På lördag den 28 november ska Svenska Deckarakademin utse årets bästa svenska respektive till svenska översatta kriminalroman. Fem titlar har som vanligt nominerats i vardera kategori. Årets svenska deckare skrevs av tre kvinnor och tre män (vilket alltså betyder att en av böckerna har två författare).

Ingrid Hedström återkom med sin andra deckare, ”Flickorna i Villette” (Alfabeta), om undersökningsdomaren Martine Poirot (efter Hercule) i den fiktiva staden Villette-sur-Meuse i Belgien. Fortfarande lovande – men är efterföljaren bättre än deckardebuten? Har Hedström infriat förväntningarna? Också hennes nya deckare är läsvärd men, tycker jag, faktiskt något svagare än debuten.

Tove Klackenberg har skrivit ännu en deckare i domstolsmiljö. ”Dömd på förhand” (Alfabeta) utspelar sig på tingsrätten i Marviken. Dit kommer juristen Monika Larsson för att tjänstgöra som notarie. Tingsrätten beskrivs som ett spökhus, vilket galet – synonymt med mänskligt – ställe. Som vanligt både underhållande och oroande – men är Klackenbergs nya deckare bättre än de tre föregående, har hon överträffat sig själv den här gången? Svar: Nja.

Håkan Nesser kan berätta en historia. ”Maskarna på Carmine Street” (Albert Bonniers) är ännu ett exempel på det – ja, nog en av hans allra bästa (kriminal)historier. Ett par flyttar från Europa till New York, bosätter sig på Carmine Street, för att komma ifrån, någon gång kunna låta bli att tänka på att deras 4-åriga dotter försvann – spårlöst – för ett och halvt år sen. Det handlar om saknad och sorg, hur relationen mellan två människor förändras så att man inte vet om händelser hänt eller man bara fått för sig.

Anders Roslund och Börje Hellström fortsätter att klä av det svenska samhället. I ”Tre sekunder” (Piratförlaget) skildras hur polisen – med politikers godkännande – använder olagliga metoder, till och med mord är tillåtet, för att bekämpa internationell brottslighet. Både välskrivet och en väl uppbyggd historia. Roslund och Hellström har dessutom förmågan att få mig att tro att historien är dokumentär, nästan sann. Ändå drabbas jag inte riktigt lika hårt som när de skrev om hemlösa, uteliggande barn.

Veronica von Schenk tar ett stort kliv framåt med sin andra deckare om Althea Molin, svensk-koreansk gärningsmannaprofilerare i Stockholm. Men innebär det också att ”Kretsen” (Ordfront) är en av 2009 års bästa svenska deckare? Nej, det har jag svårt att tycka, trots att von Schenk skrivit en lite annorlunda och ovanligt modern kriminalhistoria med både datorer och seriemördare.

Vem (eller vilka) av de ovannämnda ska få ta emot Deckarakademins svenska pris? Mitt tips: Håkan Nesser (fast gardera med Roslund och Hellström).

Inte varje år men när det finns någon extra lovande deckardebutant så brukar Deckarakademin dessutom dela ut ett debutantpris. I år har det mer eller mindre utlovats att också en debutant ska prisas. Vilken?

Följande tre bör vara aktuella: Tove Alsterdal med den internationella deckaren ”Kvinnorna på stranden” (Lind & Co), som utspelar sig i bland annat USA, Frankrike och Spanien och har människosmuggling som politiskt tema, Marianne Cederwall med icke-deckaren ”Svinhugg” (Natur & Kultur), där läkaren Mirjam kommer hem till Gotland och börjar ”mörda” med affirmation (genom att önska livet ur människor), och Olle Lönnaeus med den stämningsrika, skånska landsortsdeckaren ”Det som ska sonas” (Damm).

Också Kristina Ohlssons polisroman ”Askungar” (Pirat) eller systrarna Camilla Grebes och Åsa Träffs dubbelpsykologiska deckare ”Någon sorts frid” (W&W) skulle kunna vara tänkbar. Slutsats: många bra svenska debutdeckare i år! Mitt tips – eller snarare en förhoppning – är att debutantpriset går till Olle Lönnaeus. Så över till årets utländska, till svenska översatta deckare…

Italienaren Gianrico Carofiglio, åklagare och författare, har skrivit en domstolsdeckare, ”På sannolika skäl” (Schibsted), som också blir en samhälls- och mansroman. En advokat i staden Bari försvarar en invandrad gatuförsäljare som åtalats för mord på en pojke, 9 år. Rasism (och en aning av maffian) men främst ett nära porträtt av en italiensk man.                                                                                                                      

Argentinaren Guillermo Martínez har nominerats för ”Lucianas långsamma död” (Albert Bonniers), en litterär och mer intellektuell spänningsroman. De tre huvudpersonerna finns i Buenos Aires: två författarkolleger – eller konkurrenter – och en ung kvinna, medhjälpare till både den ene och den andre författaren. En berättelse om sanning. Finns sanningen, i singular? Och var går gränsen mellan fiktion och verklighet? Vems sanning är sann och vilken verklighet är verklig?

I ”Jägarens hjärta” (Weyler) fortsätter Deon Meyer att skildra Sydafrika så atmosfärrikt att man förflyttas till ett land som man trodde att man visste någonting om, för man har ju följt med i nyhetsrapporteringen, men det gjorde man inte. Sydafrika före och, som här, efter apartheid är ett okänt land. Tobela ”Tiny” Mpayipheli, huvudperson i den nya boken, har varit elitsoldat i ANC men behandlas som en kriminell av den sydafrikanska säkerhetstjänsten.

Denise Minas nya skotska deckare, ”I midnattens stillhet” (Minotaur), är en fristående roman. Fast miljön känns igen från hennes tidigare deckarserier: den slitna, hårda arbetarstaden Glasgow. En söndageftermiddag bromsar en skåpbil in vid ett hus i ett villaområde. Tre män tränger sig in hos en invandrarfamilj och kidnappar en familjemedlem. Lösen: 1 miljon pund. Kan den här familjen ha så mycket pengar? Här presenteras också en ny hjältinna från arbetarklassen, polisen Alex Morrow, som inte tar skit.

Engelsmannen Andrew Taylors senaste roman, ”Det blödande hjärtat” (Forum), är en deckare (jo, det får man säga, för här finns en kriminalgåta, ett eventuellt mord) men också en historisk roman (tiden är London 1934), en kvinnoroman och kanske en politisk roman. En kvinna flyr från en brutal make, som beundrar fascisten Oswald Mosley, och en tillvaro i överflöd. Hon flyttar in hos sin far på ett billigt pensionat och får stå ut med stanken av kokt vitkål.

En brokig samling deckare, läsvärda alla fem men vilken är bäst? Kvalitetsmässigt kan ingen placeras före de andra. De är så olika, hör till varsin gren på deckarträdet. Det blir en fråga om tycke och smak. Deckarakademins ledamöter brukar uppskatta kriminalromaner med en ordentlig berättelse, som går över gränsen till den skönlitterära romanen och gärna i historisk tid – så mitt tips är att priset går till Andrew Taylor. Min egen, personliga favorit: Deon Meyer.

(Ystads Allehanda 2009)

The deluded voters of North West England who sent BNP leader Nick Griffin to Brussels as one of their MEPs in June must be disappointed that he has chosen to express his deep commitment to the area by putting forward his candidacy for the Westminister parliamentary seat of Barking in East London just five months later. Talk about carpet-bagging. The absurd thing is that the BNP is the official opposition to Labour on Barking and Dagenham borough council. They got in there not just because they capitalised on Labour’s failure to tackle some of the real problems in the area, but also because they shamelessly borrowed Liberal Democrat tactics of presenting themselves as community politicians, knocking on doors, seemingly caring about bread-and-butter issues, while keeping some of their more scary members and supporters of the streets. Could they really not find someone local to fight this parliamentary seat for them? Instead, they are going to parachute in their Great Leader, presumably in the hope that they will get lots of media attention. Probably they will, though it may not be helpful to their cause. Along with millions of other people, I watched Nick Griffin on Question Time the other week and was surprised, not by his deviousness and inconsistency, but that he came across as such a plonker.

When Oswald Mosley tried to woo the East End for his crypto-fascists he got the rough reception he deserved, and Nick Griffin deserves the same. It is also essential that all of the other parties, including the Liberal Democrats, choose strong candidates to fight this seat, not just to show the BNP leader up in hustings but also to give the disillusioned voters of Barking someone worthwhile to support.

I spent some time at the British Library today, and popped into The Sound and the Fury exhibition (free entrance; turn right after coming through the main doors). The exhibition is a show case of the British Library’s sound archives, mostly speeches and debates. You can sit yourself at a computer screen, put on the headphones and listen away to whatever takes your fancy.

I was most moved by the retelling of the memories of a not-so-well known speaker, 101 year old Lou Kenton. Born in Stepney to Jewish parents who had fled Ukraine during the tsarist pogroms, Kenton joined the Communist Party of Great Britain after noticing the widespread antisemitism in London. In 1937, when right-wing general Franco staged a coup against the democratically elected government of Spain, Lou Kenton joined the International Brigades and headed to Spain to fight fascism.

Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists

The audio clip in the exhibition though tells us of an earlier, lifechanging moment, which perhaps turned him into a fighter against fascism. The year was 1934, and Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists held the largest fascist rally ever held in Britain at Olympia, a large exhibition hall in West Kensington. Lou Kenton and around 40 to 60 other anti-fascist activists smuggled themselves into Olympia to heckle and disrupt the meeting. Kenton describes the stirring music, black uniforms and the stomp of jackboots as Mosley and his entourage entered the hall. The anti-fascists sat separately in pairs around the hall and took it in turns to heckle as Mosley began his speech. Kenton described jackbooted stewards pulling the hecklers out as each rose in turn to shout down Mosley. Kenton turned to his comrade and asked, “Who’s first,” and his comrade decided to go first. As Kenton’s comrade heckled, the stewards moved along the row from both ends, pulled the comrade out onto the gangway and began to give him a serious beating right there in the exhibition hall. Kenton watched this and said to himself, “Right, it’s me next!” He stood to heckle, knowing the consequences.

Hearing Lou Kenton describe this brought a tear to my eye. When one is convinced that evil is upon us, one cannot sit idly by while the defenceless are carried off, one can but oppose it whatever the cost.

The blackshirted and jackbooted BUF may seem such an age away today, but its noisome stench remains. The mass of the movement’s media support was provided by the Daily Mail, which responded to the Olympia rally with the front page headline “Hurrah for the blackshirts!” The proprietor of this hate-rag, Harold Harmsworth, wrote an editorial earlier that year that said the BUF were “a well organised party of the right ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Hitler and Mussolini have displayed”. The previous year, Hitler had written to Harmsworth to thank him for his favourable coverage. Oddly, the Mail has tried its best to hide all of its pro-fascist history. If you know anyone who is stupid enough to read this hate-rag, please tell them that their ‘newspaper’ was the foremost pro-fascist British media outlet before the Second World War.

After the war, released from house arrest Mosley became a great pro-European (the Right were all for it after the War apparently; Churchill even advocated a ‘United States of Europe’), and eventually stood for Parliament in 1959 with a one issue campaign on immigration. He called for the ‘assisted repatriation’ of immigrants, and flavoured his policies with scaremongering about black criminals raping white women. Mosley’s party at the time was called the Union Movement (seeing as the word ‘fascist’ was out of favour). It was a prominent local organiser of the Union Movement, John Bean, who founded the first British National Party. The BNP turned into the National Front, which after going into decline at the end of the 70s, left the way open for its members, including Bean, to found today’s British National Party, of which Nick Griffin is now the leader. The bloodlines flowing from the BUF to the BNP are clear, they belong to the same vein of fascist hate. Griffin is on the record for saying that he wanted the BNP to “put the boots away, and put on suits”, as part of a process of decoupling itself from its past and trying to pass as a mainstream political party offering an ‘alternative’ .

What would Lou Kenton, East-End Hero, do? Stand up and say, “Right, it’s me next!”

The big man moved with great speed for someone so cumbersome. Within an instant he had placed the weight back on the nearest rack and taken two great strides across the mat towards her.

Dave Binnington's Battle of Cable Street, Cable Street, Shadwell, Tower Hamlets, E1

Within an instant he was towering over her, still ruddy and sweating. He gripped her forearm tightly and drew her close to his face. She yelped as tears welled in her eyes.

Detail from Battle of Cable Street by Ray Walker, Cable Street, Shadwell, Tower Hamlets, E1

He brought her face up to his, so she could not escape his manic stare. His face filled her view, not allowing her look away.

I’m a bit behind with this posting as there has been so much written and said since his appearance on Question Time the other night. However I’m going to add my twopence worth.

Let me say a few things at the outset here. I find Griffin a horrible, loathsome character. Having watched him the other night I also have formed the opinion that he’s not very bright. I mean how did he get a law degree from Cambridge?

As I had never paid very much attention to him until this week, I wondered if perhaps he was a latter day Oswald Mosley. Mosley a fascist who enjoyed widespread support in the UK in the 30’s (Daily Mail headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”) and was described by political foe Michael Foot thus:

“No rising star in the political firmament ever shone more brightly than Sir Oswald Mosley. Since by general assent he could have become the leader of either the Labour or the Conservative Party. What Mosley so valiantly stood for could have saved this country from the Hungry Thirties and the Second World War”

Thankfully Nick Griffin is no Oswald Mosley.

But……

I tuned in on  Thursday to see what Griffin had to say as part of a democratic forum. What I saw was a smug self satisfied man wrapped up in his own political philosophy. A philosophy that has had to change to reflect society’s shift.

However, enough about Jack Straw.

The audience seemed carefully hand picked. Griffin was howled down, interrupted and scorned by all. Fair enough you may say but unless we hear what someone has to say how can we properly argue against it?

For instance it was pointed out by David Dimbleby that Griffin had called Islam a “cruel and wicked” religion. I wondered how the panel and audience would react. Islam does after all involve a fair share of dogma, discrimination and misogyny.

However, whilst we are at liberty to berate Griffin for his crazy beliefs, doing the same to Islam is quite beyond the pale it seems. The very notion that anyone should challenge a religion or religious belief no matter how at odds it (the religion) may be with modern thinking was anathema to the Question Time collective.

Why is this?

I would contend that Richard Dawkins has it pretty well spot on in the God Delusion. He states that if apartheid South Africa had based their constitution on religion, then much of the global opposition to them would have “tiptoed away”.

If Griffin is smart therefore (of which I saw no evidence on Thursday) he’ll stop criticising Islam but positively use Christianity to help him. Beliefs can be as crazy as you like but so long as there’s a man in the sky with a white beard to back them up then………….

My summary of the programme was that Griffin looked and sounded like a political buffoon supporting one policy, aborrent to any decent person, that he really has no idea how to achieve.

However David Dimbleby, the panel and audience did a very poor job of opposing Griffin. Never have I witnessed such a cozy coiteree of middle class, platitudinal nonsense on a BBC programme.

Griffin was their Wicker Man.

Griffin on Question Time

Griffin won’t care. He was talking not to those in the studio but over their heads to the disenfranchised working class at home.

Royle families and their equivalent all over the country will have been impressed no doubt.

I lived in a working class area in London thirty years ago. An old couple who I knew as kind and friendly told me that they would be voting “National Front next time” rather than Labour. They were going to do this because they felt abandoned by mainstream politics.

Unless UK politicians start engaging with their constituents then they will find that the sons, daughters and other descendents of the couple I describe above may find the BNP an attractive alternative at the next election.

Griffin seems to be labouring (sic) the point about politicians and parties being  “the political elite”.

On that point at least he is (very far) right.

Footnote: I’ve just realised that I haven’t used the word racist or racism (doh!)

(In response to this and this.)

Self-Portrait by Richard Avedon (1923-2004)

Photographer Annie Leibovitz doesn’t talk to her subjects when photographing them. “I certainly can’t talk to people and take pictures at the same time. For one thing, I look through a viewfinder when I work.” (1)

But famed photographer Richard Avedon had a different style. Leibovitz observed that Avedon “seduced his subjects with conversation. He had a Rolleiflex that he would look down at and then up from. It was never in front of his face” but next to him while he talked. (1)

Truman Capote, author of "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" photographed by Richard Avedon in New York City, 1955.

In this way, Avedon got what he wanted from his sitter. According to writer Truman Capote, Avedon was interested in “the mere condition of a face.”

The Duchess and Duke of Windsor with one of their beloved pugs.

Some, though, felt that Avedon’s impulses had a cruel edge, showing the face in a harsh light. Here’s a case in point: In 1957, Richard Avedon scheduled a New York City appointment to photograph the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom and Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore. The Windsors were very practiced at putting on happy, regal faces for the camera and Avedon anticipated that. As a royal pair, they were endlessly photographed since they had nothing better to do with themselves since the Duke abdicated the British throne in 1936, giving up crown and kingdom, and moving to France with Wallis.

But Avedon didn’t want that kind of stock photo of the royal pair. According to another fellow photographer, Diane Arbus, Avedon knew that the Windsors were avid dog lovers and would use this knowledge to cruel advantage.

Valet in livery of the Bois de Bologne, Paris home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with pugs Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Chu, Trooper, Imp, and Davy Crockett

In 1997, Sotheby's auctioned off the contents of the Paris home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Included in their possessions were these pug pillows arranged at the foot of the Duchess' bed. Although Wallis, the Duchess, was fastidious about cleanliness, she allowed the pugs to sleep in the bed with her. "“Paper money for the Duchess was either ordered new and crisp from a bank or wash cleaned and ironed by the housemaids; coins were always washed. Each evening, just before dinner was served, two maids could be found carrying bedsheets through the halls by their corners; the bed linens, having just been ironed, were destined for the rooms of the Duke and Duchess. Wallis could not stand wrinkles in her bed….Once the bed was made, a plastic sheet was spread atop the satin eiderdown so that the pugs could climb onto the bed with Wallis; there she would feed them the hand-baked dog biscuits prepared fresh each day by her chef. Usually the pugs slept on the bed with her, although the Duke’s favorite might disappear through the boudoir to his own spot at the foot of his master’s bed.” The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson by Greg King

This is what he did: When Avedon arrived at the appointment to photograph the Windsors, he got them seated just as he wanted them then told them a lie. He explained how, on his way to meet them, his taxi had accidentally run over a dog in the street and killed it. As the Windsors flinched with sympathetic horror, Avedon clicked the shutter – and caught their expression. Here is that photo.

The Duchess and Duke of Windsor, New York, 1957. Photograph by Richard Avedon

The photograph caused an international sensation. Some said it made the Duchess look like a toad. British Royalists were outraged at the unflattering portrait. But Avedon defended lying to the couple to conceive the portrait, arguing that his photographs tended to show what people were really like.

If that was indeed true, the Windsors appeared to be two very dreadful people, a suspicion already aroused by their most ungracious familiarity with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cronies in the pre WWII years. While living in an elegant Paris home provided by the French government on a lavish income bestowed on them by the  British government, the Windsors regularly made pro-fascist remarks to the press as well as disparaging comments about their lack of loyalty to either of  their host countries, France and Britain. They palled around with British traitors like Oswald Mosley and wife Diana Mitford in the French countryside until the Duke’s brother, the reigning King George VI of the United Kingdom got wise to the danger and shipped them off to the Bahamas for the duration of the war.

Avedon once remarked that the Windsors loved dogs more than they loved Jews.

(1) Leibovitz, Annie. Annie Leibovitz at Work. New York: Random House, 2008.

Readers: For more posts on this site on Annie Leibovitz or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, scroll down the right sidebar: Categories: People.

Wallis Warfield (Simpson) marries the former King Edward VIII of Britain on June 3, 1937, in France, after he gave up the British throne to be with her. Wallis Warfield Simpson was an American divorcee. For the King to have married her and tried to install her as his Queen would have precipitated a constitutional crisis in Great Britain....The wedding day dawned bright and sunny. It was Wallis' third wedding; her dress was not white but blue. Blue was also the mood. The day before the wedding, the former king's brother, the new British king, George VI, sent Edward a letter granting him and Wallis new titles: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The titles were hollow; there was no dominion of Windsor to rule. Even worse: the King's letter contained a bomb - the former king, now titled the Duke, despite his abdication of the throne, could continue to "hold and enjoy...the title, style or attribute of Royal Highness," but his bride, the Duchess, could not, nor could any of their offspring. She, though a duchess, was denied what her sister-in-laws would enjoy - that her name would be preceded by the magic initials 'H.R.H.' At her entrance, no women had to curtsey, no men to bow. She would not be referred to as "Her Highness" but with the lower form of "Her Grace." "What a damnable wedding present!" Windsor shouted upon reading the King's letter. (Bryan III, J. and Murphy, Charles J.V., The Windsor Story. New York: Dell, 1979.)

In 1937, after King Edward VIII had given up the British throne to marry his American divorcee, Wallis Warfield Simpson, the two tiny, trim party animals were exiled to France, where they were doomed to live a life of idle nothingness. They were given the new but hollow titles of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Accustomed to a lifetime of adulation and privilege yet denied a kingdom, the Duke (and the Duchess), set about creating an imaginary realm of their own that would given them the validation they craved as royals. This new kingdom:

“…was a region whose borders were outlined in society pages, peopled mostly by glamorous nobodies lucky enough to have been born into wealth. It was an ornamental place, whose citizens, according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of ”Blithe Spirit” [a past costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum], were unsurpassed ”in the beauty, elegance and craftsmanship” of their dress. For self-indulgence, they were also hard to beat.”

The people who congregated around the Duke and Duchess were dubbed the ”Windsor set.” They were all-consumed with the photographic image.

“They arranged those lives to suit the lens. Voluntarily estranged from the real aristocracy, the Duke of Windsor, with the aid of his wife, the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, set up a parallel court composed of people like Elsie de Wolfe, the interior decorator and social arbiter; Mona Bismarck, a gorgeous adventuress who was the daughter of a stableman on a Kentucky horse farm; and Daisy Fellowes, whose fortune derived from sewing machines and who had the distinction of being one of the first people on record to alter her nose surgically.”

the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at home with their precious pug dogs. The Duchess, the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, often appeared in her stylish best in public with a pug tucked under one arm. It became a fashion trend - to carry a dog around with you when away from home.

Granted, the Windsors were despicable people, dining with Adolf Hitler in 1937 and hobnobbing with fellow Nazi sympathizers and British ex-pats Oswald Mosley and wife Diana Mitford. Nevertheless, the Duke and Duchess - and their fancy friends – obsessed with clothing,  had tremendous style.

