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9/11 Truth, JFK assassination, Holocaust revision & ISIS interactive spreadsheet |
Samuel UntermyerFake Holocaust Rumorsexcerpts from Francis Neilson's 'The Makers of War' Wilson blackmail to involve US in WWIBenjamin Freedman's Hidden Tyranny ... establishes that Treaty of Versailles was overwhelmingly controlled by Jews. Untermyer speech 1933 and rebuttal Heddesheimer The First Holocaust pdf Origins of the Holocaust ... Excerpts from Hedesheimer |
Untermyer: "Just over 100 years ago Disraeli pointed out that strange people had power to direct the actions of gov- ernments. Sidonia, one of the characrers in his novel, says: "So you see, my dear Coningsby, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." Untermyer was so much behind the scenes that he stood in the prompt entrance and rang up the curtain on the tragedy which, six years later, was to embroil the nations of the world in utter disaster. His campaign was really started in April, 1933, when it was launched unofficially at a meeting to dedicate a memorial theater as part of the Hebrew University in Palestine. ... It took a few weeks, however, to work up the propaganda to fever heat, and it was not until he made his radio speech in August that some people in America realized that Untermyer seemed bent upon provoking a war. He tried to whip up the general interest by telling of the "fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children," and saying that when their full story was known it would present a picture “so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people." |
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p3 In putting together this synopsis of the Ipo itical and In future, the investigator in this branch of the art This was finished in Fefiruary, 1950, before anyone August 1, 1950 p7 Looking back upon the condition of Europe after the Underlying these disrurbances of foreign policy there p8 When politicians are in control, as they are today, Bureaucracy today is a vested interest-the most pow- erful the world has ever known. In other respects, it Your English forefathers did all this. Do you think p9 thought you would enjoy and which would lead to Now let us see how we got into the maze of European politics. We rambled into it fifty years ago, and we give As the commitments of the British Government be- The insane armament race be an about 1897. Taking the The visit of the French fleet to Kronsradt in 1892 and All the great naval powers were interested to some p10 No clearer evidence of what the race for armaments There is another line of approach that must be taken This should not be overlooked in a search for the The pressure of hard facts increased in many competi- p11 The high-tariff legislation of the McKinley adminis- Great Britain had been caught napping. The smug, When the South African War began in 1899, the or- p12 The military correspondent of the Newcastle Cbrcmicle, The mass of the British people never knew the truth p13 The plot of Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, and It was a national crime in 1881! Eighteen years later What thinking man would now challenge that state- p14 Some writers whose articles appeared in the monthly A series of articles appeared in The Time: during World In the 1890's the conditions which had given Britain The last sentence is significant, but its meaning was p15 p16 THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR LEFT BRITAIN WITHOUT A The Entente Cordiale was a diplomatic tour de force. Some In studying the expenditures of the great powers upon linking her fortunes with France, was committed as p17 The ink was scarcely dry on the signatures appended Already while the expedition was on its way, light began The expeditionary force complains, he gravely records, of the p18 The horror of the light of the colonists in Fez deeply John Dillon desired to know to what extent Britain His Majesty's Government have been informed by the There were men in the House who took the trouble The second lie is about the political status of Morocco. p19 The story, as it was known to independent French Honesty would in Morocco. and the Congo have been the The private interests! Or, as they were afterwards The French "group" included the Cie. des Forges de p20 gier, etc.; the Spanish " group" included the Marquis de Villa- mejor, and so on. France and Britain were to pay dearly for the hoax. The generosity of a democracy was never more no- Durin this time the diplomatic bfimcfiers of Germany acific speeches from platforms in the country had little p21 When the Archduke was murdered at Sarajevo, the When Germany sided with Austria, Great Britain p22 War patriotism is a madness for which there is no It is marvelous what punishment the proletarians p23 The main point, however, is that the proletarian will It was in the winter of 1907-08 that many men became Arthur Balfour was anxious about the future. In the p24 During this visit, White had several conversations BALPOUR (somewhat lightly): "We are probably fools not to find a reason for declaring war on Germany before she builds too many ships and takes away our trade. WHITE: “You are a very high-minded man in private life. How can you possibly contemplate anything so politically immoral as provoking a war against a harmless nation which has as go a right to a navy as you have? If you wish to BALPOURI “That would mean lowering our standard of Wan-a: “I am shocked that you of all men should enunci- BALPOUR (again lightly): “Is it a question of right or White also had a talk with the Foreign Minister, and Not long after this, a reason was found for arming p25 It was one of the most disgraceful, cooked-up con- Now this is the truth: En land has seven "Dreadnau hts" It is doubtful if, even so late as May last, a German "Dread- naught" had been commenced. The damage was done, and from that time prepara- The two principal questions put to the electors in p26 After the Agadir affair, the Prime Minister sent Secretly, the Committee of Imperial Defence carried It should be unnecessary here to go into the matter of That treaty, even at the time it was signed by the p27 The terms of peace were yesterday delivered [May 7, 1919] The impression made by it is one of disappointment, of It must be admitted in honesty that the League is an The League as now constituted will be the prey of greed find few readers. When a war is over, the ordinary et back to the normal condition of things. No matter The books that would give him some notion of how p28 His efforts to save civilization are penalized by tons as won prestige and honor in defeating his fellow- p29 The Boer War and World War I provided some his- The people, however, backed the Crimean War. It No one attempts to expfain the extraordinary change p30 The steady stream of books that have come from the A well-known bookseller remarked that most of the Influential seCtions of men in public positions in p31 It is very difficult to get at the truth of anything The search for truth is the task of tasks. Perhaps only It may very well be that the proletariat thinks it is p32 ears. During the past two years I have followed the corre- uency. I have no doubt that those w o complain of There are many truths that should be placed before They did not do so badly when they got down to p33 Let us consider the glorious wars for a minute or two. Consider what that means. England spent thirty-five The Radical member for Northampton knew his book. p34 We have suffered ourselves to be deceived by names and a common cause," and many more Such expressions, w1t out any Other meanin than to exhaust our wealth, consume the profits of our trage and 'load our posterity with intolerable The great slogan of World War II was "the common But how the proletariat could be humbugged about It rises ucp before me when I think of it as a ghastly phan- tom which uring one hundred and seventy years, whilst it has been worshipped in this country, has loaded the nation p35 of families, and has left us, as the great result of the profli‘gate expenditure it has caused, a doubled peerage at one end 0 the social scale, and far more than a doubled pauperism at the Other. It is amazing to witness, in war after war, how the In trying to drag a little truth from history, it is out to us. Read this letter that Smith wrote to Lady Europe, and prorecring mankind: I mm t ink a little of myse f. I am sorry for the Slpaniards-I am sorry for the Greeks-I deplore the fate o the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed; do not like the present state of the Delta; Thibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make al men good and happy? We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the conse- quence will be, that we shall cut each other's throats. No war, dear Lady Greyl-No eloquence; but apathy, selfishness, Ma the vengeance of Heaven" overtake all the Legiti- in such a cause to be a luxury; but the business of a prudent, sensible man, is to guard against luxury. There is no such thing as a "just war," or, at least, as a p36 Savile “is one of the most brilliant of politicians and Anyone who took the trouble to search the speeches Proletarians never seem to get tired of spoof. They p37 Peace campaigns usually end in war. It was so before Arthur Balfour crossed the Atlantic with Edward President Roosevelt never dreamed of sending an Poor old proletarian! He never seems to get tired of The toral bill for World War II exceeds the financial p38 According to Wbitaker': Almanac-k, the national debt An article published in Newaeek for December 12, Nat one American in a hundred realizes that total tax In fan, the best-kept secret in the country today is the Size of the tax load. Small wonder shopkeepers complain of a consumer's No one seems prepared to face the music, but the So long as the workers in Great Britain look to the p39 No bureaucrat talks of saving the taxpayers, and the The modern man we hear so much about has no time p40 Perhaps he knew that walking was an aid to thinking, What, therefore, can be expected from a dphysically Thinking is a bore; the moron is a very happy Short-cuts to knowledge are the bane of e ucation. p41 The same may be said of other studies. The waste of Since the introduction into our colleges of such p42 Read Chapter Five-"The Grand Inquisitor"-in In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worth- less and rebellious. Is that what it all comes to? Was the author a prophet p43 THERE IS NO CONFESSIONAL FOR THE POLITICAL SINNER, Certainly whitewash has been applied in excess since Stupidity in foreign affairs is not easily detected-not If you make a mistake in your foreign affairs; if you enter into unwise treaties; if you conduct campaigns upon vicious principles; if the scope and tendency of your foreign system are p44 No one will quarrel with that statement. But the Their excuses for the conflagration they started in One of the chief reasons why progress in reconstruc- There will never be peace in Europe until the lie that p45 Surely the peace of the world is of more importance In taking up this task, students must understand that Recently a new light has been thrown upon documents In a letter to the writer from a well-known prelate, p46 Lord Haldane saidz.”Grey and I were dining at Queen Then, in the prelate's letter, the details are given In the White Papers published by the government, The German Army had its advance posts on our frontiers
see pdf file for remainder of Neilson's book
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This is an accurate translation of the first sentence of L'amie allmande a u: aunt-porter .mr no: bomr-frontiirer, p47 Not long after the war broke out, suspicion was cast However, there are stranger things than that about Worse still, and far more difficult to understand, are p48 It must be noted that the first one is not from the The only reason I can find for the exchan e of these It would require courage to tell the country the truth that an adequate military force of our own. Before the House rose, Mr. Amery moved to reduce But the speeches of Grey's critics are net suflicient to p49 That is the point that he insists upon in his memoirs. But every subterfuge failed to impress those who, for There was a reticence and a secrecy which practically ruled out three-fourths of the Cabinet from the chance of making any genuine contribution to the momentous questions then of the world. He states in his War Memoir: that Lord Northcliffe, The situation on Sunday, August 2nd, was desperate p50 Lord Hugh Cecil: “The right hon. gentleman [Asquith] p51 but a pacific foreign policy, and we are far from saying that their policy is in any way an aggressive one; but certainly we The Prime Minister: "Will the noble lord define a little Lord Hugh Cecil: "I am only anxious not to use words The Prime Minister: "1 do not complain.” Lord Hugh Cecil: "There is a very general belief that this The Prime Minister: "I ought to say that it is not true." himself was informed. After the war, I made it my Sir Edward Grey consulted the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Why, therefore, should Asquith try to deceive the p52 MY om Baum, There would be a row in Parliament here if I had used B. Gan? It was T. P. Conwell-Evans who discovered this letter Suppose that engagement had been made publicly in the Now the Proletarian may ask, "What is the good of been threatened with war, and today the gigantic debt p53 Now the military experts in America are preparing Do you know that the British army and navy esti- Under terms of the loan, Britain had the privilege of This was written on December 25, 1949. Such things The importance of resurrecting the "old stufim set out p54 From the outset of the war I have been thrown into the Never were men "in the know" so sure of a speedy Perhaps no man in the House of Commons desired p55 There it is! The course that he had pursued since he p56 In 1920, Herbert Morrison was Secretary of the Lon- All the governments of all the warring nations deliber- Therefore, he called on all trade unionisrs to say: Never again shall leaders of labor or their rank and file be p57 When we entered this war we were too credulous-we In 1939 these men were politicians. Both were mem- Ask your grandfather about the situation as he found Lloyd George says, in his War Memoirr, that on Sun- p58 The world was exceptionally unfortunate in the quality If, then, cabinet ministers, other members of Parlia- Bismarck knew them well, but I cannot find a direct p59 But how is the elector to know what goes on behind The proletarian may ask what chance he has to edu- Yet, it is possible for an intelligent man to get some p60 Shortly after the pamphlet was issued, anOther trade I formally accuse the big cosmopolitan banks, at least the I cannot remember reading in a single work by an The speeches of ministers of State and the dis atches In such a course some light might be thrown upon p61 We are in the hands of an organization of crooks. They He was in a position to gather the facts and know In the United States in the past few years there have No one attempts to make a direct reply to this, and The pretext of defending Belgium in the First World p62 It was a commercial war, planned chiefly by Delcassé Underlying all the frictions and animosities of the Of what importance would the yonng navy of Germany p63 When Woodrow Wilson returned to America for the Why, my fellow-citizens, is there an man here, or any The German bankers and the German merchants and the It did more than “spoil the plans" of the German p64 In cutting down a trade rival, Great Britain discov- The statistics of the economic interdépendence of Germany In our own case we sent more exports to Germany than A rather cruel wit, during the Peace Conference at The Treaty of Versailles was a catastrophe from which p65 The situation of this country at the successful close of a Where are Britain's friends