who was confidential adviser to the fascist leader, Gerald L. K. Smith, ex-Silver Shirter No. 3223.

Richard Krebs, alias Jan Valtin: ex-convict and confessed former Gestapo agent.(8)

“General” Walter G. Krivitsky, alias Samuel Ginsberg, a self-styled “GPU agent” under Yagoda, who had fled to the United States, where he published a lurid anti-Soviet autobiography.(9)

The files of Martin Dies soon overflowed with the names of supposedly dangerous “Bolsheviks.” At frequent intervals the Congressman from Texas would dramatically announce that he had uncovered a nationwide Fifth Column operating under directions from Moscow.

In 1940, Congressman Dies published a book to popularize the “findings” of his Committee. Entitled The Trojan Horse in America: A Report to the Nation, Dies’s book was chiefly devoted to anti-Soviet propaganda. While German-American Bundists and Christian Fronters were staging pro-Nazi mass demonstrations in American cities as spearheads of the Nazi Fifth Column, Congressman Dies pictured Stalin “at the head of 150 divisions of uniformed Soviet troops” invading the United States. Dies declared that, in fact, “Moscow agents” had already begun “the Soviet invasion of the United States.” (10)

Two days after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Dies predicted, “Hitler will be in control of Russia in thirty days.” The Congressman denounced the idea of sending aid to the Red Army. “American aid to Russia is foolish,” he declared, “because Germans will only get the equipment anyway.” He warned that “the very great danger exists that our government, by its aid to Russia, has opened up for Stalin a new Western Front right here in the capital of America.”

In a letter to President Roosevelt, written on October 2, 1941, shortly after the President had proclaimed that the defense of the Soviet Union was vital to the defense of America, Dies announced his intention of continuing his anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. “I intend, Mr. President,” wrote Dies, “to seize every opportunity to let the American people know that the similarities between Stalin and Hitler are far more striking than their differences.”

Even after the United States and Soviet Russia became military allies, Martin Dies continued his anti-Soviet campaign. On March 29, 1942, Henry Wallace, Vice-President of the United States, declared: –

If we were at peace, these tactics could be overlooked as the product of a witchcraft mind. We are not at peace, however. We are at war, and the doubts and angst which this and similar statements of Mr. Dies tend to arouse in the public mind might as well come from Goebbels himself as far as their practical effect is concerned. ‘As a matter of fact, the effect on our morale would be less damaging if Mr. Dies were on the Hitler payroll… We Americans must face the implications of this ugly truth.

5. Lone Eagle

Late in 1940, as Hitler was completing the enslavement of Europe and preparing for his coming showdown with the Red Army, a strange phenomenon appeared on the American political scene. It was called the America First Committee. During the following year, on a national scale, through the medium of press, radio, mass rallies, street-corner meetings and every other kind of promotional device, the America First Committee energetically spread anti-Soviet, anti-British and isolationist propaganda among the American people.

The original leaders of the America First Committee included General Robert E. Wood; Henry Ford; Colonel Robert R. McCormick; Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald P. Nye and Robert Rice Reynolds; Representatives Hamilton Fish, Clare E. Hoffman and Stephen Day; and Katherine Lewis, the daughter of John L. Lewis.

The leading woman spokesman for the Committee was the ex-aviatrix and socialite Laura Ingalls; she was subsequently convicted as a paid agent of the Nazi Government. Behind the scenes, another Nazi agent, George Sylvester Viereck, was writing much of the propaganda which America First publicists were circulating. Ralph Townsend, later convicted as a Japanese agent, headed a branch of the America First Committee on the West Coast and was a member of the editorial board of the Committee’s propaganda organs, Scribner’s Commentator and the Herald.(11) Werner C. von Clemm, later convicted of smuggling diamonds into the United States in collusion with the German High Command, served as an incognito strategist and financial supporter of the New York branch of the America First Committee. Frank B. Burch, subsequently convicted of having received $10,000 from the Nazi Government for illegal propaganda services in the United States, was one of the founders of the Akron, Ohio, branch of the Committee.

In July 1942 a Department of Justice indictment listed the America First Committee as an agency which had been used in a conspiracy to undermine the morale of the United States armed forces…

By far the most prominent leader and spokesman of the America First Committee was the famous American aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, who had already distinguished himself as a pro-Nazi and anti-Soviet agitator in Europe and America.

Lindbergh had paid his first visit to Germany in the summer of 1936. He traveled as a guest of the Nazi Government. The Nazis held impressive ceremonies in Lindbergh’s honor and extended many special favors to him. High Nazi officials personally conducted him on a private “inspection tour” of German war plants and air bases. Lindbergh was deeply impressed with Nazi Germany.

At the lavish parties given for him by Field Marshal Hermann Goering and other Nazi bigwigs, Lindbergh expressed his conviction that the German Air Force was unbeatable. “German aviation ranks higher than that in any other country,” he told the Luftwaffe ace, General Ernst Udet. “It is invincible!”

“Wonder what the hell is the matter with that American?” the German air commander, General Bruno Loerzer, remarked to the political journalist, Bella Fromm. “He’ll scare the wits out of the Yankees with his talk about the invincible Luftwaffe. That’s exactly what the boys here want him to do.”

“He’s going to be the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in,” said Axel von Blomberg, the son of the Nazi Minister of War, after attending a party given for Lindbergh in 1936.

Two years later, in the crucially decisive days preceding the Munich Pact, Lindbergh visited the Soviet Union. He was there only a few days. On his return, he immediately began spreading the word that the Red Army was hopelessly ill-equipped, badly trained and wretchedly commanded. He asserted that Soviet Russia would be useless as a partner in any military alliance against Nazi Germany. In his opinion, Lindbergh declared, it was necessary to co-operate with, not against, the Nazis.

Lindbergh’s black and orange plane became a familiar sight on the airfields of Europe’s anxious capitals as he flew from one country to another, advocating the formation of political and economic alliances with the Third Reich…

As the Munich negotiations got under way, small select groups of anti-Soviet British businessmen, aristocrats and politicians gathered at Lady Astor’s estate at Cliveden to hear Lindbergh’s views or the European situation. Lindbergh spoke of Germany’s vast air power, swiftly expanding war production and brilliant military leadership. The Nazis, he repeated again and again, were invincible. He recommended that France and Great Britain come to terms with Hitler and “permit Germany to expand eastward into Russia without declaring war.” (12)

A series of intimate conferences were arranged for Lindbergh with British Members of Parliament and various key political figures. Among them was David Lloyd George, who subsequently had this to say about the American flyer: –

He was in Russia, I think, about a week. He had not seen any of the great leaders of Russia, he could not have seen much of the air force, and he came back and told us that the Russian army was no good, that Russian factories were in an awful mess. And there were a great many who believed it – except Hitler.

Lloyd George’s conversation with Lindbergh left the former Prime Minister with the conviction, as he put it, that the American flyer was “the agent and the tool of much more astute and sinister men than himself.”

From the Soviet Union came the same accusation in more specific language. A group of outstanding Soviet flyers published a statement in Moscow accusing Lindbergh of circulating the “colossal lie” that “Germany possesses such a strong air force it is capable of defeating the combined air fleets of England, France, Russia and Czechoslovakia.” The Soviet airmen went on to say: –

Lindbergh plays the role of a stupid liar, lackey and flatterer of German Fascists and their English aristocratic protectors. He had an order from English reactionary circles to prove the weakness of Soviet aviation and give Chamberlain an argument for capitulation at Munich in connection with Czechoslovakia.

Three weeks after the signing of the Munich Pact, the Government of the Third Reich demonstrated its official appreciation of the services Lindbergh had rendered Nazi Germany. On the evening of October 18, 1938, at a dinner given in Lindbergh’s honor in Berlin, Field Marshal Goering conferred on the American flyer one of Germany’s highest decorations, the Order of the German Eagle…

Having lived abroad for three and a half years, Lindbergh returned to the United States shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939.

As soon as the Nazis invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, Lindbergh rushed into print with an urgent pronunciamento: the war against Germany was the wrong war; the right war lay to the east. In an article entitled “Aviation, Geography and Race,” in the November issue of Reader’s Digest, in language startlingly reminiscent of Alfred Rosenberg, Lindbergh declared: –

We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the white race… Asia presses toward us on the Russian border, all foreign races stir relentlessly… We can have peace and security only so long as we band together or preserve that most priceless possession our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies, and dilution by foreign races.

During 1940 Lindbergh identified himself more and more closely with the isolationist, anti-Soviet, and frequently pro-Axis movement that was then mushrooming on the American scene. He became the leading spokesman for the isolationist No Foreign Wars Committee and the idol of the U. S. Fifth Column.(18)

That fall Lindbergh addressed a small group of students at Yale University. “We must make our peace with the new powers in Europe,” Lindbergh told them.

The meeting at Yale University had been arranged by a wealthy young student named R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., who was heir to the Quaker Oats fortune. Shortly afterwards, Stuart’s group was incorporated in Chicago, Illinois, under the name of the America First Committee…

Speaking at huge rallies staged throughout the country by the America First Committee and over coast-to-coast radio hookups, Lindbergh told the American people that Soviet Russia and not Nazi Germany was their real enemy. The war “between Germany on the one side and England and France on the other side,” warned Lindbergh, could only result “either in a German victory or in a prostrate and devastated Europe.” The war must be converted into a united offensive against the Soviet Union.(14)

The entire America First publicity apparatus was put to work in a nationwide campaign protesting the sending of Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. Charles E. Lindbergh, Representative Hamilton Fish, Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye and other Congressional spokesmen for the America First Committee denounced aid to the Red Army and declared that the fate of Soviet Russia was of no concern to the United States.

Herbert Hoover took a part in the campaign. On August 5, together with John L. Lewis, Hanford MacNider, and thirteen other leading isolationists, the former President issued a public statement protesting the “promise of unauthorized aid to Russia and other such belligerent moves. The statement declared: –

Recent events raise doubts that this war is a clear-cut issue of liberty and democracy. It is not purely a world conflict between tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion.”

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee was officially disbanded. Its chairman, General Wood, pledged the support of the America First membership to the United States war effort against Germany and Japan. Lindbergh retired from the American public scene, and entered the employment of Henry Ford as a technical consultant to the Ford Motor Company.

But the anti-Soviet America First propaganda went on…

When the Red Army began its great counteroffensives in Russia, the former America First spokesmen, who had shortly before announced that Russia was smashed, now declared that Moscow and its “Comintern agents” were about to “communize” all of Europe.(16) When the Red Army approached its western borders, the America Firsters predicted that Soviet troops would not cross the frontier but would make a “separate peace” with Nazi Germany, leaving Britain and the United States to fight on alone. When the Red Army crossed its border, the America Firsters again raised the cry of a Europe “dominated by Moscow.”…

Three of the most influential newspaper publishers in the United States, who had formerly sponsored the America First Committee, continued to spread vicious anti-Soviet propaganda even after the United States and Soviet Russia were allied in the war against Nazi Germany. These three publishers -William Randolph Hearst, Captain Joseph M. Patterson, and Colonel Robert R. McCormick- printed for their many millions of readers an endless series of articles and editorials designed to arouse suspicion and antagonism against America’s ally, the Soviet Union.

Here are some typical passages from their newspapers during the war: –

You know we cannot expect too much of Russia. The bear that walks like a man does not always think like a man. There is always in the Russian mental processes the suggestion of the brutal selfishness and utter untrustworthiness of this wild animal which is her symbol. – Hearst’s New York Journal-American, March 30, 1942

Summarizing the various war fronts, matters seem to be progressing very favorably in Russia – for RUSSIA. Of course, Russia is not a full partner of the United Nations. She is a semi-partner of the Axis. Hearst’s New York Journal-American, March 30, 1942

What Stalin is getting at is this: He is preparing the way for a separate peace with Germany at the moment when he considers that this is good policy. He lays the ground for it by accusing the allies of not living up to their agreements. Therefore he is released from any that he may have made. He may not need this excuse. It is there if he wants it. He has prepared the ground. – McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1943

If Stalin can get more out of Germany with less trouble than he can get from his so-called allies later, what would a supremely self-centered man, to whom perfidy is a natural habit, choose? The whole career of the Georgian tenant of the Kremlin has been a turbulent stream of self-interest unscrupulously flowing from sources of natural cupidity to the objects desired. – McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1943

Which will smell better – a Russian Europe or a German Europe? – Patterson’s Daily News, August 27, 1943

It is ridiculous to plan to preserve peace with the aid of Russia. Russia invaded poor Finland and Poland, and was ready to pounce on Germany with England’s sanction, only Hitler beat her to it. – Letter of November 2, 1943, from a series of similar letters printed regularly in Patterson’s New York Daily News

President Roosevelt warned on April 28, 1942, that the war effort “must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.”

On November 8, 1943, at a Madison Square Garden meeting celebrating the tenth anniversary of U. S.-Soviet diplomatic relations, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes issued a scathing denunciation of the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign which was still being carried on without interruption by Hearst, Patterson and McCormick. The outspoken Secretary of the Interior declared: –

Unfortunately there are powerful and active forces in this country that are deliberately fostering ill will toward Russia. … Let me simply mention, as an example, the Hearst press and the Patterson-McCormick newspaper axis, particularly the latter…If these newspaper publishers hate Russia and Great Britain, their hate of their own country is more than libertine… They must hate their own country and despise its institutions if, deliberately, they pursue an intention to stir up hate for the two nations whose help we must have if we are to defeat Hitler…

In the fall of 1944, as Nazi Germany faced imminent defeat as a result of the combined offensives of the armies of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, a renewed call to arms against Soviet Russia was heard in the United States.