Adolf Hitler kisses the hand of the Duchess of Windsor as her husband the Duke looks on, admiringly. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Germany in 1937 before WWII broke out across Europe. They were outspoken supporters of Nazi fascism and suspected of spying for Germany. At the beginning of the war, the Windsors were whisked out of France to safe haven in the Bahamas, where the Duke served out the war years as governor. There he could do Britain little harm - and he was less likely of being kidnapped by the Germans who were reportedly interested in installing him as a puppet king in a conquered Great Britain under German rule.

Fashion designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (French, 1883-1971) at Lido Beach in 1936

"Evening Dress," 1938. Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel. Black Silk Net with Polychrome Sequins. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Special Exhibit: "Blithe Spirit: The Windsor Set" The decoration of sequined fireworks on this evening dress, which was worn by the Countess Madeleine de Montgomery to Lady Mendl's seventy-fifth birthday party in 1939, is a fitting climax to le beau monde of the 1930s. It was the end of an era when, on Sept. 1, 1939, Parisians heard an early-morning radio announcement from Herr Hitler in German, at once translated into French, that "as of this moment, we are at war with Poland." The thirties were over; the Second World War had begun.

The Windsors were famous for their elegant Paris dinner parties, creating a demand for expensive clothes and jewels for them and their guests. Thus, the prewar years in France from 1935-1940 were rich in the decorative arts, putting trendy fashion designers front and center. It was a time when Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was “rethinking the suit” to allow for the way women really move and Elsa Schiaparelli* was designing lobster dresses with surrealist Salvador Dali.*

Then Hitler invaded Poland and World War II shattered the fantasy world of endless cocktail parties and silk and organza gowns made to order. The Germans invaded and occupied France.

Shockingly, Coco Chanel spent the war years living at the Ritz in Paris with a Nazi officer. After the war was over, Chanel was arrested by the free French for suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis. She purportedly offered this explanation for sleeping with the enemy:

 “Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.”

It is generally believed that Winston Churchill  intervened with the French government, convincing them to let his old friend Coco Chanel escape to Switzerland rather than be paraded through the streets of Paris with her head shaved like other female Nazi collaborators.

Women accused of being Nazi collaborators are humiliated after the liberation of France, 1944. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

Fast forward 19 years. It's November 22, 1963. Jackie Kennedy,* in her pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat, is riding through Dallas in a motorcade just minutes before a sniper kills her husband, President John F. Kennedy

*See “Elsa Schiaparelli: Shocking-Pink” and “Salvador Dali: Fill ‘Er Up – With Cauliflower” on this blog.

*For more on the Kennedys on this blog, please see right sidebar – Categories – People  – the Kennedys.

See “Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor,” which follows this blog post.

STALIN

Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States

In answer to your inquiry:

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin
January 12, 1931

[Pravda, No. 329, 1936.11.30; И.В. Сталин, Сочинения, Огиз, Государственное Издательство Политической Литературы, Москва, 1949; J.V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 13, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954, p. 30 ]

The American Hebrew, September 10, 1920

“The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world.”

Rabbi Stephen Wise, The American Bulletin, May 5, 1935

“Some call it Marxism I call it Judaism.”

Jewish Chronicle, London, April, 4, 1919

“There is much in the fact of Bolshevism itself, in the fact that so many Jews are Bolshevists. The ideals of Bolshevism are consonant with many of the highest ideals of Judaism.”

Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, p. 81

“In the Bolshevik era, 52 percent of the membership of the Soviet communist party was Jewish, though Jews comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population.”

If you believe that nation-states are sovereign, autonomous powers, led by people who represent the will of the populace, then you will have already fallen into the trap of taking sides in the wars, lining up to advocate for or against Britain, or Poland, or America, or Germany, or Japan, or Italy, or the USSR, or Hitler, or Churchill, or Roosevelt, or Mussolini, or Stalin, or Tojo, depending on what you believe are your politics, or depending upon how you have been informed, or depending upon what myths you have been compelled to believe in at your “secular” school.

The aggressor, the party at fault, the power that “caused the war” was no nation-state or political party or individual. The aggressor, responsible for both World Wars, was the same power that causes wars today, and is conspiring to bring about a Third World “War to End All Wars”. This power is the combined force of the British Empire, Zionist-Occupied America, the Money Power, Zionist-controlled media, Zionist-controlled France, the Zionist USSR, and the Anti-Christ, kabbalistic, Noacchide occult forces that are nurtured by the secret societies; in a word: Freemasonry.

If you’ve grown up in the matrix that is still called “The West”, then the preceding sentence will only have amused you, or angered you, or bewildered you. That is because your conditioning kicked in when you read certain trigger-words. This same conditioning makes you functionally retarded when you read or hear anything relating to the Rothschilds, “Holocaust Denial”, ZOG, the USS Liberty, Zionazism, Israeli support for Hamas, the Jewish creation of so-called “Evangelical Christianity” and “Moderate Islam”, or any Israeli connection to 911. Your mind reels, you feel ill, nauseous, you want to smash something, burn a book, maybe kill someone. You start having visions of diving Arabs in to the sea, or you smile at the thought of dissidents being raped in jail, or you take pleasure in similar Satanic desires. Or perhaps you’re not so ignorant as the rest of the herd; you know, you begin to admit that it’s true, but fear grips you, you look around, you wish everything would just go away and people could then see your the unicorns and sugar-plum fairies, and you wish you had more time for yoga, and you swallow your meds. But it’s not gong to go away. You’ll just have to get used to it or kill yourself: Rothschilds, Zionism, “Israel”, Open Borders, One World Government, New World Order, Freemasons. If you stop hearing or reading this mantra every time you try to find out what’s going on in the world, that’s when you should really start worrying.

Sir Oswald Mosley, former MP: “Britain First”

Earls Court, July 16th, 1939

Mosley was jailed without trial in 1940 as a political dissident. Even the psychopath Churchill was mellow by present-day standards. If anyone today deared to give such a speech. Obama and Harper and Grey Brown would have him chained up, then take turns kicking him in the balls before bowing down to kiss some Bronfman’s ass. (Sarkozy wouldn’t be required to so debase himself in order to prove his loyalty, for obvious reasons.)

Fellow Britons, tonight the British people are here, (Cheers) and tonight from this great audience will be heard the voice of British people telling Parliament, telling Parties, telling Government something it is time that they should hear. (Cheers.) This is a demonstration of “Britain First” (Cheers) and, therefore, is a demonstration of world peace. (Cheers.) This, the greatest gathering of the English under one roof assembled, tells Government and tells the Parties: “At last we have had enough.” (Cheers.) We are here to tell them there is something for them to do here in Britain, and when they fail to do it, as again and again they have betrayed our people, we, the British people in British Union, will do it for them. (Cheers.)

Enough we have had of alien quarrels, enough threats of foreign war, enough diversion from what matters to the British people, our own land, our own Empire and our own problems. (Cheers.) We say to the Parties who betray, we say to them here tonight: “When you speak of war we tell you this, if any country in the world attacks Britain or threatens to attack Britain, then every single member of this great audience and of British Union would fight for Britain.” (Cheers.) But just as straight this too we tell them. We say to the Parties who clamour for war, we fight for Britain, yes, but a million Britons shall never die in your Jews’ quarrel. (Loud Cheers.) And before you drag a million Englishmen to doom, we of British Union, we, the British people in sacred revolution, will sweep you by the declared will of the British people from the seats of power that you disgrace. (Cheers.)

We will deal with them, every argument they advance, every trick they try, deal with them and deal faithfully in this great audience here tonight. But before we come to that, fellow Britons, I have something of which to remind you that you may have forgotten. All of you here tonight, this vast audience here assembled, all we Members of British Union, all we people who hold the principles of this British revolution, according to the Press, my friends, you don’t exist at all. (Laughter) So every one of you to-night in this great hall is just dreaming that you are here, and when you wake up in the morning you will learn the truth in your precious National Press. You will learn you were not here to-night. You will learn that there was not such a meeting, or if there was, of course nobody at all bothered to go.

My friends, what does it mean? I want those who are not with us in British Union, I want those who come to our creed and our cause for the first time, to understand something of what we are up against; to realise, to begin with, that this great meeting here to-night is the first large indoor meeting for over three years that British Union has been permitted in London (cries of ” Shame “), because the halls of this great city are owned by rich Conservatives and the parks of this great city are owned by the Labour majority on the L.C.C., and both of them use their power corruptly to forbid speech to their opponents. Well, I take it as a tribute. I have never tried to forbid them speaking in Britain or to prevent it in any way. The more they address us, the more they address their fellow countrymen and the more they are seen by audiences of Englishmen, the more support we get for British Union. (Laughter)

There is every kind of corruption that their money power can afford, and they will go to any length to forbid us halls in which to speak. (Cheers.) And then, when they forbid us halls in which to speak, their papers are able to turn round and say: “Of course, they don’t exist. You don’t see them speaking in big halls, you don’t read about them in the newspapers, and, therefore, it’s all imagination that this revolution of the British people is taking place at all.” In fact, my friends, we are faced by a coalition of the money power in Press and in Parliament and in the ownership of the great halls of Britain, who are so mortally afraid of the British people being permitted to hear the truth that to any length they will proceed to forbid even me speaking to them.

Well, fellow Britons, if a Movement which has been born and has run for less than seven years, a Movement started with thirty two men, without newspapers, without Press, without money, and without resources, with nothing in the world except the English spirit alive and flaming in their souls, if in less than seven years we have driven the Parties together in this corrupt conspiracy to prevent us speaking to the British people, how much longer before we win and they perish? (Cheers.)

Now let me ask anyone here, who thinks that we have been unfair when we have attacked the ownership and conduct of the Press of this country, on what grounds do they behave as they have behaved? Do they tell us any longer that there is no news value in British Union, that the people of Britain have no interest in British Union? If they say that, let them glance round this great hall to-night and say whether or not the British people are interested in British Union. And yet any little Labour politician who cannot fill a schoolroom, any little B.B.C. crooner who bores you on a Sunday evening, (Laughter) any of these little creatures who have been made by the Press of this country, when they fill their little schoolroom, they get a headline in the newspapers the next morning.

We were told there was no news value in British Union. That excuse cannot hold water any longer. What other excuse then has the Press got for its treatment of British Union? There is one excuse, and one alone, a reason of which I am proud. The Press believes that in our principles and in our persons we are so reprehensible that we are unworthy to be reported. I am glad that they think that of us. But let us examine their position. When they say that a Briton, when they say that people of whom they do not approve, shall not be reported, what then becomes of the talk of the Free Press in Britain? It vanishes. There is no such thing.

When they say that censorship exists in foreign countries but does not exist in Britain, we give them the lie direct. We say by their own admission, by their treatment of British Union, they admit the censorship of money. (Cheers.) The only difference between the censorship in Britain and the censorship in the foreign countries they denounce is this: In foreign countries the people concerned have decided by an enormous majority that their Government shall be vested with power to prevent the publication of lies which destroy the life of their nation. But in Britain we have censorship given not to any Government, censorship in the hands of money and money alone, (Cheers) and censorship used by money, not to suppress anything damaging to the life of the nation, but to promote everything that is damaging to the life of the nation, to sell to the people false news, to sell to the people lies, to push the vested interests, to raise the interest of the faction and the section above those of the people and of the nation. So if we have to choose in the modern world between the right of Government elected by the people to rise above even the power of the Press Lords, if we have to choose between that and the right of money to tell Britons what they should know, what they should learn and how they should live, I say: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” every time. (Cheers.)

But when they tried these tactics upon us what did it avail them? My friends, it availed them nothing, because the great affairs of this great country are not settled in that square mile that stretches from Fleet Street to Mayfair. We did not go to them to make our appeal; we went to the back streets of Britain, we went to the homes of the people before they denied us great halls such as this in the West End of London. We went to the homes and the streets of the people whence we have drawn our strength and whence ever we draw our inspiration. In their masses and in their thousands the people came to us, and the force and the weight and the fury of the people behind us now rocks the Press Lords on their golden throne. That is why I am proud to have the enmity and the hatred of the Press.

It is right that I should be hated by the enemies of the people, because throughout my political life, in a pilgrimage of strife and struggle such as few have known, I have ever stood for the people’s cause, and in their cause I challenge the money power. (Cheers.) The Lords of the Press are right to hate us, but we reply to them: “We are glad we are not among those little politicians whom the Press has made. We, of British Union, have not been made “by the Press; we have made ourselves.” (Cheers.) Because we had within us the truth, and because we had within us a love of England, our land and her people, our fellow countrymen, our English men and women have come to us in such thousands to-day that we can say that this Movement is established, this revolution lives, and no power of Press Lords or of money, no material force this world has ever seen, shall hold us down or stay our triumph. (Cheers.) And what have they got? — what have they got except money? What else? We have got the men and women; we have got the thousands of men and women who give their lives to this struggle of British Union. What have they got on their side except the money bags and the Press Lords? Why, if you changed these things over to-morrow and we got their money and their Press, the battle would be over — it would not exist. (Laughter.)

They talk of the coming Election — a fight between several Parties of the British people. Nothing of the kind — a fight between two or three big money combines. That and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the Party machine, in an electoral battle to-day determined purely by principles and by the number of active workers at our disposal, British Union could fight and beat to-day the old Parties over the whole electoral field. (Cheers.) But you know and I know the battle is nothing of the kind — the battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. So when they speak of Democracy they do not mean government by the people or of the people; they mean financial Democracy in which money counts, and nothing but money.

Then you may say, my friends, how can the British people fight, and how can they overwhelm the money power against them? I will give you the answer. We shall get the resources with which to defeat them, not because those with money love us, but because before long they shall fear us. Then we shall breakthrough in our national revolution, break through all their money power; yet until we reach that point which now we approach, when the mass and when the might of the people is so great and so terrific that even the money power cannot withstand it, until then we know, from previous examples of revolution in the modern world, that right up until that last moment their newspapers and their money power will go on telling lies about us, will go on even telling you that audiences like this do not exist, will cover the leadership and cover the membership with every violence of filthy abuse that their lying hands can pen. Until that last moment their citadel of corruption will stand, and then suddenly the gathering force and strength of the people’s revolution will burst the bonds and will sweep them from their feet. (Cheers.)

Let us make no mistake; let us have no concealment at all. This Movement is a revolutionary Movement, a Movement which seeks no compromise, a Movement that will stand for no unity with the Parties of betrayal. We stand for union of the British people— yes, we do—the union of the British people in a new system of their own creation, but a system purged and cleansed of this corruption. Our Movement, therefore, is a Movement of revolution, a Movement which will be given its power by the declared will of the British people, not merely with their consent, but with a passion of enthusiasm behind it that the old Parties of Democracy have never known. We are a Movement of revolution in fundamental challenge to everything for which the old Parties stand. (Cheers.)

I have been told lately, reading their pretty speeches about each other in the Press, that the old Parties have a great respect for each other. Well, my friends, let us make it clear, in order to have no humbug at all, we have no respect for them whatever (cheers), and I will go further and say I very much hope they will never develop any respect for us, (Cheers) why on the day they develop any respect for me, do have me examined by a doctor quickly, if you please. (Laughter.) No, they are all together the old Parties. They have even got over the pretence of fighting each other. They are all in one camp, huddled together for purposes I shall analyse in a moment.

British Union, and British Union alone, is the challenger of all the old Parties, who today all mean the same thing. They are the Parties of the money power, the kept Parties of the money power engaged and employed by that international force to put up a sham battle in public, in order that the British people may be deceived into acquiescence. Some people may say: “What proof has he got of these allegations? These are crazy doctrines without proof at all. Good men and true are the statesmen of Britain, honestly fighting each other for the benefit of the British people.”

My friends, before I sit down to-night — in case there are any of you who think that I should give chapter and verse for what I say — I will prove to you that the policy on which the old Parties unanimously agree is a policy of Bedlam, a policy of madness, a policy of disgrace. (Cheers.) A policy which could not be pursued by the statesmen of Britain unless they were mad, or unless they were the servants of Jewish finance. (Cheers.) But before I prove this from the actual facts of their policy, which we can explain, in no other way, I want those of you who are not members of the British Union here tonight to understand how profound is the difference between us and the old Parties, how grave are the charges we bring against them, how insuperable is the gulf which divides us, how necessary in fact it is that this fight between us shall be a fight to a finish, in which we or they shall perish forever.

Of what, in brief, do we accuse them? We accuse them of making a sham battle. We accuse them of dividing the nation about issues in which they do not believe, and which, between them, do not seriously exist. We accuse them in their battle of Party and their battle of class of dividing the British people, because unless they can be divided the British people cannot be conquered, and we say that in this division of Party and of class the Parties have divided the British people, and the British people, for the first time in their history, have been conquered — not by the foe without, but by the foe within. (Cheers.)

The Parties are the servants of the money power and that money power is largely in alien hands. (Cheers.) We show you in detail in our literature how, under this system — I have shown it in fact in innumerable speeches — any Party or any Government can be broken at once by the money power, because, under this international system that every one of them supports, the infinite mobility of the money power, its capacity to move rapidly from one country to another, to break Exchanges, to create financial panic and chaos, can bring down any Government which dares for one moment to oppose it. We have shown again and again how in Britain once, and twice in France, the so-called Socialist Governments of the international Socialist persuasion have been broken by finance the moment they dared to lift a finger to gainsay the power of the financiers.

I have shown you in innumerable speeches how the power of money has reached out all over the world; how it has taken British credit, British resources and British wealth built up by generations of effort on the part of hard-working simple British folk; how it has lent or given our resources all over the world; how it has equipped our competitors against us; how the cotton mills of India, the cotton mills of Japan and the cotton mills of China have been created by British money for the destruction of Lancashire and Yorkshire. (Cheers.)

We have shown again and again in infinite detail how the money and credit of the British people, created by the exertions of the British people and by no other force on earth, has been used for their own destruction in the equipment of the Orient, with its sweated labour, to undercut and to destroy the West, in order that usury, international usury, may draw its dividends and its interest by destroying its country of origin, through the equipment of our world-wide competitors against us. We have shown again and again how the British Empire, as well as the British people, the British industrialist and the British worker, has been relentlessly sacrificed to this international power; how the whole of our international trading system, how our conflicting Party system, and our foreign policy, above all, is maintained for one reason and one reason alone; that the money power of the world may rule the British people, and through them may rule mankind. (Cheers.)

What right, some may say, has this man to bring these charges? I say to them: Study our case and tell us the answer if you can. No man or woman in England has any excuse at all for not knowing the case of British Union, not merely from the speeches of our speakers at meetings more numerous, on the streets at least, than those of any other Party, but in literature, a wealth of literature and argument, which has now been published for years. Any men or women who say they do not know our case merely betray their ignorance of political and public life. I ask you, if you have not studied that case, to study it and ask yourself what is the answer to it. If you cannot yourselves answer it, if you cannot persuade the political leaders in other Parties to provide the answer, you are driven to this conclusion, that we are denied the opportunity to begin the task of building up the British Empire to be the greatest civilisation mankind has ever seen by one interest, by one force, and one power alone, the power of money which rules the political Parties for the reasons that to-night I have given. If we can, without reply, prove our case that such a system in the British Empire today is possible, am I not entitled to say, if the Parties can make no reply to us, that their motives are such as those which I have described to-night? Why do the Parties make no reply? They have debated with me quite often in the old days in Parliament when’ I was with them. I have been attacked in public by six Cabinet Ministers in the course of one weekend in recent years. I have challenged any one of them to enter the public platform with me before an audience of my fellow countrymen. (Cheers.)

Tory and Labour leaders alike I have challenged, amateur wind-bags and professional wind-bags, (Laughter) both of them, to debate the issue before our fellow countrymen. They remain strangely coy; so tonight I make this offer, that if any outstanding figure in the old political Parties, a man capable of drawing even a quarter of the audience here tonight assembled, if he will come to this hall and debate with me we will take this hall and meet him face to face. (Cheers.) While these men fear to meet Our argument in fair debate before the great tribunal of our fellow countrymen, while they condemn our nation, masses and millions of our people to live in unnecessary poverty, while they seek foreign war and quarrel and expend money on things which are no concern of Britain, while they sacrifice every interest of the British people to the service of their financial masters, while they do that and dare not meet us, then I shall continue to denounce them as I do to-night (Cheers), for as long as these men forsake and abandon the interest of the British people, pursue foreign quarrels and controversy which suit their financial masters, and no other force upon earth, while they do that I am entitled to denounce them, and here tonight I do — as the flunkeys of finance and the jackals of Judah! (Cheers.)

Now I state straight away the issues between us in order that none of you may labour under any misapprehension as to where we stand in relation to the Parties on their unity racket. But in case any of you think I have been unfair in the charges I made against them, I propose tonight to do two things: very briefly to describe to you in home and foreign affairs what we of British Union want, and then also briefly to analyse what all the old Parties do, and the reason why they do these strange things.

Very briefly, these are the principles of British Union at home and abroad, the principles which at home we are certain will bring peace, prosperity and happiness to our people, principles which abroad will bring not only peace but lasting, abiding peace, and happiness to all mankind. (Cheers.)

Our principles are summarised in the words, “Britain First” because we believe that we can solve every single problem of the British people in Britain or in the Empire. We remind the British people of something that nowadays we are asked to forget: that we possess an Empire which contains one-quarter of the globe, one-fifth of its inhabitants, which contains within it every single raw material, every material resource that mankind can possibly desire; that the output of our machinery can be enormously increased, and even multiplied. None can deny that we have got workers of skill, that we have got technicians second to none in the world, and we could have machinery second to none. No one can deny that we have got the raw materials. Not a single technician in industry either can deny that granted a market for which to produce, within Britain and the Empire alone, without any reliance on outside supplies, within the Empire alone, we can enormously increase our present production and wealth. Provided we have got a market for which to produce, there is no technician who can deny the possible increase of productive capacity. But everybody knows that the market does not exist, and if you ask any industrialist to increase production he simply tells you that the market is not there, and it is no good producing goods for people who cannot buy them. So at once we of British Union pose the question to which the old Parties have no answer: Why is it that the British people in this country and in the Empire lack the power to buy the goods which the British people themselves are capable of producing? (Cheers.) The Parties have no answer, but we of British Union have. We say that we are chained down to an international system 100 years out of date, and that, under that system, on the home market and on the foreign market alike, British labour has got to compete with cheap sweated slave labour such as that of Japan, labour with only one-fifth of the production cost of British labour; and that this cheap sweated competition has been created by the financial power of Britain itself, which has equipped the slave-producing countries in order to undercut the labour of the West, and thus to supply the financier with a higher rate of usury. (Cheers.)