today? Outside the Com- Put your thinking caps on and commune with your- The cold-blooded pessimist who is dealing with facts p66 Anyway, suppose we grant that you saved it: what There we are! That gentleman hit the nail squarely barbarians. In the past we thou ht that education would usy they have had no time to use it, and it has gone. p67 Years ago, John Watson, the behaviorist, told us that Now that the white savages of Europe are over-running When the division bell rings and the tellers have p68 Some of you, if prompted, will remember the maze of When we consider what German politicians passed I spent some months in Germany in 1921, and on p69 prepared to deal with the Allies, if it were free to do so. commercial disorder of Central Europe affected British The men who thought as he did were many and had Wherever I went in Europe, from Vienna to Bordeaux, p70 My other visits to Germany before the rise of Hitler One of the most significant thin s I noticed, month I spoke to my friends in Munich about these hikers, I have not been able to explain to myself or to anyone p71 Three years after his first volume was published, I However, there was so much bitter controversy itterly denounced by another. Then people who had When the unex urgated edition appeared in English, p72 As a matter of record, however, it was not any part I fully appreciate the difficulties one must encounter But the greatest obStacle one has to surmount is the p73 Some papers Cpermit popular columniSts to print what Here it should be clearly understood that the propa- He has a hard road to travel during a war. The patriOts Now that the fighting is over for a while, these ani- aid to the problem of how anather war is to be averted. p74 hat means they will have to find out for themselves. However, few will be inclined to make an effort to learn Somehow war-time myths sink deeper into the con- p75 However, all were agreed upon the necessity of de- They have been a positive cause of friction and ill-will, A statesman out of office is a very different rson p76 Should a taxpayer care to understand this difference, M213! people would like to see, or would have liked to I find no reference, in his speeches delivered while he There were warnings-very definite ones- based on p77 The work was published in the United States in Then came the invasion of the Ruhr. To that adventure, I think Powell was the firsc man to take the Nazi p78 As I shall have something to say about Germany re- refuses to believe that the French stand in perpetual fear of another German onslaught. Fully aware of the defenseless and enfeebled condition of his own country and the overwhelming Infantry regiments 223 21 Cavalry “ 86 18 Artillery “ 104 7 Tank “ 19 none Engineer battalions S6 7 Heavy artillery groups 282 none Aviation squadrons 136 none Balloon companies 18 none Tatal peace establishment 541,154 men 99,191 men “The trouble with France," a distinguished American p79 The most discouraging‘feature of the whole business is the What Europe needs, and needs desperately, is a political 80 long as the diplomatic system exists, there will p80 One thing is certain now-there is no way of checking The agitation for open diplomacy, which followed Was there ever a more ignominious example of the Before we ever fired a shot, the spoils of our joint Vietory p81 p82 Mn. CHURCHILL wnorn A LETTER TO HIMSELF oN MAY 1, He then asks the question: "How much is the Hitler Now it must be remembered that this letter was not When I read this letter, a few days after it was pub- Now by the time that he published these letters to p83 Toward the end of this letter, he gives the German All this has gone into makin the mosr destructive war It must be remembered that this was written to him- A taxpayer wishing to understand the vagaries of the p84 Let us take a volume published in 1937, about two Owing to a fortunate conjunction of cirCumstances, I was Roberts declares himself to be a democratic individual- I must also pay tribute to the ordinary people of Germany p85 Their [the General StaE's] problem was a difficult one- It became obvious, then, that it would take years to (give This statement from an unprejudiced observer can p86 Here are figures taken from the League of Nations Professor Roberts tells us that "France and Czecho- Another question that may be resented by the thought- The taxpayer who really desires information about flGerman} by Cesare Santoro, a forei n press correspondent p87 Unlike Professor Roberts, the democratic individual- Historically this book is invaluable. The statistics A few days after the announcement of Germany's with- But already on March 17, the French Government, in its p88 There are books enough to enlighten men who wish In America, a staff study, made under the direction of German industry and German aircraft production facili- The work is called, "Foreign Logistical Organiza- The report reveals that in 1938 Germany produced only The report is far too long to be dealt with adequately Germany was not prepared in 1939-contrary to demo- |
The Jewish Declaration of War
on Nazi Germany The Economic Boycott of 1933 Article from The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 41-45.
The war by the international Jewish leadership on Germany not only sparked definite reprisals by the German government but also set the stage for a little-known economic and political alliance between the Hitler government and the leaders of the Zionist movement who hoped that the tension between the Germans and the Jews would lead to massive emigration to Palestine. In short, the result was a tactical alliance between the Nazis and the founders of the modern-day state of Israel - a fact that many today would prefer be forgotten. To this day, it is generally (although incorrectly) believed that when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in January of 1933, the German government began policies to suppress the Jews of Germany, including rounding up of Jews and putting them in concentration camps and launching campaigns of terror and violence against the domestic Jewish population. While there were sporadic eruptions of violence against Jews in Germany after Hitler came to power, this was not officially sanctioned or encouraged. And the truth is that anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany (or elsewhere in Europe) were actually nothing new. As all Jewish historians attest with much fervor, anti-Semitic uprisings of various degrees had been ever-present in European history. In any case, in early 1933, Hitler was not the undisputed leader of Germany, nor did he have full command of the armed forces. Hitler was a major figure in a coalition government, but he was far from being the government himself. That was the result of a process of consolidation which evolved later. Even Germany's Jewish Central Association, known as the Verein, contested the suggestion (made by some Jewish leaders outside Germany) that the new government was deliberately provoking anti-Jewish uprisings. The Verein issued a statement that "the responsible government authorities [i.e. the Hitler regime] are unaware of the threatening situation," saying, "we do not believe our German fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews." Despite this, Jewish leaders in the United States and Britain determined on their own that it was necessary to launch a war against the Hitler government. MORE |
The following is a transcript of Samuel Untermyer's speech made on WABC, declaring a 'holy war' by the Jews against Germany, and appealing to the masses of non-Jewish humanity to boycott German-made imports and all merchants who have German-made items in their establishments. The entire speech was published in the New York times on the morning following the broadcast (August 7th, 1933) which was mentioned byBenjamin Freedman in his talk before a group of patriots. A short excerpt from The World's Trouble Makers gives further insight to this speech: When Hitler had been soundly established, Samuel Untermeyer, a New York Jewish Lawyer, called for war on Germany. The call was made through radio station WABC on 8-7-33. He had just returned from a world conference of Jews at The Hague. In the broadcast, he said he was calling for a "holy war", and described the Jews as "the aristocrats of the world". This same gentleman was connected with the Foreign Policy Association of New York and the worldwide organisation to move Jews out of Germany, not only into the United States, but to Palestine and other countries. These activities were tied in with the organisation known as the "International Boycott on German Goods", of which Untermeyer was the head! We have all, on a world-wide scale, been sold the myth (lie) of the so-called Holocaust... "Six million Jews killed..." Note Untermyer's mention of the "600,000 souls we must save". That is from the horse's mouth, in 1933, during the time the Jews were leaving Germany by the thousands. The "holocaust" lie has created a great guilt complex in people all over the world who had nothing to do with the murder of even one Jew, never mind the fallacious figure of six million allegedly killed in foreign countries. The fact that more than 20 million people were killed by Joseph Stalin in the Bolshevist-controlled USSR -- mostly Christians -- is never mentioned; nor are the tens of millions slaughtered by Mao-Tse-Tung in Communist China. I was told several years ago by an educated and intelligent person that, "That was different. It was their own people that they killed." It's called brain-washing, folks. Thought control and mind control to the max. It's okay if a despot puppet-ruler kills "his own people". But... the holocaust myth of 6 million Jews is a crime/sin with which we must all live forever more. And pay, and pay and pay. It is time for the lying to stop. Why was Adolf Hitler so vilified? Because he had created a state money system, non-gold-backed, and had negotiated trade with other nations that didn't use the International Banker's monetary system. They were bartering! By-passing the usurers. Hitler continued, despite the boycott, to further his barter-trading and if enough nations had had the opportunity to participate, it would have been the end of the strangle-hold, the unbridled power in the hands of a few creatures lusting after World Dominion. Money is the name of their deceitful and dangerous game. Hitler called it "bogus money". There is much about Hitler we don't know, so this is not intended to be a Hitler- apologist commentary. I am sharing information gleaned from many and varied sources which I believe to be credible, including historian Nesta Webster. Mrs. Webster, along with other writers, had also written that Hitler had kicked the International Bankers out of Germany. In his speech, Untermyer claims that 'wealthy Jews are financing Hitler'. Untermyer was intimately connected with the wealthy Jews. Since they are the masters of lies, perhaps the statement was made to confuse the issue. It remains for the time being an unanswered question for me. A thought which has been recurring for weeks now as a result of a recent reading frenzy... a thought and a question: Given the Political Zionists have controlled the media for a couple of hundred years, why would we believe that everything we've heard/read about Adolf Hitler in the Zionist-controlled media was true? - Jackie -- More on Samuel Untermyer in Who Was Cyrus Scofield? =================================
The New York Times, Monday, August 7, 1933 Text of Untermyer's Address Following is the text of Samuel Untermyer's address last night over Station WABC after his return from Europe: My Friends: What a joy and relief and sense of security to be once more on American soil! The nightmares of horrors through which I have passed in those two weeks in Europe, listening to the heartbreaking tales of refugee victims, beggar description. I deeply appreciate your enthusiastic greeting on my arrival today, which I quite understand is addressed not to me personally but to the holy war in the cause of humanity in which we are embarked. Jews and non-Jews alike, for we are equally concerned that the work of centuries shall not be undone, and that civilization shall not be allowed to die. It is a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds of bigotry, race hatred and fanaticism that have descended upon what was once Germany, but is now medieval Hitlerland, have been dispersed. If we will but enlist to a man and persist in our purpose, the bright sun of civilization will again shine upon Germany, and the world will be a safer place in which to dwell. As our ship sailed up the bay today past our proud Statue of Liberty, [a gift to the U.S. from the Grand Orient - Illuminati - Lodge of France] I breathed a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving that this fair land of freedom has escaped the curse that has descended upon benighted Germany, which has thereby been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts. The World's Concern We owe it not only to our persecuted brethren but to the entire world to now strike in self-defense a blow that will free humanity from a repetition of this incredible outrage. This time the Jews are the victims, next time it may be the Catholics or the Protestants. If we once admit, as is brazenly insisted by the German Government, that such fiendish persecution of the people of one race or creed is an internal domestic affair and not a world concern, how are we to know whose turn will be next? Now or never must all the nations of the earth make common cause against the monstrous claim that the slaughter, starvation and annihilation, by a country that has reverted to barbarism, of its own innocent and defenseless citizens without rhyme, reason or excuse is an internal affair against which the rest of the world must stand idly by and not lift a hand in defense. I have seen and talked with many of these terror-stricken refugees who have had the good fortune to escape over the border, though forced to leave their property behind them, and I want to say to you that nothing that has seeped through to you over the rigid censorship and lying propaganda that are at work to conceal and misrepresent the situation of the Jews in Germany begins to tell a fraction of the frightful story of fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children, of the terrors of worse than death in which they are living. When the tale is told, as it will be some day if the impotent League of Nations ever sufficiently awakens from its Rip Van Winkle slumbers to the realization of its power and duty to prosecute an investigation into the facts, the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people -- a people who love and have shed their blood for their Fatherland, and to whom Germany owes in large part its prosperity and its great scientists, educators, lawyers, physicians, poets, musicians, diplomats and philosophers, who are the backbone of its past cultural life. Back to Dark Ages But why dwell longer upon this revolting picture of the ravages wrought by these ingrates and beasts of prey, animated by the loathsome motives of race hatred, bigotry and envy. For the Jews are the aristocrats of the world. From time immemorial they have been persecuted and have seen their persecutors come and go. They alone have survived. And so will history repeat itself, but that furnishes no reason why we should permit this reversion of a once great nation to the Dark Ages or fail to rescue these 600,000 human souls from the tortures of hell as we can with the aid of our Christian friends, if we have the will to act. Protests and pleas from all corners of the earth, from the leaders of all creeds, having proven as vain and unavailing as was the idealistic dream of our martyred President of making the world safe for democracy and of protecting minorities, what then are to be the lines of our defensive campaign against these atrocities, on which