From Rome, the recently liberated capital of Italy, William C. Bullitt, the former Ambassador to Moscow and Paris, called for a new anti-Soviet alliance to save Western civilization from the menace of “Soviet imperialism.”

The career of William C. Bullitt had followed a familiar pattern…

In 1919, Bullitt had been one of Woodrow Wilson’s emissaries to Soviet Russia. Fifteen years later, in 1934, he became the first American Ambassador to Soviet Russia. Wealthy, ambitious, with a flair for diplomatic intrigue, Bullitt formed friendly relations with a number of the Russian Trotskyites. He began to talk of the necessity for Soviet Russia to surrender Vladivostok to Japan and to make concessions to Nazi Germany in the Welt. In 1935, Bullitt visited Berlin. William E. Dodd, then American Ambassador to Germany, recorded in his diplomatic Welt diary: –

Coming through Berlin in the spring or summer of 1935, he (Bullitt) reported to me that he was sure Japan would attack eastern Russia within six months and he expected that Japan would take all the Far Eastern end of Russia.

Bullitt said Russia had no business trying to hold the peninsula which projects into the Japanese sea at Vladivostok. That is all going to be taken soon by Japan. I said: You agree that if the Germans have their way Russia with 160,000,000 people shall be denied access to the Pacific, and be excluded from the Baltic? He said: “Oh, that makes no difference.”… I was amazed at this kind of talk from a responsible diplomat…

At luncheon with the French Ambassador, he repeated his hostile attitude and argued at length with the French for the defeat of the Franco-Soviet peace pact then being negotiated, which the English Ambassador reported to me was the best possible guarantee of European peace… Later, or about the same time, when the new Italian Ambassador came here directly from Moscow, we were told that Bullitt had become attracted to Fascism before leaving Moscow.

On January 27, 1937, Ambassador Dodd recorded: –

Recently reports have come to me that American banks are contemplating large new credits and loans to Italy and Germany whose war machines are already large enough to threaten the peace of the world. I have even heard, but it seems unbelievable to me, that Mr. Bullitt is lending encouragement to these schemes.

In 1940, after the fall of France, Bullitt returned from France to the United States to announce that Marshal Petain was a “patriot” who, by surrendering to Nazism, had thereby saved his country from Communism.

Four years later, as the Second World War was drawing to its close, Bullitt reappeared on the European continent as a “correspondent” for Life magazine. From Rome he sent a sensational article to Life, which was published in that periodical on September 4, 1944. Purporting to give the opinions of certain anonymous “Romans,” Bullitt repeated the anti-Soviet propaganda which for twenty years had been utilized by international Fascism in its drive for world conquest. Bullitt wrote: –

The Romans expect the Soviet Union to dominate Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia… They expect that, besides eastern Poland, the Russians will also annex East Prussia, including Konigsberg… A sad joke going the rounds in Rome gives the spirit of their [the “Romans”] hope: What is an optimist? A man who believes that the third world war will begin in about 15 years between the Soviet Union and western Europe backed by Great Britain and the U. S. What is a pessimist? A man who believes that western Europe, Great Britain and the U. S. will not dare to fight.

Bullitt asserted that the menace against which Western civilization must unite was Moscow and its “Communist agents.”

It was the same cry with which, a quarter of a century before, at the close of the First World War, Captain Sidney George Reilly had sought to rally counterrevolution throughout the world.(17)

But profound changes had taken place in the world.

Even as William C. Bullitt was calling for a new crusade against Soviet Russia, the armies of Great Britain and the United States and the Soviet Union were converging from east, west, north and south upon the citadel of counterrevolution – Berlin.

In the face of the threat of Fascist slavery and against the most reactionary force which the world had ever seen, the Western democracies had found their most powerful ally in the state which had been born out of the Russian Revolution. The alliance was no accident. The inexorable logic of events, after a quarter of century of tragic misunderstanding and artificially incited hostility, had inevitably brought together and forged into a fighting unity the freedom-loving peoples of the world. Out of the unparalleled bloodshed and suffering of the Second World War emerged the United Nations.

Notes:

1. Associated with Rybakoff as a contributor to Rossiya was the ex-agent of the Ochrana and anti-Semitic propagandist, Boris Brasol, who (?)up the first anti-Soviet White Russian organization in the United (?) shortly after the Russian Revolution and who had obtained wide distribution in America for The Protocols of Zion. (See page 145.)

Brasol had never lost hope in the restitution of Czarism in Russia. During the 1920’s and 1930’s he campaigned tirelessly in the United States against the Soviet Union, organizing White Russian anti-Soviet societies, writing articles and books attacking Soviet Russia, and supplying U. S. Government agencies with anti-Soviet forgeries. On November 15, 1935, at a small secret meeting in New York City of leading representatives of anti-Soviet White Russian organizations, Brasol spent more than an hour reporting on his “anti-Soviet work” since his arrival in the United States in 1916; at this meeting he referred with special pride to his “own modest work” in helping prevent recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States before 1933.

Promoting himself as an authority on Russia law, Brasol became a legal consultant for the law firm of Coudert Brothers of New York City. He was employed by U. S. Government agencies to give “expert advice” on matters relating to Soviet Russia. He gave lectures on Russian literature and similar subjects at Columbia University and other well-known American educational institutes. In every way, Brasol used his many influential contacts to promote suspicion and hostility against Soviet Russia.

When the isolationist and anti-Soviet American First Committee was formed in the fall of 1940, Brasol immediately became one of its most active supporters. He prepared large amounts of anti-Soviet propaganda literature for distribution by the Committee, and his articles were featured in America First publications. Among the propaganda material provided by Brasol to the America First Committee, and widely circulated by that organization, was a leaflet published after the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., in protest against American Lend-Lease aid to Russia. The leaflet featured a “Declaration of the Russian Emigrant Colony in Shanghai,” signed by twenty-one White Guard organizations in the Far East, all of which were operating under the supervision of the Japanese Government. Among the organizations listed was the Russian Fascist Union, headed by Konstantin Rodsaevesky, aide-in-chief to Ataman Grigori Semyonov.

in June 1940, Vonsiatsky informed a reporter from the newsletter, the Now, that he and Leon Trotsky had “parallel interests” in their struggle against the Soviet regime.

3. Fascist White Russians were not the only Russian émigrés carrying on anti-Soviet agitation in the United States. A number of former Russian Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and other anti-Soviet political elements had come to America and had made the United States the headquarters for their continued intrigue or propaganda activities against Soviet Russia. Typical of these émigrés were Victor Chernov, Raphael Abramovitch, Nikifor Grigorieff and Nathan Chanin.

In Czarist Russia, Victor Chernov had been one of the leaders of the Social Revolutionary movement. As such, he had been intimately associated with two other Social Revolutionary leaders: the extraordinary Czarist agent provocateur and assassin, Ievno Aseff; and the anti-Soviet conspirator and assassin, Boris Savinkov. In his book Memoirs of a Terrorist, Savinkor describes how he went to Geneva in 1903 to consult with Chernov about the plans for assassinating the Czarist Minister of Interior, Von Plehve. Savinkov also tells how he and Aseff went before the Central Committee of the Social Revolutionary Terrorist Brigade in 1906 to get out of their assignment to assassinate Premier Stolypin. “The Central Committee,” (?) Savinkov, “declined to grant our request and ordered us to continue the work against Stolypin… Present, in addition to Aseff and myself, was Tchernov [Chernov], Natanson, Sletov, Kraft and Pankratov.” After the collapse of Czarism, Chernov became Minister of Agriculture in the (?)

.

Provisional Government. He carried on a bitter fight against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Following the establishment of the Soviet Government, he helped organize Social Revolutionary plots against the Soviet regime. Leaving Russia in the early 1920’s, he became one of the most active anti-Soviet propagandists among the Russian émigrés and a leader of anti-Soviet activity in Prague, Berlin, Paris and other European capitals. At the beginning of the Second World War, he came from France to the United States of America, he continued his anti-Soviet propaganda and organizational operations. He worked closely with anti-Soviet Socialist elements in the American labor movement. On March 30, 1943, David Dubinsky, President of the (?) Ladies’ Garment Workers, introduced Chernov as a guest of (?) at a rally in New York City protesting the execution by the Soviet authorities of Henry Erlich and Victor Alter, two Polish Socialists who had been found guilty by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme court of spreading disruptive propaganda in the Red Army and urging the Soviet troops to make peace with the Germans.

Associated with Victor Chernov in his anti-Soviet activity in the United States was Raphael Abramovitch, the former Russian Menshevik leader who, according to testimony given at the Menshevik trial in March 1931, was a leading member of the espionage-sabotage ring then plotting the over throw of the Soviet Government. (See page 171.) After carrying on anti-Soviet activities in Berlin and London, Abramovitch came to the United States and settled down in New York City, where he, like Victor (?); formed close working relations with David Dubinsky and other Socialist labor leaders. His violent attacks on Soviet Russia appeared in the New Leader, the New York Forward and other anti-Soviet publications.

Nikifor Grigorieff, an anti-Soviet Ukrainian émigré and former leading member of the Ukrainian Social Revolutionary Party, came to the United States in 1939. As a prominent anti-Soviet propagandist in émigré circles in Europe, Grigorieff had worked closely with Victor Chernov. In Prague, Grigorieff was an editor of a magazine called Suspilstvo (Community), which published propaganda claiming that “Soviet Russia and the Soviet Ukraine are in the hands of the Jews” and advocating a “great anti-Jewish struggle… on the territory of the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Poland.” After he came to the United States, Grigorieff continued his anti-Soviet activities. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Grigorieff and Chernov helped form a “Committee for the Promotion of Democracy” in New York City, which called for the “liberation” from the U.S.S.R. of the Ukraine and other Soviet republics. Among the propaganda material distributed by Grigorieff in the United States was a booklet entitled Basic Principles of Independent Ukrainian Political Action, which contained “statistics” to show that Jews “dominate” industry, finance and politics in the Soviet Ukraine. In this same booklet Grigorieff advocated the desertion of soldiers from the Red Army, urging that they “not risk their lives for their oppressors. ”

Also prominent among the “left-wing” anti-Soviet Russian émigrés in the United States was Nathan Chanin, Educational Director of the Workmen’s Circle and regular contributor to the anti-Soviet Forward. In the early 1930’s Chanin published propaganda appealing for funds to finance “the secret Social Democratic cells now at work in Russia” and “the difficult struggle our comrades carry on in Russia against Bolshevism.. In January 1942 Chanin wrote, “The last shot has not yet been fired… And the last shot will be fired from free America – and from that shot the Stalin regime, too, will be shot to pieces.”

4. In 1933 a central agency to direct the International anti-Soviet agitation was set up by Alfred Rosenberg in Berlin. It was called the International Committee to Combat the Menace of Bolshevism – the original form of the

Anti-Comintern. Affiliates included: –

General League of German Anti-Communist Associations, Anti-Communist Bloc of South America, Anti-Communist Union of the Province of North China European Anti-Communist League

American Section of the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism

5. Japanese agents were also active in spreading anti-Soviet propaganda in the United States. A typical case was that of John C. Le Clair, assistant personnel director of the International Telephone Company and former history instructor at New York City College and St. Francis College in Brooklyn. As an accepted authority on the Far East, Le Clair wrote numerous articles for well-known American periodicals, in which he praised Japan and declared that Soviet Russia represented the real menace to the United States. He also edited a column called “Comments and Forecasts,” which contained similar propaganda and was distributed to 200 newspapers and periodicals throughout the country. Characteristic of Le Clair’s articles was one which appeared in the September 1940 issue of the magazine America under the title “No Friendship Wanted Between the United States and the USSR.” Arrested by FBI agents in the fall of 1943, Le Clair pleaded guilty in a New York Federal court on September 8 to having served as a secret paid propaganda agent of the Japanese government for a three-year period ending a few months prior to Pearl Harbor.

6. To those of his influential friends abroad who still considered him a liberal journalist and who were deeply surprised at his return to Germany, Scheffer confidentially explained that he was undertaking some (space here that shouldn’t be, a hard return perhaps?)

anti-Nazi mission in the Third Reich. With an eye toward his future work, Scheffer wanted to maintain his useful associations in foreign circles. Strangely enough, many of his friends believed his story.

Among those whom Scheffer failed to convince of his anti-Nazi sentiments was the anti-fascist American Ambassador to Germany, the late William E. Dodd. On November 15, 1936, Dr. Dodd wrote in his diary the following notation about Scheffer: “I have been watchful of this Scheffer who was a Social Democrat a few years ago, was several years in the United States as correspondent for the German press and is now a good Nazi.”

(7) American taxpayers who paid Sullivan’s salary while he was Chief Investigator of un-American activities for the Dies Committee might have been interested in Sullivan’s police record: –

Offense	Place of Offense	Date	Disposition
Drunkenness	Charlestown, Mass.	9/7/20	Released
Driving so as to endanger	Roxbury	12/18/23	Fined $25
Driving without license	Suffolk	2/11/24	Fined $25
Driving so as to endanger	Suffolk	6/27/24	Placed on file
Larceny	Malden	2/4/32	6 mos. House of Correction; appealed
Larcery	Middlesex	(?)	-prossed Superior Court 4/12/32
Operating after license	Lowell	2/11/32	Filed suspended
Violation of Section 690	New York City	12/20/33	Acquitted of the penal law
(Sodomy)Arrested on charges of im-	Pittsburgh	12/11/39	Charges (this should follow ‘charges’ as the ‘im’ goes with ‘personating’) personating FBI officer

8. In January 1941, when the German High Command was completing its preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union, a sensational anti-Soviet book was published in the United States entitled Out of the Night. The author’s name was given as Jan Valtin.