Under that international system, not only do we have to meet cheap sweated labour on the foreign markets, but on the home markets as well we are subject to such competition from the import of £350,000,000 a year of cheap sweated goods from foreign countries, undercutting and dragging down and down our standard of life. What on earth is the use of asking British employers under the present system to raise wages when to raise wages is to be undercut and put out of business by the sweated competition abroad, or even at home? Therefore, we say that this international system, 200 years out of date, is directly responsible for the low purchasing power of the British people, in that it holds down British wages and British purchasing power far below the level which is justified by Britain’s present power to produce.

The answer of British Union is a self-contained Empire. We exclude from Britain and the Empire the flood of cheap sweated goods which drag down our standard of life. Behind that insulation, by Law of the corporate system, we shall raise wages over the whole field of industry and give to the British people at last the power to consume the goods which the British people produce. The Finance and Credit system of the country will no longer be used for the creation of foreign competition and other purposes inimical to the British people. The Finance and Credit of Britain at last will be used for the purposes of the British people as laid down by British Government.

Within Britain we shall thus produce the maximum amount of goods which our industries are capable of producing for consumption in an assured home market; and what cannot be produced in Britain we shall purchase by direct bargain from our own Dominions and Colonies overseas. That bargain, which they have often offered, will be that for every pound’s worth of food stuff or raw material we purchase from them they shall accept a pound’s worth of our manufactured goods in exchange.

To study the scientific details of this constructive policy you will have to study our literature. In this speech to-night, which must deal chiefly with other things, I can give no more than the barest outline. Now I can only ask you, who have studied it, what argument is presented against our detailed policy for the development of the self-contained Empire. Every technician in industry knows well that it is today possible immensely to increase British production provided that a market is available. That market will be found, that market will be created in the purchasing power of the British people. What interest loses by such a system? Not the industrialist who increases his turnover; not the worker who greatly increases his wages. One interest and one interest alone stands to lose — the Usury system of the City of London.

They have lent British money all over the world in order to draw a high rate of usury by the equipment of our competitors. They draw the interest on their foreign loans in the import of sweated goods. If we keep out the cheap competitive goods that destroy British industry we keep out the usury of the City of London. British Union challenges that corrupt interest of Jewish Finance and declares that within Britain and the Empire we will build a system, with a productive power far beyond anything yet conceived by man, with a level of prosperity, of material well-being and moral happiness for our people, beyond the previous dreams of humanity.

What is the argument against that system? I have not yet heard it and I shall not hear it. Obviously, to plan that system requires a revolution in our national life. To carry through such a complete transformation of our whole system of politics and industry it is necessary to have peace. We cannot be diverted from such a task by being dragged into foreign quarrels.

How can we begin to carry through the greatest revolution in material circumstances that man has ever known while our whole system of politics and of industry is dragged into foreign adventure, while British statesmen never give even a passing thought to British problems, but are ever chasing round the world finding what dago they can guarantee next? (Cheers.)

When we say: “Mind Britain’s business,” we mean it. We want peace. We want to concentrate upon the British Empire because we believe that within the British Empire we can solve every single material problem of our people, and, therefore, we advance the policy of peace, again as straight and as direct as our economic policy itself. I have advanced four points of a peace policy, to which again I challenge an effective reply.

Point 1: Disinterest in the East of Europe. (Cheers.) I care not what happens in the East of Europe. It seems to me as natural that Germany should have a Monroe Doctrine in the East of Europe as that America should have it on the American Continent. We have had enough Balkan wars. If someone will keep them in order, well good luck to that someone, but I do not envy them their job. (Cheers.)

Point 2: Disarmament in the West of Europe in return — and I mean this — we shall be in a position to say to Germany: “We have no interest whatever in the East of Europe; that is, your nightmare of encirclement has gone forever; you will never have to fight against Britain and France on one front and against Russia and anyone they can collect on the other front. Encirclement is gone. Your fear is banished. I ask something of you in return. Meet us round the table and let us all be relieved of the burden of armaments, British and Germans alike.” (Cheers.)

They want to build houses in Berlin; we want to build houses in Britain. What folly to use the resources that can be spent in building houses for our people in arming against each other when we have nothing in the world to fight about. (Cheers.) And I am as certain as I stand here tonight that if we said to Germany: “We won’t interfere on your Eastern borders and you leave us alone in the British Empire and in the West of Europe,” I could immediately get a disarmament conference relieving the stricken people of Europe, not only from the threat of war, but lifting from their backs for our time and beyond it the crushing burden and fear of arms for war. (Cheers.)

Point 3: Return of the mandated territories we do not want, because we have a quarter of the world already. “Oh,” says the Labour Party, “You can’t do that. Why, we big boys who stand up for British Empire, we would not let you do that.” We reply to the Labour Party: “We can well believe that you think this territory is part of the British Empire because you have only discovered the British Empire in the last six months because you want a war with Germany.” (Cheers.) Anyway, who is the Labour Party to tell us we should not hand back to Germany territory which always belonged to them and never belonged to us when the Labour Party in its published and declared policy is willing to give the open door and to throw open the whole of the British Empire to anyone in the world who wants to come and take it? (Cheers.) But Labour is not our only enemy. Labour, of course, while it is willing to give away the British Empire to anyone who wants it, wishes to hang on to German territory just to have a war, if they can possibly get it.

There is poor old Tory too. Tories say: “Oh, you can’t let them back into Africa. Why, if you let a Pickelhaube appear in Africa again we would have to clear out in double quick time.” “Damn right, Tory,” we reply, “you may have to run for your life every time you see a German, but not us, not us.” “But,” the Tories bleat, “if you let them back into Africa in their old colonies they will start building bases and they will use those bases in order to take the whole of Africa from us.” Well, when the British Navy has been in the charge of the Conservative Party for some years there may be some force in that view, but there will be no force in that view whatever when the British Navy is in the charge of British Union. (Cheers.) Let the Tory Party remember something they have forgotten, something they may well forget and hide their heads in shame because for so long they neglected it. Let them remember the British Navy. Then let them look at the map of the world. They will find the blue sea dividing Africa from Europe, and as long as that blue sea is commanded by the British Navy then the Continent of Africa is in British hands.

There is not one single continental power that could carry supplies across the Mediterranean to fighting armies in Africa provided that the Mediterranean Sea was held by the British Navy, and as long as British Union rules, Britons shall rule the seas. (Cheers.) because we do not fear, because we shall be strong, because being men, we can understand men, we will make peace with Germany and all great nations. (Loud Cheers)

I will give you one last point of peace to which I have referred already in briefly describing our policy. At long last we say: “Mind Britain’s business. Concentrate on the British Empire. Say to the world, as I do to-night, if any nation in the world sets foot across the frontier of British Empire, as one man, we English will fight for Britain. But Britons shall die in no other quarrel.”

I say to you, my friends, from the very depth of my inner knowledge and consciousness tonight, that this policy declared by Britain to Germany, and the world, will bring peace and the friendship of men for our time and beyond our children’s time as well. Why not do it? . What is the argument against it? I am told that Germany just wants to swallow up one or two little countries in Eastern Europe and then turn round and overthrow the British Empire.

I am told that Hitler wants the whole world. In other words, I am told that Hitler is mad. What evidence have they got so far that this man, who has taken his country from the dust to the height in some twenty years of struggle (Cheers), what evidence have they got to show that he has suddenly gone mad? Because any man who wants to run the whole of the modern world with all its polyglot population and divers peoples and interests, such a man is undoubtedly mad, and I challenge my opponents to produce one shred of such evidence about that singularly shrewd and lucid intellect whom they venture so glibly to criticise. “Oh,” they say, “any man who gets to such a supreme position must go mad.” Well, of course, any democratic leader would (laughter), but then we knew before they told us that they had got weak heads. (Laughter)

They say: “The Kaiser went mad; he tried it on. Nero went mad. Anyone who gets to a position of great power goes mad.” Well, my friends, that may be true of their Kaisers, that may be true of their hereditary princelings, that may be true of some of their little Dukelings in the English House of Lords. (Laughter) Any man who is hoisted, not by his own exertions, but by the efforts of his forefathers, to a great height which he is not fitted to occupy is very likely to get dizzy and to topple over. That is an argument against the hereditary system which we condemn but they support. But, my friends, never yet in history has it been true of a man who has climbed to a great height with his own hands and with his own feet, who has clung to the mountain face against the tempest and has fought every inch and foot of the way until he rises from the depths to the height where he can see the sun of a nation’s glory. Men who have made themselves do not lose their heads; it is only those whom others have made. (Cheers.) So, when they base their war incitement on evidence as flimsy as that, I ask them to read their history and study their human nature.

Now I go on and ask them this: Supposing that we withdrew from Eastern Europe, supposing that we did not have King Carol or Colonel Beck as an ally, supposing then everything our opponents said came true, which I deny and utterly deny — but supposing it came true — supposing Germany turned round upon us and said: “All right, we challenge you for the British Empire; we want your quarter of the globe; we fight you to the death,” supposing the Germans said that, which I am convinced they would never do, but supposing that what is said by our opponents came true, why are we to be told that the British Empire is unable to stand and face Germany or any other nation upon earth? Why do the democrats thus suggest that Germany is so superior that we cannot hold the British Empire without the help of King Carol of Rumania? (Laughter) Why is it? Is it population that makes Germany so superior according to the democrats? — not according to me but according to the democrats. Is it population? We have got 70 million white British people in the British Empire.

Before the Anschluss Germany had precisely 70 million people in Germany. Since then they have picked up a few million Austrians and a few million Czechs. All right, let the original 70 million white people in the British Empire face the original 70 million of Germans. Then the other 430 million of coloured population in the British Empire can look after the few million Czechs and Austrians that they picked up the other day. Is that a fair deal? (Laughter.) In manpower we are certainly equal to them. We are immeasurably stronger in material resources. In counting our material resources we must remember we have got a quarter of the globe, and Germany is lacking in many vital raw materials owing to the Peace Treaties of injustice. In material resources the British Empire alone is immeasurably stronger than Germany. If in manpower we are equal and if in material resources we are superior, who dares to deny that the British people in war, if war came, could face either Germany or any other nation upon earth? (Cheers.)

But what is the democrat admitting when he is so afraid of Germany that he runs round the world looking for Turkey, Greece, Rumania, Poland, or Soviet Russia to save him? What is the financial democrat admitting except this, the truth of what we have told Britons and the world for seven years past ; that our system of government is out-worn, that our system of Parties is corrupt. (Cheers.) Give to the British by British methods, character and policy, born of our own national inspiration, give to them a system of the modern age, and light again the heart of the British people with their own great spirit; then, it will not be a question of other nations leading us, but we, the British, again will lead the world. (Cheers.) Therefore, when the financial democrat says we cannot pursue the national policy of Mind Britain’s Business, when he tells us we cannot live in the world unless we pick up any little ally that is going in Eastern Europe, I say he is doing one thing and one thing alone: he is admitting the decadence and corruption of the system which he supports; he is providing British Union with the most powerful argument that we could have. (Cheers.)

Now, fellow Britons, I have proceeded on the assumption that our opponents’ argument is true when I myself know it to be untrue. I say to them even if your wildest fears were true, there is no reason for Britain to be afraid, or for Britain to make war certain by the absurd policy of encirclement and intervention in places which are nothing to do with us. But I go beyond that and say to them: “When you accuse Germany and its Leader, Hitler, when you accuse them of the intention to attack and overthrow the British Empire, what shred of evidence do you possess? Name it.” I will not refer to the fact that the German Leader has again and again disclaimed any such intention, because you have only to mention the name of a foreign statesman for a large section of British Press and Politics to join in one great shriek of “Liar,” although they whine and complain, of course, if the courtesy is ever returned. (Laughter.)

But I challenge a reply to this question. If it is the aim and intention of Hitler to attack and overthrow the British Empire, why in heaven’s name did he not take his chance last September? Last September Britain was helpless. My evidence for that is Mr. Winston Churchill. It was Mr. Churchill who told us that last September Britain was helpless, and I will give you a very brief quotation from Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates of October 5th last. Mr. Churchill said this: “After all, there are no secrets now about what happened in the air and in the mobilisation of our anti-aircraft defences. These matters have been seen by thousands of people. Who pretends now that our anti-aircraft defences were adequately manned or armed? ”

I could read you other damning admissions from Government spokesmen on the state of our defences last September. Owing to the criminal neglect of our defences by the system of financial democracy and by all the Parties in Parliament, we were a helpless nation.

Therefore, I challenge these parties to answer this question: “If it be the intention of Hitler to attack and overthrow Britain, why did he miss his great opportunity last September?” (Cheers.) A great many hard things have been said about Hitler by his opponents, but I think his worst enemy has never yet said that he was a man who in life had missed very many chances. So when Mr. Churchill tells us: (1) that it is Hitler’s intention to attack and defeat Britain; (2) that we were helpless last September; we have got to believe one of two things: either Hitler is a man who misses big chances, or Mr. Churchill is a big liar. (Cheers and Laughter.) The British people, perhaps know the answer to that one. (Cheers.)

Now, to summarise my argument, in a sentence, it comes to this; if the wildest fears of our opponents were true, and Germany did attack Britain, provided that Britain had a Government and system of the modern age, Britain has nothing in the world to fear even if she fought alone; and, secondly, and beyond that, no evidence in the world exists of any such intention on the part of Germany although, on the other hand, I shall produce evidence in the policy being pursued in Britain of the intention on the part of some of the vilest forces this world has ever known, forces of paramount power here in Britain to-day to bring world war if they can; I denounce the forces of Jewish finance. (Cheers.)

Now when I turn in my final argument to analyse the policy of the Parties I shall ask this great audience to examine this policy of Bedlam, as it seems to me, this policy of madness and this policy of disgrace, and to ask themselves what other explanation could be given except that which British Union gives: that the Parties and political system of Britain is subordinate to an international force which seeks to pursue its world vendetta, if necessary, in British life and British blood.

Let us look, having examined our own policy, at the policy of these other Parties. First of all, of course, to the purposes of war, every interest of the British people is cast aside and every hope of reform, every hope of lifting higher the lot of those who suffer in Britain is abandoned, possibly for our generation, in pursuit of a policy of war. We are hardly allowed to-day to mention the lot or the condition of the British people. I, my friends, have been fighting their battle since I entered political life at twenty-one years old, and as long as life is within me that battle I shall continue to fight. (Cheers.)

Therefore, I make no apology here tonight, even when this country is faced with the war conspiracy, in referring to the conditions of our people of Britain and reminding you of their betrayal in the not distant past. To-day I read of £500,000,000 lent in the course of one year to arm Britain for a Jews’ war.

I remember but very few years ago when, as a Minister of the Crown, I asked for only £100,000,000 for the war of the British people on want and poverty, and I was mocked and derided by the Labour Government of the day. When I went to them and asked them for £100,000,000 for public work, for re-housing, for destroying and re-building the slums, for carrying out great works of public reform, economic works, too, which would yield a return of wealth to the people of the nation, when I asked for £100,000,000 to bridge the gulf between the poverty of the present and the reconstruction of our national system, I remember the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Labour Prime Minister — and I remember the serried ranks of the Labour M.P.s behind him, saying: “You are mad. Fancy asking for £100,000,000! The City would never stand for it.” (Laughter.) The City would never stand for it; “that’s wild-cat finance.” (Laughter) But £500,000,000 is raised for a foreign War and gilt-edged securities do not fall a couple or three points. £100,000,000 I wanted to be spent for the British people, they said it would break our financial system. Now they find £500,000,000 for the financiers foreign war and we are told the burden is like water on a duck’s back.

So in pursuit of this policy of war every hope of re-building Britain, every hope of raising the lot of our people is abandoned, not only by the Conservative Party, but by the professed champions of the people, the Labour Party themselves. And all Parties are united — sinking all quarrels about social problems and social, differences — for a policy of foreign war, for a policy of encirclement and intervention in Eastern Europe, supported by the loans of British finance.

Let us look first at the Labour Party, because always in the Labour Party you see the broad caricature of the financial democratic system. Labour leaders are a bit slower-witted than the Tory leaders, and so it is easier to catch them; that is all. Let us look at the Labour Party’s pretensions and what they do today. What has Labour told us? They were a party of revolution; they were a Party of peace; they were a Party that stood for the people. Let us look at their points. Revolution! You would find as much revolutionary spirit in a home for tame cats. (Laughter and Cheers.)

Labour leaders, supposed to be fighting the capitalist system to the end, dropping in for tea, knitting parties and gossip at Downing Street twice a week, (Laughter) not even pretending to fight. Every time the bell rings some Labour Leader hops round to Downing Street longing to be patted on the head and told what a good boy he is. A little harder work and they may even be asked to dinner by the dear Duchess at last. Labour — a travesty, a Party of caricature in a revolutionary fight, forgetting even to mumble the old lines and strike the old posture; Labour, in practical coalition with the Conservatives even before the eyes of the people.

Now, Labour as a “Party of Peace.” How many wars have the Labour Party wanted us to fight in the last two or three years? Let us try to count. First of all, they were all for a war in China when there was any hope of saving the great capitalist cotton interest. When it is only a question of Englishmen getting stripped and kicked in Tientsin we have not heard so much about it. Labour clamoured for a war in China. War No. 1. You and I were to put on khaki and go and save the Chinese.

War No. 2, Abyssinia, a war for oil; a war for the maintenance of slavery; a war for some of the vilest capitalist interests which have ever disgraced this continent and its adjoining territory.

War No. 3 – in Spain. Oh, we had to fight in Spain, the British flag was being insulted, bombs were being dropped near British ships. Stop a moment. We said: “British ships?” We looked up the register at Lloyds and we found thirty of them registered that month, Greeks, Jews, dagoes. Not bad, a war for the cotton Lords, a war for the slave-owners, a war for the ship-owners.

Then Austria, War No. 4, and then Czecho-Slovakia, War No. 5; Czecho-Slovakia! We were informed by Lord Winterton, of the present Government, that the land of Czecho-Slovakia is not owned by the peasants who inhabit it, but by Jewish money-lenders; a war to maintain their land for the Jewish money-lenders. War for the slave-owners; war for the ship-owners; war for Jewish money-lenders.

Now, war in Poland for the great investments of the City of London; war for the Polish miners to be sweated for a wage of 10s [shillings] a week to hew the cheap coal that puts the British miner out of a job but that fills the coffers of the City of London. And now, last but not least, is it the sixth or seventh war that Labour again wants us to fight? A holy crusade, something that will thrill the heart of every Englishman, if not the “heart of every night-club proprietor (Laughter), a war to keep King Carol on his throne (laughter), to say nothing about getting a good hand into those oil wells in Rumania, of course. Six or seven wars; count them up if you can; no wonder that Lord Ponsonby said the only trouble with his Party, the Labour Party, was that wherever there was a war going on they wanted to be in it. And what is this Party? Are they Colonel Blimps, old-fashioned Englishmen of a belligerent model? Are they boys of the bulldog breed who want to get into every scrap that is going on anywhere in the world? Not a bit of it.

Among the Labour ranks are to be found men who, in the last War, were conscientious objectors when Britain was fighting for her life, and now these men, among whom, too, were some who were stabbing us in the back trying to organise strikes in munition works while we were fighting and sweating and bleeding in the trenches, these men on their platforms today denounce us because we do not want to put on khaki and go to war with Germany in a Jews’ quarrel.

These men in the Labour ranks are denouncing us ex-Servicemen as lacking in patriotism because we do not want war with Germany about nothing. Who else is there who denounce us? There are those young intellectuals who were at Oxford five, or was it seven, years back, these mincing sissies who would not fight for King or country. They would not fight for King George, but they are longing to fight for King Carol — a boy after their own heart. (Laughter)

My friends, it would be funny if it was not so disgraceful to see such creatures, not only engaged in this conspiracy to send a million Englishmen to their doom — make certain they themselves will be missing on the day — not only thus conspiring, but also from their platforms denouncing, as unpatriotic, men who, in days gone by, gave all in their generation and risked all in their persons that England might live and might endure in greatness on the earth. (Cheers.) The Labour Party we can dismiss, not merely with the contempt the British people feel for them today, but with the judgment which the British people, in their own good time, will bring to the Labour Leaders in the days to come. (Cheers.)

Now what of the Tory Party? Let us be fair. We have advanced our policy, we have looked at Labour — let us now look at what is called the Party of Loyalty; the Party of Patriotism; the Tory Party. What is the Tory Party supposed to stand for in the world? (Cries of “Jewry”- from the audience.) We have got an answer here to-night which I am inclined to agree with. (Cheers.)

But first let us examine what they pretend to stand for. I do not think a Conservative in this hall, if there be one left, will disagree with me when I say that if the Conservative Party pretended to stand for anything on earth it was the Security of Britain and the Empire, the Prestige of Britain and the Empire, and the Maintenance and development of the British Empire. I do not think that any Conservatives would say that is an unfair description of the aims of Conservatism which were published in the past and to which thousands of sincere men and women still adhere, wrongly believing that they are still the principles of the Conservative Party, just as thousands of sincere men and women still adhere to the principles of the Labour Party, wrongly believing that the battle of the people is still being fought, while in fact it is the Party which best serves the enemies of the people, international finance.

Let us examine just briefly those principles of the Conservative Party in the light of what they have actually done. Take first the security of Britain and the Empire. The Conservative Party had been in power for seven years last Autumn. With two brief intervals they had been in power for twenty years before last Autumn, and yet that leading Conservative, Mr. Winston Churchill, and not only he but prominent Members of this Government, have had to admit that the defences of Britain last September were so inadequate that we were defenceless and helpless in an armed world. And when Conservatism was asked to give its reason for that policy, the reason was provided by their trusted leader of so many years, Lord Baldwin, who frankly informed us that he was well aware of the inefficiency of our defences, well aware of the danger of our position, but if he had asked the country to re-arm, he might have lost an election — so he did not. And that is a, man publicised for years by the financial democratic Press as pre-eminently honest.

Now I ask any Conservative, apart altogether from their present performances, how can you, believing in the principles which they proclaim, remain in that Party with such a record? What reason have you got for remaining in that Party, except that it may be unpleasant to leave that Party? Some of your friends may not like it, and for the first time in your life you may have to do something rough and hard, fight for other people and fight for England. (Cheers.) Why, any young man who remains in the Conservative Party after a record like that and a confession like that admits to all the world that he would rather lose the British Empire than lose a dinner party. (Laughter.) Security! That is the security they gave us in the past! What security are they giving us now?