we are already actively embarked? Are we right in our plan? If so, what steps shall now be prosecuted to attain success? Our campaign is twofold -- defensive and constructive. On the defensive side will be the economic boycott against all German goods, shipping and services. On the constructive side will be an appeal to the League of Nations to construe and enforce the labor union provisions of the Versailles Treaty and the written promises made by Germany, while the treaty was under negotiation, to protect its minorities, which have been flagrantly violated by its disfranchisement and persecution of the German Jews. What Boycott Means As in the boycott, strange to say a mere handful in number, but powerful in influence, of our thoughtless but doubtless well-intentioned Jews seem obsessed and frightened at the bare mention of the word "boycott". It signifies and conjures up to them images of force and illegality, such as have on occasions in the past characterized struggles between labor unions and their employers. As these timid souls are capitalists and employers, the word and all that it implies are hateful to their ears. In point of fact, it signifies nothing of the kind. These gentlemen do not know what they are talking or thinking about. Instead of surrendering to their vague fears and half-baked ideas, our first duty is to educate them as to what is meant by a purely defensive economic boycott, and what we are doing and proposing. Admittedly, the boycott is our only really effective weapon. These gentlemen who are taking counsel of their groundless fears to the exclusion of their reason have done nothing and have no program except to attempt to arouse world opinion, which is and has been from the outset on our side, as it was bound to be because of this brutal, senseless, unprovoked assault upon civilization. It is not necessary to belittle or underrate that accomplishment, if their aimless, fruitless endeavors in that direction may be so dignified in recognition of their good intentions, barren of results as they have been. It is sufficient that their efforts have proven unavailing and that the campaign of Schreckligheit not only goes on unabated in the face of unanimous world opinion; but that it is increasing in intensity and that the masses of the German people, misled by government propaganda and suppression of free speech and of the press, are either voluntarily, or through fear of punishment at the hands of their despotic rulers, supporting their government in this hellish campaign. What then have these amiable gentlemen accomplished and what do they hope or expect to accomplish in the way of stemming this conflagration of civilization by their "feather-duster" methods? You cannot put out a fire, and especially that kind of a fire, by just looking on until the mad flames, fanned by the wind of hate, have destroyed everything. What we are proposing and have already gone far toward doing, is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends. "Force Them to Learn" They have flaunted and persisted in flaunting and defying world opinion. We propose to and are organizing world opinion to express itself in the only way Germany can be made to understand. Hitler and his mob will not permit their people to know how they are regarded by the outside world. We shall force them to learn in the only way open to us. Revolting as it is, it would be an interesting study in psychology to analyze the motives, other than fear and cowardice, that have prompted Jewish bankers to lend money to Germany as they are now doing. It is in part their money that is being used by the Hitler regime in its reckless, wicked campaign of propaganda to make the world anti-Semitic; with that money they have invaded Great Britain, the United States and other countries where they have established newspapers, subsidized agents and otherwise are spending untold millions in spreading their infamous creed. The suggestion that they use that money toward paying the honest debts they have repudiated is answered only by contemptuous sneers and silence. Meantime the infamous campaign goes on unabated with ever increasing intensity to the everlasting disgrace of the Jewish bankers who are helping to finance it and of the weaklings who are doing nothing effective to check it. The Hitler regime originated are fiendishly prosecuting their boycott to exterminate the Jews by placarding Jewish shops, warning Germans against dealing with them, by imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers and parading them through the streets by the hundreds under guard of Nazi troops for the sole crime of being Jews, by ejecting them from the learned professions in which many of them had attained eminence, by excluding their children from the schools, their men from the labor unions, closing against them every avenue of livelihood, locking them in vile concentration camps, starving and torturing them, murdering and beating them without cause and resorting to every other conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception, until suicide has become their only means of escape, and all solely because they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object of exterminating them. Appeal to Mankind As against this, the foulest boycott in the annals of time, we are appealing to all mankind to enforce a counter-boycott. That appeal is meeting with the conviction that idealism and justice are still alive. There is nothing new in the use of the economic boycott as an instrument of justice. The covenant of the League of Nations expressly provides in these identical words for its use to bring recalcitrant nations to terms. President Roosevelt, whose wise statesmanship and vision are the wonder of the civilized world, is invoking it in furtherance of his noble conception for the readjustment of the relations between capital and labor under the terms of the sweeping Industrial Recovery Act, to the end that labor shall receive a more just share of the wealth it creates. He is about to enlist the consumers of the country in a national campaign in which they pledge themselves to boycott all manufacturers, jobbers and retailers who fail to subscribe to the codes and to buy only from those who have assented and who are thereby privileged to fly the blue eagle of NRA [National Recovery Act]. What more exalted precedent do our timid friends want? With this explanation of our aims, I appeal to the American Jewish Committee, whose public spirit and good intentions I do not for a moment question, but the wisdom of whose judgment I challenge, no longer to hold aloof but to rid themselves of their timid and ill-considered prejudices and join in actively pressing this boycott as our only weapon except the appeal to the League, which I shall discuss at a later time. I purposely refrain from including the American Jewish Congress in this appeal because I am satisfied that 95 per cent of their members are already with us and that they are being misrepresented by two or three men now abroad. Of them I ask that, prior to the meeting to be held this month in Prague by their executive committee, they instruct these false leaders in no uncertain terms as to the stand they must take on this all-important subject and demand that they shall either openly represent their views or resign their offices. One of them, generally recognized as the kingpin of mischief makers, is junketing around the Continent engaged in his favorite pastime of spreading discord, asserting at one time and place that he favors and supports the boycott and at another that he is opposed or indifferent to it, all dependent on the audience he is addressing; but always directly or indirectly delivering a stab in the dark. Progress So Far Made There is not time now, but I hope and expect in the near future to be able to report to you the steps that have been taken and that are already under way, and the surprising and gratifying progress already made in many countries toward the success of the economic boycott in which we are engaged. Although considerable progress in that direction has already been made in Great Britain and in the United States, you will be surprised to learn that they are the least advanced and as yet the most inadequately organized of all the countries that were represented at theAmsterdam World Economic Conference, where the boycott was unanimously and enthusiastically approved by formal resolution by a rising vote. With us in America the delay has been due in part to lack of funds and the vast territory to be covered, but it is hoped, and expected, that this condition will soon be corrected. The object-lesson we are determined to teach is so priceless to all humanity that we dare not fall. Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping. To our shame be it said that there are a few Jews among us, but fortunately only a few, so wanting in dignity and self-respect that they are willing to travel on German ships where they are despised and meet with the just contempt of the servants who wait upon them and of their fellow passengers. Their names should be heralded far and wide. They are traitors to their race. In conclusion, permit me again to thank you for this heartening reception and to assure you that, with your support and that of our millions of non-Jewish friends, we will drive the last nail in the coffin of bigotry and fanaticism that has dared raise its ugly head to slander, belie and disgrace twentieth century civilization.
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UntermyerGardens Germanness and Jewishness: |
Under other circumstances, inviting a foreign ambassador to speak—and flying his country’s flag—would be a diplomatic courtesy. But in a crowded meeting of the United German Societies of New York on September 18, 1933, the issue was a heated one. The ambassador, Hans Luther, represented Hitler’s Germany, and the flag in question bore the swastika. Unfortunately for the opposition, pro-Nazi sympathizers had packed the meeting hall, and the motion to invite Luther was accepted. In response, the Jewish delegates at the meeting immediately staged a walkout. Before departing, one of them expressed the reason for his disgust: “German Jews … have not refused the [German] flag. The flag has refused them.” In subsequent weeks, Jewish organizations formally withdrew from the United German Societies, and the split became a permanent one.1 Historians of early-twentieth-century immigrant history have only recently begun to explore overlaps between German-American and Jewish-American narratives.2 Even terminology presents an obstacle, as illustrated by the loaded term “German Jews.” Does it refer to all Jews from German-speaking Europe, those who belonged to German-American organizations, or those who adhered to German traditions? In other cases, the term has been even more subjective, suggesting affluent, assimilated Jews, the proverbial “old immigrants,” who looked down on newcomers.3 Indeed, much work can be done to sort through these connotations and to shed light on the connections between the two immigrant groups. In helping to link the stories of Germans and Jews in America, it is helpful to examine German identity among individuals commonly thought of as Jewish leaders. Samuel Untermyer and Felix Warburg, Jewish Americans of German background, make for good case studies, especially in their respective responses to Nazism. While Untermyer and Warburg pursued starkly different strategies in reacting to Nazi Germany, there are important similarities in their stories. Both the American-born Untermyer and the immigrant Warburg had a demonstrable record of German immigrant nationalism prior to 1933, and subsequently they acted in the name of a nation that, they argued, had been hijacked by the Hitler movement. In addition, their centrality in the world of Jewish philanthropy placed them in the middle of American Jewish debates over how to combat Nazism. Finally, their stories demonstrate the ongoing—and increasing—difficulties of traditionally German leadership within the larger Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century.4 26 • American Jewish Archives Journal The Jewish-German-American World As with other immigrant groups, it is easy to oversimplify the JewishAmerican story. But while scholars have rightly questioned the labeling of pre- and post-1880 waves of Jewish immigrants as “German” and “eastern European,” there is no denying that German culture predominated in nineteenth-century American Jewry. A majority of the 250,000 pre-1880 arrivals came from German-speaking lands, and many of them felt at home within German-American organizations.5 Social distinctions persisted between Jewish and gentile German-Americans, but many nineteenth-century Jewish organizations operated in the German language. Reform Judaism, which originated in Germany, also found broad support in the United States.6 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the Progressive Era, urban-based reformers sought to apply professional expertise and organizing to better manage American cities and improve the lives of their inhabitants.7 In this context, many Jewish organizations hoped to Americanize newcomers, in part to prevent an antisemitic backlash that could threaten their social positions. By this time, however, a growing number of eastern European immigrants—a majority of the 2.5 million post-1880 arrivals—were challenging the older leadership and its “assimilationist” aspirations.8 These developments had already begun to strain the German foundations of Jewish organizational life well before Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933. Within German-American communities, gentile as well as Jewish, the twentieth century brought a multitude of problems. For decades, “mass culture,” as exemplified by modern advertising and forms of entertainment that reached broader portions of the population, had pulled individuals from ethnic affinities into a larger, more national identity. At the same time, social identities based on race rather than on countries of origin had sapped the strength of German ethnic consciousness. Worse yet, a hostile atmosphere during World War I convinced many Americans of German descent to shed their ethnic identities.9 To counter these forces, German-American organizations in the twentieth century pushed for ethnic revitalization. Their efforts culminated in the First German-American National Congress, held in Philadelphia in 1932, which pledged to re-energize German communities. The rise of Nazism shattered whatever unity that movement helped to create, however, as German organizations staked positions ranging from strong support of Hitler to active protest against him. The divisions were especially sharp between Jewish and gentile German-Americans, as the example of the New York societies has demonstrated.10 Even avowedly apolitical groups such as the Philadelphia-based Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation faced rapid declines in Jewish membership and donations.11 Nazism, like demographic shifts and assimilation, sent shockwaves through the German-American organizational world. Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 27 Samuel Untermyer and Felix Warburg were part of that turbulent world. Untermyer was an American-born attorney who placed himself at the head of the effort to fight Nazism through an international boycott. Warburg, an immigrant tied to the European and American banking worlds, pursued a much more cautious strategy in response to the Third Reich. Despite their different trajectories, both stories reflect important trends in American ethnic life, particularly among Jews. Samuel Untermyer as a German-American Untermyer was prominent in New York politics and philanthropy in the interwar period. Born in Virginia in 1858, Untermyer started a highly successful law firm in New York City with his half-brother, Randolph Guggenheimer. Untermyer also became active in the Democratic Party, supporting antitrust and regulatory efforts by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. He sometimes felt spurned by the Democratic Party, however, since he never received a national political appointment.12 Untermyer’s frustration with the Democratic Party was one reason why he increasingly shifted his attention toward Jewish organizations. In the early 1920s Untermyer established himself as a philanthropist and a key member of several important Jewish groups. In the wake of World War I, he supported the international relief efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), as well as various Jewish charities within the United States. Also in the early 1920s, he served as the president of the Keren Hayesod, or Palestine Foundation Fund. The American-born Untermyer considered himself a cultural, rather than political, Zionist. As an Americanized German Jew, he helped the Keren Hayesod collect donations from a larger spectrum of the American Jewish community, especially those who shied from political Zionism. Beyond this work, a vast array of Jewish societies valued Untermyer’s financial and public support.13 It is also significant, if often overlooked, that Untermyer identified himself as a German-American. Both he and his wife, Minnie Carl of St. Louis, had been raised in immigrant households, and his in-laws boasted of their friendship with the late senator and German-American hero, Carl Schurz.14 Untermyer supported the German Theater in New York and was a member of Freundschaft, an ethnic fraternity in the city. In 1916 he served on the memorial committee for the late Herman Ridder, publisher of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the nation’s largest German-language daily. He vacationed in Imperial Germany, often patronizing German ocean liners. These activities indicate that Germanness was no small part of his identity, and one can infer from his active participation that other German-American leaders regarded him as a peer.15 Untermyer’s business connections to Germany often blended with his affinities for that country, even during the period of American neutrality in 28 • American Jewish Archives Journal World War I. Prior to 1914, his law firm had represented a number of GermanAmerican brewing companies. After the outbreak of the war, Untermyer joined other German-Americans in regarding British and French propaganda with suspicion.16 While his wife, Minnie, coordinated efforts to buy milk for German babies, Samuel consulted with German investors in the United States and even attempted to broker a deal to put the New York Sun into the hands of German propagandists. In these efforts, Untermyer left a record of interactions with George Sylvester Viereck, a virulently pro-German writer and paid German propagandist. He also met with Heinrich Albert, a Reich diplomat who was publicly exposed as a coordinator of German espionage in the United States. While the Sun deal fell apart, it created suspicions about Untermyer’s loyalty once the United States entered the war. A lack of hard evidence ultimately enabled him to dodge the accusations, however.17 Untermyer enthusiastically supported the American war effort after April 1917, another move that helped him to counter questions about his loyalties.18 Untermyer’s advocacy for Germany and German-Americans continued after the armistice. He considered himself a Wilsonian, but he denounced the “spirit of conquest and robbery” that had shaped the Versailles Treaty. Viereck—who would be prosecuted in the 1940s as a Nazi agent—entreated Untermyer in 1914 to finance his Fatherland magazine, which was dedicated to countering pro-Allied sentiment. While it is unclear whether Untermyer provided monetary assistance, he did periodically contribute articles decrying anti-German attitudes after 1919. Untermyer also maintained business interests within Germany. He owned shares in a German utility company and real estate holdings outside Berlin. The freezing of these assets by the Nazi government after 1933 later served as a concrete representation of the severing of Untermyer’s connections to Germany.19 Felix Warburg as a German-American Unlike Untermyer, Warburg had grown up in Germany; however, the two men’s careers bore similarities. The Moritz Warburg family had built up the M.M. Warburg banking firm in Hamburg, Germany, in the late nineteenth century. By the time of Mortiz’s death in 1910, three of his sons had gained prominence in transatlantic business. The eldest, Max, headed the family firm, sat on the board of the Hamburg-America Steamship Line, and became a financial adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Paul, a year younger, married Nina Loeb, connecting him to the Kuhn, Loeb and Company banking firm in New York. He moved to the United States in 1902 and became a U.S. citizen nine years later, although he still spent considerable time in Hamburg. Felix, originally trained in the diamond and pearl business, had moved to the United States in 1894 and married the daughter of Jacob Schiff, a Manhattan banker and fellow German-Jewish immigrant. Felix received a Kuhn, Loeb partnership in Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 29 1897. He quickly became a New York socialite and an active philanthropist. Geography now divided the brothers, but they forged links between Kuhn, Loeb and M.M. Warburg, empowering both companies.20 By 1914, Paul Warburg found his Germanness to be a liability as he worked to reform the American monetary system. Within a year of his arrival in New York in 1902, Paul sketched a proposal for a central banking system that eventually evolved into the Federal Reserve. He served on the Federal Reserve Board in 1914, despite the fact that he had become a target of nativist anger. One congressman, for example, opposed his nomination to the Federal Reserve on the grounds that he was “a Jew, a German, a banker and an alien.” Although Paul was a naturalized citizen who worked actively to Americanize, his transatlantic connections were never far from view. Paul helped to direct the American war economy in 1917 while his older brother Max filled the same role for the German Reich. Such connections later provided fodder for Nazi propagandists, who accused the brothers of orchestrating both the start and the end of the Great War “in the interest of the Jewish race.”21 Felix, three years Paul’s junior, was more outspoken and more active in social circles. He took U.S. citizenship in 1900, quickly becoming comfortable in American society. He joined his father-in-law, Jacob Schiff, in reform work that emphasized Americanization. In turn-of-the-century New York, they sponsored the Henry Street Settlement and joined the Educational Alliance, an organization that catered to poor Jews. His charitable work became “so diverse as to defy easy summary,” as biographer Ron Chernow explains, but a major realm of activity was international relief. In 1906 he joined Schiff in co-founding the American Jewish Committee (AJC), an elite philanthropic organization. He also became the chair of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), created in 1914 to provide support for victims of the European war. Warburg’s reputation as a “democratic aristocrat” helped the JDC to soften animosities between established and recently arrived Jews. He increasingly devoted his time to the JDC, and his stature as a philanthropist increased accordingly.22 By 1917, Warburg had also established himself within the German-American community. He became a member of the Chamber of German-American Commerce; the German Society of New York, a philanthropic society; and the Germanistic Society of America, dedicated to preserving German culture in the United States. Like Untermyer, he demonstrated sympathy for the German Reich. In 1915 he donated funds anonymously to the Hilfsverein deutscher Frauen (German Women’s Aid Organization) and other groups that supported German “war sufferers.” As a partner at Kuhn, Loeb, he helped prevent the company from issuing a loan to the Allies in 1915, a decision that brought scorn from pro-Allied elements of the American press and public.23 Following American entry into the war in April 1917, Warburg moved quickly to support the U.S. war effort. He devoted time and money to the 30 • American Jewish Archives Journal United Service Organization, donated his own resources to the war effort, and ostentatiously reduced his level of consumption. In 1918, his brother Paul gave in to growing criticism of his German ancestry, resigning from the Federal Reserve Board. Upset by the treatment of Germans in the United States, both brothers became active in the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, dedicated to preserving German-American heritage. Felix, meanwhile, threw himself into the work of the JDC and added investment in Palestine to his already massive record of philanthropy.24 Responses to National Socialism Immediately following Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, Jewish organizations in America sought a proper response to a regime suffused with antisemitism. By March, a movement was underway to mount an economic boycott of Nazi Germany. When the divided American Jewish Congress initially hesitated on the matter, the Jewish War Veterans assumed leadership of the movement. Soon, however, the momentum passed to organizations founded specifically to promote the boycott, foremost among them the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights (ALDJR).25 Jewish leaders diverged on the subject, and Untermyer and Warburg were no exception. Untermyer actively supported the anti-Nazi movement in America, and he became the head of the ALDJR. He now openly expressed regret for his own pro-German sentiments prior to World War I. As he looked back, he recalled that “German-Jewish advisers” like himself had naively worked for peace, in contrast to the “Hitler–von Tirpitz type” who drove toward war in both the 1910s and 1930s.26 In another attempt to reconcile his older views with his new stance, he compared Nazi propaganda to the “British-French war fables” of 1914, Advertisement for Gala Concert for the Benefit of German Jewish Relief, 28 September 1933 (Courtesy American Jewish Archives) Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 31 referring to the Allied campaigns to exaggerate and, in some cases, fabricate German atrocities to steer American public opinion. Americans would no longer accept foreign propaganda at face value. “We … have learned our lesson in the ways of counteracting that kind of poison,” Untermyer declared in 1933.27 His speeches against Nazism also reflected the sense of betrayal that he and other Jews of German background felt in the 1930s, both in Europe and the United States. Untermyer cited a long record of Jewish military service in Germany, as well as Jewish contributions to culture, science, and business, all of which were ignored by “the blind bigotry and fanaticism of the Hitler platform.”28 Undoubtedly, many German-American Jews shared his sentiments, harboring “the strongest feeling of sympathy toward the German people” alongside a “corresponding feeling of revulsion” against the Nazis. As one who had considered himself German, Untermyer was the ideal spokesperson for the ALDJR’s position that the German people were unhappy under Hitler and could be persuaded, through economic pressure, to remove him from power.29 Untermyer sometimes used his German background and perspective to lend credibility to the anti-Nazi movement. In a May 1933 speech, he shared his thoughts on his “old friend,” Herman Metz, who represented the I.G. Farben corporation in the United States and who worked to improve the Nazis’ image abroad. Having talked privately with Metz, Untermyer declared that “Mr. Metz knows what he has seen with his own eyes in Germany.” Sadly, he said, Metz’s economic interest compelled him to defend the Nazis, rather than speak the truth. Citing his personal relationship with Metz provided Untermyer with a unique means of refuting pro-German “Violators” List distributed by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League of New Jersey, April 1939 (Courtesy American Jewish Archives) 32 • American Jewish Archives Journal propaganda. This view of Metz also reinforced Untermyer’s assertions about the importance of economic pressure.30 Warburg, too, loathed Nazism, but his reaction was notably different than that of Untermyer. Warburg was a member of the traditional—and stereotypically “German Jewish”—philanthropic elite. He was a prominent officer of the AJC, founded in 1906 to aid victims of Russian pogroms. For the affluent leaders of the committee, philanthropy had long provided a means of steering Jewish communities and Americanizing newcomers. The committee was so effective in shaping Jewish community life that one scholar has described it as a “self-perpetuating oligarchy.”31 Warburg had long favored assimilation but still retained an affinity for his country of birth. As a result of Nazism, he became ambivalent about GermanAmerican cultural life. His relationship with the German Society of New York illustrates this ambivalence. When the charitable organization invited Warburg to serve on its 150th Anniversary Committee in 1934, he declined, saying that he could not “join a committee on which I may meet some people whose attitude toward the present German Government may be more favorable than mine.” He did, however, maintain his membership in the society.32 Warburg took a quieter, more cautious stance toward Nazi Germany than did Untermyer. This attitude stemmed, in large part, from his desire not to draw attention to his relatives in Europe. His brother Max, after all, was trying to maintain both the family firm and his own physical well-being in Hamburg. As a result, Felix refused to comment publicly on reports of anti-Jewish violence in the spring of 1933. In April, when Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht came to the United States, other leaders of the AJC asked Warburg whether they should meet with the German official. Warburg’s secretary replied that the committee should do so but that Warburg himself could not be involved, and his name was to be kept out of any communication. A few years later he sponsored refugee professors through the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, but only with the understanding that his name never appear in its records.33 For Warburg and Untermyer, and for their respective organizations, the campaign to boycott imports from Germany remained a heated issue throughout the 1930s. Untermyer, president of the ALDJR after May 1933, became the boycott movement’s most visible spokesperson. The ALDJR saw his status as an American-born, affluent figure as a way to broaden its appeal, both within and beyond the United States. The calculation seems to have met some success, as a federation of pro-boycott groups chose Untermyer to appeal their case before the League of Nations in the summer of 1933.34 As Untermyer often reiterated, the boycott was not simply the most effective means of protest, but the only means. “There is no longer a free press or freedom of speech in Germany,” he explained. “If world opinion does not reach [the Germans], there is just one way, and Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 33 only one.” Economic pressure would “reach t he m a s s e s” a nd force a repudiation of Nazism.35 Untermyer also insisted on the boycott becoming more than a “Jewish” movement. He characterized it as “the spontaneous uprising of outraged civilization against [the] ‘Mad Dog of Europe.’” Indeed, the need for broad—especially gentile—support convinced Untermyer to change the group’s name to the Non-Sectarian AntiNazi League to Champion Human Rights (NSANL) in November 1933.36 The movement spread beyond New York, with the Jewish War Veterans and its women’s auxiliaries helping to