“Jan Valtin” was one of the several aliases of Richard Krebs, a former Gestapo agent. His other aliases were Richard Anderson, Richard Peterson, Richard Williams, Rudolf Heller and Otto Melchior.

Krebs’s book, Out of the Night, purported to be the confession of a Communist, “Jan Valtin,” who had been traveling about the world carrying out sinister assignments for Moscow. The author described in lurid detail the criminal conspiracies which had supposedly been engineered by “Bolshevik agents” against world democracy. The author related how after ten years of criminal service “for the Conmintern,” including an attempted murder in California in 1926, he had begun to have “doubts about the desirability and the purpose of the Communist Party.” Finally, so his story went, he had decided to make a complete break with Moscow and tell all…

Krebs arrived in the United States in February 1938. He brought with him from Europe the manuscript of Out of the Night, which bore a startling resemblance to an anti-Soviet propaganda book which was being currently circulated in Nazi Germany. In preparing the book for publication in the United States, Krebs was assisted by the American journalist Isaac Don Levine, a veteran anti-Soviet propagandist and a regular contributor to the Hearst press.

Aided by an unprecedented promotional campaign, Out of the Night became a sensational best-seller. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed 165,000 copies among its readers. Reader’s Digest published a lengthy condensation with the comment that the autobiography had been “carefully authenticated by the publishers.” In two consecutive issues Life magazine quoted extensive sections from the book. Few books in the history of American publishing received the promotional ballyhoo and expensive advertising lavished on Out of the Night.

While a number of book reviewers were openly skeptical about the book, others, well-known for their anti-Soviet sentiments, showered praises on Krebs’s work. Freda Utley, anti-Soviet newspaperwoman writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, described the book in these words: “No other book more clearly reveals the aid which Stalin gave to Hitler before he won power, and which he must be giving him today.” Sidney Hook, an admirer of Trotsky, declared in the New Leader, organ of the so-called Social Democratic Federation: “As a sheer story it is so compelling in its breath-taking sequences that it could never be accepted as fiction, for it violates all the canons of fictional credibility.” William Henry Chamberlin, whose anti-Soviet interpretation of the Moscow Trials had appeared in the Tokyo propaganda organ, Contemporary Japan, urged in the New York Sunday Times Book Supplement that “Valtin” become “a valuable assistant to those United States agencies which are engaged in combating espionage, sabotage and other illegal, foreign inspired activities.” Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, and others of the anti-Soviet, pro-Trotsky literary clique in America excitedly hailed the “historic expose” by the former Gestapo agent.

“Jan Valtin” became a national figure. He was invited to testify as an anti-Soviet expert before the Dies Committee.

On March 28, 1941, Krebs was served with a warrant of arrest as an undesirable and deportable alien. The subsequent Federal hearings established that Krebs had been found guilty of attempted murder in California in 1926 and had served thirty-nine months in San Quentin. The Los Angela court records showed that this crime, which Krebs had portrayed in Out of the Night as a Comintern assignment, had resulted from an argument over a bill which Krebs owed a small merchant. Explaining in court why he had tried to kill the merchant, Krebs said, “The Jew made me mad.”

The Federal hearings also revealed that Krebs had been deported from the United States in December 1929 and that in 1938, as in 1926, he had entered the United States illegally. In addition, the hearings established that in 1934 Krebs had acted as a witness for the Nazi Government in securing a treason conviction against a fellow seaman. As for his connection with the German Communist Party, from which he had been expelled, Krebs admitted that he had “penetrated the organization.”

The U. S. Immigration Court stated in its findings: “Within the past five years the subject has been considered an agent of Nazi Germany. On the record before us it appears he has been completely untrustworthy and amoral.”

The exposure of Krebs as a former Nazi agent and convicted criminal received little publicity. Later, endorsed and vouched for by his influential anti-Soviet American friends, Krebs was given a clear bill of health by U. S. Immigration authorities as a reformed individual and was granted American citizenship papers. Out of the Night remained on public library bookshelves throughout the country and continued to spread its anti-Soviet message among tens of thousands of Americans.

9. According to Louis Waldman, who was Krivitsky’s American attorney, Krivitsky’s entry into the United States had been “sponsored by William C Bullitt, ambassador to France:’ For comment on Bullitt’s anti-Soviet activities see page 374.

10. Pro-Axis and anti-Soviet elements in the United States enthusiastically supported the work of Congressman Martin Dies. On December 8. 1939. Merwin K. Hart, the leading American spokesman for the Spanish Fascist regime of Generalissimo Franco, gave a banquet in New York City at which Dies was the guest of honor. Among those attending the banquet were John B. Trevor, Archibald E. Stevenson and Fritz Kuhn, head of the German American Bund. When newspapermen asked Kuhn what he thought of the Dies Committee, he replied: “I am in favor of it being appointed again and I wish them to get more money.”

Here are some other comments by anti-Soviet agitators on the work of the Dies Committee: –

I have the highest respect for the Dies Committee and sympathize with its program. – George Sylvester Viereck, Nazi agent, sentenced on February 21, 1942, to serve eight months to two years in prison

I founded the Silver Legion in 1933… to propagandize exactly the same principles that Mr. Dies and his Committee are engaged in prosecuting right now.-William Dudley Pelley, leader of the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, sentenced on August 13, 1942, to fifteen years’ imprisonment for criminal sedition; again indicted in 1944 on charges of participating in a Nazi conspiracy against America

In your appreciation of the work accomplished by Dies employ some of your leisure moments to write him a letter of encouragement. In fact a million letters, brought to his desk would be an answer to those who are bent on destroying him and the legislative body he represents. – Father Charles E. Coughlin, pro-Nazi propagandist, founder of the Christian From and of Social Justice, which in 1942 was banned from the U. S mails as seditious

Berlin itself openly expressed enthusiastic approval of Dies’s anti-Soviet work in the United States. The short-wave monitoring system of the Federal Communication Commission reported in the winter of 1941 that Representative Martin Dies was the American “most frequently and approvingly” quoted on Axis short-wave broadcasts beamed to the Western Hemisphere.

11. The editors of the Herald operated short-wave receivers which were kept tuned day and night to Hitler-dominated Europe and to Japan. Official Axis propaganda, received in this manner, was incorporated into the Herald and into Scribner’s Commentator.

The Herald and Scribner’s Commentator were distributed throughout the United States free of charge, handed out at America First Committee rallies and circulated on a mass scale to specially prepared America First mailing lists supplied by Charles E. Lindbergh, Hamilton Fish, Charles E. Coughlin, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and the Nazi agents Frank Burch, George Sylvester Viereck and others.

12. Describing his activities during this period, Lindbergh told an America First Committee rally in the United States on October 30, 1941: “By 1938 I had come to the conclusion that if a war occurred between Germany on the one side and England and France on the other it would result either in a German victory or in a prostrate and devastated Europe. I therefore advocated that England and France… permit Germany to expand onward into Russia without declaring war.”

12.13. 13. In 1937, John C. Metcalfe, a reporter for the Chicago Daily Times and later a Federal agent, had recorded the following statement made to him by Hermann Schwarzmann, leader of the Astoria, Long Island, unit of the German American Bund: “You know who might become the Fuehrer of our great political party? Lindbergh! Yes, that is not so far-fetched as you might think. You know he could carry the public with him very easily. The Americans like him… Yes, there are a lot of things being planned the public knows nothing about as yet.”

14. The Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia was enthusiastically hailed by the America First Committee. The America First mouthpiece, the Herald, carried this headline: –

Europe Masses to Fight Russian Communists. Seventeen Nations Join the German Reich in Holy Crusade against the U.S.S.R.

Soviet Russia’s defeat by Nazi Germany was pictured as being in the interest of the United States. The August 1, 1941, issue of the America First Research Bureau Bulletin stated: –

“Did you know that even if Nazi Germany conquers Communist Russia, the enlarged German economy may be weakened rather than strengthened?”

15. On October 30, 1941, with the Nazis nearing Moscow, an America First Rally at Madison Square Garden, New York City, was addressed by John Cudahy, the former captain with the American interventionist army in Archangel who, subsequently, as American Ambassador to Belgium, adopted a pro-German stand which forced his recall from that post. Cudahy urged that the United States Government initiate an international “peace conference” which would include Nazi Germany. Cudahy declared that “those in positions of authority in the Nazi Government realize the great threat of American potential war power. Von Ribbentrop told me this when I saw him in Berlin five months ago.” Cudahy added that this would be a good bargaining point in “peace negotiations” with the Nazis. “They say there can be no peace with Hitler. But Hitler is only a passing phase…” said Cudahy. “We have in this country a great European expert and a man of purest patriotic motives, Herbert Hoover… Let us put Mr. Hoover to work on a plan for a permanent peace settlement.”

The invocation at the America First Rally which Cudahy addressed was given by a Reverend George Albert Simons. Before the Russian Revolution, this Reverend Mr. Simons had been a pastor at a Protestant missionary church in St. Petersburg. There he had become friendly with Boris Brasol, the anti-Semitic propagandist who was to play a major role in distributing the Protocols of Zion in America. In February 1919 Mr. Simons testified before the Senate Committee investigating “Bolshevism.” Here is an excerpt from Mr. Simons’s testimony: “More than half of the agitators in the so-called Bolshevik movement were Yiddish. This thing [the Russian Revolution] is Yiddish and one of its bases is to be found in the East Side of New York.” Mr. Simons recommended the Protocols of Zion as a valuable source of information about the Revolution. He said: “… it shows what this secret Jewish society has been doing to make a conquest of the world… and finally to have the whole world, if you please, in their grip, and now, in that book ever so many things are said with regard to their program and methods which dovetail into the Bolshevik regime.’

16. On May 22, 1943, the Comintern, or Communist International, was formally dissolved. In a special article for the United Press, the former American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies, summed up the dissolution of the Comintern as follows: “To the well-informed in the Foreign Offices of the world this action did not come as a surprise. It was simply placing the cap on the pedestal, to complete and close a chapter in the development of Soviet foreign policy. This can be best understood from a brief survey of the historical facts in connection with the Comintern… It was organized in 1919 when the young revolutionary government was being attacked on all sides… Under Stalin, however, it finally became a clearinghouse for the working-class movement of other countries. In the democratic countries these [Communist] parties were advised to seek lawful status and to conduct their activities through peaceful and constitutional methods. In these countries, they generally became vociferous but non-violent minorities. Only in aggressor or hostile countries was it probable that Comintern support was actively given to revolutionary class warfare and internal subversive attacks upon governments… The enemy – the Nazis, Fascists, and Japs – have done their utmost to scare us with the bogy of the Communist threat to our Western civilization. It was done under the disguise of a so called anti-Comintern pact that they originally got together in 1936, 1937, 1939 and 1940, in their conspiracy to conquer us, as well as the rest of the world… At one stroke, on May 22 [1943], Stalin and his associates in Moscow spoiled Hitler’s game… When they abolished the Comintern, they spike the last big gun of Hitler’s propaganda… The abolition of the Comintern, moreover, was a definite act, confirming their expressed purpose to co-operate with, and not to stir up trouble for, their neighbors, with whom they are pledged to collaboration to win the war and the peace… The abolition of the Comintern contributes to the cementing of confidence between fighting allies in the war effort. It is also a contribution to postwar construction, in the building of a decent world community of nations, who, realistically, seek to build that world by co-operating and working together as good neighbors.”

17. The same cry was re-echoed, even after the final defeat of Nazi Germany by the Anglo-American-Soviet coalition, when Congresswoman Clare Lure, wife of the publisher of the magazines Time, Life and Fortune. returned from a European tour early in 1945 to inform Americans that Bolshevism was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe because of the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany. Mrs. Luce called on the United States to give its support to all anti-Soviet forces in Europe. This, of course, had been the chief hope of the Nazis and the main theme of the Nazi Propsgana Minister, Dr. Goebbels, during his last broadcasts from besieged Berlin.

Again, the same cry was raised when one of a group of American Senators visiting Rome in the spring of 1945 was said to have asked a gathering of American soldiers if they would not be willing to go on “and finish (?)” by fighting against Soviet Russia. The soldiers were reported to have received the Senator’s anti-Bolshevik crusading with obvious disapproval. Many of them walked out of the room.

At the same time, anti-Soviet propaganda continued to be spread in the United States by a number of books similar in style and content to Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night. Among the most widely circulated of these books published in 1945 were Report on the Russians by William L. White and One Who Survived by Alexander Barmine.

The American journalist William L. White wrote his Report on the Russians after a hasty, six-weeks tour of the Soviet Union. From beginning to end White’s book, which originally appeared in condensed form in the Reader’s Digest, was a tirade against the Soviet people, their leaders and even against their war effort. Hailed as a “rich objective report” by such anti-Soviet journals as the Social-Democratic New Leader and enthusiastically quoted by the Patterson-McCormick and Hearst press, White’s book was vigorously condemned by those sections of the American press concerned with the maintenance of good relations between the United Nations. A group of distinguished American correspondents who had worked in the Soviet Union during the war, including John Hersey, Richard Lauterbach, Ralph Parker and Edgar Snow, issued a public statement sharply denouncing White’s book as “a highly biased and misleading report, calculated to prolong the oldest myths and prejudices against a great ally, whose sacrifices in this war have saved us incalculable bloodshed and suffering.” The statement of the foreign correspondents pointed out that “White was ignorant not only of the language but evidently, of this history and culture [of Russia] as well,” that White’s book’s “fundamental dishonesty lies in the total absence of either foreground or background detail,” and that “the book has to be linked with the significance of ignorant and inimical groups here and in Europe, who seek to sharpen distrust and suspicion among the Allies.” Nevertheless, Report on the Russians, promoted a lavish high-Pressure publicity campaign, continued to reach tens of thousands of American readers.