They are committing us to fight in the North Sea; they are committing us to fight in the Mediterranean; they are committing us to fight in the seas of the Far East all at the same time. They have antagonised Germany. They have antagonised Spain at one end of the Mediterranean, the Arabs at the other, Italy in the middle of our main route to our Eastern Empire. While in the Far East they are taking on Japan at the same time, or not taking her on but doing what they always do, bluffing and blustering into trouble and then backing out of it to the shame of Britain. Security is not there – fighting in three seas at once, against Germany, Spain, Italy, the Arabs and Japan all at the same time. And in whose quarrel have we antagonised any one of these people? — not once in a British quarrel; every time in a Jews’ quarrel. And now, having landed us in that mess, what security do they give us? The Tory Party goes cap in hand on their knees; “Great Comrade Stalin, come in and save your poor Tory friends.” (Laughter.) Security! We are told that security lies in the British Empire having a Russian alliance. We were told it was a matter of life and death to have the Russian alliance; that if we did not get it over the weekend Germany would overrun half of Europe.

Four and a half months since have been taken in negotiations. It is lucky it is not a matter of life and death, is it not? It is lucky it is just humbug and make-believe; otherwise Europe would have been overrun four months ago. (Laughter.) And what is Russia doing? — playing the old Oriental Communist game of the last twenty years and more with all the Oriental cunning and skill; luring the poor old Tory Government deeper and deeper into the bog of commitment until at last they have them where they will; dangling the carrot in front of the old donkey’s nose, who is plunging and blundering further and further and then, when she has guaranteed not only Turkey, Greece and Rumania, but all the Baltic States, when they have got Britain into any quarrel that is going on anywhere in the world, then they will provoke world war, let it loose upon us and at last achieve the objective of the Jewish Communist Leaders to overthrow Britain and Western civilisation in suicidal war. (Applause.) That is their Tory security. Now what about their prestige; what prestige have they brought us? If there is one thing lowering to prestige, if there is one thing the opposite of the Englishman’s character, it is forever to be blustering and forever climbing down, forever taking off your coat for the fight and forever backing out. (Cheers.) And that has been the policy of the Conservative Government for years past. They are certainly adepts at ignoring an insult. That is the only talent of Conservatism to-day.

It is reputed to have been said by an eminent French statesman, not long ago: “If we French are walking along the street and somebody comes and gives us a hard kick behind, we cannot help noticing it enough to turn round and see who has done it, but you British you have got such calm, such dignity, that if you are walking down the street and someone comes up and gives you a hard kick behind you can pretend not even to notice it.” (Laughter.). That is the particular genius of Lord Halifax; (Laughter) the new strong boy of the Tory Party, by whom we might be impressed for n moment if we did not remember that Halifax was only an alias for Irwin; (Laughter) Lord Halifax whose remedy for the break-up of the British Empire in the East was to ask Mr. Gandhi round to tea. (Laughter.)

Now when they speak of prestige, let them bring against them in foreign policy the severest indictment I have to bring here tonight. Not since that Dutch Admiral sailed up the Thames centuries ago carrying at his mast a broom and boasting he had swept Britain from the seas — an insult that was avenged by our forefathers — not since that date has the British Flag been dragged in the mud and suffered such disgrace as in the betrayal of the English in Tientsin. (Cheers.) When you think, my friends, maybe as we sit here to-night, that Englishmen are being stripped naked and kicked — and some cases of English women are reported as well — and subjected to the mockery and derision of Chinese crowds by triumphant Japanese, and the only answer of the Parties in Parliament is to agree to “be patient,” can we deny that this is a disgrace to the British Flag and are we wrong to feel with passion? (Cheers.)

Two years ago we warned them if you divide Europe in a financiers’ vendetta you would be impotent, derided and helpless in the East, and Europe divided has made Britain helpless in the East. It is perfectly true that we should not be in Shanghai or Tientsin at all. British Union has said so for years. We are only in Southern China serving the corrupt interests which have exploited the cheapest Chinese coolie labour in order to undercut and destroy the industries of Lancashire. We are only there because millions of British capital, if it can be called British, is there invested; but if you send Englishmen to a place you cannot permit them to be kicked, stripped naked and their women insulted, without lifting a finger to help them. (Cheers.) And while that happens in the East, while that happens in China, do not believe for one moment that the bazaars of India are not humming with the news. Do not believe for one moment that wherever the Flag of Britain waves over British territory that flag is not quivering in the storm of derision which is mounting against British power. My friends, it may take superhuman efforts, it may take terrible sacrifice, it may brand our time with anguish to win back the good name of Britain in places where once the name of Britain was held high in honour; that is the “prestige” of your Conservative Party. (Cheers.)

Now our Empire. When they talk of being the custodians of Empire, let me say this: Australia and New Zealand scarcely dare to ask for money or help, but courted and flattered and fawned upon are the oily Levantines who come as Balkan allies. (Cheers.) £60,000,000 was agreed this week for foreign loans to buy useless allies in worthless and unnecessary wars. While New Zealand wants money for her simple fanning population, while the Newfoundlanders are starving and freezing in conditions which disgrace the very name of the British Empire, while some of our African tropical possessions are sweltering in conditions which are inhuman, starving for the lack of capital assistance, money is poured out in millions to buy allies for their Jews’ war in Europe.

But we are told, of course, it is a moral duty to intervene in every single Balkan quarrel, but no moral duty to lift a finger to save a Briton from insults in Tientsin. Why is it a moral duty to go to war if a German kicks a Jew across the Polish frontier, but no moral duty to lift a little finger if a Briton is kicked in Tientsin? Is it only because English men and English women are being insulted that the Parties are indifferent? Is it only because the New Zealand farmer or the starving Newfoundlander who fought in the War is asking for a little money to get his industry going again that they are not interested, while the people who fought against them in the War, the Turks, are to be bought with the money that is denied to the New Zealanders? It is a strange policy of preserving and of developing a great Empire. And yet we are told that this is the policy of the Conservative Party which stood for security, for prestige and for Empire.

The Empire is sold and war is bought in British money today, in British lives to-morrow. (Cheers.) Then Lord Halifax announced a new departure in their policy in his last great speech. He said that, in the end, Britain might make some contribution to world peace by the policy of the open door. We have heard about the policy of the open door before. That is Labour’s policy again. You take the British Empire, won by the heroism of thousands of named and nameless Englishmen, and you say to every other country in the world: “Here you are. Wade into it. Get stuck into it. Take what you want. It does not matter to us.” The open door! We have had a bit of it already: East Africa under the Congo Basin Treaty, an instrument supported by Tory and Labour alike, made the dumping ground of cheap Japanese goods, with the result that Lancashire and Yorkshire has lost practically the whole of those markets. Carry it further, make it the open door for the whole world, says Halifax, but, of course, do not dream of giving back to Germany what belongs to her, the mandated territories. My friends, can we conceive a policy of greater insanity, heading more straight for suicide, than this, to be prepared to fight a world war over a few acres which do not belong to us, but to make a present to the whole of mankind of the land which was won by the sweat, blood and heroism of our forefathers? (Cheers.)

But it is not only the open door in the giving away of the British Empire. Let us turn at long last in conclusion to have a look here at home at the open door. Not only are their goods coming in, but they are coming in themselves, thousands of them; thousands of them coming in, not only undermining our standard of life, not only debauching our commercial practices, not only swelling the practices of criminal lawyers, not only changing the commercial outlook and morality of the British to the detriment of our simple and honest people; not only that, my friends; this policy of the open door, this universal entry of alien standards and alien life if permitted to continue, is going to change the whole character of English life and English people, and is to complete the work which a century of capitalist production began, uprooting the English from the soil of their own native land and changing forever the life of our people. (Cheers.)

Some may say, those who do not yet feel as we do, that the entry of 50,000, 100,000 or 200,000 more does not matter, that we can swallow them, we can assimilate them. I deny it, but it is not only that — the money power that the big Jews command is changing every value, every morality, sapping every fibre, tearing up every root that still grips and digs deep in the English soil. Why, read their newspapers to-day. If you are fathers and mothers of young children, do you want them to grow up reading some of those newspapers? Do you want them to grow up going to their cinemas with their slick Yiddish American slang corrupting every standard of our life? (Cheers.) It is the open door, my friends, the open door, with Britain gone, the Britain we knew and loved. It is not your doing, because you are with us, but they are doing what the Empires of the past have done that have fallen in dust and ashes in which their civilisation and their glory have departed. They reached moments of greatness and heights of Empire. Then their moral fibre was destroyed and their manhood was sapped by the entry of alien peoples of the Orient, and evil forces marched triumphant to destroy the things that were noble and the things that were beautiful. (Cheers )

I ask this audience tonight whether or not we are going to give everything we have within us, not only material resources our moral and spiritual being, our very life and our very soul. In holy dedication to England that she shall not perish, but shall live in greatness. (Cheers.) We are going, if the power lies within us, and it lies within us because within us is the spirit of the English, to say that our generation and our children shall not die like rats in Polish holes. (Cheers.) They shall not die but they shall live to breathe the good English air, to love the fair English countryside, to see above them the English sky, to feel beneath their feet the English soil.

This heritage of England, by our struggle and our sacrifice, again we shall give to our children. And, with that sacred gift, we tell them that they come from that stock of men who went out from this small island in frail craft across storm-tossed seas to take in their brave hands the greatest Empire that man has ever seen; in which tomorrow our people shall create the highest civilisation that man has ever known. Remember, we say to our children, those who have gone before you. Remember those who through the centuries have died that Britain might live in greatness, in beauty and in splendour. Remember too that, in the spiritual values that our creed brings back to earth, these mighty spirits march beside you and you must be worthy of their company.

So we take by the hand these our children, to whom our struggle shall give back our England; with them we dedicate ourselves again to the memory of those who have gone before, and to that radiant wonder of finer and nobler life that our victory shall bring to our country. To the dead heroes of Britain, in sacred union, we say: ” Like you we give ourselves to England — across the ages that divide us — across the glories of Britain that unite us—we gaze into your eyes and we give to you this holy vow—we will be true — To-day — to-morrow — and forever — England lives.”

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

Declaration of war on Germany for invading German territory

3 September 1939

I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.

[Yes, its all about you.]

Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful. Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland.

[And how is that the business of the British Empire?]

But Hitler would not have it. He had evidently made up his mind to attack Poland whatever happened; and although he now says he put forward reasonable proposals which were rejected by the Poles, that is not a true statement. The proposals were never shown to the Poles nor to us [was Britain appointed by God to represent Polish interests?]; and though they were announced in the German broadcast on Thursday night, Hitler did not wait to hear comments on them, but ordered his troops to cross the Polish frontier next morning.

His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force and we and France are to-day, in fulfilment of our obligations [Britain owed Poland something?], going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people.

We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace, but a situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel themselves safe had become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.

At such a moment as this the assurances of support that we have received from the Empire are a source of profound encouragement to us.

When I have finished speaking certain detailed announcements will be made on behalf of the Government. Give them your close attention. The Government have made plans under which it will be possible to carry on the work of the nation in the days of stress and strain that may be ahead. But these plans need your help.

You may be taking part in the Fighting Services or as a Volunteer in one of the branches of Civil Defence. If so, you will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you receive. You may be engaged in work essential to the prosecution of war or to the maintenance of life of the people — in factories, in transport, in public utility concerns or in the supply of other necessaries of life. If so, it is of vital importance that you should carry on with your jobs.

Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution.

[Rule Britannia! Giv'em Hell, Tommy!]

“Appeasement”? How about he should have stayed at home and let the Czechs and Poles work out their own problems with the territory they’d scammed off Germany?

Britain Today, where Everyone is Equal

People Died for This

Heinrich Himmler

November 25, 1939

We won’t waste much time on the Jews. It’s great to get to grips with the Jewish race at last. The more that die the better; hitting them represents a victory for our Reich. The Jews should feel that we’ve arrived. We want to put half to three-quarters of all Jews east of the Vistula. We will crush these Jews wherever we can. Everything is at stake. Get the Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, everywhere. We have no use for Jews in the Reich. Probably the line of the Vistula, behind this line no more. We are the most important people here.

Reichführer Adolf Hitler

Proclamation of War against the USSR

June 22, 1941

GERMAN PEOPLE!

NATIONAL SOCIALISTS

Weighted down with heavy cares, condemned to months-long silence, the hour has now come when at last I can speak frankly.

When on Sept. 3, 1939, the German Reich received the English declaration of war there was repeated anew a British attempt to render impossible every beginning of a consolidation and thereby of Europe’s rise, by fighting whatever power on the Continent was strongest at any given time.

That is how of yore England ruined Spain in many wars. That is how she conducted her wars against Holland. That is how later she fought France with the aid of all Europe and that is how at the turn of the century she began the encirclement of the then German Reich and in 1914 the World War. Only on account of its internal dissension was Germany defeated in 1918. The consequences were terrible.

After hypocritical declarations that the fight was solely against the Kaiser and his regime, the annihilation of the German Reich began according to plan after the German Army had laid down its arms.

While the prophecies of the French statement, that there were 20,000,000 Germans too many-in other words, that this number would have to be exterminated by hunger, disease or emigration-were apparently being fulfilled to the letter, the National Socialist movement began its work of unifying the German people and thereby initiating resurgence of the Reich. This rise of our people from distress, misery and shameful disregard bore all the signs of a purely internal renaissance. Britain especially was not in any way affected or threatened thereby.

Nevertheless, a new policy of encirclement against Germany, born as it was of hatred, recommenced immediately. Internally and externally there resulted that plot familiar to us all between Jews and democrats, Bolshevists and reactionaries, with the sole aim of inhibiting the establishment of the new German people’s State, and of plunging the Reich anew into impotence and misery.

Apart from us the hatred of this international world conspiracy was directed against those people which like ourselves were neglected by fortune and were obliged to earn their daily bread in the hardest struggle for existence.

Above all the right of Italy and Japan to share in the goods of this world was contested just as much as that of Germany and in fact was formally denied.

The coalition of these nations was, therefore, only an act of self-protection in the face of the egoistic world combination of wealth and power threatening them.

As early as 1936 Prime Minister Churchill, according to statements by the American General Wood before a committee of the American House of Representatives, declared Germany was once again becoming too powerful and must therefore be destroyed.

In the Summer of 1939 the time seemed to have come for England to begin to realize its intended annihilation by repetition of a comprehensive policy of encirclement of Germany.

The plan of the campaign of lies staged for this purpose consisted in declaring that other people were threatened, in tricking them with British promises of guarantees and assistance, and of making them march against Germany just as it did preceding the great war.

Thus Britain from May to August, 1939, succeeded in broadcasting to the world that Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and Bessarabia as well as the Ukraine were being directly threatened by Germany.

A number of these States allowed themselves to be misled into accepting the promise of guarantee proffered with these assertions, thus joining the new encirclement front against Germany. Under these circumstances I consider myself entitled to assume responsibility before my own conscience and before the history of the German people not only of assuring these countries or their governments of the falseness of British assertions, but also of setting the strongest power in the east, by especially solemn declarations, at rest concerning the limits of our interests.

National Socialists! At that time you probably all felt that this step was bitter and difficult for me. Never did the German people harbor hostile feeling against the peoples of Russia. However, for over ten years Jewish Bolshevist rulers had been endeavoring from Moscow to set not only Germany but all Europe aflame. At no time ever did Germany attempt to carry her National Socialist Weltanschauung into Russia, but on the contrary Jewish Bolshevist rulers in Moscow unswervingly endeavored to foist their domination upon us and other European peoples, not only by ideological means but above all with military force.

The consequences of the activity of this regime were nothing but chaos, misery and starvation in all countries. I, on the other hand, have been striving for twenty years with a minimum of intervention and without destroying our production, to arrive at a new Socialist order in Germany which not only eliminates unemployment but also permits the worker to receive an ever greater share of the fruits of his labor.

The success of this policy of economic and social reconstruction of our people, which by systematically eliminating differences of rank and class, has a true peoples’ community as the final aim of the world.

It was therefore only with extreme difficulty that I brought myself in August, 1939, to send my Foreign Minister to Moscow in an endeavor there to oppose the British encirclement policy against Germany.

I did this only from a sense of all responsibility toward the German people, but above all in the hope after all of achieving permanent relief of tension and of being able to reduce sacrifices which might otherwise have been demanded of us.

While Germany solemnly affirmed in Moscow that the territories and countries enumerated-with the exception of Lithuania-lay outside all German political interests, a special agreement was concluded in case Britain were to succeed in inciting Poland actually into war with Germany.

In this case, too, German claims were subject to limitations entirely out of proportion to the achievement of German forces.

National Socialists! The consequences of this treaty which I myself desired and which was concluded in the interests of the German nation were very severe, particularly for Germans living in the countries concerned.

Far more than 500,000 German men and women, all small farmers, artisans and workmen, were forced to leave their former homeland practically overnight in order to escape from a new regime which at first threatened them with boundless misery and sooner or later with complete extermination.

Nevertheless, thousands of Germans disappeared. It was impossible ever to determine their fate, let alone their whereabouts.

Among them were no fewer than 160 men of German citizenship. To all this I remained silent because I had to. For, after all, it was my one desire to achieve final relief of tension and, if possible, a permanent settlement with this State.

However, already during our advance in Poland, Soviet rulers suddenly, contrary to the treaty, also claimed Lithuania.

The German Reich never had any intention of occupying Lithuania and not only failed to present any such demand to the Lithuanian Government, but on the contrary refused the request of the then Lithuania to send German troops to Lithuania for that purpose as inconsistent with the aims of German policy.

Despite all this I complied also with this fresh Russian demand. However, this was only the beginning of continually renewed extortions which kept on repeating ever since.

Victory in Poland which was won by German troops exclusively caused me to address yet another peace offer to the Western Powers. It was refused owing to efforts of international and Jewish warmongers.

At that time already the reason for such refusal lay in the fact that Britain still had hopes of being able to mobilize a European coalition against Germany which was to include the Balkans and Soviet Russia.

It was therefore decided in London to send Mr. Cripps [Sir Stafford Cripps] as Ambassador to Moscow. He received clear instructions under all circumstances to resume relations between the English and Soviet Russia and develop them in a pro-British direction. The British press reported on the progress of this mission as long as tactical reasons did not impose silence.

In the Autumn of 1939 and Spring of 1940 the first results actually made themselves felt. As Russia undertook to subjugate by armed force not only Finland but also the Baltic States she suddenly motivated this action by the assertion, as ridiculous as it was false, that she must protect these countries from an outside menace or forestall it.

This could only be meant to apply to Germany, for no other power could even gain entrance into the Baltic area, let alone go to war there. Still I had to be silent. However, those in power in the Kremlin immediately went further.

Whereas in the Spring of 1940 Germany, in accordance with the so-called pact of friendship, withdrew her forces from the Far Eastern frontier and, in fact, for the most part cleared these areas entirely of German troops, a concentration of Russian forces at that time was already beginning in a measure which could only be regarded as a deliberate threat to Germany.

According to a statement that Molotoff [Soviet Foreign Minister and then Premier Vyachesiaff Molotoff] personally made at that time, there were twenty-two Russian divisions in the Baltic States alone already in the Spring of 1940.

Since the Russian Government itself always claimed it was called in by the local population, the purpose of their presence there could only be a demonstration against Germany.

While our soldiers from May 5, 1940, on had been breaking Franco British power in the west, Russian military deployment on our eastern frontier was being continued to a more and more menacing extent.

From August, 1940, on I therefore considered it to be in the interest of the Reich no longer to permit our eastern provinces, which moreover had already been laid waste so often, to remain unprotected in the face of this tremendous concentration of Bolshevist divisions.

Thus there resulted British-Soviet Russian cooperation intended mainly at the tying up of such powerful forces in the east that radical conclusion of the war in the west, particularly as regards aircraft, could no longer be vouched for by the German High Command.

This, however, was in line with the objects not only of the British but also of the Soviet Russian policy, for both England and Soviet Russia intend to let this war go on for as long as possible in order to weaken all Europe and render it progressively more impotent.

Russia’s threatened attack on Rumania was in the last analysis equally intended to gain possession of an important base, not only of Germany’s but also of Europe’s economic life, or at least destroy it. The Reich, especially since 1933, sought with unending patience to gain States in Southeast Europe as trading partners. We therefore also had the greatest interest in their internal constitutional consolidation and organization. Russia’s advance into Rumania and Greece’s tie-up with England threatened to turn these regions, too, within a short time into a general theatre of war.

Contrary to our principles and customs, and at the urgent request of the then Rumanian Government, which was itself responsible for this development, I advised acquiescence to the Soviet Russian demands for the sake of peace and the cession of Bessarabia.

The Rumanian Government believed, however, that it could answer for this before its own people only if Germany and Italy in compensation would at least guarantee the integrity of what still remained of Rumania.

I did so with heavy heart, principally because when the German Reich gives a guarantee that means it also abides by it. We are neither Englishmen nor Jews.

I still believe at this late hour to have served the cause of peace in that region, albeit by assuming serious personal obligation. In order, however, finally to solve these problems and achieve clarity concerning the Russian attitude toward Germany, as well as under pressure of continually increasing mobilization on our Eastern frontier, I invited Mr. Molotoff to come to Berlin.

The Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs then demanded Germany’s clarification of an agreement to the following four questions:

Point One was Molotoff’s question: Was the German guarantee for Rumania also directed against Soviet Russia in case of attack by Soviet Russia on Rumania?

My answer: The German guarantee is a general one and is unconditionally binding upon us. Russia, however, never declared to us that she had other interests in Rumania beyond Bessarabia. The occupation of Northern Bukovina had already been a violation of this assurance. I did not therefore think that Russia could now suddenly have more far-reaching intentions against Rumania.

Molotoff’s second question: That Russia again felt menaced by Finland. Russia was determined not to tolerate this. Was Germany ready not to give any aid to Finland and above all immediately to withdraw German relief troops marching through to Kirkenes?

My answer: Germany continued to have absolutely no political interests in Finland. A fresh war by Russia against the small Finnish people could not, however, be regarded any longer by the German Government as tolerable, all the more so as we could never believe Russia to be threatened by Finland. Under no circumstances did we want another theatre of war to arise in the Baltic.

Molotoff’s third question: Was Germany prepared to agree that Russia give a guarantee to Bulgaria and send Soviet Russian troops to Bulgaria for this purpose in connection with which he-Molotoff-was prepared to state that the Soviets did not intend on that account, for example, to depose the King?

My answer: Bulgaria was a sovereign State and I had no knowledge that Bulgaria had ever asked Soviet Russia for any kind of guarantee such as Rumania had requested from Germany. Moreover, I would have to discuss the matter with my allies.

Molotoff’s fourth question: Soviet Russia required free passage through the Dardenelles under all circumstances and for her protection also demanded occupation of a number of important bases on the Dardenelles and Bosphorus. Was Germany in agreement with this or not?

My answer: Germany was prepared at all times to agree to alteration of the Statute of Montreux in favor of the Black Sea States. Germany was not prepared to agree to Russia’s taking possession of bases on the Straits.