disseminate information. The American Jewish Congress finally joined the boycott in August 1933, although it and the Jewish Labor Committee eventually created the Joint Boycott Council as a rival to the NSANL.37 Differences of personality and strategy, including Untermyer’s autocratic leadership style, fueled divisions, but by 1937 the NSANL’s InterState Conference received progress reports from chapters in Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other localities.38 The AJC, whose leadership included Warburg, remained a vocal opponent of the boycott effort, although there is evidence that he initially considered lending his support. He mused in one letter that the German people might change their tone if “their pocketbooks [were] attacked by their own foolishness.” But observing the situation from Germany, where any Nazi retaliation over the boycott would actually occur, his brother Max disagreed. His impassioned pleas against confrontation convinced Felix and the AJC to withhold their support. Meanwhile, the JDC, of which Felix was president, also decided against the boycott. Comparing itself to the Red Cross, it cited a need to remain apolitical.39 In effect, the AJC, the JDC, and B’nai B’rith became the leading organizations that opposed, or at least avoided, the boycott.40 The AJC summarized its case against the boycott in August 1933. The group believed that economic action would provide a pretext for intensified persecution. It also feared alienating Christians, antagonizing German-Americans, and fueling global antisemitism. Instead, the committee favored using personal Samuel Untermyer returning to New York from London, 6 August 1933 (Courtesy American Jewish Archives) 34 • American Jewish Archives Journal contacts to exert pressure on prominent Reich officials and citizens. One memo even suggested that, in private conversations with Germans, committee members cite the boycott as evidence that the Nazis should mitigate their policies. In this way, it noted, even the reckless boycott movement “may be utilized for a good purpose.”41 The turbulent relationship between Untermyer and Warburg reflected that of the organizational world as a whole. The two had not always been amicable— Untermyer had antagonized the Warburgs in 1912 by investigating the Kuhn, Loeb firm as part of an alleged “Money Trust”—but in the 1920s they had found common ground in that both considered themselves non-Zionists in the political sense. Committed simply to supporting Jewish cultural development in Palestine, Warburg joined Untermyer’s Keren Hayesod, and Untermyer supported Warburg’s JDC. Even in the 1930s, Untermyer was at times willing to acknowledge the Warburg family’s precarious circumstances. “I suppose we shall continue to differ as to the policy of the boycott,” he wrote Warburg in 1935, “but your position and that of your people in Germany is quite understandable.” At the same time, however, Untermyer cut off his donations to the JDC, citing its opposition to the boycott.42 In public, Untermyer attacked the AJC and B’nai B’rith for their inaction. He undoubtedly had people like Warburg in mind when he railed against those who opposed his movement: [W]hen our persecuted, defenseless people are knocked over the head with a club, … these self-constituted leaders retaliate with a cry of pain and strike back by shaking a feather-duster in the faces of their tormentors, and pass eloquent resolutions of protest and appeal, but refuse to use the only effective weapon at hand, by way of defense.43 In turn, when Untermyer criticized Secretary of State Cordell Hull for ignoring evidence of Nazi propaganda in America, the AJC publicly denounced Untermyer as irresponsible.44 The rejection of public action by Warburg and his associates paralleled that of the United States government. William Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany until 1938, was an unabashed critic of the Nazis, yet he opposed the boycott as counterproductive to “the helps [sic] we apply quietly and unofficially.” Secretary Hull advised President Roosevelt to keep his distance from boycott leaders to prevent any suspicion that the White House supported their actions.45 Critics of the Warburg family read much into this inaction. Because James Warburg, Felix’s nephew, was an economic advisor to the Roosevelt administration, some detractors even concluded that the Warburgs were shaping official policy on Germany.46 Thus, at the exact same time that the Nazis blamed the Warburgs for the Versailles Treaty, the Bolshevik Revolution, and other events, Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 35 the family came under fire in the United States for being appeasers of Hitler.47 Such was the price of remaining quiet in a noisy, ideologically polarized era. Despite his cautious public stance, Warburg did commit to a range of activity to aid German Jews. After hearing an account of persecution in April 1933, he declared: I am sufficiently enraged, and so are all German Americans, even the Christian ones, … to take some drastic steps, unfriendly to Germany and seemingly unfriendly to M.M. [Warburg], in order to get [the Jews] out of the undignified position in which they find themselves. To this end, he supported the philanthropic activity of his brother, Max, who remained in Germany. Max chaired the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Aid Society for German Jews) and cofounded several other groups to provide mutual aid within Germany and to sponsor resettlement. These aid organizations even tried—with negligible results—to lobby Reich officials on behalf of Jewish communities.48 Responding to criticism of his brother for remaining in Germany, Felix Warburg insisted that the family was trying to aid those unable to leave. The JDC aligned itself with such efforts. In a 1933 letter, its fundraising chair described its goals as “maintaining [German Jewish] institutions, keeping up their morale and preventing them from falling into panic.” The letter also defended quiet action. While “one would expect the whole world to rise and protest,” it said, this was not the case. “Until that time comes, it is the duty of every Jew to protect, if he cannot protest.”49 Such a statement could only have incensed boycott leaders. Within the divided Jewish organizational world, one strategy—refugee aid—provided some common ground. In March 1934 the JDC’s United Jewish Appeal campaign in New York, chaired by Warburg, merged the efforts of the JDC and the American Palestine Campaign. In the following two years it raised more than four million dollars for resettlement. Untermyer, despite earlier refusals, donated generously to the JDC in 1938, stipulating that his money be used only to get people out of Germany. Meanwhile, the JDC, the AJC, and the American Jewish Congress all collaborated in resettling and educating German Jewish children. Felix and Max Warburg cofounded the Council for German Jewry, dedicated to relocating 100,000 German Jewish youth. While its controversial plan to rescue Jews through economic incentives to the Reich never got off the ground, the council did help the JDC and other groups to sponsor exiles.50 The level of cooperation regarding refugees was undoubtedly welcome in light of other differences among Jewish organizations. Ultimately, however, not even this work was immune to division. 36 • American Jewish Archives Journal The Decline of Elite Leadership Because the United States could not—or would not—absorb many refugees from Germany, the central question became where to send them. For Warburg and the JDC, the answer was simple: anywhere. Working with the League of Nations High Commission for German Refugees, for example, the JDC lobbied countries throughout the Western Hemisphere to open their borders, with little success. The most obvious answer, Palestine, became a divisive one, however. In America, the prospect of a Jewish home in Palestine had generally appealed to poorer and recently arrived Jews. For those who had already established themselves in American society—such as prominent members of the AJC—pushing for a state in Palestine offered more problems than solutions. Many feared that endorsing Zionism would only raise questions of loyalty. Equally important was the fact that Zionist groups constituted new rivals to traditional leadership.51 Since the early 1920s, Warburg had supported Jewish development in Palestine, but he eschewed political Zionism, which he considered antithetical to his assimilationist views. Ever a believer in the power of philanthropy, Warburg thought that generous investment alone might repair Arab-Jewish relations.52 In the 1930s, however, calls for a Jewish state increased in response to Nazism. Zionists consolidated control of both the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Hebrew University, a favorite charity of Warburg’s. As the unofficial leader of the non-Zionists, Warburg remained committed to Arab-Jewish coexistence. Many Zionists, including World Zionist Congress president Chaim Weizmann, increasingly favored a partition of Palestine. Warburg traveled to Zurich in August 1937 to plead his case to the Jewish Agency Council, but his opponents’ momentum was too great, and his efforts failed. Warburg died in October 1937, his plans for compromise in tatters. Warburg’s defeat, along with his death, symbolized a final phase in the transfer of Jewish-American leadership from the traditional elite to large, broad-based, and generally Zionist groups. Still, even Warburg’s critics acknowledged his work on behalf of Jewish communities. Commenting on the philanthropist’s death, Samuel Untermyer reflected that Warburg “could always be counted on” for charitable causes.53 Untermyer, already in poor health, curtailed his activism less than a year after Warburg’s death. It is apparent that, by the late 1930s, he had become alienated from the NSANL. In addition to differences of personality, not all boycott leaders agreed with his insistence on nonsectarianism, and the issue exacerbated existing divisions.54 Already disillusioned by apathy and disunity in December 1937, Untermyer vented his frustrations in his last major public address. He wondered aloud why “Americans generally have been so indolent, callous and short-sighted as to have failed … when they have within easy reach the means of self-protection for themselves and their brethren in Germany.” He resigned as president of the NSANL in April 1938. Until his death in March Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 37 1940, he fought to have his name removed from NSANL letterhead, a testament to both his prestige within the boycott movement and his alienation from it.55 Conclusion There has been a long-running scholarly discussion over the failure of American Jews to oppose Nazism effectively.56 Historian Gulie Ne’eman Arad has specifically noted the ambivalence of Jewish German-Americans, who misunderstood the threat of Nazism. According to Arad, their position was a mixture of ongoing affinity for the German people and a view of the Jewish people as “eternal,” able to withstand yet another antisemitic regime.57 There is much in the stories of Untermyer and the Warburgs to support this assertion. Their identification with Germany, as demonstrated by their actions during and after World War I, informed their disparate reactions to Nazism. The American-born Untermyer based his advocacy of a boycott on the belief that economic pressure would spur the German nation to topple the Hitler regime. Felix Warburg, whose family in Germany made him leery of open confrontation, tried to protect German Jews by defusing tensions and, later, by trying to move them out of harm’s way until the threat passed. Over time, events showed that both men underestimated the Nazis’ staying power. The careers of Untermyer and Warburg also reflect the weakening of elite leadership styles in Jewish organizational life at the same time that Nazi persecution boosted calls for a Jewish state. Warburg’s attempts to use elite power to protect Reich Jews, effect peace in Palestine, and unify Jewish communities brought hostility from other leaders. Untermyer’s leadership style, along with his commitment to nonsectarianism, similarly fostered infighting. As their stories help to show, the 1930s and 1940s saw the completion of the effort by broad-based groups to supplant the older style of philanthropic leadership.58 One must be careful, however, not to undervalue these leaders’ efforts in the 1930s. While the direct financial impact of the boycott is unclear, a study by Moshe Gottlieb has asserted that damaging the Reich’s economy was but one goal of the boycott. It severed symbolic ties to Germany, he argues, and helped to wrest Jewish-American leadership away from cautious elites. Furthermore, although Untermyer’s efforts did not stop the persecution of Reich Jews, they helped to bring the violence in Germany into the view of the American public, exacerbating a diplomatic problem for the Nazis.59 Nor can one dismiss the less confrontational activities undertaken by figures like Felix Warburg. He broadened the ideological range of support for refugee relief and Palestine aid, just as Untermyer did for the boycott. In addition, the efforts of the Warburg-led JDC yielded quantifiable results. In 1934 the JDC’s United Appeal campaign in New York funded the relocation of 17,000 German Jews. In 1935 the JDC gave nearly $1 million to relief efforts within the Reich and spent approximately the same amount on resettlement. Donations to the 38 • American Jewish Archives Journal JDC for refugee relief increased every year under Warburg’s leadership, reaching $2,374,062 in 1936. His own timidity and naïveté have brought valid criticism, but no one could deny the impact of a man who, along with his wife, personally donated over $13 million to charity.60 An epilogue to the Warburg story shows that ethnic identity grew more complicated in the late 1930s but that echoes of earlier years remained. A few months after the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, Max Warburg emigrated to the United States, taking Felix’s place on the JDC’s executive committee. He worked closely with the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation to identify refugee scholars in need of aid, and he stressed the need to show the world “how many Germans … worked for honest democracy.” Felix’s son, Eddie, served intermittently as JDC chair from 1941 to 1965. National Socialism convinced him, like many others, of the need for a Jewish state, and in 1940 he reunited the JDC with the Zionists.61 His cousins James (Paul’s son) and Eric (Max’s son) served in the United States military during World War II. All three cousins lobbied against a harsh peace settlement at the war’s conclusion, and Eric even returned to the board of his family’s firm in Hamburg.62 In the postwar era, at least among the Warburgs, Germanness endured. Gregory Kupsky is a historian in the World War II section at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Knox College and a master’s from The University of Tennessee. He received his doctorate in modern U.S. History from The Ohio State University in March 2010. His dissertation was a study of German-American organizations’ responses to National Socialism. Notes 1 “German Societies Meeting Is Disrupted by Row over the Flying of a Nazi Flag,” New York Times (19 September 1933): 3; “Jews Again Quit German Societies,” New York Times (3 October 1933): 14. 2 See Mark Bauman, “On German American and American Jewish History,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 67–71. 3 On the definitions of “German Jews,” see Tobias Brinkmann, “Jews, Germans, or Americans? German-Jewish Immigrants in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, ed. Krista O’Donnell et al. (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 132–134. 