Alexander Barmine’s book, One Who Survived, purported to be the “inside story” of Soviet politics and leadership by a former “Soviet diplomat” and “specialist” in Soviet affairs. Like the Report on the Russians, Barmine’s book virulently attacked everything connected with the Soviet Union, declaring that Stalin was the leader of “a triumphant counterrevolution” which had become “a reactionary dictatorship.” At the time of the exposure and liquidation of the Russian fifth column, Alexander Barmine was serving as the Soviet charge d’affaires in Athens, Greece. Barmine promptly left his post and refused to return to the Soviet Union. In One Who Survived, Barmine relates that a number of the Soviet conspirators who were executed had been among his closest “friends” and “colleagues.” Regarding General Tukhachevsky, who was found guilty of plotting with the German General Staff against the Soviet Union, Barmine states, “In Moscow I had worked in intimate collaboration with him,” and adds that the Russian general “had been in the last years my close friend.” Barmine also remarks that he “carried out” a “few jobs” under the direction of Arkady Rosengoltz, who admitted in 1938 to having been a paid agent of the German Military Intelligence; and that he, Barmine, had been visited in Paris by the “keen-witted” Leon Sedov Trotsky. The book One Who Survived contained a eulogistic introduction by Max Eastman, and was vigorously promoted by other anti-Soviet persons in the United States. Like William L. White’s book, Barmine’s One Who Survived was praised and publicized with special enthusiasm by the New Leader, the editors of which included Eugene Lyons, whose anti-Soviet writings were periodically quoted by official agencies of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry; William Henry Chamberlin, whose anti-Soviet articles were featured by the Hearst press and whose interpretation of the Moscow trials appeared in the Japanese propaganda organ, Contemporary Japan; Sidney Hook, former follower of Trotsky; John Dewey, former Chairman of the “Commission of Inquiry” at the Trotsky hearings in Mexico; and Max Eastman, Trotsky’s former close collaborator, friend and translator.

In Europe, both W. L. White’s and Alexander Barmine’s writings were used by the Nazis in their propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union. The publication of White’s Report on the Russians was hailed in an enthusiastic front-page article in the ‘January 30, 1945, issue of Der Westkaempfer (West Front Fighter), official organ of the Nazi Reichwehr; the article asserted that White’s book proved the possibility of division in the ranks of the United Nations. In March 1945, American troops in Italy were bombarded by the Nazis with shells containing pamphlet reprints of an article by Barmine which had previously been published in the Reader’s Digest under the title “The New Communist Conspiracy.”

The end of the Second World War in Europe found the voices of the anti-Bolshevik crusaders no less shrill than after 1918, but far less potent in their influence on Americans and other peoples, who had learned much since the death of Woodrow Wilson.

CHAPTER XXIV – The Case of the Sixteen

IN the last months of the Second World War, the chief propagandist issue of anti-Soviet agitation in Great Britain and the United States centered on the question of Poland. As the Red Army drove westward, crossing the Polish frontiers and liberating ever greater sections of Poland from the Nazi invaders, British Tories and American isolationists charged that “Polish freedom” was now endangered by the Soviet Union. Week after week, the Hearst and Patterson-McCormick press in the United States called for anti-Soviet action to save Poland from “Bolshevism.” In the United States Congress and the British Parliament, speakers rose repeatedly to denounce “Red Imperialistic aims in Poland” and to accuse the Soviet Government of betraying the principles of the United Nations. Much of this anti-Soviet propaganda was based on statements and material officially released by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London and by its representatives in Washington, D. C. The London Polish Government-in-Exile was composed of Polish militarists, spokesmen of Poland’s feudal landlords, some Polish fascists and a few socialists and peasant leaders, who had found haven in England after Poland’s collapse in 1939.(1)

At the time, there were actually two Polish governments. Besides the emigre regime in London, a Provisional Polish Government, the so-called Warsaw regime, existed within Poland itself. The Warsaw Government, based on an alliance of Polish anti-fascist parties, repudiated the 1935 Pilsudski fascist constitution which the London Poles upheld. The Warsaw Government stood for sweeping economic and political reforms inside Poland, the abolition of the feudal estates, and close friendly relations with the Soviet Union.

At the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin discussed the question of the future of Poland at length, and agreed that the Warsaw regime was to be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad,” and then recognized as the legitimate Provisional Government of the country.

The Yalta agreement met with strenuous opposition from the London Polish émigrés and their American and British allies. It was denounced as a “betrayal of Poland.” Diplomatic intrigues were set afoot to prevent the fulfillment of the Yalta decision.

The anti-Soviet agitation and intrigues around the Polish issue reached their height when in May 1945 the Soviet Government announced that it had arrested sixteen Polish agents of the London Government-in-Exile on charges of anti-Soviet conspiracy. This action on the part of the Soviet Government, declared the Polish émigrés in London, was the most extreme example of Moscow’s program to stifle “Polish democracy” and impose a “Red dictatorship” upon the Polish people…

The best-known name among the sixteen Poles arrested by the Soviet Government was that of General Leopold Bronislaw Okulicki, former Chief of Staff of the Polish army in exile. This army had played a key role in the anti-Soviet campaign of the Polish émigrés…

This Polish army was originally, organized on Soviet soil in 1941 by joint Polish-Soviet agreement, to fight side by side with the Red Army against the Germans. It was headed by General Wladislaw Anders, a former member of the “colonels’ clique” which had dominated Poland under the Pilsudski dictatorship. To train and equip Anders’s army for military action against Germany, the Soviet Government granted a loan without interest of 300,000,000 rubles, and gave the army facilities for recruiting and encampment. However, General Anders, Okulicki and other Polish militarists secretly opposed the alliance with the Red Army. They believed that Soviet Russia was doomed to speedy defeat by Nazi Germany and were acting accordingly.

A report by Lieutenant Colonel Berling, subsequently leader of the armed forces of the Warsaw regime, revealed that in 1941, shortly after the formation of the first Polish units on Soviet soil, General Anders held a conference with his officers at which he stated: –

When the Red Army collapses under German blows, which will be no later than within a few months, we will be able to break through to Iran via the Caspian Sea. Since we will be the only armed power in this territory, we will be in a position to do whatever we please.

When, contrary to General Anders’s expectations, the Red Army failed to collapse before the Nazi blitzkrieg, the Polish commander informed his officers that they need not be concerned about meeting the terms of the Polish-Soviet military agreement to fight jointly against Germany. “There is no need to hurry,” Anders told General Borucie-Spiechowiczow, commander of the Polish 5th Infantry Division.

Anders and his officers, according to Lieutenant Colonel Berling, “did everything possible to drag out the training and arming of the divisions” so that they would not have to go into action against Germany. The Polish Chief of Staff, General Okulicki, actively sabotaged the equipping of the Polish troops. In Berling’s words: –

Okulicki sabotaged the organization of the base on the Caspian Sea for receiving English arms and provisions from Iran. Soviet authorities built a special railway branch and warehouses on the shores of the Caspian Sea, but General Anders’ command prevented a single rifle, tank or sack of supplies from coming through.

Polish officers and men who were eager to accept the Soviet help and to take up arms against the German invaders of their homeland were terrorized by the reactionary clique headed by Generals Anders and Okulicki. Lists were compiled of “friends of the Soviet” who were “traitors to Poland.” A special index known as File B contained the names and records of all those said to be “sympathetic to the Soviets.” Fascist anti-Semitic propaganda was promoted by the Polish command. “There was,” reported Berling, “open talk about the need `to square accounts with the Jews,’ and there were frequent cases of Jews being beaten up.” The Dwojka, espionage service of Anders’s army, began secretly accumulating data about Soviet war plants, state farms, railroads, army depots and positions of the Red Army troops.

By the spring of 1942, Anders’s army in Russia had still failed to fight a single engagement against the German enemy. Instead, Polish officers and men were being intensively indoctrinated with the anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic ideology of their generals. Finally the Polish command requested that its army be evacuated to Iran under British auspices. By August 1942, 75,491 Polish officers and men and 37,756 members of their families had left Soviet territory, without ever having struck one blow for their native land.

On March 13, 1944, the Australian correspondent James Aldridge cabled the New York Times an uncensored report on the fascist behavior of the émigré Polish army leaders in Iran. Aldridge stated that he had wanted to make public the facts about the Polish émigrés for over a year, but the Allied censorship would not permit him to do so. One Allied censor told Aldridge: “I know it’s all true, but what can I do? We recognize the Polish Government, you know.”

Here are a few of the facts reported by Aldridge: –

The Polish camp was divided into classes. At the camp conditions got progressively worse as one’s situation was lower. The Jews were separated into a ghetto. The camp was run on totalitarian lines… A continuous campaign against Russia was conducted by the more reactionary groups… When more than 300 Jewish children had been fixed up to go to Palestine, the Polish elite, who were very anti-Semitic, put pressure on the Iraqui authorities not to allow the Jewish children to pass through…

I have heard many Americans say they would like to tell the real story about the Poles, but that it was useless because the Poles have such a powerful lobbying bloc in Washington…

From Iran, the Polish émigrés moved to Italy, where, under the direction of the British High Command, and supported by the Vatican, the Polish émigré army established its headquarters. The ambition of Generals Anders, Okulicki and their associates, which they made little attempt to conceal, was to convert this Polish émigré army into the nucleus of a new White Army for eventual action against Soviet Russia.

As the Red Army neared the Polish border in the spring of 1944, the London Polish émigrés intensified their anti-Soviet campaign. “An essential condition both for our victory and our very existence is at least the weakening, if not the defeat, of Russia,” declared Penstwo Polski, one of the underground newspapers circulated in Poland by agents of the Government-in-Exile. Secret instructions from the London Poles to their underground agents stated: “At all costs an effort must be made to keep on the best terms with all German civil authorities.”

The Polish Government-in-Exile was preparing for armed action against the Soviet Union. The agency which was to carry out this action was the Armia Krajowa, or AK, an underground military apparatus inside Poland organized and controlled by the London émigrés. The Armia Krajowa or AK was headed by General Bor-Komorowski.

Early in March 1944, General Okulicki was summoned to the headquarters of General Sosnkowski, military representative of the London Polish émigrés. Later, General Okulicki gave this description of this secret conference: –

… when I was received by General Sosnkowski, before flying to Poland, he said that in the near future we could expect a Red Army offensive which would result in routing the Germans in Poland. In that case, Sosnkowski said, the Red Army would occupy Poland and would not permit the existence of the Armia Krajowa on Polish territory as a military organization subordinated to the London Polish government.

Sosnkowski proposed that the Armia Krajowa should carry out a sham dissolution after the Red Army drove the Nazis from Poland, and that a secret “reserve headquarters” be established for operations in the rear of the Red Army: –

Sosnkowski stated that these reserve headquarters would have to direct the struggle of the Armia Krajowa against the Red Army.

Sosnkowski asked that these instructions be conveyed to the commander of the Armia Krajowa in Poland, General Bor-Komorowski…

Shortly after, General Okulicki was mysteriously flown into German-occupied Poland, where he promptly contacted General Bor-Komorowski, and delivered Sosnkowski’s instructions. The commander of the Armia Krajowa told Okulicki that he would set up a special apparatus to carry out the following tasks: –

1. Preserve arms for underground activities and for the preparation of an uprising against the U.S.S.R.

2. Create armed combat detachments, of not more than sixty men each.

3. Form terrorist, “liquidation” groups for assassinating the enemies of the AK and representatives of the Soviet military command.

4. Train saboteurs for operations behind the Soviet lines.

5. Carry on military intelligence and espionage activities in the rear of the Red Army.

6. Preserve the radio stations already set up by the AK and maintain radio communications with the central command of the AK in London.

7. Conduct printed and oral propaganda against the Soviet Union.

In the fall of 1944, the Red Army reached the banks of the Vistula and halted before Warsaw to regroup its forces and bring up fresh supplies after its prolonged summer offensive. The strategy of the Soviet High Command was not to launch a frontal attack upon the Polish capital but to take it by sudden encirclement, thus preserving the city and its population. But, without the knowledge of the Soviet High Command and acting on orders from London, General Bor-Komorowski initiated a general uprising of the Polish patriots in Warsaw, declaring that the Red Army was about to move on the city. With the Red Army completely unprepared to cross the Vistula at this time, the Nazi High Command was able systematically to bomb and shell every section of the city held by the insurgent Polish patriots. Here is General Okulicki’s own account of General Bor-Komorowski’s role in the ultimate surrender of the Polish forces in Warsaw: –

At the close of September, 1944, the commander of the Armia Krajowa, General Bor-Komorowski, negotiated regarding surrender with the commander of the German troops in Warsaw – SS. Obergruppenfuehrer von Den-Bach. Bor-Komorowski appointed the deputy chief of the second (intelligence) department of headquarters, Colonel Bogusla wski, to conduct negotiations as representative of the chief of staff of the Armia Krajowa. Reporting to Bor-Komorowski in my presence on the terms of surrender advanced by the Germans, Boguslawski said that von Den-Bach thought it necessary for the Poles to cease armed struggle against the Germans because it was the Soviet Union that was the common enemy of Poland and Germany. On meeting Bor-Komorowski on the day of the surrender I told him that von Den-Bach was possibly right and Bor-Komorowski agreed with me on this.