National Socialists! Here I adopted the only attitude that I could adopt as the responsible leader of the German Reich but also as the representative of European culture and civilization and conscious of my responsibility.

The consequence was to increase in Soviet Russia the activity directed against the Reich, above all, however, the immediate commencement of undermining the new Rumanian State from within and an attempt to remove the Bulgarian Government by propaganda.

With the help of the confused and immature leaders of the Rumanian Legion (Iron Guard) a coup d’etat was staged in Rumania whose aim was to overthrow Chief of State General Antonescu and produce chaos in the country so as to remove all legal power of the government and thus the precondition for an implement of the German guarantee.

I nevertheless still believed it best to remain silent.

Immediately after the failure of this undertaking, renewed reinforcement of concentrations of Russian troops on Germany’s eastern frontier took place. Panzer detachments and parachutists were transferred in continually increasing numbers to dangerous proximity to the German frontier. German fighting forces and the German nation know that until a few weeks ago not a single tank or mechanized division was stationed on our eastern frontier.

If any final proof was required for the coalition meanwhile formed between England and Soviet Russia despite all diversion and camouflage, the Yugoslav conflict provided it.

While I made every effort to undertake a final attempt to pacify the Balkans and in sympathetic cooperation with Il Duce invited Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact, England and Soviet Russia in a joint conspiracy organized that coup d’etat which in one night removed the then government which had been ready to come to agreement.

For we can today inform the German nation that the Serb Putsch against Germany did not take place merely under the British, but primarily under Soviet Russian auspices. As we remained silent on this matter also, the Soviet leaders now went still one step further. They not only organized the Putsch, but a few days later also concluded that well-known friendship pact with the Serbs in their will to resist pacification of the Balkans and incite them against Germany.

And this was no platonic intention: Moscow demanded mobilization of the Serb Army.

Since even now I still believe it better not to speak, those in power in the Kremlin went still further: The Government of the German Reich today possesses documentary evidence which proves that Russia, in order finally to bring Serbia into the war, gave her a promise to supply her via Salonika with arms, aircraft, munitions and other war materials against Germany.

And this happened almost at the very moment when I myself advised Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka that eased tension with Russia always was in hope, thereby to serve the cause of peace.

Only the rapid advance of our incomparable divisions to Skoplie as well as the capture of Salonika itself frustrated the aims of this Soviet Russian-Anglo-Saxon plot. Officers of the Serb air force, however, fled to Russia and were there immediately received as allies.

The victory of the Axis Powers in the Balkans in the first instance thwarted the plan to involve Germany this Summer in months-long battles in Southeastern Europe while meantime steadily completing the alignment of Soviet Russian armies and increasing their readiness for war in order, finally, together with England and supported by American supplies anticipated, to crush the German Reich and Italy.

Thus Moscow not only broke but miserably betrayed the stipulations of our friendly agreement. All this was done while the rulers in the Kremlin, exactly as in the case of Finland and Rumania, up to the last moment pretended peace and friendship and drew up an ostensibly innocent démenti.

Although until now I was forced by circumstances to keep silent again and again, the moment has now come when to continue as a mere observer would not only be a sin of omission but a crime against the German people-yes, even against the whole of Europe.

Today something like 160 Russian divisions are standing at our frontiers. For weeks constant violations of this frontier have taken place, not only affecting us but from the far north down to Rumania.

Russian airmen consider it sport nonchalantly to overlook these frontiers, presumably to prove to us that they already feel themselves masters of these territories.

During the night of June 17 to June 18 Russian patrols again penetrated into the Reich’s territory and could only be driven back after prolonged firing. This has brought us to the hour when it is necessary for us to take steps against this plot devised by the Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers and equally the Jewish rulers of the Bolshevist center in Moscow.

German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as regards extent, compares with the greatest the world hitherto has seen. United with their Finnish comrades, the fighters of the victory of Narvik are standing in the Northern Arctic. German divisions commanded by the conqueror of Norway, in cooperation with the heroes of Finnish freedom, under their marshal, are protecting Finnish soil.

Formations of the German Eastern Front extend from East Prussia to the Carpathians. German and Rumanian soldiers are united under Chief of State Antonescu from the banks of the Pruth along the lower reaches of the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of Europe and thereby the salvation of all.

I therefore decided today again to lay the fate and future of the German Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.

May God help us especially in this fight!

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop

Statement on the Declaration of War against the USSR

Berlin, June 22, 1941

When in the Summer of 1939 the Reich Government, motivated by a desire to achieve adjustment of interests between Germany and the U.S.S.R., approached the Soviet Government, they were aware of the fact that it was no easy matter to reach an understanding with a State that on one hand claimed to belong to a community of individual nations with rights and duties resulting therefrom, yet on the other hand was ruled by a party that, as a section of the Comintern, was striving to bring about world revolution-in other words, the very dissolution of these individual nations.

The German Government, putting aside their serious misgivings occasioned by this fundamental difference between political aims of Germany and Soviet Russia and by the sharp contrast between diametrically opposed conceptions of National Socialism and Bolshevism, made the attempt.

They were guided by the idea that the elimination of the possibility of war, which would result from an understanding between Germany and Russia, and safeguarding of the vital necessities of the two people, between whom friendly relations had always existed, would offer the best guarantee against further spreading of the Communist doctrine of international Jewry over Europe.

This belief was strengthened by the fact that certain happenings in Russia itself and certain measures of international scope undertaken by the Russian Government allowed it to be assumed that departure from these doctrines and former methods of causing disintegration among foreign nations appeared possible.

The reception accorded in Moscow to the German démarche and the readiness of the Soviet Government to conclude a pact of friendship with Germany appeared to confirm this change of attitude.

Thus, on Aug. 23, 1939, a non-aggression pact was concluded, while on Sept. 28, 1939, a frontier and friendship agreement was signed by the two States. The essence of these agreements consisted of:

1. Reciprocal engagement on the part of both States not to attack one another and to live on peaceful and neighborly terms, and

2. Delimitation of spheres of interest-the German Reich renouncing all influence in Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Bessarabia while territories of the former Polish State as far as the line formed by the Narew, Bug and San (rivers) were to be incorporated into Russia according to the desire of the Soviets.

The Reich Government, in the pact immediately following conclusion of the non-aggression pact with Russia, effected a fundamental change in their policy toward the Soviet Union. The German Government faithfully adhered in both letter and spirit to the treaties concluded with the Soviet Union.

In addition to this they had, through the conquest of Poland, by shedding German blood, gained for the Soviet Union the greatest success in foreign politics that it had achieved since coming into existence. This was only possible by reason of Germany’s friendly policy toward Russia and the overwhelming victories of German forces.

Not unreasonably, the Reich Government therefore felt entitled to expect that the attitude of the Soviet Union toward the German Reich would be of the same nature, especially since, during the negotiations that were conducted in Moscow by Herr von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs, and also on other occasions, the Soviet Government had repeatedly expressed the view that these treaties would form the basis for permanent adjustment of German-Soviet Russian interests and that the two peoples, each respecting the regime of the other and prepared to abstain from any interference in internal affairs of the other partner, could reach permanent good neighborly relations.

Unfortunately it soon was to become evident that the German Government had been quite mistaken in this assumption.

In actual fact the Comintern resumed its activities in every sphere very soon after conclusion of the German-Russian treaties. This was true not only of Germany herself, but also as applied to States friendly to Germany, to neutral States and to such European territory as was occupied by German troops. In order to avoid openly infringing the treaties methods were changed and camouflage was applied more painstakingly and with greater cunning.

It obviously was thought necessary in Moscow to counteract the effect of conclusion of the pact with National Socialist Germany by continually pillorying Germany’s alleged “imperialistic war.

Strict and effective preventive measures adopted by German police compelled the Comintern to seek to conduct their subversive activities and their intelligence work in Germany by devious routes, making use of centers established for that purpose in neighboring countries.

For this purpose former German Communist agents were employed to foment sedition and to arrange for acts of sabotage in Germany. OGPU Commissar Kryloff was in charge of systematic courses of training with this object in view. Apart from this, intensive subversive activities were carried on in territories occupied by Germany, more particularly in the protectorate [Bohemia-Moravia] and occupied France, but also Norway, Holland, Belgium, etc.

Soviet Russian representatives, notably the Consul General at Prague, rendered valuable assistance in this connection. Assiduous intelligence service maintained by means of wireless transmitters and receiving stations afforded absolute proof of the activities of the Comintern directed against the German Reich. There also is comprehensive documentary evidence consisting of witnesses’ statements and correspondence concerning all subversive activity and reconnoitering carried on by the Comintern.

In addition to this sabotage groups were formed, which maintained their own laboratories for the manufacture of incendiary and high-explosive bombs for the purpose of committing acts of sabotage. Attempts of this kind were made, for example, against no fewer than sixteen German ships.

Espionage was another field of activity. Thus repatriation of Germans from Soviet Russia was utilized for the purpose of gaining the services of these Germans for ends of the OGPU by the most reprehensible means. Not only men but women too were victims of shameless extortion and were forced to enter the service of the OGPU.

Even the Soviet Russian Embassy in Berlin, headed by M. Kobuloff, Counselor of the Embassy, did not shrink from unscrupulous abuse of the rights of extraterritoriality for espionage purposes. M. E. Mokhoff, member of the Russian Consulate at Prague, was at the head of another Russian espionage organization, which had ramifications throughout the protectorate.

Further instances in which the police were able to take action in good time provided clear, unequivocable evidence of these extensive Soviet Russian machinations. The whole of the evidence proves irrefutably that Soviet Russia was engaged against Germany in the political, military and economic spheres in large-scale subversive activities, acts of sabotage, terror and espionage in preparation for war.

As to activities by Russia in European countries outside Germany, they extended to almost all European states that are friendly to or are occupied by Germany. Thus in Rumania, for example, Communist propaganda in the form of pamphlets of Russian origin represented Germany as being responsible for all local troubles in order to create an anti-German atmosphere

The same thing had been evident in Yugoslavia since the Summer of 1940. Pamphlets there incited the people to protest against the Cvetkovitch regime, which was “hobnobbing with the imperialistic governments in Berlin and Rome.” At a meeting of Communist party functionaries in Zagreb the whole of Southeastern Europe from Slovakia to Bulgaria was described as a Russian protectorate that would come into being after Germany’s hoped for military decline.

In the Soviet Legation at Belgrade, German troops discovered documentary evidence of the Soviet Russian origin of this propaganda.

Whereas Communist propaganda in Yugoslavia sought to make use of nationalist catch-words, in Hungary it was effective chiefly among the Ruthenian population, to whom it held out hopes of coming liberation through Soviet Russia.

Anti-German propaganda was particularly active in Slovakia, where the propaganda was openly carried on in favor of annexation of that country by Soviet Russia.

In Finland the notorious “Association for Peace and Friendship With the Soviet Union” actively cooperated with the Petroskoi broadcasting station, attempting to bring about disintegration of this country and at the same time carried on activities of a marked anti-German nature.

In France, Belgium and Holland agitation was directed against the German armies of occupation. A similar campaign was conducted in the Government General [Poland], cloaked by national Pan-Slavistic propaganda.

Scarcely had Greece been occupied by the German and Italian Armies when Soviet Russian propaganda commenced there too.

All this is evidence of a campaign systematically carried out in every country by the U.S.S.R. against Germany’s endeavor to establish a sound order in Europe.

Parallel with this there was directed propaganda designed to counteract measures of German policy, taking the form of denunciation of these measures as anti-Russian and attempting to win over various countries to side with Soviet Russia against Germany.

In Bulgaria there was agitation against adherence to the Tripartite Pact and in favor of a guarantee pact with Russia. In Rumania attempts were made at infiltration into the Iron Guard and suborning its leaders, including Groza, a Rumanian who started the Putsch of Jan. 23, 1941, and behind whom Bolshevist agents of Moscow stood as wire-pullers. Indisputable proofs of this are held by the Reich Government.

In regard to Yugoslavia the Reich Government has come in possession of documents according to which a Yugoslav delegate named Georgevitch gained the impression from a conversation with Molotoff [Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, Russian Foreign Commissar], in Moscow early in May, 1940, that Germany was being regarded there as a mighty foe of tomorrow.

Soviet Russia’s attitude to requests for arms made by Serbian military circles left even less doubt. In November, 1940, the Chief of the Soviet Russian General Staff declared to the Yugoslav military attaché: “We will give you everything you ask for immediately.” The prices to be paid and the mode of payment were left to the discretion of the Belgrade Government and only one condition was made-secrecy as far as Germany was concerned.

When the Cvetkovitch government subsequently approached the Axis powers Moscow began to delay deliveries of munitions, and this was briefly communicated to the Yugoslav military attaché by the Soviet Russian War Ministry.

The staging of the Belgrade Putsch of March 27 of this year formed the climax to these conspiracies against the Reich by Serbian plotters and Anglo-Russian agents. The Serbian leader of this Putsch and the head of the “Black Hand,” M. Simitch, is still today in Moscow, displaying there great activity against the Reich on closest cooperation with Soviet Russian propaganda officers.

The foregoing examples provide only a glimpse of the enormously varied propaganda activities which the U.S.S.R. is conducting against Germany throughout Europe. In order to furnish the outside world with a comprehensive survey of the activities of Soviet Russian authorities in this direction since the conclusion of the pacts between Germany and Russia and to enable the public to judge for themselves, the Reich Government will publish the extensive material at their disposal.

In general, the Reich Government note the following:

At the conclusion of the pacts with Germany, the Soviet Government repeatedly made the unequivocal declaration that they did not intend to interfere, either directly or indirectly, in German affairs.

On conclusion of the pact of friendship they solemnly stated they would collaborate with Germany in order to bring an end, in accordance with the true interests of all peoples, of the war existing between Germany on one hand and Great Britain on the other, and to achieve this aim as soon as possible.

In the light of the above mentioned facts, which have continually become more apparent during the further course of the war, these Soviet Russian agreements and declarations were revealed as being intentionally misleading and deceptive. Nor did the advantages accruing from Germany’s friendly attitude cause the Soviet Government to adopt a loyal attitude toward Germany.

On the contrary, the Reich Government have been forced to observe that conclusion of the pacts in 1939 was yet another instance of the application of Lenin’s thesis, as expressly reaffirmed in October, 1939, in “instructions for the Communist party in Slovakia,” stating that “pacts may be concluded with certain other countries if they further the interests of the Soviet Government and help render the opponent innocuous.”

The conclusion of these pacts of friendship was, accordingly, for the Soviet Government only a tactical manoeuvre. The real aim was to reach agreements which were advantageous to Russia, thus simultaneously preparing for future action.

The leading idea remained the weakening of non-bolshevist states in order to be in a position to disintegrate them more easily and, when the time came, break them up. In a Russian document discovered after the capture of Belgrade in the Soviet Legation there, this object was expressed with stark brutality in the following words:

“The U.S.S.R. will not wait until the opportune moment occurs. Axis powers have further dissipated their forces and the U.S.S.R. will consequently strike a sudden blow against Germany.”

The Soviet Government have not heeded the voice of the Russian people, who sincerely wished to live in peace and friendship with the German people, but have continued in the old bolshevist policy of duplicity and, by so doing, have assumed a heavy burden of responsibility.

If the Soviet Union’s subversive propaganda carried out in Germany and the rest of Europe leaves no room for doubt as to its attitude toward Germany, then the policy of the Soviet Government toward Germany in the military sphere and in the fields of foreign politics, even since the conclusion of pacts between Germany and Russia, makes matters even clearer.

In Moscow, on the occasion of the delineation of spheres of interest, the Soviet Government declared to the German Minister of Foreign Affairs that it did not intend to occupy, bolshevize or annex any states situated within their sphere of interest, other than territories of the former Polish State, which were at that time in a state of disintegration.

In actual fact, however, as the course of events has shown, the policy of the Soviet Union during the whole time was exclusively directed toward one object-namely, that of extending Moscow’s military power wherever the possibility offered in the area between the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, and of furthering bolshevism in Europe.

Development of this policy was marked by the following stages:

1. It was initiated by the formulation of so-called assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in October and November, 1939, and by establishment of military bases in those countries.

2. The next Soviet Russian move was against Finland, when Soviet Russian demands, acceptance of which would have meant the end of the sovereignty of an independent Finnish State, were rejected by the Finnish Government. The Soviet Government was responsible for the formation of the Kusinin Communist puppet government, and, when the Finnish people refused to recognize this government, an ultimatum was presented to Finland. The Red Army was subsequently marching in at the end of November, 1939. By the Finnish-Russian peace concluded in March, Finland was obliged to surrender part of her southeastern provinces immediately.

3. A few months later-in July, 1940-the Soviet Union took action against the Baltic States. Under terms of the first Moscow pact Lithuania belonged to the German sphere of interest.

In the second pact, at the desire of the Soviet Union, the German Government relinquished their interests in a greater part of Lithuania in favor of the Soviet Union for the sake of peace, although they did so with heavy heart. A strip of this territory still remained within the German sphere of interest.

Following upon an ultimatum delivered on June 15, the whole of Lithuania, including that part which had remained within the German sphere of interest, was occupied by the Soviet Union without notification of the German Government so that the U.S.S.R. now extended right up to the entire eastern frontier of East Prussia.

When subsequently Germany was approached on this question the German Government, after difficult negotiations and in order to make a further effort toward reaching a friendly settlement, ceded this part of Lithuania also to the Soviet Union.

A short time afterward Latvia and Estonia were likewise occupied by military force, procedure which constituted gross abuse of the pacts of assistance concluded with these states.

Contrary to the express assurance given by Moscow, all Baltic States were then Bolshevized and summarily annexed by the Soviet Government a few weeks after occupation.

Simultaneously with the annexation, the Red Army was for the first time concentrated in force throughout the whole of the northern sector of the Soviet Russian buttress directed toward Europe.

It goes almost without saying that the economic pacts between Germany and these States, which, according to the Moscow agreements were not to be affected, were unilaterally canceled by the Soviet Government.

4. In the pacts of Moscow it had been expressly agreed in connection with the delimitation of interest in former Polish territories that no kind of political agitation was to take place beyond the frontiers marking these zones of interest, but that activity of occupation authorities on either side was to be restricted exclusively to peaceful development of these territories.

The German Government possesses irrefutable proof that in spite of these agreements the Soviet Union very soon after occupation of the territory not only permitted anti-German propaganda for consumption in the Government-General of Poland but, in point of fact, sponsored it parallel with Bolshevist propaganda in the same region. Strong Russian garrisons were also transferred to these territories immediately after the occupation.

5. While the German Army still was fighting in the west against France and Britain, the Soviet Union advanced in the Balkans. Although the Soviet Government had declared during the Moscow negotiations they would never make the first move toward achieving settlement of the Bessarabian question, the German Government was informed on June 24, 1940, by the Soviet Government that they now were resolved to settle the Bessarabian question by force.

It was stated at the same time that Soviet claims also extended to Bukovina, that is to say, territory which was ancient Austrian crown land, had never belonged to Russia and had, moreover, not ever been mentioned at the time of the Moscow negotiations.

The German Ambassador to Moscow declared to the Soviet Government their decision had come as a complete surprise to the German Government and that it would seriously affect Germany’s economic interest in Rumania and lead to disruption of the life of a large German settlement there as well as of the German element in Bukovina. Molotoff replied that the matter was one of extreme urgency and that the Soviet Union expected to be apprised of the German Government’s attitude with regard to this question within twenty-four hours.

In spite of this brusque action against Rumania, the German Government once more intervened in favor of the Soviet Union in order to preserve peace and maintain their friendship with that country.

They advised the Rumanian Government, who had appealed to Germany for help, to yield and recommended to them to surrender Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to Soviet Russia. The affirmative answer of the Rumanian Government was communicated to the Soviet Government by Germany, together with the Rumanian Government’s request to be granted sufficient time for evacuation of these large areas and the safeguarding of lives and property of the inhabitants.

Once more, however, the Soviet Government presented an ultimatum to Rumania, and, before its expiration, began to occupy parts of Bukovina on June 28, and immediately afterward the whole of Bessarabia as far as the Danube. Those territories were also immediately annexed by the Soviet Union, bolshevized and thus literally reduced to ruin.

By occupying and bolshevizing entire spheres of interest in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans accorded to the U.S.S.R. by the Reich Government during the Moscow negotiations, the Soviet Government plainly and irrefutably acted contrary to the Moscow agreements.

In spite of this, the Reich Government continued to maintain an absolutely loyal attitude toward the U.S.S.R. They refrained from intervention in the Finnish war and in the Baltic question. They supported the attitude of the Soviet Government against the Rumanian Government in the Bessarabian question, and reconciled themselves, albeit with heavy heart, to the state of affairs created by the Soviet Government.

Furthermore, in order to eliminate as far as possible any divergences between the two States from the very outset, the Reich government set to work on a large-scale resettlement scheme, whereby all Germans in areas occupied by the U.S.S.R. were brought back to Germany. The Reich Government felt that more convincing proof of their desire to come to a lasting peace with the U.S.S.R. could scarcely be given.

As a result of Russia’s advance toward the Balkans, territorial problems in this region came up for discussion. In the Summer of 1940, Rumania and Hungary appealed to Germany to effect settlement of their territorial disputes after these divergencies, fostered by British agents, had resulted in a serious crisis at the end of August.

War was imminent between Rumania and Hungary. Germany, who had repeatedly been requested by Hungary and Rumania to mediate in their quarrel, desired to maintain peace in the Balkans and, together with Italy, invited the two States to confer at Vienna, where, at their request, she proclaimed the Vienna arbitration award of Aug. 30, 1940.

This defined the new frontier between Hungary and Rumania and, in order to enable the Rumanian Government to justify before their people territorial sacrifices which they made and to eliminate any quarrels in this area for the future, Germany and Italy undertook to guarantee the remaining Rumanian State.

As Russian aspirations in this area had been satisfied, this guarantee could never be taken as directed against Russia. The Soviet Union nevertheless complained and stated that, contrary to former declarations according to which its aspirations in the Balkans had been satisfied by occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, it had further interests in Balkan questions, though for the time being those were not further defined.

Soviet Russia’s anti-German policy began from that time to become steadily more apparent. The Reich Government kept on receiving more and more definite news, according to which negotiations which had been carried on for some time in Moscow by British Ambassador Cripps were developing favorably. The Reich Government at the same time came into possession of proof of the Soviet Union’s intensive military preparations in every sphere.

These proofs are, among other things, confirmed by a report recently found in Belgrade by the Yugoslav military attaché to Moscow, dated Feb. 17, 1940, which reads literally: “According to information received from Soviet sources, armaments for the air force, tank corps and artillery in accordance with experiences of the present war are in full progress and will, in the main, have been completed by August, 1941. This probably also constitutes a time limit before which no appreciable changes in the Soviet’s foreign policy can be expected.”