4 Portions of this article draw on chapter one of Gregory Kupsky, “‘The True Spirit of the German People’: German-Americans and National Socialism, 1919–1955,” doctoral dissertation (The Ohio State University, 2010). 5 Hasia Diner concedes that the model of two waves, while oversimplified, carries a measure of validity. In her analysis, which is otherwise rich with statistical evidence, Diner does not place specific numbers on the Germanness of the 1820–1880 wave. Presumably because of the problems inherent in trying to quantify a hard-to-define pool of “German Jews,” Diner simply asserts that the 1820–1880 wave “tended to come heavily” from areas that eventually became Germany, or where “an urban elite [was] deeply influenced by German culture.” Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 79. Elsewhere, Diner has described the German subgroup as a “slim majority” of the pre-1880 Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 39 migration. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1. 6 Brinkmann, 114, 119; Cornelia Wilhelm, “The Independent Order of True Sisters: Friendship, Fraternity, and a Model of Modernity for Nineteenth Century American Jewish Womanhood,” American Jewish Archives Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 54; Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 210–212. 7 A good overview of the Progressive Era is Arthur Link and Richard McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan-Davidson, 1983). 8 Diner, 79; Gerald Sorin, “Mutual Contempt, Mutual Benefit: The Strained Encounter between German and Eastern European Jews in America, 1880–1920,” American Jewish History 81, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 34–59. 9 Russell Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2. While Peter Connolly-Smith notes that World War I served as an easy scapegoat for an ethnic decline that actually started decades earlier, one cannot ignore the sharp decline in the number of German-American organizations and German-language media immediately before and during the war. Of 552 German newspapers in America in 1910, for example, approximately half remained in 1920. Conolly-Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918 (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 2004); Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 271. 10Erster National-Kongress der Amerikaner deutschen Stammes (New York: Deutsch-amerikanische Konferenz von Gross-New York und Umgebung, 1932). The fragmentation of ethnic German organizations is the subject of Kupsky, “‘The True Spirit.’” 11Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation Sixth Annual Report, 30 April 1935, National Carl Schurz Association Papers, Box 44, Folder 2, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter cited as NCSA); Wilbur Thomas to Dietrich Gristede, 2 December 1935, Box 2, Folder 11, NCSA. 12Richard Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe’: Samuel Untermyer and the Boycott of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938,” American Jewish History 93, no. 1 (March 2007): 21–50; Hawkins, “Samuel Untermyer and the Zionist Project: An Attempt to Reconcile the American ‘Melting Pot’ with Zionism,” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 21 (2007): 116; Hawkins, “American Boomers and the Flotation of Shares in the City of London in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Business History 49, no. 6 (November 2007): 802–822; correspondence between Untermyer and Roosevelt, 1929–1930, Papers as Governor of New York, Box 80, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library; Untermyer’s secretary to William Julian, 15 July 1920, Samuel Untermyer Papers (MS-251), Box 2, Folder 1, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH (hereafter cited as AJA); Untermyer, “Some of America’s Social and Economic Follies,” 17 February 1931, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA; Untermyer statement, 12 March 1933, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA. 13Hawkins, “Zionist Project,” 114, 116, 119; Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 22; “The Purim Association Ball,” New York Times (23 February 1902): 10; Untermyer to Paul Baerwald, 7 May 1920, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 1, AJA. See, for example, the letters in MS-251, Box 3, Folder 4, AJA. 14“Mrs. S. Untermyer Dies at Greystone,” New York Times (17 August 1924): 24. 15Circular from the Executive Komitee für Subvention des deutschen Theaters, May 1914, Felix Warburg Papers (MS-457), Box 165, Folder 3, AJA; “Freundschaft is in New $500,000 Home,” New York Times (18 June 1914): 11; “German Squadron in Hudson To-Day,” New York Times (9 June 1912): 5; “To Honor Ridder’s Memory,” New York Times (17 February 1916): 14. 16Hawkins, “American Boomers,” 804; “Untermyer Points the War’s Lessons,” New York Times (23 August 1914): 9. 17Untermyer also allegedly bankrolled other troubled papers with pro-German slants. “Milk for German Babies,” New York Times (13 November 1915): 2; “Fight to Hold Wireless,” New York Times (4 June 1915): 2; “New Yorkers Deny Disloyal Taint,” New York Times (7 December 1918): 40 • American Jewish Archives Journal 2; “Untermyer Again Defends Loyalty,” New York Times (8 December 1918): 3; “Untermyer Denies Aiding Propaganda,” New York Times (9 December 1918): 9; “Ousted as Proally,” Washington Post (12 December 1918): 2; “Untermyer Tells of His Call on Editor,” New York Times (30 December 1918): 18; “Palmer Retorts to Untermyer,” New York Times (26 January 1921): 3. 18Hawkins, “Zionist Project,” 115; Untermyer to General Crowder, 27 November 1917, MS- 251, Box 1, Folder 4, AJA. 19Untermyer to Frank Cobb, 9 September 1919, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 4, AJA; George Sylvester Viereck to Samuel Untermyer, 1 August 1914, MS-457, Box 166, Folder 1, AJA; Untermyer, “Justice for German-Americans,” American Weekly (24 April 1918): 189; “Samuel Untermyer Shows How Germany Was Wronged at Versailles,” American Monthly (January 1925): 354. Statement on Untermyer by Jim Larkin, RG 59, Series 1930–1939, Box 4729, Folder 3, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA); Edward Russell, Randolph Guggenheimer, and Samuel Untermyer to Cordell Hull, 11 June 1938, RG 59, Series 1930–1939, Box 1671, File 362.115, NARA; Guggenheimer and Untermyer to State Department, 2 July 1940, and Paul Culbertson to Guggenheimer and Untermyer, 16 July 1940, RG 59, Series 1940–1944, Box 1246, File 362.1143/783, NARA. 20Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Random House, 1993), xvi, 32, 46–48, 53, 69, 85–86, 89–90, 105, 108, 123. 21“Mr. Warburg Urges Government Bank,” New York Times (14 November 1907): 8; Chernow, 86–90, 130–40; Der Stürmer (September 1938), quoted in Chernow, 474; Chernow, 216. 22Chernow, 86, 99–101; JDC Statement on Felix Warburg, January 1917, MS-457, Box 168, Folder 16, AJA. 23Heinrich Charles to Felix Warburg, 10 June 1914, MS-457, Box 165, Folder 1, AJA; J.P. Meyer to Warburg, 28 January 1916, MS-457, Box 168, Folder 15, AJA; Franz Boas to Members of Germanistic Society, 15 November 1920, MS-457, Box 188, Folder 4, AJA; Chernow, 168–169. 24Chernow, 181–182, 186–189, 220, 223–224, 246, 249–252; “Warburg a Victim of War Prejudice,” American Weekly (18 September 1918): cover. On the Warburgs’ connections to the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, see Guest List, 8 May 1933, Box 1, Folder 3, NCSA; CSMF By-Laws, Box 1, Folder 10, NCSA; and M. Habrich to Helene Wittmann, 11 February 1932, and Joseph Marks to Wilbur Thomas, 27 July 1932, MS-457, Box 285, Folder 3, AJA. 25“Nazi Foes Here Calmed by Police,” New York Times (20 March 1933): 5; “Boycott Advocated to Curb Hitlerism,” New York Times (21 March 1933): 10; “Anti-Hitler March to be Led by O’Brien,” New York Times (5 May 1933): 9; “Jews Here Decree Boycott on Reich,” New York Times (15 May 1933): 1. 26“Untermyer Scores Congress on Nazis,” New York Times (17 April 1933): 6. 27Untermyer, “Germany’s Medieval Challenge to World Jewry and Civilization,” 7 May 1933, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA. On the “war fables” themselves, see John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 28Untermyer, “Germany’s Medieval Challenge.” 29Quoted in Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 23. 30Sander Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 109; “Address of Mr. Samuel Untermyer before the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights,” 14 May 1933, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA. 31Naomi Cohen, “The Transatlantic Connection: The American Jewish Committee and the Joint Foreign Committee in Defense of German Jews, 1933–1937,” American Jewish History 90, no. 4 (December 2002): 353–384. See also Cohen, Not Free to Desist: A History of the AmericanJewish Committee, 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972). 32J.P. Meyer to Warburg, 5 October 1934; Warburg to Meyer, 8 October 1934; and German Society of New York to Warburg, 25 January 1934, MS-457, Box 295, Folder 8, AJA. Germanness and Jewishness: Samuel Untermyer, Felix Warburg, and National Socialism • 41 33Julius Meier to Warburg, 25 March 1933, and James Rosenberg to Meier, 26 March 1933, MS-457, Box 286, Folder 3, AJA; American Jewish Committee Memo, 28 April 1933, MS- 457, Box 286, Folder 6, AJA; Memo of Conversation between Miss Emanuel and William Rosenwald, 21 May 1936, and John Whyte to Miss Emanuel, 5 December 1936, MS-457, Box 321, Folder 7, AJA. 34Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 24, 31; Untermyer, “Celebration of the Dedication Ceremonies Held at the Hebrew University,” 13 April 1933, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA. 35Untermyer Statement on the Boycott, 18 September 1933, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 2, AJA. 36Untermyer to George Gordon Battle, 10 April 1935, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 2, AJA; Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 38. 37Jewish War Veterans Message to Ladies’ Auxiliaries, 10 September 1937, Bertha Corets Papers (MS-307), Box 1, Folder 2, AJA; List of Auxiliaries That Did Not Respond to Boycott Questionnaire, undated, Box 1, Folder 5, Ms-307, AJA; Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 27–29, 32. 38Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 39–41; Moshe Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1981), 226; Minutes of Inter-State Conference of NSANL, 7 March 1937, MS-307, Box 1, Folder 2, AJA. 39Warburg to Hans Meyer, 3 April 1933, MS-307, Box 285, Folder 14, AJA; Chernow, 372–373; Warburg to Louis Rittenberg, 8 August 1933, MS-307, Box 288, Folder 8, AJA; Joseph Proskauer to Committee on Policy, 22 May 1933, and Warburg to Proskauer, 24 May 1933, MS-457, Box 287, Folder 2, AJA; “$2,000,000 Sought to Aid Reich Jews,” New York Times (20 May 1933): 2. 40B’nai B’rith reversed course in 1937, however, and thereafter supported the boycott. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 341. 41Statement, “Shall The Jews Engage in an Official Boycott Against Germany?” 17 August 1933, MS-457, Box 287, Folder 1, AJA; Memo, “Counter Boycott Propaganda,” undated, MS-457, Box 286, Folder 8, AJA. 42Hawkins, “Zionist Project,” 121, 132, 134–136, 141; Correspondence between Untermyer and Warburg, June 1935, MS-457, Box 307, Folder 10, AJA; Untermyer to Jonah Wise, 24 November 1933, MS-457, Box 291, Folder 11, AJA. 43Untermyer, “The Economic Boycott of Germany,” 27 June 1933, MS-251, Box 4, Folder 9, AJA. 44“Untermyer Turns Attack upon Hull,” New York Times (4 November 1933): 8; Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 25–26; Untermyer to Samuel Dickstein, 3 May 1934, Samuel Dickstein Papers (MS-8), Box 5, Folder 6, AJA. 45William Dodd to Stephen Wise, 1 August 1933, William Dodd Papers, Box 43, Folder 7, Library of Congress; Dodd to Leo Wormser, 26 September 1933, William Dodd Papers, Box 43, Folder 6, Library of Congress; Cordell Hull to Louis Howe, 6 September 1933, Papers as President, Official File, File 198-a, Box 2, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. 46The detractors included Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress. See the public statement by Felix Warburg, 9 August 1933, Ms-457, Box 285, Folder 14, AJA. 47Chernow, 181, 387–388, 391, 407. 48Warburg to Hans Meyer, 3 April 1933 and 11 April 1933, MS-457, Box 285, Folder 14, AJA; Chernow, 402–403. 49Concert Program, 28 September 1933, MS-457, Box 291, Folder 10; Jonah Wise Fundraising Letter, 23 November 1933, and Form Letter, 28 July 1933, MS-457, Box 291, Folder 11, AJA. 50“$3,000,000 Drive On to Help Refugees,” New York Times (23 March 1934): 18; “3,250,000 Sought for Jewish Relief,” New York Times (11February 1935): 36; “$10,000,000 Agency Will Aid Refugees,” New York Times (22 July 1935): 1; “Jews Split Drives of United Appeal,” New York Times (30 October 1935): 19; Untermyer to Paul Baerwald, 18 November 1938, MS-251, Box 2, Folder 1, AJA; “250 Reich Children To Be Brought Here,” New York Times (7 September 42 • American Jewish Archives Journal 1934): 12; “Quakers Aid Vienna Jews,” New York Times (22 April 1938): 12; “To Take More Refugees,” New York Times (27 May 1939): 6; Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 277. 51Chernow, 292–296; Address by Felix Warburg in St. Louis, Missouri, 25 January 1936, MS- 457, Box 319, Folder 4, AJA. 52Chernow, 248–251; Rafael Medoff, “Felix Warburg and the Palestinian Arabs: A Reassessment,” American Jewish Archives Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 14, 16. 53Chernow, 253, 448–449, 454–456; “Weizmann Drafts Program for Zion,” New York Times (10 August 1937): 17; “F.M. Warburg Off for Zurich Parley,” New York Times (12 August 1937): 13; “U.S. Non-Zionists Bolt at Zurich,” New York Times (20 August 1937): 1; “Palestine Parley Asked by Warburg,” New York Times (4 September 1937): 15; “Warburg Career Widely Extolled,” New York Times (21 October 1937): 18. 54Jeffrey Gurock, America, American Jews, and the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1998), 245–246; Gottlieb, “The Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement in the United States: An Ideological and Sociological Appreciation,” Jewish Social Studies 35, nos. 3/4 (July–October 1973): 226. 55Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 49–50; B. Dubovsky to E.W. Russell, 27 April 1938, and E.W. Russell to NSANL, 28 April 1938, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 2, AJA; Dubovsky to Untermyer, 13 May 1939, and Untermyer to Dubovsky, 11 May 1939, MS-251, Box 1, Folder 3, AJA. 56A recent, and valuable, summary of the overall historiography is Steven Bayme, “American Jewish Leadership Confronts the Holocaust: Revisiting Naomi Cohen’s Thesis and the American Jewish Committee,” American Jewish Archives Journal 61, no. 2 (2009): 163–186. 57Gulie Ne’eman Arad, America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 109–111, 122–123. 58Rafael Medoff, “‘Our Leaders Cannot Be Moved’: A Zionist Emissary’s Reports on American Jewish Responses to the Holocaust in the Summer of 1943,” American Jewish History 88, no. 1 (March 2000): 115–126. A concise article that makes several references to the fading power of Jewish elites is Henry Feingold, “Crisis and Response: American Jewish Leadership during the Roosevelt Years,” Modern Judaism 8, no. 2 (May 1988): 101–118. 59Hawkins, “‘Hitler’s Bitterest Foe,’” 50; Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 344–349. 60“Felix Warburg,” New York Times (21 October 1937): 22; “$2,374,062 Raised for Jewish Fund,” New York Times (26 October 1936): 18; “$2,654,500 Is Spent on European Jews,” New York Times (5 December 1935): 10; “F.M. Warburg Left Estate to Family,” New York Times (29 October 1937): 17. 61Chernow, 512, 602; Max Warburg to Wilbur Thomas, 14 September 1944, Box 41, Folder 11, NCSA. 62James Warburg, Foreign Policy Begins at Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944), 280–283; James Warburg, Germany: Bridge or Battleground? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 4; Chernow, 525, 537–538, 576–577, 581–582. |