Throughout the fall and winter months of 1944 and the spring of 1943, with the Red Army waging gigantic offensives aimed at the final smashing of the German military power on the Eastern Front, the Armia Krajowa under General Okulicki’s leadership carried on a widespread campaign of terrorism, sabotage, espionage and armed raids in the rear of the Soviet armies.

“Measures of the Soviet military command in the zone of hostilities were sabotaged,” later declared Stanislaw Jasiukowicz, Vice-Premier in Poland of the London Government-in-Exile and one of Okulicki’s confederates. “Our press and radio stations engaged in slanderous propaganda. The Polish people were being incited against the Russians.”

Detachments of Okulicki’s AK dynamited trains carrying Red Army troops, destroyed Soviet supply depots, mined roads along which Russian troops were passing and disrupted Soviet transport and communication lines in every possible manner. An order issued on September 17, 1944, by one of Okulicki’s aides, read as follows: –

The operations must be universal – blowing up military trains, trucks, railway tracks, burning of bridges, destruction of stores and village soviets. It must be carried out in secret.

A commander of an AK detachment named Lubikowski, who conducted a special secret school for spies and saboteurs, later reported regarding some of the assignments carried out by his agents: –

I received a written report on the execution of my order … from Ragner who informed me that he carried out twelve acts of sabotage, derailed two trains, blew up two bridges and damaged a railway track in eight places.

Specially trained groups of AK terrorists waylaid and murdered Red Army soldiers and spokesmen for the Warsaw regime. According to incomplete data subsequently made public by the Soviet military authorities, AK terrorists killed 594 Red Army officers and men over a period of eight months and wounded an additional 294…

At the same time, acting under instructions received by radio from the Polish command in London, General Okulicki’s agents carried on extensive intelligence operations behind Soviet lines. A directive of the London Polish Government, addressed to

General Okulicki and dated November 11, 1944, No. 7201-1-777, read as follows: –

Since the knowledge of the military intentions and possibilities… of the Soviets in the east is of basic importance for foreseeing and planning further developments in Poland, you must… fill the gap by transmitting intelligence reports in accordance with the instructions of the intelligence department of headquarters.

The directive went on to request detailed information regarding Soviet military units, supply trains, fortifications, airdromes, armaments and war industry.

Week after week coded intelligence reports were dispatched to the Poles in London from a network of illegal radio stations operating in the rear of the Red Army. A typical radiogram, No. 621-2, sent from Cracow to the chief command in London, and intercepted and deciphered by the Soviet Military Intelligence, read as follows: –

In the latter half of March an average of 20 trains with troops and munitions (artillery, American tanks, infantry, of whom one third were women) were passing daily in a western direction… An order on the urgent conscription of 1895-1925 age classes has been posted in Cracow. A ceremony of commissioning 800 officers brought from the east took place in Cracow with the participation of General Zymierski…

On March 22, 1945, General Okulicki summed up the ultimate hopes of his superiors in London in a secret directive addressed to Colonel “Slavbor,” the commandant of the western district of the Armia Krajowa. Okulicki’s extraordinary directive read: –

In the event of the victory of the U.S.S.R. over Germany, this will not only threaten Britain’s interests in Europe but the whole of Europe will be frightened… Considering their own interests in Europe, the British will have to proceed to the mobilization of the forces of Europe against the U.S.S.R. It is clear that we shall take our place in the front ranks of this European anti-Soviet bloc; it is also impossible to visualize this bloc without the participation of Germany which will be controlled by the British.

These plans and hopes of the Polish émigrés were short-lived. Early in 1945, the Soviet Military Intelligence began rounding up the Polish conspirators behind the Soviet lines. By the summer of 1945, the ringleaders were in Soviet hands. Sixteen of them, including General Okulicki, faced trial before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R.

The trial began on June 18 in the House of Trade Unions in Moscow. It lasted three days. The testimony clearly established that the Polish émigrés and their underground apparatus had been led by their hatred for Soviet Russia into giving substantial aid to the Nazi invaders of their own country.

During the trial, the following exchange took place between the Soviet Prosecutor, Major General Afanasiev, and the short, tight-lipped leader of the anti-Soviet Polish underground, General Okulicki: –

AFANASIEV: Did your action interfere with the Red Army’s operations against the Germans… ?

OKULICKI: It interfered.

AFANASIEV: Whom did it help?

OKULICKI: Naturally, it helped the Germans.

Major General Afanasiev told the court that he would not demand the death sentence for any of the defendants because they were “mere puppets” of the Polish émigrés in London and because “we are now experiencing the joyful days of victory and they are no longer dangerous.” The Soviet Prosecutor added: –

This trial sums up the activities of the Polish reactionaries who for years have fought the Soviet Union. Their policy led to the occupation of Poland by the Germans. The Red Army fought for freedom and independence against barbarism… The Soviet Union, with the help of the Allies, played the decisive role in Germany’s defeat. But Okulicki and the others wanted to knife the Red Army in the back… They prefer a cordon sanitaire around Russia to friendship with her….

On June 21, the Soviet Military Collegium handed down its verdict. Three of the accused were acquitted. General Okulicki and eleven of his confederates were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten years to four months.(2)

Following the trial, the United States and Great Britain withdrew their recognition of the London Polish Government-in-Exile.(3) The Warsaw regime, reorganized in accordance with the terms of the Yalta agreement, was formally recognized as the Provisional Government of Poland.

Notes:
1. The London Polish Government-in-Exile considered itself the legitimate heir to the Pilsudski regime whose traditional policy was based on opposition to Soviet Russia. As Raymond Leslie Buell wrote in his book Poland: The Key to Europe: “Pilsudski believed that Poland had to have a large territory. For historical reasons it was easier to get this base at the expense of Russia than of Germany.” Prewar Polish diplomacy, under the direction of the former anti-Soviet Intelligence officer Colonel Josef Beck, was directed not against Nazi Germany but against Soviet Russia. The Polish Army, with the largest percentage of cavalry of any army in the world, was organized for operations on the Ukrainian plains. Polish industries were concentrated on the German border; Polish military fortifications on the Soviet frontier. Since its formation, the Poland dominated by the militarists and feudal landlords was a cornerstone of the anti-Soviet cordon sanitaire, and a rendezvous for international agents plotting the overthrow of the Soviet Government. Boris Savinkov established his headquarters in Poland after fleeing from Russia and, with the direct aid of Pilsudski, built a White Army in Poland of 30,000 men for use against Soviet Russia. In the late 1920’s, the Torgprom conspirators came to an understanding with the Polish High Command that Poland was to be one of the chief bases in the new war of intervention they were plotting against Soviet Russia. The Polish Intelligence Service established intimate working relations with all anti-Soviet forces, including the Trotskyite-Bukharinist underground organization. In 1938, the Munich Pact brought the anti-Soviet character of the Polish rulers clearly into the open. When the Nazis served their ultimatum on Czechoslovakia and the Czechs were preparing to resist, the Polish Government mobilized its army and placed it directly in the way of any possible assistance to the Czechs from the Soviet Union. As a reward. Hitler permitted the Poles to seize the Teschen district from the Czechs at the time of the partition of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, on the eve of the Nazi attack on Poland, the Polish militarists still refused to revise their suicidal anti-Soviet policy; rejected a proposed military agreement with Soviet Russia; and would not permit the Red Army to cross Polish boundaries to meet the Nazi Wehrmacht. The consequences of this policy for Poland were disastrous, and almost immediately after the Nazi invasion the Polish Government fled abroad, taking with it the Polish gold reserves. First in France and subsequently in England, representatives of this Polish Government constituting themselves the Polish Government-in-Exile, continued the antiSoviet intrigues which had brought their nation to ruin. They were supported in these intrigues by powerful elements in international economic. political and religious circles which regarded victory for Soviet Russia in the war against Nazi Germany as a menace to their own interests.

2. The trial of the sixteenth individual named in the indictment, Anton Paidak, was postponed because of his illness. When these sixteen Poles had originally been arrested by the Soviet authorities, the American Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had vigorously protested, declaring the arrested men were important Polish “democratic leaders.” After the trial, Stettinius and Eden maintained a discreet silence.

3. The Soviet Government had severed diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile two years previously, on April 25, 1943, because of the London regime’s anti-Soviet conspiratorial activities.

Since its inception, the Polish Government-in-Exile had been chiefly sponsored and financed by the British Government. After the recognition of the Warsaw regime, it was understood that some of the Polish émigrés would be offered British citizenship, and perhaps given police jobs in the British colonies. On learning of the Allied decision to recognize the Warsaw regime, General Anders and his aides issued public statements declaring that the Polish émigré troops under their command would never accept the Allied decision, would remain loyal to the – `government” in London, and would return to their native land only “with arms in their hands.” By the fall of 1945, however, large numbers of the Polish émigré troops were deserting the cause of their reactionary leaders, and, on the invitation of the Warsaw regime, were returning to Poland to participate in its reconstruction.

CHAPTER XXV – United Nations

IN a struggle for existence, people learn to know their friends and to recognize their enemies. In the course of the Second World War, many illusions and lies were stripped bare.

The war presented the world with many surprises. The world was stunned at first when the Fifth Columns emerged out of the underworld of Europe and Asia to seize power with the aid of the Nazis and the Japanese armies in many countries. The speed with which the early victories of the Axis were won astonished all those who had not known of the long years of secret Axis preparations, intrigue, terror and conspiracy.

But the greatest of all surprises of the Second World War was Soviet Russia. Overnight, it seemed, a thick false fog was torn apart, and through it emerged the true stature and meaning of the Soviet nation, its leaders, its economy, its army, its people and, in Cordell Hull’s words, “the epic quality of their patriotic fervor.”

The first great realization which came out of the Second World War was that the Red Army, under Marshal Stalin, was the most competent and powerful fighting force on the side of world progress and democracy.

On February 23, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur of the United States Army informed his fellow countrymen concerning the Red Army: 

The world situation at the present time indicates that the hopes of civilization rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army. During my lifetime I have participated in a number of wars and have witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past.

In none have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back to his own land.

The scale and grandeur of the effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

The second great realization was that the economic system of the Soviet Union was amazingly efficient and capable of sustaining mass production under unprecedentedly adverse conditions.

On his return from an official mission to Moscow in 1942, the Vice-Chairman of the United States War Production Board, William Batt, reported: 

I went with a somewhat uncertain feeling about the Russians’ ability to stand up to an all-out war; I became convinced very quickly, however, that the entire population was in the fight to the last woman and child.

I went rather doubtful of the Russians’ technical skill; I found them extraordinarily hard-headed and skillful at running their factories and turning out the machines of war.

I went very much perplexed and troubled by accounts circulated here of disunity and arbitrariness in the Russian Government; I found that Government strong, competent and supported by immensely popular enthusiasm.

In a word, I went with a question to be answered: is Russia a dependable, a competent ally?… And my question was answered for me in a ringing affirmative.

The third great realization was that the multinational peoples of the Soviet Union were united behind their government with a patriotic fervor unique in history.

At Quebec, on August 31, 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared concerning the Soviet Government and its leadership: 

No government ever formed among men has been capable of surviving injuries so grave and cruel as those inflicted by Hitler on Russia… Russia has not only survived and recovered from those frightful injuries but has inflicted, as no other force in the world could have inflicted, mortal damage on the German army machine.

The fourth great realization was that the alliance of the Western democracies with Soviet Russia opened up the realistic promise of a new international order of peace and security among all peoples. On February 11, 1943, the New York Herald Tribune stated in an editorial: 

There are but two choices before the democracies now. One is to cooperate with Russia in rebuilding the world – as there is an excellent chance of doing, if we believe in the strength of our own principles and prove it by applying them. The other is to get involved in intrigues with all the reactionary and anti-democratic forces in Europe, the only result of which will be to alienate the Kremlin.

In New York City on November 8, 1943, the Chairman of the United States War Production Board, Donald Nelson, reported on his visit to Soviet Russia: 

I have come back from my journey with a high faith in the future of Russia, and in the benefit which that future will bring to the entire world, including ourselves. So far as I can see, once our victory is won and we have put this war behind us, we shall have nothing to fear except suspicion of each other. Once we are working in collaboration with the other United Nations to produce for peace and to raise the living standards of peoples everywhere, we shall be on our way toward new levels and prosperity and greater human satisfactions than we have ever known.

On December 1, 1943, at the historic Conference of Teheran, the answer was given to the anti-democratic and anti-Soviet conspiracy which for twenty-five years had kept the world in an incessant turmoil of secret diplomacy, counterrevolutionary intrigue, terror, fear and hatred, and which had culminated inevitably in the Axis war to enslave humanity.

The leaders of the three most powerful nations on earth, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States of America, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Marshal Joseph Stalin of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, met together for the first time, and after a series of military and diplomatic conferences issued the Declaration of the Three Powers.

The Declaration of Teheran guaranteed that Nazism would be wiped out by the united action of the three great allies. More than that, the Declaration opened up to the war-torn world a perspective of enduring peace and a new era of amity among the nations. The Declaration read: 

We, the President of the United States of America, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the Premier of the Soviet Union, have met in these four days past in this the capital of our ally, Teheran, and have shaped and confirmed our common policy.