Despite the unfriendly attitude of the U.S.S.R. over the Balkan question, Germany made a fresh effort to come to an understanding with the Soviet Union: the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a letter to Stalin, gave a comprehensive survey of the policy of the Reich Government since the negotiations in Moscow. The letter referred in particular to the following points:

When the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan was concluded it was unanimously agreed this pact in no sense was directed against the Soviet Union, but that friendly relations of the three powers and their treaties with the U.S.S.R. should remain completely unaffected by the pact. This was also placed on record in the Tripartite Pact of Berlin.

At the same time the letter expressed the desire and hope that it might prove possible jointly to clarify still further friendly relations with the U.S.S.R. desired by the signatories to the Tripartite Pact and to give such relations concrete form. In order to discuss these questions more fully, the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs invited Molotoff to visit Berlin.

During Molotoff’s visit to Berlin the Reich Government was forced to the conclusion that the U.S.S.R. was inclined toward genuinely friendly cooperation with the signatories of the Tripartite Pact and with Germany in particular, provided the latter were prepared to pay the price demanded by the Soviet Union. This price was to take the shape of further penetration of the Soviet Union into North and Southeast Europe.

The following demands were made by Molotoff in Berlin and in subsequent diplomatic conversations with the German Ambassador in Moscow:

1. The Soviet Union desired to give a guarantee to Bulgaria and, above this, to conclude with her a pact of assistance on the same lines as those concluded with the Baltic states-i.e., providing for military bases.

At the same time Molotoff declared he did not wish to interfere with the internal regime of Bulgaria. A visit of Russian Commissar Soboleff to Sofia at that time was likewise undertaken with the object of realizing this intention.

2. The Soviet Union demanded an agreement in the form of a treaty with Turkey for the purpose of providing, on the basis of a long-time lease, a base, for Soviet land and naval forces on the Bosporus and in the Dardanelles. In case Turkey should not agree to this proposal, Germany and Italy were to cooperate with Russia in diplomatic steps to be undertaken to enforce compliance with this demand. These demands were aimed at the domination of the Balkans by the U.S.S.R.

3. The Soviet Union declares that once more it felt itself threatened by Finland and therefore demanded complete abandonment of Finland by Germany, which, in actual fact, would have amounted to occupation of this state and extermination of the Finnish people.

Germany naturally was unable to accept these Russian demands designated by the Soviet Government as a primary condition for cooperation with the signatories to the Tripartite Pact. Thus the latter’s efforts to come to an understanding with the Soviet Union failed.

In consequence the attitude adopted by Germany was that the U.S.S.R. now had intensified a policy more openly directed against Germany and that its increasingly close cooperation with Britain was clearly revealed.

In January, 1941, this antagonistic attitude on the part of Russia first showed in the diplomatic sphere. When that month Germany adopted certain measures in Bulgaria against the landing of British troops in Greece the Russian Ambassador in Berlin pointed out in an official démarche that the Soviet Union regarded Bulgarian territory and the two straits as the security zone for the U.S.S.R. and that it could not remain a passive spectator of events taking place in these territories which amounted to a menace for the interests of such security. For this reason the Soviet Government issued a warning with regard to the appearance of German troops on Bulgarian territory or on that of either of the two straits.

Thereupon the Reich Government furnished the Soviet Government with exhaustive information about the causes and aims of their military measures in the Balkans.

They made it clear Germany would prevent, with every means of her power, any attempt on the part of Britain to gain a foothold in Greece, but that she had no intention of occupying the straits and would respect Turkish sovereignty and territory. The passage of German troops through Bulgaria could not be regarded as an encroachment on the Soviet Union’s security interests; on the contrary, the Reich’s Government believed they were serving Soviet interests by those operations. After carrying through her operations in the Balkans, Germany withdrew her troops from there.

Despite the declaration on the part of the Reich Government, the Soviet Government for their part published a declaration addressed to Bulgaria directly after the entry of German troops into that country which manifested a character clearly hostile to the German Reich and said in effect that the presence of German troops in Bulgaria was not conducive to the peace of the Balkans, but rather to war.

An explanation of this attitude was found by the Reich Government in incoming information, steadily increasing in volume, about growing collaboration between Soviet Russia and Britain. Even in the face of these facts, Germany remained silent.

Along the same lines was the assurance given in March, 1941, that Russia would not attack Turkey in event of the latter’s joining in war on the Balkans. This, according to information in possession of the Reich Government, was the result of Anglo-Russian negotiations during the visit of the British Foreign Secretary in Ankara, who thereby aimed at drawing Russia closer to the British camp.

The aggressive policy of the Soviet Union toward the German Reich, which steadily was becoming more pronounced ever since this time, as well as the hitherto somewhat discreet political cooperation between the Soviet Union and Britain became, however, patent to the whole world on the outbreak of the Balkan crisis at the beginning of April.

It is today fully established that the Putsch instigated by Britain in Belgrade after Yugoslavia had joined the Tripartite Pact was started with the connivance of Soviet Russia. A long time before, in fact since Nov. 19, 1940, Russia had secretly assisted Yugoslavia in arming against the Axis powers. Documents which fell into the hands of the Reich Government after the occupation of Belgrade revealing every phase of these Russian deliveries of arms in Yugoslavia give decisive proof of this.

Once the Belgrade Putsch had succeeded Russia on April 5 concluded a friendly agreement with the illegal Serbian Government of General Simovitch which was to lend moral support to the Putschists and with its weight assist the growing Anglo-Yugoslav-Greek front.

Evident satisfaction was expressed on this occasion by American Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles when he stated on April 6, 1941, after several conversations with the Soviet Ambassador in Washington that “the Russo-Yugoslav Pact might, under certain circumstances, be of the greatest importance. It is attracting interest in many quarters and there are grounds for assuming it will be more than a mere pact of friendship and non-aggression.

Thus, at the same time when German troops were being concentrated on Rumanian and Bulgarian territory against growing landings of British troops in Greece, the Soviet, now obviously in concerted action with the British, was attempting to stab Germany in the back by:

1. Giving Yugoslavia open political and secret military support.

2. Attempting to move Turkey to adopt an aggressive attitude toward Bulgaria and Germany by guaranteeing not to attack her and to concentrate her army in a very unfavorable strategic position in Thrace.

3. Herself concentrating a strong force on the Rumanian frontier in Bessarabia and in Moldavia, and

4. The sudden attempt early in April of Vyshinski, Deputy Peoples’ Commissar in the Foreign Commissariat, in his conversations with Gafencu, Rumanian Minister in Moscow, to inaugurate a policy of rapid rapprochement with Rumania in order to persuade that country to break away from Germany.

British diplomacy through the intermediary of the Americans was making efforts in the same direction in Bucharest.

According to the Anglo-Russian plan, German troops concentrated in Rumania and Bulgaria were to have been attacked from three sides, namely Bessarabia and Thrace and from the Serbian-Greek frontier.

It solely was due to the loyalty of General Antonescu’s realistic policy, followed by the Turkish Government and, above all, to the rapid German initiative and decisive victories of the German Army, that this Anglo-Russian plan was frustrated.

According to information in the hands of the Reich Government, almost 200 Yugoslav aircraft carrying Soviet Russian and British agents as well as Serbian parachutists led by Simitch were flown off, partly to Russia-these officers are today serving in the Russian Army-and partly to Egypt. This fact alone throws a particularly characteristic light upon the close collaboration between Britain, Russia and Yugoslavia.

In vain the Soviet Government tried on various occasions to veil the real intentions underlying their policy. Besides maintaining economic relations with Germany even during the last stage, they adopted a succession of measures to deceive the world into thinking they were maintaining normal, even friendly, relations with Germany.

Instances of this, for example, are requests to leave that they addressed a few weeks ago to diplomatic representatives of Norway, Belgium, Greece and Yugoslavia, silence observed by the British press about German-Russian relations, acting under instructions of Sir Stafford Cripps, British Ambassador, who was in agreement with the Russian Government, and finally the dementi recently published by the Tass Agency in which relations between Germany and the Soviet Union were described as completely correct.

These attempts at camouflage, which stand in such flagrant contrast to the real policy of the Soviet Government, naturally did not succeed in deceiving the Reich Government.

The anti-German policy of the Soviet Government was accompanied in the military sphere by steadily increasing concentration of all available Russian armed forces on the long front extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Already at the time when Germany was deeply engaged in the west in the campaign against France and when only a few German detachments were stationed in the east, the Russian High Command began systematically to transfer large bodies of troops to their eastern frontiers with the Reich, marked mass movements being noticed along the East Prussian frontier and that of the Government-General, as also in Bukovina and Bessarabia, opposite Rumania.

Russian garrisons facing Finland continually were being reinforced. Constant transfers of more and more fresh Russian divisions from the Far East and the Caucasus to Western Russia were further measures of a similar kind. After the Soviet Government had declared originally that the Baltic area, for instance, would only be occupied by troops, they proceeded to concentrate in this area, after military occupation had been completed, masses of additional troops, their number today being estimated at twenty-two divisions.

It was obvious that Russian troops were advancing ever closer to the German frontier, although no military measures had been adopted on the German side which might justify such action on the part of the U.S.S.R. It is this action on the part of the Soviet Union which first compelled German armed forces to adopt counter-measures.

Various units of the Russian Army and Air Force moved closer and closer in the direction of the frontier and strong detachments of the air force were posted on airdromes along German boundaries. Since the beginning of April more frontier violations also have taken place and a steadily increasing number of incursions over Reich territory by Russian aircraft have been observed.

According to reports from the Rumanian Government, similar occurrences have been observed on the Rumanian frontier in the area of Bukovina and along Moldavia and the Danube.

Since the beginning of the current year the German High Command has repeatedly attracted attention of the Foreign Office to the steadily increasing menace which the Russian Army presents for Reich territory, emphasizing at the same time that only aggressive intentions could account for the troop concentrations. The communications from the German High Command will be published in detail.

If the slightest doubts about the aggressive intentions of this Russian concentration could still be entertained, they have been completely dispelled by news which reached the German High Command during the past few days.

Now that the Russian general mobilization is complete, no less than 160 divisions are concentrated facing Germany. Observations made during the past few days have shown that grouping of Russian troops, and especially of motorized and armored units, has been carried out in such a way as to allow the Russian High Command at any moment to make an aggressive advance on the German frontier at various points.

Reports about increased reconnaissance patrol activity as well as accounts received daily of incidents on the frontier and outpost skirmishes between the two armies complete the picture of an extremely strained military situation which may at any moment reach the breaking point.

News received today from England about negotiations by Sir Stafford Cripps, with the view of establishing still closer collaboration between the political and military leaders of Britain and the U.S.S.R., together with the appeal by Lord Beaverbrook, one-time enemy of the Soviet regime, to support Russia in the oncoming conflict by every available means and his exhortation to the United States to do the same, show unambiguously what kind of a fate it is desired to prepare for the German nation.

Summarizing the foregoing points the Reich Government wish therefore to make the following declaration:

Contrary to all engagements which they have undertaken in absolute contradiction to their solemn declarations, the Soviet Government have turned against Germany. They have:

1. Not only continued but, even since the outbreak of war, intensified subversive activities against Germany and Europe; they have

2. In continually increasing measure, developed their foreign policy in a tendency hostile to Germany; and they have

3. Massed their entire forces on the German frontier ready for action.

The Soviet Government have thus violated treaties and broken their agreements with Germany.

Bolshevist Moscow’s hatred of National Socialism was stronger than its political wisdom.

Bolshevism is opposed to National Socialism in deadly enmity.

Bolshevist Moscow is about to stab National Socialist Germany in the back while she is engaged in a struggle for her existence.

Germany has no intention of remaining inactive in the face of this grave threat to her eastern frontier.

The Fuehrer has, therefore, ordered German forces to oppose this menace with all the might at their disposal.

In the coming struggle the German people are fully aware that they are called upon not only to defend their native land but to save the entire civilized world from the deadly dangers of bolshevism and clear the way for true social progress in Europe.

USSR

Sumner Welles, Acting Secretary of State

Letter to the Ambassador of the USSR

August 2, 1941 [Department of State Bulletin, August 9, 1941]

MY DEAR MR. AMBASSADOR:

I am pleased to inform you that the Government of the United States has decided to give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression. This decision has been prompted by the conviction of the Government of the United States that the strengthening of the armed resistance of the Soviet Union to the predatory attack of an aggressor who is threatening the security and independence not only of the Soviet Union but also of all other nations is in the interest of the national defense of the United States.

In accordance with this decision of the Government of the United States and in order to implement the policy enunciated above, the Government of the United States is giving the most friendly consideration to requests from the Government, institutions, or agencies of the Soviet Union relative to the placing in this country of orders for articles and materials urgently required for the needs of the national defense of the Soviet Union and, for the purpose of promoting the speedy completion and delivery of such articles, is extending to these orders priority assistance upon the principles applicable to the orders of countries struggling against aggression.

In order to facilitate the extension of economic assistance to the Soviet Union, the Department of State is also issuing unlimited licenses permitting the export to the Soviet Union of a wide variety of articles and materials needed for the strengthening of the defense of that country, in accordance with the principles applicable to the furnishing of such articles and materials as are needed for the same purpose by other countries resisting aggression.

The appropriate authorities of the Government of the United States, in pursuance of the decision to which I have above referred, are also giving their favorable consideration to requests for the extension of available American shipping facilities for the purpose of expediting the shipment to the Soviet Union of articles and materials needed for the national defense of that country.

I am, etc.

SUMNER WELLES.

Constantine A. Oumansky, Soviet Ambassador to the USA

Letter to the American Acting Secretary of State

August 2, 1941

MY DEAR MR. ACTING SECRETARY:

I am pleased to take notice of the contents of your communication of this date in which you informed me that the Government of the United States has decided to give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression. You add that this decision has been prompted by the conviction of the Government of the United States that the strengthening of the armed resistance of the Soviet Union to the predatory attack of an aggressor who is threatening the security and independence not only of the Soviet Union but also of all other nations is in the interest of the national defense of the United States.

On behalf of my Government, I wish to emphasize the correctness of the view that the aggressor who has treacherously invaded my country is threatening the security and independence of all freedom loving nations and that this threat naturally creates a community of interest of national defense of those nations. My Government has directed me to express to the Government of the United States its gratitude for the friendly decision of the Government of the United States and its confidence that the economic assistance you refer to in your note will be of such scope and carried out with such expedition as to correspond to the magnitude of the military operations in which the Soviet Union is engaging, in offering armed resistance to the aggressor — a resistance which, as you so justly observed, is also in the interest of the national defense of the United States.

I am also pleased to note your statement that:

“In accordance with this decision of the Government of the United States and in order to implement the policy enunciated above, the Government of the United States is giving the most friendly consideration to requests from the Government, institutions, or agencies of the Soviet Union relative to the placing in this country of orders for articles and materials urgently required for the needs of the national defense of the Soviet Union and, for the purpose of promoting the speedy completion and delivery of such articles and materials, is extending to these orders priority assistance upon the principles applicable to the orders of countries struggling against aggression.

“In order to facilitate the extension of economic assistance to the Soviet Union, the Department of State is also issuing unlimited licenses permitting the export to the Soviet Union of a wide variety of articles and materials needed for the strengthening of the defense of that country, in accordance with the principles applicable to the furnishing of such articles and materials as are needed for the same purpose by other countries resisting aggression.

“The appropriate authorities of the Government of the United States, in pursuance of the decision to which I have above referred, are also giving their favorable consideration to requests for the extension of available American shipping facilities for the purpose of expediting the shipment to the Soviet Union of articles and materials needed for the national defense of that country.”

I am [etc.]

CONSTANTINE A. OUMANSKY.

Reichführer Adolf Hitler

Declaration of War against the U.S.A.

December 11, 1941

Deputies, Men of the German Reichstag!

A year of events of historical significance is drawing to an end. A year of the greatest decisions lies ahead. In these serious times, I speak to you, Deputies of the German Reichstag, as to the representatives of the German nation. Beyond and above that, the whole German people should take note of this glance into the past, as well as of the coming decisions the present and future impose upon us.

After the renewed refusal of my peace offer in January 1940 by the then British Prime Minister and the clique which supported or else dominated him, it became clear that this war — against all reasons of common, sense and necessity — must be fought to its end. You know me, my old Party companions: you know I have always been an enemy of half measures or weak decisions. If the Providence has so willed that the German people cannot be spared this fight, then I can only be grateful that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next 500 or 1,000 years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world. The German people and their soldiers are working and fighting today, not only for the present, but for the coming, nay the most distant, generations. A historical revision on a unique scale has been imposed on us by the Creator.

Shortly after the end of the campaign in Norway, the German Command was forced, first of all, to ensure the military security of the conquered areas. Since then the defences of the conquered countries have changed considerably. From Kirkenes to the Spanish Frontier there is a belt of great bases and fortifications; many airfields have been built, naval bases and protections for submarines which are practically invulnerable from sea or air. More than 1,500 new batteries have been planned and constructed. A network of roads and railways was constructed so that today communications from the Spanish Frontier to Petsamo are independent of the sea. These installations in no wise fall behind those of the Western Wall, and work continues incessantly on strengthening them. I am irrevocably determined to make the European Front unassailable by any enemy.

This defensive work was supplemented by offensive warfare. German surface and underwater naval Forces carried on their constant war of attrition against the British Merchant Navy and the ships in its service. The German Air Force supported these attacks by reconnaissance, by damaging enemy shipping, by numerous retaliatory raids which have given the English a better idea of the so charming war caused by their present Prime Minister.

In the middle of last year Germany was supported above all by Italy. For many months a great part of British power weighed on the shoulders of Italy. Only because of their tremendous superiority in heavy tanks could the English create a temporary crisis in North Africa. On 24th March a small community of German-Italian units under Rommel’s command began the counter-attack. The German Africa Corps performed outstanding achievements though they were completely unaccustomed to the climate of this theatre of war. Just as once in Spain, now in North Africa Germans and Italians have taken up arms against the same enemy.

While in these bold measures the North African Front was again secured by the blood of German and Italian soldiers, the shadow of a terrible danger threatening Europe gathered overhead. Only in obedience to bitter necessity did I decide in my heart in 1939, to make the attempt, at least, to create the pre-requisites for a lasting peace in Europe by eliminating the causes of German-Russian tension. This was psychologically difficult owing to the general attitude of the German people, and above all, of the Party, towards Bolshevism. It was not difficult from a purely material point of view — because Germany was only intent on her economic interests in all the territories which England declared to be threatened by us and which she attacked with her promises of aid — for you will allow me to remind you that England, throughout the spring and late summer of 1939, offered its aid to numerous countries, declaring that it was our intention to invade those countries and thus deprive them of their liberty. The German Reich and its Government were therefore able to affirm, with a clear conscience, that these allegations were false and had no bearing whatsoever on reality. Add to this the military realization that in case of war, which British diplomacy was to force on the German people, a two front war would ensue and call for very great sacrifice.

When, on top of all this, the Baltic States and Rumania showed themselves prone to accept the British Pacts of assistance and thus let it be seen that they, too, believed in such a threat, it was not only the right of the Reich Government, but its duty to fix the limits of German interests. The countries in question, and above all, the Reich Government, could not but realize that the only factor which could be a buttress against the East was Germany. The moment they severed their connection with the German Reich, and entrusted their fate to the aid of that Power which, in its proverbial selfishness, has never rendered aid, but always requested it, they were lost. Yet the fate of these countries roused the sympathy of the German people. The winter struggle of the Finns forced on us a feeling mixed with bitterness and admiration. Admiration because we have a heart sensitive to sacrifice and heroism, being a nation of soldiers ourselves: bitterness, because with our eyes fixed on the menacing enemy in the West, and on the danger in the East, we were not in a position to render military assistance. As soon as it became evident that Soviet Russia deduced the right to wipe out the nations living outside the limits of the German sphere of interest, as a result of that limitation of interests our subsequent relations were merely governed by utilitarian considerations, while our reason and feelings were hostile.

With every month I became more convinced that the plans of the men in Kremlin aimed at domination and annihilating all Europe. I have had to submit to the nation the full extent of the Russian military preparations. At a time when Germany had only a few divisions in the provinces bordering on Russia it would have been evident to a blind man that a concentration of power of singular and world historic dimensions was taking place, and that not in order to defend something which was threatened, but merely in order to attack an object it did not seem possible to defend. The lightning conclusion of the Western campaign, however, robbed the Moscow overlords of their hope of an early flagging of German power. This did not alter their intentions — it merely led to a postponement of the date on which they intended to strike. In the summer of 1941 they thought the time was ripe. A new Mongolian storm was now to sweep Europe. At the same time, however, Mr. Churchill spoke on the English aspect of the struggle with Germany. He saw fit, in a cowardly manner, to deny that in the secret session of 1940 in the House of Commons that he pointed out that the entry of Russians into the war which was to come in 1941 at the very latest, was the most important factor which would make a successful conclusion of the war possible. This was also to enable England to take the offensive. In the spring of that year, Europe was to feel the full extent of the might of a world power which seemed to dispose of inexhaustible human material and resources. Dark clouds began to gather on the European sky. For, my Deputies, what is Europe? There is no fitting geographical definition of our Continent, but only a national and cultural one.

Not the Urals form the frontier of our Continent, but the eternal line which divides the Eastern and Western conceptions of life. There was a time when Europe was that Greek Island into which Nordic tribes had penetrated in order to light a torch for the first time which from then onwards began slowly, but surely to brighten the world of man. When these Greeks repulsed the invasion of the Persian conquerors they did not only defend their homeland, which was Greece, but that idea which we call Europe today. And then Europe traveled from Hellas to Rome. With the Greek spirit and Greek culture, the Roman way of thinking and Roman statesmanship were joined. An Empire was created which, to this day has not been equaled in its significance and creative power, let alone outdone. When, however the Roman legions were defending Rome against the African onslaught of Carthage and at last gained a victory, again it was not Rome they were fighting for, but the Europe of that time, which consisted of the Greek-Roman world.

The next incursion against this homestead of European culture was carried out from the distant East. A terrible stream of barbarous, uncultured hordes sallied forth from the interior of Asia deep into the hearts of the European Continent, burning, looting, murdering-a true scourge of the Lord. In the battle of the Catalonian fields the West? was formed. On the ruins of Rome the West was built, and its defence was a task, not only of the Romans, but also above all of the Teutons. In centuries to come the West, enlightened by Greek culture, built the Roman Empire and then expanded by the colonization of the Teutons was able to call itself Europe. Whether it was the German Emperor who was repelling the attacks from the East on the Field of Lech or whether Africa was being pushed back from Spain in long fighting, it was also a struggle of Europe, coming into being, against a surrounding world alien in its very essence. Once Rome had been given its due for the creative defense of this continent, Teutons took over the defense and the protection of a family of nations which might still differentiate and differ in their political structure and objective, but which nevertheless represented a cultural unity with blood ties. And it was from this Europe that a spiritual and cultural abundance went out, of which everyone must be aware who is willing to seek truth instead of denying it.