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Wikipedia Samuel Untermyer (whitewash) |
Samuel Untermyer (March 6, 1858 – March 16, 1940, although some sources cite March 2, 1858,[1] and even others, June 6, 1858[2] also known as Samuel Untermeyer[3]) was an American lawyer and civic leader as well as a millionaire. He was born in Lynchburg, Virginia but after the death of his father the rest of the family moved to New York, where he studied law. After admission to the bar, he soon gained fame as a lawyer, focusing on corporate law, and became a staunch advocate of stock market regulations, government ownership of railroads, and various legal reforms. He was also as a civic leader, frequently attending the Democratic National Convention as a delegate. An active Zionist Untermyer was an able advocated for the Zionist liberation movement and was President of the Keren Hayesod, the agency through which the movement was conducted in America. Untermyer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia on March 6, 1858 to Isadore Untermyer and Therese Laudauer, both of whom were German Jews who emigrated to the United States from their native Bavaria. His father, who had been a lieutenant in the Confederate Army, died in 1866, soon after the close of the Civil War. The family then moved to New York. On August 9, 1880 he married Minnie Carl, daughter of Mairelius Carl of New York City. They had three children, Alvin, who served in the 305th Field Artillery in France during the Great War; Irwin, a justice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, and Irene, a philanthropist who married Louis Putnam Myers and, after his death, became the wife of Stanley Richter. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Untermyer, his wife, and two servants were vacationing in Carlsbad, Germany, and returned to the United States aboard the Baltic via London in late August.[5] The gravesite of Samuel Untermeyer in Woodlawn Cemetery Untermeyer died March 16, 1940, in Palm Springs, California. His body was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.[6] His obituary was published in the New York Times (March 17, 1940, pg 1). Untermyer Park[edit] Part of Untermyer Park, the former estate of Samuel Untermyer Untermyer developed elaborate gardens at his 150-acre riverside estate Greystone, in Yonkers, New York, on land adjacent to the Hudson River. Greystone had previously been owned by defeated Presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, and was purchased by Untermyer when Tilden died in 1899. When Untermyer himself died in 1940, his plan had been to donate the whole estate to the Nation, or the State of New York, or at least to the City of Yonkers. Eventually the city of Yonkers agreed to accept part of the estate gardens; this parcel of land was renamed Untermyer Park in his honor.[7] It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.[8] Legal practice[edit] Interior of Samuel Untermyer's tomb at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx NY He was educated at the College of the City of New York and received his LL.B. from Columbia Law School in 1878.[1] He was admitted to the bar, and started practice with his half-brother Randolph Guggenheimer in New York city. A younger brother Maurice Untermyer was later admitted, and then in 1895 Louis Marshall joined and the name was changed to Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall, a name it held for 45 years. Between the start of his practice and the end of 1921 he was counsel in many celebrated cases covering almost every phase of corporate, civil, criminal and international law, specifically:[1][9] "I Like a Little Competition" – J.P. Morgan by Art Young. Cartoon relating to one of J.P. Morgan's replies to Untermyer at the Pujo Committee.[10] As counsel for H. Clay Pierce he prevented the Standard Oil Co., after its dissolution in 1910, from dominating the Waters-Pierce Co. In the same year he effected the merger of the Utah Copper Co. with the Boston Consolidated and the Nevada Consolidated Co.'s involving more than $100,000,000. In 1912, as counsel to the Kaliwerke Aschersleben and the Disconte Gesellschaft in the controversy arising out of the control of the potash industry by the German Government, he assisted in reaching a settlement. In 1903 he undertook the first judicial exposure of " high finance " in connection with the failure of the U.S. Shipbuilding Co., organized only a year before as a consolidation of the larger shipbuilding companies in America including that subsequently known as the Bethlehem Steel Co. As a result of the sensational exposures connected with that company, a reorganization was effected under the name of the Bethlehem Steel Co., in which Untermyer became a large shareholder. After this he conducted a number of similar exposures. In 1911 he delivered an address entitled, "Is There a Money Trust?" which led the following year to an investigation by the Committee on Banking and Currency of the U.S. House of Representatives headed by Arsène Pujo. Untermeyer was counsel to the Committee and famously cross-examined J.P. Morgan and other New York bankers. This so-called Pujo Money Trust Investigation resulted in the passage of remedial legislation, including the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. Untermyer for years agitated before Congress and state legislatures such measures as the compulsory regulation of stock exchanges. He for many years conducted agitations and wrote magazine articles dealing with reforms in the criminal laws, the regulation of trusts and combinations and other economic subjects. He was counsel for many reorganization committees, including those of the Seaboard Air Line, the Rock Island railway, the Central Fuel Oil Co., and the Southern Iron and Steel Co. In 1915 he acted as a counsel for the U.S. Government in the suit brought against the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency by the Riggs National Bank of Washington, D.C., which charged there was a conspiracy to wreck it; the defendants were cleared. He took an active part in preparing the Federal Reserve Bank law, the Clayton bill, the Federal Trade Commission bill, and other legislation curbing trusts. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1904, 1908, 1912, and delegate-at-large for the state of New York in 1916. He was a strong supporter of President Wilson's administration. After America entered the Great War he was adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department regarding the interpretation of the income tax and the excess profits tax laws. He was appointed by President Wilson to serve on the U.S. section of the International High Commission, which sat at Buenos Aires in 1916, for the purpose of framing uniform laws for the PanAmerican countries. Detail of Samuel Untermyer's tomb at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx NY In 1920 - He was counsel for the Lockwood Committee, appointed by the state Legislature to investigate an alleged conspiracy among the building trades of New York City. It was charged that labor leaders were using their power by extorting bribes for the prevention of strikes, by preventing independent bids and by forcing building awards to favorites. Many illegal acts were disclosed and numerous convictions secured. Robert P. Brindell, who was at the head of the labor council of the building trades with a membership of 115,000 was prosecuted by Untermyer, who conducted the case in person as a special attorney-general, and convicted of extortion and sentenced to five-to-ten years in state prison. At the end of 1921, when the prosecutions were being continued, more than 600 indictments had been found as a result of the investigation and many more were said to be pending. There were more than 200 convictions including pleas of guilty by employers, labor leaders and others and over $500,000 had been collected in fines. In connection with the exposure of abuses and acts of illegality among the labour unions, all unions in the state were required, under the threat of criminal prosecution and of submitting to incorporation, to amend their constitutions and bylaws by eliminating these abuses; this they all agreed to do. It was shown that in many of the building trades both manufacturers and dealers, often with the collusive aid of labour leaders, had organized to fix prices and prevent competition. Subsequent prosecutions established the fact that these and other unfair practices were an important element in preventing building operations and increasing rental charges for dwelling property. Public opinion, especially in view of the housing shortage, reacted sharply to these revelations, and it was felt that Untermeyer's work in this connection had been performed with admirable public spirit, energy and courage. It was generally believed, moreover, that the evils brought to light by the committee were not confined to New York, and a demand for similar investigations arose in other parts of the country. As special counsel until 1933 in the famous New York City transit suits, he helped maintain the five-cent subway fare. Untermeyer was a staunch advocate of stock market regulations, government ownership of railroads, and various legal reforms. |
Origins of the Holocaust ... Excerpts from Hedesheimer |
Origin of Holocaust Propaganda
Excerpts from Historical Revisionism, written by Don Heddesheimer The ‘holocaust” propaganda regarding the “extermination” of “6 million” had an early start prior to the First World War and developed to a fever pitch following the Second World War. Today we are exhorted to not question these themes and warned that we are somehow “anit-semitic” if we do. Examination and discussion of these keywords are considered “hate speech” and against the law in many nations where Jews have pressed for such laws. Recognizing that we are being told to not look there, we know exactly where to look to see what is behind the propaganda curtain of illusion. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise was the major leadership figure of the American Jewish Congress during its formative period. Born in Hungary, the son of a Rabbi and a porcelain heiress and the grandson of Joseph Hirsch Weisz, a Grand Rabbi of Hungary, he was brought to New York by his parents as a small child in 1875, when his father became rabbi of a Brooklyn, New York, congregation. The younger Wise was instructed in Talmudic law by his father and the Rev. Dr. Gustav Gotheil. He attended the College of the City of New York, and was reported to have completed his studies abroad. After returning to the United States, at the age of 20, he was elected rabbi of the Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in New York where he remained for over five years. Shortly after June of 1900, he went to Portland, Oregon, to head up a congregation and then returned to New York, founding the Free Synagogue in 1906. Early on, Dr. Wise was known for his progressive ideas on general topics and also as an exponent of Zionism, a movement then contemplating the reestablishment of the Jewish nation. As early as 1900, Wise is recorded telling a Zionist gathering that "there are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism" as reported in a New York Times article. ("Rabbi Wise's Address", New York Times, June 11, 1900, p. 7) The position of our co-religionists in Russia grows increasingly deplorable, and recent advices from that country indicate that there is little likelihood of any relief being afforded. The situation is of the gravest. It may be doubted whether Jewry has ever confronted a greater crisis since the overthrow of the Jewish state by the Roman Empire. Not even the horrible persecutions of the times of the Crusades or the expulsion from Spain and Portugal affected so large a mass of our co-religionists. Russia has since 1890 adopted a deliberate plan to expel or exterminate six millions of its people for no other reason than that they refuse to become members of the Greek Church, but prefer to remain Jews. REPORT OF AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE American Jewish Year Book 5672 (Sept. 1911 to Sept. 1912) p. 308 "As soon as the World War [One] started and it was obvious that a large part of the War would be fought in the zone in which six or seven million Jews lived, particularly Poland, Russia and Galicia, many worthy people started organizations to collect funds for the sufferers in the War zones." -- Felix M. Warburg, A Biographical Sketch, New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1938, p. 14. The story of the holocaust of up to six million European Jews didn't originate with World War Two. In fact, a very similar scenario was played out in somewhat less flamboyant terms during World War One and its aftermath. After World War One it was reported as news that five million, over five million, even six million Jews in Europe were sick or dying in a holocaust from starvation, horrible epidemics, and a malignant persecution. The following focuses especially on the World War One fund raising drives. These selected campaigns by major Jewish advocacy groups may offer historical significance both on their own and in terms of the post World War Two Holocaust industry. "Holocaust" is a World War I word. Holocaust was used during and after World War One to describe what was going on in Europe and what allegedly happened to the Jews of Europe during and after that war. While the stories that are today referred to as "the Holocaust" weren't called a holocaust during or even for decades after World War Two, the word holocaust was used while World War One was happening and thereafter. It was called a holocaust, it was called the greatest tragedy the world has ever known and it was called the greatest need the world has ever known. Until 1917, the leader of the Jewish community in New York, Jacob Schiff, repeatedly called for an end to "this holocaust".(1)In 1919, the American Hebrew magazine used the word holocaust in describing the plight of European Jewry in an article written under the byline of a former Governor of New York State.(2) Yehuda Bauer wrote in My Brother's Keeper, an authorized history of the Joint Distribution Committee of Jewish War Sufferers, that (3) "the destruction of European Jewry during World War Two has obliterated the memory of the first holocaust of the 20th century in the wake of the First World War." A "holocaust of humanity" is the way World War One was described in The Great Betrayal, a book co-authored by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and published in 1930. The premise ofThe Great Betrayal was that the British had reneged on promises they made concerning Palestine to the Jewish leadership during World War One. (4) The Price of Liberty is an authorized history of the American Jewish Committee that was published in 1948, after World War Two was over. It contains a chapter about World War One entitled "The Holocaust of War". This chapter mentions some of these World War One and postwar fund raising efforts and includes the following quote: (5) "As the armies rolled back and forth in desperate conflict over the borders of Poland, Galicia, and East Prussia, terror, desolation and death descended on the civilian population in general, but most of all upon the seven million Jews. The Christian Poles, Ruthenians and Germans suffered the inevitable hardships that attend all warfare; but the Jews, already proscribed by the Russians and Poles, met with a concentrated orgy of hatred, blood lust and vindictive opportunity that threatened to wipe them out in one vast holocaust." In 1915, at a rally in New York, Louis Marshall, on behalf of the American Jewish Relief Committee, along with Jacob Schiff and Congressman Meyer London, denounced the apathy toward the suffering of co-religionists declaring that millions were in dire distress and pleading with the rich to give. Marshall said there were about 13 million Jews in the world, and that over 6 million of them are in eastern Europe where the war is being fought. Marshall also read a letter from Schiff that "private reports" had been received showing conditions in Russia, Palestine, Poland, and Galicia, "the frightful nature of which could not be pictured." Mr. London said this was the worst period in Jewish history and that millions of Jewish peoples depended on the generosity of more fortunate Jews of the United States. (6) Another 1916 project was a book entitled The Jews in the Eastern War Zone. Published by the American Jewish Committee, 25,000 copies of this book were sent to the leaders of American thought and the molders of public opinion including President Wilson, members of the Presidential Cabinet and Congress, the press and the magazines, influential men and women everywhere.