We express our determination that our nations shall work together in the war and in the peace that will follow.

As to the war, our military staffs have joined in our round-table discussions and we have concerted our plans for the destruction of the German forces. We have reached complete agreement as to the scope and timing of operations which will be undertaken from the east, west and south. The common understanding which we have here reached guarantees that victory will be ours.

And as to the peace, we are sure that our concord will make it an enduring peace. We recognize fully the supreme responsibility resting upon us and all the nations to make a peace which will command good will from the overwhelming masses of the peoples of the world and banish the scourge and terror of war for many generations.

With our diplomatic advisors we have surveyed the problems of the future. We shall seek the cooperation and active participation of all nations, large and small, whose peoples in heart and in mind are dedicated, as are our own peoples, to the elimination of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance. We will welcome them as they may choose to come into the world family of democratic nations.

No power on earth can prevent our destroying the German armies by land, their U-boats by sea, and their war plants from the air. Our attacks will be relentless and increasing.

Emerging from these friendly conferences we look with confidence to the day when all the peoples of the world may live free lives untouched by tyranny and according to their varying desires and their own consciences.

We came here with hope and determination. We leave here friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose. Signed at Teheran, Dec. 1, 1943.

ROOSEVELT, STALIN, CHURCHILL.

The historic Teheran Accord was followed by the decisive Crimea Decisions of February 1945. Once again the three statesmen, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, came together, this time at Yalta in the Crimea, where they agreed upon their joint policies for the final defeat of Nazi Germany and the complete elimination of the German General Staff. The Yalta discussions looked forward to the period of peace that was to come, and laid the groundwork for the epoch-making United Nations Conference at San Francisco at which the Charter of a world security organization, rooted in the alliance of the three greatest powers, was to be promulgated in April.

On the eve of the San Francisco Conference, on April 12, 1945, Soviet Russia lost a great friend and the whole world lost a great democratic leader: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. But the work he had initiated went on. President Harry S. Truman, immediately on taking office, pledged himself to carry on the war against Axis aggression to a victorious conclusion in alliance with the other members of the United Nations, and to fulfill Roosevelt’s postwar program for lasting peace in firm accord with Great Britain and Soviet Russia.

On May 8, 1945, the representatives of the German High Command, in the presence of the chief American, British and Soviet generals, signed in ruined Berlin the final act of unconditional surrender of the forces of the Nazi Wehrmacht. The war in Europe was concluded. Winston Churchill, in a message to Marshal Stalin, said: “Future generations will acknowledge their debt to the Red Army as unreservedly as do we who have lived to witness these proud achievements.”

No war in history had been fought so fiercely as the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. For one thousand four hundred and eighteen days, forty-seven months, four years, battles of unprecedented scope and violence raged on the gigantic battlefields of the Eastern Front. The end came on May 2, 1945, when armored troops of the Red Army stormed and captured the heart of the Nazi citadel – Berlin. An anonymous Red Army man hoisted the Red Flag over the Reichstag.

The flags of freedom flew everywhere in Europe.(1)

As this book went to press, the authors interviewed the man with whose story this book begins: Colonel Raymond Robins. A few years ago, Colonel Robins retired from public affairs to live quietly on his 2000-acre estate at Chinesgut Hill, Florida, which he has deeded to the United States Government as a wildlife refuge and agricultural experimental station. Colonel Robins has retained his “outdoor mind,” his passionate concern for the welfare of the common man, his impatience with prejudice and greed, and his keen interest in the nation whose birth amid the turmoil of revolution he personally witnessed.

Here is what Colonel Robins said: 

“The greatest hour I shall ever know was to see the light of hope for freedom from age-long tyrannies and oppressions in the eyes of the workers and peasants of Russia as they responded to the appeals o f Lenin and other leaders o f the Soviet Revolution.

“Soviet Russia has always wanted international peace. Lenin knew that his great domestic program would be deflected if not destroyed by war. The Russian people have always wanted peace. Education, production, exploitation o f a vast and rich territory engage all their thoughts and energies and hopes. The greatest Minister o f Foreign Affairs in our generation, Commissar Maxim Litvinov, worked ably and steadily for collective security until the Anglo-French appeasement policies towards Mussolini and Hitler made collective security impossible.

“Soviet Russia exploits no colonies, seeks to exploit none. Soviet Russia operates no foreign trade cartels, seeks none to exploit. Stalin’s policies have wiped out racial, religious, national and class antagonisms within the Soviet territories. This unity and harmony o f the Soviet peoples point the path to international peace.”

Notes:

1. The Anglo-American war in the Far East, against the third partner of the Axis, Imperial Japan, continued. Here, too, Soviet Russia showed its strength and its identity of interest with the democratic cause.

Japan was one of the first powers to intervene against the young Soviet Republic in 1919. The Tanaka Memorial of 1927 called for Japanese conquest of the Soviet Far East as a preliminary to domination of the entire Pacific region. Japan’s rulers repeatedly conspired against the Soviet regime. In July 1938, Japanese armed forces actually invaded Soviet territory, only to be hurled back by Soviet troops. “Incidents,” often involving considerable forces of men, tanks and planes, were frequent along the Soviet-Manchurian border throughout 1938; but in 1939 the rout of the Japanese Army in what amounted to a major engagement of armored divisions caused the Japanese war lords to reconsider their plans for an immediate full-scale attack on Soviet Russia from the east. An armistice was signed in September 1939, on terms unfavorable to Japan, which formed the basis for the neutrality pact of April 1941. The Soviet Government never concealed its opposition to the feudal-fascist clique which ruled in Tokyo, and it was clear that a day of reckoning would come between Soviet Russia and Imperial Japan.

Throughout the period when the Red Army was battling the Nazi Wehrmacht in the West, the Far Eastern Red Army continuously immobilized a massive Japanese army, reportedly composed of more than 500,000 of the best mechanized troops at Tokyo’s command, on the Manchurian border. On April 6, 1945, following the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Government denounced its neutrality pact with Japan on the following grounds, as stated in the Soviet Note of that date: “Germany attacked the USSR and Japan – Germany’s ally – helped the latter in her war against the USSR. In addition, Japan is fighting against the USA and Great Britain, which are allies of the Soviet Union. In such a situation the pact of neutrality between Japan and the USSR has lost its meaning, and the continuance of this pact has become impossible.”

On August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union formally entered the war against Japan, thus fulfilling a pledge made at the Yalta Conference in January 1945 to enter the Far Eastern war within ninety days after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Following the Soviet war declaration, and the American atomic bombing of two Japanese industrial centers, the Japanese Government capitulated and sued for peace. On September 2, Japan acknowledged her defeat and signed the act of unconditional surrender. East and West, the Second World War was over.

Bibliographical Notes

In the preparation of this hook, the authors have drawn heavily upon the official records of the U. S. State Department; the Hearings and Reports of various U. S. Congressional Committees; official documents published by the Government of Great Britain; and the verbatim reports published by the Soviet Government of the proceedings at the espionage, sabotage and treason trials which have taken place in Soviet Russia since the Revolution. We have also made extensive use of the published memoirs of leading personages mentioned in this book. All of the dialogue in this book is drawn from these memoirs, from official records or other documentary sources. The Index of the New York Times, The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature and the International Index to Periodicals were invaluable reference sources. We wish to express our appreciation in particular to Harper and Brothers for permission to quote at length from Britain’s Master Spy, Sidney Reilly’s Narrative written by Himself, edited and compiled by His Wife. We also wish to record our special indebtedness to Cedric Belfrage for his editorial and research assistance during the early stages of the work on this book. The following is a list of the chief source references for The Great Conspiracy. It is by no means an exhaustive bibliography, being merely intended as a record and acknowledgment of those sources which the authors have found particularly useful and, in some cases, indispensable.

CHAPTERS I-II

The basic material for the account of Raymond Robins’s mission has been drawn from Robins’s own testimony before the Overman Committee in 1919, as recorded in German and Bolshevik Propaganda; Report and Hearings o f the Subcommittee o f the Judiciary o f the United States Senate, 65th Congress, Volume III (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1919), and from William Hard’s Raymond Robins’ Own Story (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1920). The dialogue between Robins and such persons as his chief, Colonel William Boyce Thompson, Alexander Kerensky, Major General Alfred Knox and Lenin is as Robins himself reported it. Robins’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee provides one of the richest, most comprehensive and most vivid eyewitness pictures of the Bolshevik Revolution, and is well worth the attention of any student interested in this period. For the historical background to this period the authors have drawn upon a number of sources, including the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia, Vols. I, II and III (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1931); John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (New York, Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1919); The History of the Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, edited by a Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (New York, International Publishers, 1939); Albert Rhys Williams, The Soviets (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937); James Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918, documents and materials (Stanford University, California, 1933); Vladimir 1. Lenin, A Political Biography Prepared by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (New York, International Publishers, 1943); Lenin, V. I. Ulyanov (Ogiz, State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1939) – an extremely interesting collection of unusual documents and photographs; Frederick L. Schuman, American Policy Toward Russia Since 1917 (International Publishers, 1938). Of all the written accounts of the Revolution, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World remains after twentyseven years the most exciting and enlightening. It is not difficult to understand why Lenin himself said that he read this classic of reportage with “the greatest interest and with never slackening attention.” The facts regarding Ambassador David Francis’s secret dealings with the counterrevolutionary forces and the various anti-Soviet intrigues in which he became involved are drawn from his own confidential reports to the State Department, subsequently published in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of she United otates, 1918, Russia; and also from Francis’s autobiographical account, Russia From the American Embassy, April 1916-November 1913 (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931). Other useful sources describing the intrigues of the period include Sir Samuel Hoare’s The Fourth Seal (London, W. Heinemann, Ltd., 1930); Alexander F. Kerensky’s The Catastrophe and The Crucifixion of Liberty (New York, John Day, 1934); and Boris Viktorovich Savinkov’s Memoirs of a Terrorist (New York, A. C. Boni, 1931). Each of these three books gives an interesting picture of the diverse elements among the forces fighting against the Soviets at the time of the Revolution. A fascinating and scholarly examination of the Brest-Litovsk peace controversy, with much interesting material on the activities of Trotsky and the Left Opposition at this time, is John Wheeler-Bennett’s The Forgotten Peace, Brest-Litovsk, March 1918 (New York, Morrow, 1939). Bruce Lockhart has written his own account of his mission and his experiences in Russia during the Revolution in British Agent (New York, Garden City Publishing Company, 1933). Additional firsthand material may be found in Captain Jacques Sadoul’s The Socialist R. public of Russia (London, People’s Russian Information Bureau, 1918). The notorious socalled “Sisson Documents,” which purported to show that the Bolshevik Revolution was a plot engineered by the German High Command and certain German banks, were first published in the United States as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy (U. S. Public Information Committee, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1918). Leon Trotsky’s account of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and a polemical justification of his conduct throughout the revolutionary period may be consulted in Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution, translated from the Russian by Max Eastman (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1932).

CHAPTER III

For the basic material in this chapter dealing with the career and exploits of Captain Sidney George Reilly of the British Secret Intelligence Service the authors have drawn extensively on Reilly’s personal narrative as contained in Britain’s Master Spy, Sidney Reilly’s Narrative written by Himself, edited and compiled by His Wife (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1933). Although written in a style reminiscent of the lurid British “penny dreadfuls,” this account by the British master spy of his own conspiracy against the Soviet Government remains the most complete record of its kind available in print. Additional material on Reilly’s career and personality may be found in Winfried Ludecke’s Secrets of Espionage (New York, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1929); Richard Wilmer Rowan’s Terror in Our Time (New York, Longmans, Green and Company, 1941); R. H. Bruce Lockhart’s British Agent (New York, Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1933); and in the accounts of British Secret Intelligence Operations in Soviet Russia written by Reilly’s friend and colleague, George Hill: Go Spy the Land, Being the Adventures o f I.K.8 o f the British Secret Service (London, Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1932) and Dreaded Hour (London, Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1936). The dialogue in this chapter, unless otherwise so indicated in the text, is quoted from Reilly’s own narrative.

CHAPTER IV

The basic material for the account of the American Expedition in Siberia is drawn from General William S. Graves’s American Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (New York, Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931). No other book gives so vivid a picture of this phase of the war, of intervention against Soviet Russia. Of considerable interest is the foreword to Graves’s book by the former Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. Material supplementing Graves’s account of the Siberian expedition is to be found in the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations o f the United States, 1918 (Russia); David Francis’s Russia From the American Embassy, April 1916-November 1918; Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, 2 volumes; and George Stewart, The White Armies o f Russia (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1933).

CHAPTER V

Contemporary periodicals and newspapers offer valuable material on public sentiment and the general mood in Europe and the United States at the rime of the Versailles Treaty. The authors have consulted in particular the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic and the Literary Digest. Of special interest is Walter Lippmann’s and Charles Merz’s A Test o f the News, Supplement to the August 4, 1920, issue of New Republic. Other useful sources are George Seldes, World Panorama, 1918-1935 (New York, Blue Ribbon Books, Inc., 1935); Roger Burlingham and Alden Stevens, Victory Without Peace (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944); The Bullitt Mission to Russia (New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1919). A remarkable description of the various inter-Allied intrigues in Paris at the time of the Versailles Peace Conference appears in Herbert O. Yardley’s The American Black Chamber (New York, Blue Ribbon Books, Inc., 1931; published in England under the title of Secret Service in America, Faber and Faber, Limited, 1931). For the discussions at the Paris Peace Conference the authors have drawn heavily upon the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, Volumes III and IV. Material of interest regarding Churchill’s role is included in Rene Kraus’s popular biography Winston Churchill (New York, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1940).