Thus it was not England who brought culture to the Continent, but the offspring of Teutonic nationhood on the Continent who went as Anglo-Saxons and Normans to that Island made possible a development in a way surely unique. In just the same way, it was not America who discovered Europe, but the other way around. And everything which America has not drawn from Europe may well appear worthy of admiration to a judaised, mixed race; Europe, on the other hand, sees in it a sign of cultural decay.

Deputies and Men of the German Reichstag, I had to make this survey, for the fight which, in the first months of this year, gradually began to become clear, and of which the German Reich is this time called to be the leader also far exceeds the interests of our nation and country. Just as the Greeks once faced the Persians in war, and the Romans faced the Mongolians, the Spanish heroes defended not only Spain, but the whole of Europe against Africa, just so Germany is fighting today, not for herself, but for the entire Continent. And it is a fortunate symptom that this realization is today so deep in the subconscious of most European nations that, whether by taking up their position openly or whether by the stream of volunteers, they are sharing in this struggle.

When, on the 6th of April of this year, the German and Italian Armies took up their positions for the fight against Yugoslavia and Greece, it was the introduction of the great struggle in which we are still involved. The revolt in Belgrade which led to the overthrow of the former Regent and his Government was decisive for the further course of events in this part of Europe, for England was also a party to this putsch. But the chief role was played by Soviet Russia. What I refused to Mr. Molotov on his visit to Berlin, Stalin now thought he could achieve by a revolutionary movement, even against our will. Without consideration for the agreements which had been concluded, the intentions of the Bolsheviks in power grew still wider. The Pact of Friendship with the new revolutionary regime illuminated the closeness of the threatening danger like lightning.

The feats achieved by the German Armed Forces were given worthy recognition in the German Reichstag on the 4th of May. But what I was then unfortunately unable to express was the realization that we were progressing at tremendous speed toward a fight with a State which was not yet intervening because it was not yet fully prepared, and because it was impossible to use the aerodromes and landing grounds at that time of year on account of the melting snow.

My deputies, when in 1940 I realized from communication in the English House of Commons and the observation of the Russian troop movements on our frontiers that there was the possibility of danger arising in the East of the Reich, I immediately gave orders to set up numerous new armoured motorised infantry divisions. The conditions for this were available from the point of view both of material and personnel. I will give you, my Deputies, and indeed the whole German people, only one assurance: the more the democracies speak much about armaments, as is easily understandable, the more National Socialist Germany works. It was so in the past, it is not different today. Every year brings us increased, and above all, improved weapons, there where decisions will be made. In spite of my determination under no circumstances to allow our opponent to make the first stab in our heart — in spite of that my decision was a very difficult one. If democratic newspapers today declare that, had I known the strength of our Bolshevik opponent more accurately, I would have hesitated to attack, they understand the position just a little as they understand me. I sought no war. On the contrary I did everything to avoid it. But I would have been forgetful of my duty and responsibility if, in spite of realizing the inevitability of a fight by force of arms, I had failed to draw the only possible conclusions. In view of the mortal danger from Soviet Russia, not only to the German Reich, but to all Europe, I decided, if possible a few days before the outbreak of this more struggle, to give the signal to attack myself.

Today, we have overwhelming and authentic proof that Russia intended to attack; we are also quite clear about the date on which the attack was to take place. In view of the great danger, the proportions of which we realise perhaps only today to the fullest extent, I can only thank God that He enlightened me at the proper time and that He gave me the strength to do what had to be done!

To this, not only millions of German soldiers owe their lives, but Europe its very existence. This much I may state today: had this wave of over 20,000 tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of guns, accompanied by more than 10,000 aircraft, suddenly moved against the Reich, Europe would have been lost. Fate has destined a number of nations to forestall this attack, to ward it off with the sacrifice of their blood. Had Finland not decided immediately to take up arms for the second time, the leisurely bourgeois life of the other Nordic countries would soon have come to an end.

Had the German Reich not faced the enemy with her soldiers and arms, a flood would have swept over Europe, which once and for all would have finished the ridiculous British idea of maintaining the European balance of power in all its senselessness and stupid tradition. Had Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians not taken over part of the protection of this European world, the Bolshevik hordes would have swept like Attila’s Huns over the Danubian countries, and at the cost of the Ionic Sea, Tartars and Mongols would have enforced today the revision of the Montreux Agreement. Had Italy, Spain and Croatia not sent their divisions, the establishment of a European defense Front would have been impossible, from which emanated the idea of the New Europe as propaganda to all other nations.

Sensing and realising this, the volunteers have come from Northern and Western Europe, Norwegians, Danes, Dutchmen, Flemings, Belgians, even Frenchmen-volunteers who gave the struggle of the United Powers of the Axis the character of a European crusade — in the truest sense of the world.

The time has not yet come to talk about the planning and the conduct of this campaign, but I believe that I may sketch in a few sentences what has been achieved in this most gigantic of all struggles, in which memories of the various impressions might so easily fade because of the vastness of the space and the great number of important events.

The attack began on 22nd of June; with irresistible daring the frontier fortifications which were destined to secure the Russian advance against us were broken through and on the 23rd Grodno fell. On the 24th Vilna and Kovoo were taken after Brest-Litovsk had been occupied. On the 26th Duenaburg was in our hands and on 10th July, the first two great pincer battles of Bialystok and Minsk were concluded: 324,000 prisoners, 3,332 tanks and 1,809 guns fell to us. Already, on 13th July, the Stalin Line was broken through on all important points. On the 16th Smolensk fell after heavy fighting, and on the 19th German and Rumanian formations forced the crossing of the Dniester. On the 6th of August, the Battle of Smolensk was concluded in many pockets and again 310,000 Russians fell into German captivity, while 3,205 tanks and 3,120 guns were destroyed or captured. Only three days later the fate of another Russian Army group was sealed and on 9th August another 103,000 Russians were taken prisoner in the Battle of Ouman; 317 tanks and 1,100 guns destroyed or captured. On 17th August Nicolaeff was taken, on the 21st, Kherson. On the same day the Battle of Gomel was concluded with 84,000 prisoners taken and 124 tanks, as well as 808 guns captured or destroyed. On the 21st August, the Russian positions between Lakes Peipus and Ilmen were broken through and on the 26th the bridgehead at Dniepropetrovsk fell into our hands. On 28th August German troops marched into Reval and Boltisk Port after heavy fighting, while on the 30th the Finns took Viipuri. By conquering Schluesselburg on the 8th September, Leningrad was finally cut off, also from the South. On 6th September we succeeded in establishing bridgeheads on the Dnieper and on the 8th Poltava fell into our hands. On 9th September German formations stormed the citadel of Kiev and the occupation of Oesel was crowned by taking the Capital. Only now the greatest operations matured into the expected successes; on 27th September the Battle of Kiev was concluded; 665,000 prisoners began to move westwards, 884 tanks and 3,178 guns remained as booty in the pockets. As early as 2nd October the break-through battle on the Central Front began, while on 11th October the battle on the Sea of Azov was successfully concluded; again 107,000 prisoners, 212 tanks and 672 guns were counted. On 16th October, German and Rumanian troops marched into Odessa after hard fighting. On 8th October the break-through battle on the Central Front was concluded with a new success, unique in history, when 663,000 prisoners were only part of its results; 1,242 tanks and 5,452 guns were either destroyed or captured. On 31st October, the conquest of Dagoo was concluded.

On 24th October, the industrial centre of Kharkov was taken. On 28th October, the entrance of the Crimea was finally forced at great speed, and on 2nd November already the capital Sinferopol was taken by storm. On 6th November we had pierced through the Crimea up to Kerch.

On 1st December, the total number of Soviet prisoners amounted to 3,806,865; the number of tanks destroyed or captured was 21,391, that of guns, 32,541 and that of aeroplanes, 17,322. During the same period 2,191 British planes were shot-down. The Navy sank 4,170,611 g.r.t. of British shipping, the air force 2,346,080 g.r.t.; a total of 6,516,791 g.r.t. was thus destroyed. [Note: Figures checked, as they do not tally.]

My Deputies, my German people, those are sober facts or perhaps dry figures. Yet, may they never disappear from the history and, above all from the memory and the consciousness, of our own German people. For behind those figures are hidden the achievements, the sacrifices, the privations, the everlasting heroic courage and the readiness to die of millions of the best men of our own nation and of the States allied to us.

All this had to be fought for by my staking health and life and by effort of which those at home can hardly have an idea. Marching for an endless distance, tormented by heat and thirst, often held up by the mud of bottomless roads which would drive them almost to despair, exposed, from the Black Sea to the Arctic Sea, to the inhospitability of a climate which from the blazing heat of the July and August days, dropped to the wintry storms of November and December, tortured by insects, suffering from dirt and vermin, freezing in snow and ice, they have fought — the Germans and the Finns, Italians, Slovaks, Hungarians and Rumanians, the Croats, the volunteers from the North and West European countries, all in all the soldiers of the Eastern Front.

The beginning of winter only will now check this movement; at the beginning of summer it will again no longer be possible to stop the movement. On this day I do not want to mention any individual section of the Armed Forces, I do not want to praise any particular command; they have all made a supreme effort. And yet, understanding and justice compel me to state one thing again and again; amongst our German soldiers the heaviest burden is born today, as in the past, by our matchless German infantry

From 22nd June to 1st December the German Army lost in this heroic fight 158,773 killed, 563,082 wounded and 31,191 missing. The Air Force lost 3,231 killed, 8,453 wounded and 2,028 missing. The Navy lost 210 killed, 232 wounded and 115 missing. The total losses of the armed forces are thus 162,314 killed, 571,767 wounded and 33,334 missing. [Note: The figures for soldiers killed do not tally.] That is to say, in killed and wounded slightly more than the field of death of the Somme Battle, in missing a little less than half those missing at that time. But all fathers and sons of our German people.

And now permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representative in that man, who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war. When in 1939 the conditions of our national interest in the then Polish State became more and more intolerable, I tried at first to eliminate those intolerable conditions by way of a peaceful settlement. For some time it seemed as though the Polish Government itself had seriously considered to agree to a sensible settlement. I may add that in German proposals nothing was demanded that had not been German property in former times. On the contrary, we renounced very much of what, before the World War, had been German property. You will recall the dramatic development of that time, in which the sufferings of German nationals increased continuously. You, my deputies, are in the best position to gauge the extent of the blood sacrifice, if you compare it to the casualties of the present war. The campaign in the East has so far cost the German armed forces about 160,000 killed; but in the midst of peace more than 62,000 Germans were killed during those months, some under the most cruel tortures. It could hardly be contested that the German Reich had had a right to object to such conditions on its Frontiers and to demand that they should cease to exist and that it was entitled to think of its own safety; this could hardly be contested at a time when other countries were seeking elements of their safety even in foreign continents. The problems which had to be overcome were of no territorial significance. Mainly they concerned Danzig and the union with the Reich of the torn-off province, East Prussia. More difficult were the cruel persecutions the Germans were exposed to, in Poland particularly. The other minorities, incidentally, had to suffer a fate hardly less bitter.

When in August the attitude of Poland — thanks to the carte blanche guarantee received from England — became still stiffer, the Government of the Reich found it necessary to submit, for the last time, a proposal on the basis of which we were willing to enter into negotiations with Poland-negotiations of which we fully and completely apprised the then British Ambassador. I may recall these proposals today: “Proposal for the settlement of the problem of the Danzig Corridor and of the question of the German-Polish minorities. The situation between the German Reich and Poland has become so strained that any further incident may lead to a clash between the Armed Forces assembled on both sides. Any peaceful settlement must be so arranged that the events mainly responsible for the existing situation cannot occur again — a situation which has caused a state of tension, not only in Eastern Europe, but also in other regions. The cause of this situation lies in the impossible Frontiers laid down by the Versailles dictate and the inhuman treatment of the German minorities in Poland. I am now going to read the proposals in question. [Hitler then proceeded to read the first 12 points of these proposals.] The same goes for the proposals for safeguarding the minorities. This is the offer of an agreement such as could not have been made in a more loyal and magnanimous form by any government other than the National Socialist Government of the German Reich.

The Polish Government at that period refused even as much as to consider this proposal. The question then arises: how could such an unimportant State dare simply to refuse an offer of this nature and furthermore, not only indulge in further atrocities to its German inhabitants who had given that country the whole of its culture, but even order mobilization? Perusal of documents of the Foreign Office in Warsaw has given us later some surprising explanations. There was one man who, with devilish lack of conscience, used all his influence to further the warlike intentions of Poland and to eliminate all possibilities of understanding. The reports which the then Polish Ambassador in Washington Count Potocki, sent to his Government are documents from which it may be seen with a terrifying clearness to what an extent one man alone and the forces driving him are responsible for the second World War. The question next arises, how could this man fall into such fanatical enmity toward a country which in the whole of its history has never done the least harm either to America or to him personally?

So far as Germany’s attitude towards America is concerned, I have to state: (i) Germany is perhaps the only great power which has never had a colony either in North or South America, or otherwise displayed there any political activity, unless mention be made of the emigration of many millions of Germans and of their work, which, however, has only been to the benefit of the American Continent and of the U.S.A. (ii) In the whole history of the coming into being and of the existence of the U.S.A. the German Reich has never adopted a politically unfriendly, let alone hostile attitude, but, on the contrary with the blood of many of its sons, it helped to defend the U.S.A. The German Reich never took part in any war against the U.S.A. It itself had war imposed upon it by the U.S.A. in 1917, and then for reasons which have been thoroughly revealed by an investigation committee set up by President Roosevelt himself. There are no other differences between the German and the American people, either territorial or political, which could possibly touch the interests let alone the existence of the U.S.A. There was always a difference of constitution, but that cannot be a reason for hostilities so long as the one state does not try to interfere with the other. America is a Republic, a Democracy, and today is a Republic under strong authoritative leadership. The ocean lies between the two States. The divergences between Capitalist America and Bolshevik Russia, if such conceptions had any truth in them, would be much greater than between America led by a President and Germany led by a Führer.

But it is a fact that the two conflicts between Germany and the U.S.A. were inspired by the same force and caused by two men in the U.S.A. — Wilson and Roosevelt. History has already passed its verdict on Wilson, his name stands for one of the basest breaches of the given word, that led to disruption not only among the so-called vanquished, but also among the victors. This breach of his word alone made possible the Dictate of Versailles. We know today that a group of interested financiers stood behind Wilson and made use of this paralytic professor because they hoped for increased business. The German people have had to pay for having believed this man with the collapse of their political and economic existence.

But why is there now another President of the U.S.A. who regards it as his only task to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of war? National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President. I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. I was only one of those who carry out orders, as an ordinary soldier, and naturally returned from the war just as poor as I was in Autumn 1914. I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand.

After the war Roosevelt tried his hand at financial speculation: he made profits out of the inflation, out of the misery of others, while I, together with many hundreds of thousands more, lay in hospital. When Roosevelt finally stepped on the political stage with all the advantages of his class, I was unknown and fought for the resurrection of my people. When Roosevelt took his place at the head of the U.S.A., he was the candidate of a Capitalist Party which made use of him: when I became Chancellor of the German Reich, I was the Führer of the popular movement I had created. The powers behind Roosevelt were those powers I had fought at home. The Brains Trust was composed of people such as we have fought against in Germany as parasites and removed from public life.

And yet there is something in common between us. Roosevelt took over a State in a very poor economic condition, and I took over a Reich faced with complete ruin, also thanks to Democracy. In the U.S.A. there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and in Germany 7,000,000 part-time workers. The finances of both States were in a bad way, and ordinary economic life could scarcely be maintained. A development then started in the U.S.A. and in the German Reich which will make it easy for posterity to pass a verdict on the correctness of the theories.

While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took place in Germany under National Socialist leadership within the space of a few years, President Roosevelt did not succeed in bringing about even the slightest improvements in his own country. And yet this work must have been much easier in the U.S.A. where there live scarcely 15 persons on a square kilometer, as against 140 in Germany. If such a country does not succeed in assuring economic prosperity, this must be a result either of the bad faith of its leaders in power, or of a total inefficiency on the part of the leading men. In scarcely five years, economic problems had been solved in Germany and unemployment had been overcome. During the same period, President Roosevelt had increased the State Debt of his country to an enormous extent, had decreased the value of the dollar, had brought about a further disintegration of economic life, without diminishing the unemployment figures. All this is not surprising if one bears in mind that the men he had called to support him, or rather, the men who had called him, belonged to the Jewish element, whose interests are all for disintegration and never for order. While speculation was being fought in National Socialist Germany, it thrived astoundingly under the Roosevelt regime.

Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation was all wrong: it was actually the biggest failure ever experienced by one man. There can be no doubt that a continuation of this economic policy would have done this president in peace time, in spite of all his dialectical skill. In a European State he would surely have come eventually before a State Court on a charge of deliberate waste of the national wealth; and he would have scarcely escaped at the hands of a Civil Court, on a charge of criminal business methods.

This fact was realized and fully appreciated also by many Americans including some of high standing. A threatening opposition was gathering over the head of this man. He guessed that the only salvation for him lay in diverting public attention from home to foreign policy. It is interesting to study in this connection the reports of the Polish Envoy in Washington, Potocki. He repeatedly points out that Roosevelt was fully aware of the danger threatening the card castle of his economic system with collapse, and that he was therefore urgently in need of a diversion in foreign policy. He was strengthened in this resolve by the Jews around him. Their Old Testament thirst for revenge thought to see in the U.S.A. an instrument for preparing a second “Purim” for the European nations which were becoming increasingly antisemitic. The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied round this man, and he stretched out his hands.

Thus began the increasing efforts of the American President to create conflicts, to do everything to prevent conflicts from being peacefully solved. For years this man harboured one desire — that a conflict should break out somewhere in the world. The most convenient place would be in Europe, where American economy could be committed to the cause of one of the belligerents in such a way that a political interconnection of interests would arise calculated slowly to bring America nearer such a conflict. This would thereby divert public interest from bankrupt economic policy at home towards foreign problems.

His attitude to the German Reich in this spirit was particularly sharp. In 1937, Roosevelt made a number of speeches, including a particularly mean one pronounced in Chicago on 5th October, 1937. Systematically he began to incite American public opinion against Germany. He threatened to establish a kind of Quarantine against the so-called Authoritarian States. While making these increasingly spiteful and inflammatory speeches, President Roosevelt summoned the American Ambassadors to Washington to report to him. This event followed some further declarations of an insulting character; and ever since, the two countries have been connected with each other only through Chargés d’Affaires.

From November 1938 onwards, his systematic efforts were directed towards sabotaging any possibility of an appeasement policy in Europe. In public, he was hypocritically pretending to be for peace; but at the same time he was threatening any country ready to pursue a policy of peaceful understanding with the freezing of assets, with economic reprisals, with demands for the repayment of loans, etc. Staggering information to this effect can be derived from the reports of Polish Ambassadors in Washington, London, Paris and Brussels.

In January, 1939, this man began to strengthen his campaign of incitement and threatened to take all possible Congressional measures against the Authoritarian States, with the exception of war. While alleging that other countries were trying to interfere in American affairs and insisting on the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine, he himself began from March 1939 onwards, to meddle in European affairs which were no concern at all of the President of the U.S.A., since he does not understand those problems, and even if he did understand them and the historic background behind them, he would have just as little right to worry about the central European area as the German Reich has to judge conditions in a U.S. State and to take an attitude towards them.

But Mr. Roosevelt went even farther. In contradiction to all the tenets of international law, he declared that he would not recognize certain Governments which did not suit him, would not accept readjustments, would maintain Legations of States dissolved long before or actually set them up as legal Governments. He even went so far as to conclude agreements with such Envoys, and thus to acquire a right simply to occupy foreign territories.

On 5th April, 1939, came Roosevelt’s famous appeal to myself and the Duce. It was a clumsy combination of geographical and political ignorance and of the arrogance of the millionaire circles around him. It asked us to give undertakings to conclude non-aggression pacts indiscriminately with any country, including mostly countries which were not even free, since Mr. Roosevelt’s allies had annexed them or changed them into Protectorates. You will remember, my Deputies, that I then gave a polite and clear reply to this meddling gentleman. For some months at least, this stopped the flow of eloquence from this honest warmonger. But his place was taken by his honourable spouse. She declined to live with her sons in a world such as the one we have worked out. And quite right, for this is a world of labour and not of cheating and trafficking.

After a little rest, the husband of that woman came back on the scene and on the 4th November, 1939, engineered the reversion of the Neutrality Law so as to suspend the ban on the export of arms, in favor of a one-sided delivery of arms to Germany’s opponents. He then begins, somewhat as in Asia and in China, but the roundabout way of an economic infiltration to establish a community of interests destined to become operative sooner or later. In the same month, he recognizes, as a so-called Government in exile, a gang of Polish emigrants, whose only political foundation was a few million gold coins taken with them from Warsaw. On the 9th of April he goes on and he orders the blocking of Norwegian and Danish assets under the lying pretext of placing them beyond the German reach, although he knows perfectly well that the Danish Government in its financial administration is not in anyway being interfered with, let alone controlled, by Germany. To the various exiled Governments recognized by him, the Norwegian is now added. On the 15th May, 1940, he recognizes the Dutch and Belgian emigre Governments. This is followed by blocking Dutch and Belgian assets. His true mentality then comes clearly to light in a telegram of 15th June to the French Prime Minister, Reynaud. He advises him that the American government will double its help to France, provided that France continues the war against Germany. So as to give still greater expression to this, his wish for a continuation of the war, he issues a, declaration that the American Government will not recognize the results of the conquest of territories — i.e., the restoration to Germany of lands which had been stolen from her. I don’t need to assure you, Members of the Reichstag, that it is a matter of complete indifference to every German Government whether the President of the U.S.A. recognizes the frontiers of Europe or not, and that this indifference will likewise continue, in the future. I merely quote this to illustrate the methodical incitement which has come from this man who speaks hypocritically of peace, but always urges to war.