(7) The book said that Russia has virtually converted an area into a penal settlement, where six million human beings guilty only of adherence to the Jewish faith are compelled to live out their lives in squalor and misery, in constant terror of massacre, subject to the caprice of police officials and a corrupt administration - in short, without legal rights or social status: (8) The Pale of Settlement At the beginning of the war the number of Jews in the Russian Empire was estimated at six million or more, comprising fully half of the total Jewish population of the world. Ninety-five percent of these six million people were confined by law to a limited area of Russia, known as the Pale of Settlement, consisting of the fifteen Governments of Western and Southwestern Russia, and the ten Governments of Poland, much of which territory is now under German occupation. In reality, however, residence within the Pale was further restricted to such an extent that territorially the Jews were permitted to live in only one two-thousandth part of the Russian Empire. No Jew was permitted to step outside this Pale unless he belonged to one of a few privileged classes. Some half-privileged Jews might, with effort, obtain special passports for a limited period of residence beyond the Pale; but the great majority could not even secure this privilege for any period whatsoever. A tremendous mass of special restrictive legislation converted the Pale into a kind of prison with six million inmates, guarded by an army of corrupt and brutal jailers. The Jews in the Eastern War Zone is an important book from this period because the language in the book is reused extensively by other sources, such as the New York Times. It is important today because it shows what the American Jewish establishment was telling people before the United States entered World War One, as a reading of the introduction and the introduction to the section on Russia shows. This book's concept included the theme that the Jews in eastern Europe were experiencing a unique suffering, that this suffering was to an extent suffered by no others, that they were denied elementary rights denied to no other people, and were the victims of government sponsored persecutions. It even contains the buzz words "six million" and "extermination." After America entered the war, "actual war films" (sic) were produced in Hollywood and released, and the Committee on Public Information employed an immense army of speakers and pamphleteers. Lies were successfully circulated including poisoned sugar-candy dropped by German airplanes for children to eat and German soldiers giving poisoned candy and hand grenades to children. A particularly gruesome lie about German soldiers crucifying a young girl was the basis of a war propaganda drama, "Duty to Civilization", which had the blessing of President Wilson. (9) It was during this period that the Provisional Zionist Committee whose chairman was Stephen S. Wise in a news story entitled "Germans let Jews Die, Women and Children in Warsaw Starving to Death" vouched that "Jewish mothers, mothers of mercy, feel happy to see their nursing babies die, at least they are through with their suffering." (10) This report ignores the facts that aid had been sent to Warsaw through Hamburg while America was still neutral and that just a month before, in May of 1917, 'Joint' officials made arrangements through both the U.S. Secretary of State and German officials to send relief funds to the German occupied areas of Poland and Lithuania by way of a committee of Dutch Jews as noted previously in this chapter. The Netherlands managed to remain neutral throughout that war and provided asylum for Kaiser Wilhelm the Second from the time of his abdication until his death in 1941. Also in 1918, the American Jewish Congress was founded with the original goals of "providing humanitarian relief for European Jews who had suffered from the carnage of the war and restoring the State Of Israel to Palestine". (11) The American Jewish Congress saw itself as the voice of the eastern European Jews rather than the American Jewish Committee, whose members were mostly German Jews. In November of 1918, Wise was named chairman of a delegation to go to London, England, on behalf of the Zionist Organization of America. (12) In January of 1919, after conferring with Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, Wise was in Paris, France, where he conferred with Colonel House and received the Legion of Honor decoration in appreciation of his eminent services to the French cause. When asked if there was any likelihood of boundary difficulties in the Near East, Dr. Wise said: "Not if France and Great Britain act as they may be expected to act in the spirit of friends and allies - and have regard not for obsolete conventions and questionable facts, but for that spirit throughout the permanent conference." After returning to the United States, Dr. Wise met with President Wilson in 1919 who approved of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine under British rule. Wise was quoted on page one of the New York Times on March 3, 1919, saying: (13) "The rebuilding of Zion will be the reparation of all Christendom for the wrongs done to the Jews." The occasion was a meeting of Zionist leaders headed by Wise and President Wilson at the White House, where guarantees for human rights to Jews throughout the world including eastern Europe and Palestine were discussed. Afterwards, Wise and other leaders spoke to a large Washington, D.C., audience about his recent experiences in Paris and its bearing on the Paris Peace conference. He predicted that Britain, through the League of Nations, would accept a mandate over Palestine and that the Jews would return to their rightful place in the world. These articles show that by 1919 the Jewish lobby was international, focused, and powerful. They were in friendly contact with the heads of the victorious allied governments and a strong voice at the Paris Peace Conference. Wise was a major player as the head of the Zionist Organization of America and later the driving force behind the American Jewish Congress. Wise was meeting with world leaders, passing on their agendas, and representing the Jewish leadership on the issue of Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, Chairman of the British Zionist Committee who had been that organization's central Paris Peace Conference figure, indicated that the allies and especially the British were sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Displaying confidence and assurance that the mandate of Palestine through the League of Nations would naturally evolve into a Jewish commonwealth, Weizmann said: "The League of Nation has made it possible to give expression to the centuries old desire of the Jewish race." An early American Jewish Congress news story and fund drive article from May 20, 1920, included this message: "The fund for Jewish war sufferers in Central and Eastern Europe where six millions face horrifying conditions of famine, disease and death." In the second paragraph Dr. Wise says: "If American Jews now fail to help those who suffer through no fault of their own, the blame will rest on their own heads should they miserably perish. Surely no self respecting American Jew will wish, or even will suffer, the extinction of large numbers of Jewish people to come to pass." The article lists many large contributors, including a ten thousand dollar contribution from Adolf Ochs, who was then the owner of the New York Times. (14) We are concentrating on Stephen S. Wise because of his role in breaking the World War Two extermination stories to the American mainstream media through the New York Times. A New York Times article of November 25, 1942, written under the byline of James MacDonald, has been mounted and displayed in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It is titled: "Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews. [...] Officials of Poland Publish Data - Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department." The first part of the article was based on a report issued on November 24 by the Polish government in exile in London, England, although details of the report had allegedly been previously printed in unnamed Palestine newspapers. It stated that in June of 1942 Himmler had visited Warsaw and ordered that half the Jews in Poland be killed by the end of the year and that this was being done throughout Poland and especially at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. There is no mention of Auschwitz because according to Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p. 89, Auschwitz entered the Allied war propaganda with the publication of a booklet by the War Refugee Board in November, 1944. Therefore, it makes sense that Auschwitz isn't mentioned in this 1942 story. Stephen S. Wise, who was still the president of the American Jewish Congress as well as chairman of the World Jewish Congress, is the source of the second half of the article "Wise Gets Confirmations-Checks with State Department on Nazis' Extermination Campaign." Wise said that he had learned through unnamed sources confirmed by the State Department "that about half the estimated 4,000,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been slain in an extermination campaign" and that "the plan was drafted by Herman Backe, Secretary of State for Economics, and was put into effect by Hitler by late summer." Wise presented a detailed memorandum on atrocities committed in areas occupied by German, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Slovak troops and summarized the statistical effect of the campaign on the Jews living in each country. One example: "The total number of Jews in Poland, after the deduction of some 500,000 refugees in Russia, should have approximated 2,800,000." I don't want to say that Wise's numbers in the article were wrong because one would think that, if anyone knew the Jewish population in German occupied Europe in 1942, it would be the chairman of the World Jewish Congress. If anything, he would inflate the numbers, which may have been the case here. For example, however many Jews purportedly were in Poland, since there was no modern Poland before 1918, they were previously also counted as citizens of other countries, chiefly Russia. In 1939, when Stalin invaded eastern Poland, it was on the pretext of protecting the minorities within what had for two decades been Poland. The Soviet Union considered the Jews under their control to be Soviet citizens as they had been Russian citizens before 1918. Also many so called Polish Jews moved to Hungary, a country that Wise left out of his statistical analysis. This historic article contains several inconsistencies and is historically significant for its timeliness, not for its accuracy. There are many other articles. One such example is an article on page one of the New York Times of July 22, 1942, printing the text of messages from President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to Dr. Wise containing vague statements of atrocities. There are other such examples. The points are that Wise was a major force behind breaking the World War Two holocaust story to the mainstream press through the New York Times, that he then had a history of an active ongoing relationship with the Times that went back over forty years, and that he also had a long history of making extermination claims all the way back to World War One. This makes Wise's activities during the First World War era holocaust fund raising drives all the more significant. You can't help but wonder how much of what he said he actually believed but it's possible he believed everything he said. In summary, at the beginning of World War One the leadership of the American Jewish Committee established The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for Jewish War Sufferers, ostensibly to help Jews living in Palestine. It channelled aid to Jews living in eastern Europe through Jewish welfare agencies in Germany until America entered the war, after which, with the permission of the German and American governments, aid continued to be sent through the neutral Netherlands. The suffering of Jewish civilians living in eastern Europe was described literally as a holocaust, a unique suffering, and regular fund raising campaigns to aid these people were conducted throughout the war. January 27, 1916, was set aside as Jewish Sufferers relief day by President Wilson, and also in 1916, an influential book was published by the American Jewish Committee entitled The Jews in the Eastern War Zones, that reported Jews were being denied rights denied to no other people, and used the words six million and extermination in describing their persecutions under the Czar. Anti-German hate propaganda, directed against both Jews and non-Jews in the United States reached a fever pitch. The Balfour Declaration was declared a month before the British army entered Jerusalem. The American Jewish Congress was launched and both the American Jewish Committee and The American Jewish Congress sent delegates to the Paris Peace Conference that placed Palestine under a British mandate. 1. Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, A Study in American Jewish Leadership Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1999. 2. Martin H. Glynn, "The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!," The American Hebrew, Oct. 31, 1919, pp. 582f. 3. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper. A History of the American Joint Distribution Committee 1929-1939, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974. 4. Jacob de Haas, Stephen S. Wise, The Great Betrayal, New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1930, p. 287. 5. Nathan Schachner, The Price of Liberty. A History of The American Jewish Committee, New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1948, p. 60, 287. 6. "Jews Indifference to War Aid Rebuked", New York Times, Jan. 14, 1915, p. 3. 7. Nathan Schachner, op. cit., (note 58), p. 63. 8. The American Jewish Committee, The Jews in the Eastern War Zones, New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1916, p. 19f. 9. Arthur Ponsonby, M.P., Falsehood In Wartime-Propaganda: Lies of the First World War, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1929. 10. "Germans Let Jews Die. Women and Children in Warsaw Starving to Death" New York Times, August 10, 1917 11. Gregg Ivers, To Build A Wall. The American Jews and the Separation of Church and State, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, p. 36. 12. "Send Zionist Mission", New York Times, Nov. 29, 1918. 13. "President Gives Hope to Zionists", New York Times, March 3, 1919, p. 1. For the complete article, see Appendix, p. 101. 14. "Jewish War aid Gets $100,000 Gift", New York Times May 7, 1920, p. 11. Excerpts from Historical Revisionism, written by Don Heddesheimer |
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