CHAPTER VI

There is extensive material dealing with the war of intervention against Soviet Russia. The authors have drawn chiefly upon these sources: William Payton Coates and C. Z. Coates, Armed Intervention in Russia, 1918-22 (London, Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1935); George Stewart, The White Armies o f Russia,* Captain Sergei N. Kournakoff, Russia’s Fighting Forces (New York, International Publishers, 1942); History of the Civil War in the U.S.S.R., Edited by Gorky, Molotov, Voroshilov and others (London, Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., 1937); V. Parvenov, The Intervention in Siberia (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1937); History o f the Communist Party o f the Soviet Union (New York, International Publishers, 1939); Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922); and Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia, Vols. I, II and III. Among the numerous personal accounts dealing with this period, the authors have made particular reference to the following: Ralph Albertson, Fighting Without a War, An Account of Military Intervention in North Russia (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920); John C. Cudahy, Archangel: The American War with Russia, by A Chronicler (Chicago, S. C. McClure Company, 1924); and Sir Paul Dukes, Red Dusk and the Morrow (New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922). David Francis’s Russia From the American Embassy, April 1916-November 1918, includes a most interesting description of the situation in Archangel during the early days of intervention, as does Francis’s testimony in 1919 before the Senate Subcommittee investigating German and Bolshevik Propaganda. General William S. Graves’s American Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920, is an indispensable source of material on intervention in Siberia. The character of the White Guard counterrevolutionary forces in Eastern Russia and the type of warfare they waged are impressionistically described in Vladimir Pozner’s Bloody Baron, The Story of Baron Roman von Ungern Sternberg (New York, Random House, 1936).

CHAPTER VII

For the details of Herbert Hoover’s financial investments and promotional operations in Czarist Russia and for material on his anti-Soviet activities as Food Relief Administrator, the authors have drawn largely from three biographies of Hoover: John Knox, The Great Mistake (Washington, D. C., National Foundation Press, Inc., 1930); Walter Liggett, The Rise of Herbert Hoover (New York, the H. U. Fly Company, 1932); and John Hamill, The Strange Career o f Herbert Hoover Under Two Flags (New York, William Faro, Inc., 1931). General material regarding foreign investments in Czarist Russia is to be found in Colonel Cecil L’Estrange Malone’s speech in the House of Commons on foreign investments in Czarist Russia as quoted in the November 13, 1920, issue of Soviet Russia, the official organ of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, published in New York City. Further material on this subject is contained in Colonel Malone’s The Russian Republic (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Howe,1920).

CHAPTER VIII

The phrase “ferment of the aftermath” which the authors have used as the subtitle to the opening section of this chapter is borrowed from Winston Churchill, and the material illustrating the world-wide uncertainty, unrest and insecurity of the postwar period is drawn from the excellent compilation of newspaper clippings and contemporary comment published by George Seldes, under the title World Panorama, 1918-1935 (New York, Blue Ribbon Books, Inc., 1935). The authors have also made reference to contemporary newspapers and magazines. The revealing British Foreign Office memorandum quoted in this chapter was first made public by the newspaperman and dramatist John L. Balderstone; it is reproduced in more detail in the Seldes book. Material on the little-known and extraordinary story of the great exodus of the defeated White armies from Soviet Russia may be found in George Stewart’s The White Armies o f Russia (New Yoik, The Macmillan Company, 1933) and in the memoirs written by some of the persons involved, Wrangel, Denikin, Krasnov, etc. A full account of the establishment, character and composition of the Torgprom may be found in Wreckers on Trial, A Record of the Trial of the Industrial Party, held in Moscow, November-December 1930 (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1931). The most interesting and complete account of the early development of Nazi ideology and the role of Alfred Rosenberg and his White Russian associates is contained in Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944). The authors are also indebted to Heiden’s A History o f National Socialism (New fork, Alfred A. Knopf, 1935) and National Socialism, a document published by the U. S. State Department (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1943). The part played by General Max Hoffmann in the White Russian and German imperialist conspiracies which preceded and led up to the triumph of Nazism is brilliantly expounded in Ernst Henri’s Hitler Over Russia? (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1936). The authors have also consulted Hoffmann’s The War of Lost Opportunities (New York, International Publishers, 1925) and War Diaries and other Papers (London, M. Lecker, 1929) and the famous diplomatic diary of the British Ambassador Lord D’Abernon, The Diary of an Ambassador: Versailles to Rapallo, 1920.1922 (New York, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1929). Additional valuable material on the collaboration of early Nazism with the anti-White Russian emigres may be found in The Brown Network (New York, Knight Publications, Inc., 1936).

CHAPTER IX

The material concerning the activities of Captain Sidney Reilly and his wife, including the dialogue and letters quoted in this chapter, is drawn from Mrs. Reilly s memoirs which form the second part of the book Britain’s Master Spy (see note to Chapter III). Mrs. Reilly’s memoirs contain an account of the anti-Soviet conspiracy in which she became involved following her marriage to Sidney Reilly and in which, by her own account, she continued to participate for some time after his death. For our account of the personality and career of Boris Savinkov we have drawn on Savinkov’s Memoirs o f a Terrorist (New York, A. C. Boni, 1931); Boris Nikolajewsky’s Ase ff, the Spy (New York, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1934); and on the vivid and candid biographical sketch of Savinkov written by Winston Churchill in Great Contemporaries (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937). Somerset Maugham’s impressions of Boris Savinkov may be found in Maugham’s article “The Strangest Man I Ever Knew,” Red Book magazine, October 1944. The description by Savinkov’s aide, Fomitchov, of the organization of anti-Soviet terrorist cells financed and armed by the Polish Intelligence Service is quoted from Fomicchov’s letter of September 17, 1924, to Izvestia, as reprinted in the October 2, 1924, issue of International Press Correspondence (English Edition, Vol. 4, No. 70, Vienna). For a full and enlightening account of the secret war waged at this period by international oil interests against the Soviet Government see Glyn Roberts’s The Most Powerful Man in the World (New York, Covici-Friede, 1938). Roberts’s book, a biography of Sir Henri Deterding, devotes considerable attention to Deterding’s crusade against Soviet Russia, and traces the influence of Deterding through such notorious anti-Soviet incidents in British politics as the Arcos Raid, Zinoviev Letter, etc. Additional material concerning the attitude of the oil interests toward Soviet Russia may be found in Francis Delaisi’s Oil: Its Influence or Politics (London, Labour Publishing Company, 1922) and R. Page Arnot’s The Politics o f Oil (London, Labour Publishing Company, 1924). There are also numerous references to the subject in reports in the London Times, Morning Post, Daily Mail and the New York Times concerning the negotiations at the Genoa and the Hague economic conferences of the period 1922-1924. An inside picture of the intrigues of the oil interests during this period is to be found in George Hill’s Dreaded Hour (London, Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1936). A detailed account of the Noi Jordania uprising in the Caucasus, including quotations from secret communications between the conspirators which were seized by the Soviet authorities, may be found in the October 9, 1924, issue of International Press Correspondence (Vol. 4, No. 72). An interesting report of the trial of Boris Savinkov and his sensational testimony to the court can be found in the September 11, 1924, issue of International Press Correspondence (Vol. 4, No. 65).

CHAPTER X

The facts regarding Captain Sidney Reilly’s anti-Soviet operations in the United States and his last secret mission in Soviet Russia are taker. from Britain’s Master Spy, Sidney Reilly’s Narrative written by Himself, edited and compiled by His Wife. The material on Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic and anti-democratic activities in the early 1920’s is drawn largely from the sensational series of articles by Norman Hapgood which appeared under the title “The Inside Story of Henry Ford’s Jew Mania” in the JuneNovember, 1921, issues of Hearst’s International. The files of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent are replete with anti-Semitic and anti-democratic propaganda. The intrigues in which Boris Brasol was involved in the early 1920’s are also described in Norman Hapgood’s articles in Hearst’s International. The sort of anti-democratic and anti-Semitic propaganda which Brasol spread in the United States is amply illustrated by his own books, such as The World at the Crossroads (Boston, Small, Maynard and Company, 1921). An interesting account of the origin and record of The Protocols o f the Wise Men o f Zion, which Brasol distributed in the United States, appears in Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer (New York, Lexington Press, 1944).

CHAPTERS XI-XII

Material and comment on the diplomatic atmosphere in Europe and Asia throughout this period may be found in’R. Palme Dhtt’s World Politics (New York, Random House, 1936), and in F. L. Schuman’s International Politics, Third Edition (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1941). The Tanaka Memorial has been reprinted in the pamphlet Japanese Imperialism Exposed, The Secret Tanaka Document (New York, International Publishers, 1942). Glyn Roberts’s biography of Sir Henri Deterding contains many revelations of the hectic anti-Soviet intrigues in which Deterding, Hoffmann and their associates were involved during this period. The account of the meeting in Paris in 1928 attended by Professor Ramzin at which Demsov announced that the French General Staff had drawn up a plan of attack against Soviet Russia is drawn from the court testimony of Professor Ramzin and others before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. as recorded in Wreckers on Trial, A Record o f the Trial o f the Industrial Party, held in Moscow November-December 1930 (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1931). This record also contains the details of the plan of attack on the U.S.S.R. and testimony regarding the various negotiations carried on by Ramzin and others with French, British and German political and industrial personalities. The mysterious affair of the Chervonetz Trial is dealt with by Glyn Roberts in his biography of Deterding; see also the New York Times reports on the Trial in 1927 and Ernst Henri’s Hitler Over Russia? (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1936).

CHAPTERS XIII-XIV

The facts regarding the trial of the Industrial Party conspirators in the winter of 1930 are taken from contemporary newspaper accounts and from the record of the trial as published in Wreckers on Trial, A Record of the Trial of the Industrial Party, held in Moscow, November-December, 1930 (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1931). Testimony from the Menshevik Trial in March 1931 is recorded in The Menshevik Trial (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1931). A collection of contemporary statements regarding the Menshevik trial by emigre Russian Mensheviks and their associates in the Second International is presented in the pamphlet The Moscow Trial and the Labour and Socialist International (London, The Labour Party, 1931); this pamphlet includes an article by Raphael Abramovitch entitled “My journey to Moscow,” in which he denies certain of the accusations made against him at the trial but admits the existence of a secret conspiratorial Menshevik apparatus in Soviet Russia. A verbatim record of the trial of the Vickers engineers in April 1933 is given in the Trial o f the Vickers Engineers: Official Vertatim Report: Proceedings of Special Session of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. in Moscow, April 12-19, 1933, three volumes (Moscow, State Law Publishing House, 1933). A very interesting and outspoken account of the discussions between the British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Esmond Ovey, and the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, regarding the arrest and trial of the Vickers engineers may be found in the Red Paper Lsued in Moscow by the Soviet Government on April 16, 1933. Allan Monkhouse’s own version of his arrest and trial by the Soviet Government is contained in his book Moscow 1911-1933 (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1934). A brief but comprehensive account of the reaction of the British press to the trial of the Vickers engineers can be found in Maurice Dobb’s The Press and the Moscow Trial (London, Friends of the Soviet Union, 1933). For the description of Hitler’s coming to power in Germany the authors have made special reference to Konrad Heiden’s A History of National Socialism (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1935). Material has also been drawn from Adolf Hitler, My New Order, edited with commentary by Raoul de Roussv de Sales, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941. Hitler’s Mein,’Kampf offers the most vivid example possible of the employment by the Fascist Counterrevolution of the propa ganda device of the “menace of Bolshevism.” Useful sources of material for the period immediately following the establishment of the Third Reich are: Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy, 1933-1941, (New York, William Funk, Inc., 1942); Frederick L. Schuman’s Europe on the Eve (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1939); The Brown Network (New York, Knight Publications, 1936); and Ernst Henri’s two remarkable and prophetic books, Hitler Over Europe (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1934) and Hitler Over Russia? (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1936).

CHAPTERS XV-XVI

Trotsky’s own account of his early career may be found in his autobiography, My Life (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), and in his own early political writings. Firsthand impressions of Trotsky in 1918 may be found in Bruce Lockhart’s British Agent and in Raymond Robins’s testimony before the Overman Committee in 1919. For Lenin’s estimate of Trotsky we have consulted in particular Lenin’s Selected Works (New York, International Publishers) and Vladimir I. Lenin, A Political Biography Prepared by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Moscow (New York, International Publishers, 1943). The best Soviet account available in English of the development of the Bolshevik Party and the significance of Trotsky’s struggle against Lenin and Stalin is N.. Popov’s Outline History o f the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, two volumes (Moscow-Leningrad, CoOperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934). A later Soviet history containing the new material made available as a result of the Moscow Trials is the official History o f the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Edited by a Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S. U. (B) (New York, International Publishers, 1939). Very interesting material on Trotsky’s political career before and after the Russian Revolution may be found in the speeches by various Soviet officials, including Stalin, Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Kamenev, collected in The Errors of Trotskyism (London, Centropress, 1925). A lively report of an interview with Trotsky in Moscow in 1924 and other journalistic materia’i on Trotsky is contained in Isaac F. Marcosson’s Turbulent Years (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1938). Winston Churchill’s acid portrait of Trotsky in Great Contemporaries is valuable, among other things, for the light it sheds on Churchill’s attitude towards Trotsky. Additional historical material covering the period of Trotsky’s factional struggle within the Bolshevik Party may be found in Sir Bernard Pares’s Russia (New York, Penguin Books, 1943) and a dispassionate estimate of the political program of the Trotskyite faction is contained in the second volume of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism, A New Civilization? (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937). (In a later edition of their book, the Webbs have omitted the question mark in the subtitle.) Material concerning Trotsky’s. conspiratorial intrigues against the Soviet Government while Lenin was still alive and after Lenin’s death may be found in the little-known pamphlet written by Trotsky on the death of his son in Paris in 1938: Leon Sedoff, Son-Friend-Fighter (New York, Young People’s Socialist League – Fourth International – 1938). This pamphlet also contains material on Trotsky and Sedov in Alma Ata, including an account of the organization of the underground Trotskyite courier system which Sedov supervised. There are numerous journalistic records cf Trotsky in exile at Constantinople and Prinkipo which may be found in the newspapers and magazines of the period. Three articles of major interest are S. Saenger’s “With Trotsky in Constantinople,” Living Age, July 1929; Emil Ludwig’s “Trotsky in Exile,” Living Age, February 1930; and John Gunther s “Trotsky at Elba,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1932. A documented examination of Trotsky’s political career, with a polemical account of the evolution of Trotsky’s faction into a conspiratorial anti-Soviet organization, is J. R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and Its Critics (London, Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1939). Unless otherwise so indicated in the text, the material – quotations, dialogue and incidents – concerning the secret intrigues of the Trots kyitr~ and Right conspirators and their connections with foreign Intelligence Services is drawn directly from the official records of the three Moscow Trials held before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. in August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938. For example, the details of Krestinsky’s negotiations with General Seeckt and of Rakovsky’s dealings with the British Intelligence Service in the 1920’s are drawn from KrestinskoJ ‘s and Rakovsky’s testimony before the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court in 1938. Similarly, the account of the meetings and negotiations in Berlin between Sedov,Pyatakov, Shestov, Smirnov, etc. are drawn from the testimonyof Smirnov in 1936 and Pyatakov, Shestov and others in 1937.Stacements by Trotsky and his son, Sedov, are given here and in subsequent chapters as quoted by their fellow conspirators testifying at the trials. The records of the trials are available in three volumes: Report o f Court Proceedings in the Case o f the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, August 19-24, 1936 (Peoples Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, 1936); Verbatim Report o f Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center, January 23-30, 1937 (Peoples Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., Moscow 1937); Verbatim Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, March 2-13, 1938 (Peoples Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., Moscow 1938). These volumes are a source of basic material on anti-Soviet intrigue, especially during the period of Trotsky’s exile from Soviet Russia and Hitler’s coming to power in Germany. The official public records of these trials, comprising more than 1500 pages of detailed testimony, are not only fascinating reading but also represent the most comprehensive public expose ever made of a contemporary secret state conspiracy. In addition, these records contain the first full disclosures of the inner workings of an Axis Fifth Column. They are an invaluable source of material for this period in world history, in which the Axis Fifth Columns played a major role.

CHAPTERS XVII-XX

Material on Nazi-fascist terrorism and the organization of the Fifth Column in Europe during the years immediately following Hitler’s rise to power may be found in such books as The Brown Network; Ernst Henri’s Hitler Over Europe and Hitler Over Russia?; Konrad Heiden’s History of National Socialism; and in numerous newspaper reports and magazine articles. An excellent account of Axis preparations for conquest by “internal aggression” is given in Elwyn F. Jones’s The Battle for Peace (London, Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1938). The basic material on the operations of the Trotskyite and Right conspirators in Soviet Russia is drawn here as in the preceding chapters from the official records of the three Moscow Trials held before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. in August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938. Firsthand reports of evidence of underground conspiracy and sabotage in Soviet Russia during this period may be found in the dispatches of Walter Duranty in the New York Times, in those of Joseph E. Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune and in other contemporary newspaper reports. Eyewitness accounts of the three Moscow Trials may be found in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, the Manchester Guardian and other American and British newspapers and magazines. The files of Soviet Russia Today contain many firsthand impressions of the three trials and discussions of their political implications. Walter Duranty’s The Kremlin and the People (New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941) recapitulates his personal reactions as an American newspaperman in Moscow at the three trials. Additional firsthand data is contained in D. N. Pritt’s At the Moscow Trial (New York, Soviet Russia Today, 1937) and other writings by Pritt. John Gunther’s Inside Europe, Revised Edition (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1938), also contains a summary and evaluation of the trials. Material on the international diplomatic intrigue against collective security during the 1930’s may be found in Genevieve Tabouis’s They Call Me Cas..andra (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942) and in Bella Fromm’s Blood and Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1942). Both of these books contain interesting information on Tukhachevsky’s relations with foreign diplomats and militarists. An indispensable source of material is Joseph E. Davies’s Mission to Moscow (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1941); this unique book is based on the personal observations of the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union and on his official reports to the U. S. State Department.

CHAPTER XXI

Trotsky’s reaction to the 1936 and 1937 trials may be found in the pamphlet I Stake My Life, Trotsky’s Address to the N. Y. Hippodrome Meeting (New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1937) and more elaborately in The Case of Leon Trotsky (Harper and Brothers, 1937), which is the record of the hearings staged in Mexico by the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. Further Trotskyite material on the trials is contained in Max Schachtman’s Behind the Moscow Trials (New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1936). Articles in contemporary American periodicals by Max Eastman, William Henry Chamberlin, Eugene Lyons and other antiSoviet writers repeat, according to the individual styles of the and.ors, the basic arguments and propaganda put forth by Trotrkv. Contemporary periodicals may also be referred to for descriptions of Trotsky’s mode of life in his Mexican exile. Examples of Trotskyite propaganda circulated in America may be found in The Fourth Tnternational and The Militant. A documented account of the role of the Trotskyites during the Spanish Fascist revolt in Spain is to be found in the pamphlet by George Soria, Trotskyisnn,in the Service o f Franco, A Documented Record of the Trea^fiery by the P.O.U.M. in Spain (New York, International Publishers, 1938). Material on the role of the Trotskyites in China may he found in Agnes Smedley’s Red Flood Over China (Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934) and Battle Hymn of China (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943); and in Anna Louise Strong’s One-Fifth o f Mankind, China Fights for Freedom (New York, Modern Age Books, 1938). Josef Stalin’s famous report to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, published as Mastering Bolshevism (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1937), deals in some detail with the character and activities of the Trotskyites in Russia and makes reference to the activities of the Fourth International in Norway, France, Germany and the United States. Material on Trotsky’s negotiations with the Dies Committee is contained in August Raymond Ogden’s The Dies Committee (Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1943). The New York Times of the period contains detailed reports on the murder of Trotsky and the “Jacson” case. The Trotskyite version of the murder a:: an “act of Stalin’s vengeance” may be found in Albert Goldman’s The Assassination of Leon Trotsky (New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1941); in contemporary articles in the American Trotskyite newspaper the Militant and in the article in the Militant by Betty Kuehn, Trial of Trotsky’s Murderer (April 1943).

CHAPTER XXII

A general survey of the period 1931-1941, with regrettably sparse reference to Soviet Russia, is contained in the official U. S. State Department publication, Peace and War: United States Foreign Poli-,y (Washington, Department of State, 1943). Two invaluable books covering this period of latent war and endless diplomatic intrigue are Frederick L. Schuman’s Europe on the Eve (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1939) and Night Over Europe (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). Further material on the period may be found in John Gunther’s Inside Europe, Revised Edition (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1938); F. Elwy n Jones’s The Attack from Within, The Modern Technique of Aggression (London, Penguin Books, Ltd., 1939); Joseph E. Davies’s Mission to Moscow (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1941); Ambassador Dodd’s Diary (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941); R. Palme Dutt’s World Politics: and, especially, the files of the New York Times of this period. A historic Soviet document of the period is Stalin’s Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. (B), March 10, 1939 (New York, International Publishers, 1939). A valuable book on Soviet relations with the Baltic States is Gregory Meiksins’s The Baltic Riddle (New York, L. B. Fischer, 1943). General material op the Red Army’s march into the Baltic, the Balkans and Finland will be found in the files of Soviet Russia Today. Of the very many books written about the fall of France the authors have drawn on Pierre Cot’s Triumph of Treason (Chicago-New York, Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1944) and Pertinax’s The Gravediggers of France (New York, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944). The files of the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines of the period are an indispensable source of material.

CHAPTER XXIII

An excellent summary of the reaction of the American press to the invasion of Soviet Russia by Nazi Germany in June 1941 is contained in George Seldes’s The Facts Are, A Guide to Falsehood and Propaganda in the Press and Radio (New York, In Fact, Inc., 1942). For material dealing with the anti-Soviet activities of fifth columnists and White Russian emigres, the authors have drawn extensively upon their own files. Sources of published data on pro-fascist “anti-Bolshevik” operations of subversive individuals and agencies in America include Michael Sayers and Aibert E. Kahn, Sabotage: The Secret War Against America (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1942); John Roy Carlson, Under Cover (New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1943); and the newsletter The Hour, April 1939-May 1943. One of the most interesting pieces of Nazi-sponsored “anti-Communist” propaganda distributed in the United States is Communism in Germany, The Truth About the Communist Conspiracy on the Eve of the National Revolution (Berlin,.Europa House, 1933), which contains a commendatory foreword signed by various Americans including Representative Hamilton Fish. One could list endlessly sources of anti-Soviet propaganda in books, newspapers and magazines published in the United States. Typical of the myriad pro-Nazi and “anti-Communist” propaganda publications that appeared in the United States following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany are Deutscher Weckruf and Beobachter, the official organ of the German-American Bund; Father Charles E. Coughlin’s Social Justice; William Dudley Pelley’s Liberator; Gerald Winrod’s Defender; Court Asher’s X-Ray; and E. J. Garner’s Publicity. Interesting material on the relationship between Representative Hamilton Fish and the German agent George Sylvester Viereck is contained in the testimony of Fish’s secretary, George Hill, during the Federal trial of Viereck in February 1942 in Washington, D. C.; the most detailed reports of this trial may be found in a series of articles by Dillard Stokes in the Washington Post. William E. Dodd’s views regarding the activities of the German propaganda agent Paul Scheffer are expressed in the published diary of the American Ambassador to Germany: Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, Edited by William E. Dodd, Jr., and Martha Dodd (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941). Ample evidence of Scheffer’s anti-Soviet propaganda work in the United States can be found in his own articles in Living Age, Foreign Affairs, Fortnightly Review and other such periodicals. The published records of Martin Dies’s Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities contains a vast amount of anti-Soviet propaganda. Other important examples of anti-Soviet propaganda are Martin Dies’s Trojan Horse in America (New Y(Tk, Dodd Mead & Company, 1940) and Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night (New York, Alliance Book Corporation, 1941). An interesting analysis of the reactionary use of “anti-Communistic” propaganda in the United States may be found in George Seldes’s Witchhunt (New York, Modern Age, 1940). The extensive anti-Soviet propaganda circulated by the America First Committee is amply illustrated in the bulletins of the America First Research Bureau and in the Herald and Scribner’s Commentator, two publications sponsored by the Committee, as well as in the public addresses before America First rallies of such America First spokesmen as Representative Hamilton Fish, Senator Gerald P. Nye and Sena tor Burton K. Wheeler, whose speeches are quoted at length in the New York Times and other newspapers. Particularly inter esting accounts of Charles A. Lindbergh’s pro-appeasement ac tivities in Great Britain and in Central Europe during the summer of 1938 are contained in the English newsletter, the Week, and in Bella Fromm’s Blood and Banquets. The files of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Washington Times Herald, and the Hearst press are an especially abundant source of propaganda against the Soviet Union. Pertinent information on the anti-Soviet sentiments of William C. Bullitt is contained in Ambassador Dodd’s Diary.

CHAPTER XXIV

Documented evidence of the Polish anti-Soviet conspiracy is to be found in the Soviet Government’s indictment of the sixteen agents of the Polish Governnment-in-Exile tried in Moscow in June 1945; the translated text of this indictment is published in the pamphlet, The Case of the 16 Poles (New York, The National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Inc., 1945). Additional details of the conspiracy, made public in the testimony of the Polish conspirators during their trial in Moscow, appear in the cabled dispatches of American foreign correspondents to the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and PM. A comprehensive account of earlier anti-Soviet intrigues of Polish emigres in Russia is contained in the lengthy statement released on May 18, 1943, to the British and American press by the Soviet Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs, A. Y. Vyshinsky. Raymond Leslie Buell’s Poland: Key to Europe (New York, A. A. Knopf, 1939) contains useful background material on Poland.

CHAPTER XXV

A source of basic material on Soviet affairs during the war against Nazi Germany is the excellent Information Bulletin issued three times weekly by the Soviet Embassy at Washington, D. C. There are numerous books by American correspondents, such as Henry C. Cassidy, Larry Lesueur, Maurice Hindus, Leland Stowe, Quentin Reynolds, Richard Lauterbach, Edgar Snow and Ralph Parker, who visited the Soviet Union during the conflict and brought back their eyewitness reports. The cabled dispatches of Maurice Hindus to the New York Herald Tribune and those of Ralph Parker to PM are especially vivid in their record of what the Soviet people endured during the war years and what they expect of future co-operation with their allies. Wendell Willkie’s One World (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1943) is a great American’s personal statement of the ideals summed up in the Teheran Proclamation. A similar American statement is to be found in `halter Lippmann’s study of American foreign policy, U. S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, Little, Brown and Company and Atlantic Monthly Press, 1943).

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