But now he is seized with fear that if peace is brought about in Europe, his squandering of billions of money or armaments will be looked upon as plain fraud, since nobody will attack America-and he then himself must provoke this attack upon his country. On the 17th July, 1940, the American President orders the blocking of French assets with a view, as he puts it, to placing them beyond German reach, but really in order to transfer the French gold from Casablanca to America with the assistance of an American cruiser. In July 1940 he tries by enlisting American citizens in the British Air Force and by training British airmen in the U.S.A. to pave ever better the way to war. In August 1940, a military programme is jointly drawn up between the U.S.A. and Canada. To make the establishment of a Canadian-U.S. Defence Committee plausible — plausible at least to the biggest fools — he invents from time to time crises, by means of which he pretends that America is being threatened with aggression.

This he wishes to impress upon the American people by suddenly returning on the 3rd April to Washington with all speed on account of the alleged danger of the situation. In September 1940 he draws still nearer to the war. He turns over to the British Fleet 50 destroyers of the American Navy in return for which, to be sure, he takes over several British bases in North and South America.

From all these actions, it may be clearly seen how, with all his hatred for Socialist Germany, he forms the resolution of taking over, as safely and securely as possible, the British Empire in the moment of its downfall. Since England is no longer in the position to pay cash for all the American deliveries, he imposes the Lease-Lend Law on the American people. He thus receives powers to lend or lease support to countries, the defence of which may appear to him as vital in America’s interests. Then in (indistinct) 1941, as Germany cannot be made to react to any of his gestures, he takes yet a further step. As far back as the 9th December 1939, American (?cruisers) in the security zone handed over the German ship Columbus to the British ships. In the circumstances she had to be sunk (note: i.e. scuttled). On the same day, U.S. forces co-operated to prevent the attempted escape of the German steamer Arauca. On the 27th January, 1940, the U.S. cruiser (named, but indistinct) in contravention of International Law advised enemy naval forces of the movements of the German steamers, Arauca, La Plata and Mangoni. On the 27th June, 1940, he ordered, in complete contravention of International Law, a restriction of the freedom of movements of foreign ships in U.S. harbours. In November, 1940, he ordered the German ships Reugeu (?), Niederwald and Rhein to be shadowed by American ships until these steamers were compelled to scuttle themselves so as not to fall into enemy hands. On 30th April, 1941, followed the opening up of the Red Sea to U.S. ships, so that they could carry supplies to the British armies in the Near East. Meanwhile, in March, all German ships were requisitioned by the American authorities. In the course of this German nationals were treated in a most inhuman manner, and in contravention of all notions of international law certain places of residence were assigned them, travelling restrictions imposed upon them, and so on. Two German officers who had escaped from Canadian captivity, were-again contrary to all the dictates of international law-handcuffed and handed over to the Canadian authorities. 24th March the same President who stands against every aggression, acclaimed Simovitch [Chief of Aviation, Yugoslavia] and his companions who (gained their positions?) by aggression and by removing the lawful government of the country. Roosevelt some months before sent Colonel Donavan, a completely unworthy creature, to the Balkans, to Sofia and Belgrade, to engineer a rising against Germany and Italy.

In April, he promised help to Yugoslavia and Greece under the Lend-Lease Act. At the end of April, this man recognized the Yugoslav and Greek emigre governments, and once more against international law, blocked the Yugoslav and Greek assets. From the middle of April onwards, American watch over the Western Atlantic by U.S.A. patrols was extended, and reports were made to the British. On the 26th April, Roosevelt transferred to the British 20 motor-torpedo-boats and at the same time, British warships were being repaired in U.S. ports. On 5th May, the illegal arming and repairing of Norwegian ships for England took place. On 4th June American troop transports arrived in Greenland, to build airdromes. On 9th June, came the first British report that, on Roosevelt’s orders, a U.S. warship had attacked a German U-boat with depth charges near Greenland. On 4th June, German assets in the U.S.A. were illegally blocked. On the 7th June Roosevelt demanded under mendacious pretexts, that German consuls should be withdrawn and German consulates closed. He also demanded the closing of the German Press Agency, Trans ocean, the German Information Library and the German Reichs bank Central Office. On 6th and 7th July, Iceland, which is within the German fighting zone, was occupied by American Forces or the orders of Roosevelt. He intended, first of all, to force Germany to make war and to make the German U-boat warfare as ineffective as it was in 1915-16. At the same time, he promised American help to the Soviet Union. On 10th June, the Navy Minister, Knox, suddenly announced an American order to shoot at Axis warships. On 4th September, the U.S. destroyer Greer obeying orders, operated with British aircraft against German U-boats in the Atlantic. Five days later, a German U-boat noticed the U.S. destroyer acting as escort in a British convoy. On 11th September Roosevelt finally made a speech in which he confirmed and repeated his order to fire on all Axis ships. On 29th September, U.S. escort-vessels attacked a German U-boat with depth charges east of Greenland. On 7th October, the U.S. destroyer Kearney acting as an escort vessel for Britain, again attacked German U-boat with depth-charges. Finally, on 6th November U.S. forces illegally seized the German steamer, Odenwald, and took it to an American port where the crew were taken prisoner.

I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt for I consider him mad just as Wilson was. I don’t need to mention what this man has done for years in the same way against Japan. First he incites war then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack — in the approved manner of an old Freemason. I think you have all found it a relief that now, at last, one State has been the first to take the step of protest against his historically unique and shame less ill-treatment of truth, and of right — which protest this man has desired and about which he cannot complain. The fact that the Japanese Government, which has been negotiating for years with this man, has at last become tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way, fills us all, the German people, and think, all other decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction.

We have seen what the Jews have done in Soviet Russia. We have made the acquaintance of the Jewish Paradise on earth. Millions of German soldiers have been able to see this country where the international Jews have destroyed people and property. The President of the U.S.A. ought finally to understand — I say this only because of his limited intellect — that we know that the aim of this struggle is to destroy one State after another. But the present German Reich has nothing more in common with the old Germany. And we, for our part, will now do what this provocateur has been trying to do so much for years. Not only because we are the ally of Japan, but also because Germany and Italy have enough insight and strength to comprehend that, in these historic times, the existence or non-existence of the nations, is being decided perhaps for ever. We clearly see the intention of the rest of the world towards us. They reduced Democratic Germany to hunger. They would exterminate our social things of today. When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs.

As for the German nation, it needs charity neither from Mr. Churchill nor from Mr. Roosevelt, let alone from Mr. Eden. It wants only its rights! It will secure for itself this right to life even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it.

In the whole history of the German nation, of nearly 2,000 years, it has never been so united as today and, thanks to National Socialism it will remain united in the future. Probably it has never seen so clearly, and rarely been so conscious of its honour. I have therefore arranged for his passports to be handed to the American Chargé d’Affaires today, and the following … [drowned in applause].

As a consequence of the further extension of President Roosevelt’s policy, which is aimed at unrestricted world domination and dictatorship, the U.S.A. together with England have not hesitated from using any means to dispute the rights of the German, Italian and Japanese nations to the basis of their natural existence. The Governments of the U.S.A. and of England have therefore resisted, not only now but also for all time, every just understanding meant to bring about a better New Order in the world. Since the beginning of the war the American President, Roosevelt, has been guilty of a series of the worst crimes against international law; illegal seizure of ships and other property of German and Italian nationals were coupled with the threat to, and looting of, those who were deprived of their liberty by being interned. Roosevelt’s ever increasing attacks finally went so far that he ordered the American Navy to attack everywhere ships under the German and Italian flags, and to sink them — this in gross violation of international law. American ministers boasted of having destroyed German submarines in this criminal way. German and Italian merchant-ships were attacked by American cruisers, captured and their crews imprisoned. With no attempt at an official denial there has now been revealed in America President Roosevelt’s plan by which, at the latest in 1943, Germany and Italy were to be attacked in Europe by military means. In this way the sincere efforts of Germany and Italy to prevent an extension of the war and to maintain relations with the U.S.A. in spite of the unbearable provocations which have been carried on for years by President Roosevelt, have been frustrated. Germany and Italy have been finally compelled, in view of this, and in loyalty to the Tri-Partite act, to carry on the struggle against the U.S.A. and England jointly and side by side with Japan for the defense and thus for the maintenance of the liberty and independence of their nations and empires.

The Three Powers have therefore concluded the following Agreement, which was signed in Berlin today:

“In their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the joint war against the U.S.A. and England reaches a successful conclusion, the German, Italian, and Japanese Governments have agreed on the following points:

Article I. Germany, Italy and Japan will wage the common war forced upon them by the U.S.A. and England with all the means of power at their disposal, to a victorious conclusion.

Article II. Germany, Italy and Japan undertake not to conclude an armistice or peace with the U.S.A. or with England without complete mutual understanding.

Article III. Germany, Italy and Japan will continue the closest cooperation even after the victorious conclusion of the war in order to bring about a just new order in the sense of the Tri-Partite Pact concluded by them on the 27th September 1940.

Article IV. This Agreement comes into force immediately after signature and remains in force as long as the Tri-Partite Pact of 27th September 1940. The Signatory Powers will confer in time before this period ends about the future form of the co-operation provided for in Article III of this Agreement.”

Deputies, Members of the German Reichstag:

Ever since my last peace proposal of July 1940 was rejected, we have realized that this struggle has to be fought out to its last implications. That the Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-Capitalist World finds itself now in one and the same Front with Bolshevism does not surprise us National Socialists: we have always found them in company. We have concluded the struggle successfully inside Germany and have destroyed our adversaries after 16 years struggle for power. When, 23 years ago, I decided to enter political life and to lift this nation out of its decline, I was a nameless, unknown soldier. Many among you know how difficult were the first few years of this struggle. From the time when the Movement I consisted of seven men, until we took over power in January 1933, the path was so miraculous that only Providence itself with its blessing could have made this possible.

Today I am at the head of the strongest Army in the world, the most gigantic Air Force and of a proud Navy. Behind and around me stands the Party with which I became great and which has become great through me. The enemies I see before me are the same enemies as 20 years ago, but the path along which I look forward cannot be compared with that on which I look back. The German people recognizes the decisive hour of its existence millions of soldiers do their duty, millions of German peasants and workers, women and girls, produce bread for the home country and arms for the Front. We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots — that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.

You, my fellow party members, know my unalterable determination to carry a fight once begun to its successful conclusion. You know my determination in such a struggle to be deterred by nothing, to break every resistance which must be broken. In September 1939 I assured you that neither force nor arms nor time would overcome Germany. I will assure my enemies that neither force of arms nor time nor any internal doubts, can make us waver in the performance of our duty. When we think of the sacrifices of our soldiers, any sacrifice made by the Home Front is completely unimportant. When we think of those who in past centuries have fallen for the Reich, then we realize the greatness of our duty. But anybody who tries to evade this duty has no claim to be regarded in our midst as a fellow German. Just as we were unmercifully hard in our struggle for power we shall be unmercifully hard in the struggle to maintain our nation.

At a time when thousands of our best men are dying nobody must expect to live who tries to depreciate the sacrifices made at the Front. Immaterial under what camouflage he tries to disturb this German Front, to undermine the resistance of our people, to weaken the authority of the regime, to sabotage the achievements of the Home Front, he shall die for it! But with the difference that this sacrifice brings the highest honour to the soldier at the Front, whereas the other dies dishonoured and disgraced.

Our enemies must not deceive themselves — in the 2,000 years of German history known to us, our people have never been more united than today. The Lord of the Universe has treated us so well in the past years that we bow in gratitude to a providence which has allowed us to be members of such a great nation. We thank Him that we also can be entered with honour into the ever-lasting book of German history!

US Navy, Coronado, San Diego

Taoiseach Eamon De Valera

Speech regarding the Neutrality of the Irish Free State

Cork, December 12, 1941

Here, in Cork district, you have in combination all the dangers which war can inflict. You are a very important point. Your military and marine defences cannot be too carefully organized nor too fully manned. You are a populous city. Your A.R.P., plans for evacuation, for shelters, for black-out, for fire-watching must be fully worked out and the personnel for your A.R.P. services, etc., recruited to the strength necessary and thoroughly trained and practiced. If war comes upon us, it will come as a thief in the night. Preparations to meet the danger will not bring it nearer. It may help to avert it. And if the attack should: come, our preparations made in advance will mean the saving of thousands of valuable lives. If the attack struck us unprepared it would mean confusion, unnecessary loss and perhaps defeat.

Since this war began our sympathy has gone out to all the suffering people who have been dragged into it. Further hundreds of millions have become involved since I spoke at Limerick fortnight ago. Its extension to the U.S.A. brings a source of anxiety and sorrow to every part of this land. There is scarcely a family here which has not a member or a near relative in that country, in addition to the ties of blood, there has been our two nations a long association of friendship and regard, continuing uninterruptedly from America’s struggle for independence down to our own. The part which American friendship played in helping us to win the freedom we enjoy in this part of Ireland has been gratefully recognized and acknowledged by our people. It would be unnatural, then, if we did not sympathize in this total manner with the people of the U.S.A. and if we did not feel with them in all the anxiety and trials which this war has brought upon them.

People who do not understand our conditions have asked how America’s entry into the war will affect our neutrality here. The policy of the state remains unchanged. We can only be friendly neutral. From the moment this war began, there was, for this state, only one policy possible, neutrality. Our circumstances, our history, the incompleteness of our national freedom through the partition of our country, made any other policy impossible. Any other policy would have divided our people and for a divided nation to fling itself into this war would have been to commit suicide. When we adopted the policy of neutrality, we had no illusions about it. We knew the difficulties and dangers. We are fully aware that, in a world at war, each set of belligerents is over ready to regard those who are not with them as against them; but the course we have followed is a just course. God has been pleased to save us during the years of war that have already passed. We pray that He may be pleased to save us to the end. But we must do our part.

It is the duty of our men to enroll themselves in the national services. We need all our manpower for defence. For the military and … we need a quarter of a million men.

The economic and social problems would tend to become, like the military situation, more and more difficult as time went on and we became more and more isolated. We must become more and more united as a people. It is of primary importance to make sure of the nation’s food. I would ask the Parish Councils and the other parish organizations to make it a special concern of theirs to look after stores of food and emergency feeding. With the new turn in the war and America’s entry into it, we may not be able to get enough supplies from abroad.

All our efforts should be bent toward securing the quantity required. A great national effort will also be necessary to provide the fuel we shall need. We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency.

When we have done our best, we can, as a united people, take whatever may befall with calm courage and confidence that this old nation will survive and if death should come to many of us, death is not the end.

Warsaw Uprising

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising was planned with the expectation that the Soviet forces, who had arrived in the course of their offensive and were waiting on the other side of the Vistula River in full force, would help the Poles in the battle against the Nazis for Warsaw. However the Soviets betrayed the Poles, stopping their advance at the Vistula and branding the insurgents as criminals in radio broadcasts.

The Psychopathic 33rd Degree War-Mongering Chief Druid Winston Churchill

Boasting of British Charity in not having invaded Ireland

May, 1945

“…with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, we never laid a violent hand upon them, which at times would have been quite easy and quite natural…”

Taoiseach Eamon De Valera

In response to the Rothschild puppet’s arrogance

May, 1945

I have here before me the pencilled notes from which I broadcast to you on 3 September 1939. I had so many other things to do on that day that I could not find time to piece them together into a connected statement. From these notes I see that I said that noting the march of events your Government had decided its policy the previous spring, and had announced its decision to the world.

The aim of our policy, I said, would to keep our people out of the war. I reminded you of what I had said in the Dail that in our circumstances, with our history and our experience after the last war and with a part of our country still unjustly severed from us; no other policy was possible.

Certain newspapers have been very persistent in looking for my answer to Mr. Churchill’s recent broadcast. I know the kind of answer I am expected to make. I know the answer that first springs to the lips of every man of Irish blood who heard or read that speech, no matter in what circumstances or in what part of the world he found himself.

I know the reply I would have given a quarter of a century ago. But I have deliberately decided that that is not the reply I shall make tonight. I shall strive not to be guilty of adding any fuel to the flames of hatred and passion which, if continued to be fed, promise to burn up whatever is left by the war of decent human feeling in Europe.

Allowances can be made for Mr. Churchill’s statement, however unworthy, in the first flush of his victory. No such excuse could be found for me in this quieter atmosphere. There are, however some things which it is my duty to say, some things which it is essential to say. I shall try to say them as dispassionately as I can.

Mr. Churchill makes it clear that, in certain circumstances, he would have violated our neutrality and that he would justify his action by Britain’s necessity. It seems strange to me that Mr. Churchill does not see that this, if accepted, would mean Britain’s necessity would become a moral code and that when this necessity became sufficiently great, other people’s rights were not to count.

It is quite true that other great Powers believe in this same code — in their own regard — and have behaved in accordance with it. That is precisely why we have the disastrous succession of wars – World War No. 1 and World War No. 2 and shall it be World War No. 3?

Surely Mr. Churchill must see that if his contention be admitted in our regard, a like justification can be framed for similar acts of aggression elsewhere and no small nation adjoining a great Power could ever hope to be permitted to go its own way in peace.

It is indeed fortunate that Britain’s necessity did not reach the point when Mr. Churchill would have acted. All credit to him that he successfully resisted the temptation which, I have not doubt, may times assailed him in his difficulties and to which I freely admit many leaders might have easily succumbed. It is indeed; hard for the strong to be just to the weak, but acting justly always has its rewards.

By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr. Churchill, instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already bloodstained record of the relations between England and this country, has advanced the cause of international morality an important step — one of the most important, indeed, that can be taken on the road to the establishment of any sure basis for peace.

As far as the peoples of these two islands are concerned, it may, perhaps, mark a fresh beginning towards the realisation of that mutual comprehension to which Mr. Churchill has referred for which, I hope, he will not merely pray but work also, as did his predecessor who will yet, I believe, find the honoured place in British history which is due to him, as certainly he will find it in any fair record of the relations between Britain and ourselves.

That Mr. Churchill should be irritated when our neutrality stood in the way of what he thought he vitally needed, I understand, but that he or any thinking person in Britain or elsewhere should fail to see the reason for our neutrality, I find it hard to conceive.

I would like to put a hypothetical question — it is a question I have put to many Englishmen since the last war. Suppose Germany had won the war, had invaded and occupied England, and that after a long lapse of time and many bitter struggles, she was finally brought to acquiesce in admitting England’s right to freedom, and let England go, but not the whole of England, all but, let us say, the six southern counties.

These six southern counties, those, let us suppose, commanding the entrance to the narrow seas, Germany had singled out and insisted on holding herself with a view to weakening England as a whole, and maintaining the securing of her own communications through the Straits of Dover.

Let us suppose further, that after all this had happened, Germany was engaged in a great war in which she could show that she was on the side of freedom of a number of small nations, would Mr. Churchill as an Englishman who believed that his own nation had as good a right to freedom as any other, not freedom for a part merely, but freedom for the whole — would he, whilst Germany still maintained the partition of his country and occupied six counties of it, would he lead this partitioned England to join with Germany in a crusade? I do not think Mr. Churchill would.

Would he think the people of partitioned England an object of shame if they stood neutral in such circumstances? I do not think Mr. Churchill would.

Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain’s stand alone, after France had fallen and before America entered the War.

Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?

Mr. Churchill is justly proud of his nation’s perseverance against heavy odds. But we in this island are still prouder of our people’s perseverance for freedom through all the centuries. We, of our time, have played our part in the perseverance, and we have pledged our selves to the dead generations who have preserved intact for us this glorious heritage, that we, too, will strive to be faithful to the end, and pass on this tradition unblemished.

Many a time in the past there appeared little hope except that hope to which Mr. Churchill referred, that by standing fast a time would come when, to quote his own words: “…the tyrant would make some ghastly mistake which would alter the whole balance of the struggle.”

I sincerely trust, however, that it is not thus our ultimate unity and freedom will be achieved, though as a younger man I confess I prayed even for that, and indeed at times saw not other.

In latter years, I have had a vision of a nobler and better ending, better for both our people and for the future of mankind. For that I have now been long working. I regret that it is not to this nobler purpose that Mr. Churchill is lending his hand rather than, by the abuse of a people who have done him no wrong, trying to find in a crisis like the present excuse for continuing the injustice of the mutilation of our country.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Churchill has not deliberately chosen the latter course but, if he has, however regretfully we may say it, we can only say, be it so.

Meanwhile, even as a partitioned small nation, we shall go on and strive to play our part in the world continuing unswervingly to work for the cause of true freedom and for peace and understanding.

For refusing to ally itself with the murderous imperial Anglo-American-Soviet Internazi regime, Ireland was banned from the Rockefeller’s United Nations until 1955. And what a sad day it was when it was finally accepted.

+ + +

From Judicial:

Lets stop with the Auschwitz lies

This was a work camp

This is a factual list of facilities available to prisoners at the alleged Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

Most of these facilities can still be seen in the camp today, including the cinema, swimming pool, hospital, library and post office.

	Visits were routineSupposedly the most dreaded of German camps, Auschwitz was repeatedly visited by Red Cross inspection teams who were allowed to speak to prisoner representatives alone,in order to hear first-hand of any mistreatment, chicanery, interruption of mail and parcel delivery, health concerns, food and ration matters etc.
	No such visits took place – ever! – to Soviet Gulag camps.

Auschwitz, the supposed “death camp”, had many facilities amongst which were;

Camp kitchen -one of the largest service buildings in Auschwitz, with state-of-the-art cooking facilities. There were twelve of these throughout the camp. * The caloric content of the diet was carefully monitored by camp and Red Cross delegates. It only deteriorated in Auschwitz and other camps towards the end of the war when German railroads and the entire transport system collapsed under constant aerial attacks.

A camp theater where live plays could be performed by camp inmate actors -

Camp sculture class conducted for interested, talented inmates by professional sculptors

Camp art classes for inmates

Camp university with lectures on every topic under the sun, from health, the arts, philosophy, science, economic issues etc.

A camp cinema – where every week different, mainly cultural and non-political films were shown -You must watch this 2 min video

The camp brothel, just inside the main gate was a building used during the war as a brothel for the inmates. It was not a secret that the camp had a brothel; it was mentioned in books and its existence was confirmed by the Auschwitz Museum officials.It was established in the summer of 1943 on Himmler’s order, was located in block 24 and was used to reward privileged prisoners.

Block 24

A camp swimming pool for use by the inmates on Birkenallee, where there were walkways with comfortable benches for inmates to relax in the shade of the trees -Camp sport facilities like soccer fields, handball areas, fencing classes and other exercise facilities - Camp soccer field

	Auschwitz had an artist studio “Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945.” The camp commendant provided a studio and the equipment which produced thousands of paintings and sketches. The Auschwitz museum has 1470 paintings, but none are displayed. A rash of absurd paintings, that were scretched after 1945 are pushed on a gulliable public.

Camp incentive system where through extra work inmates could obtain coupons redeemable for cake or ice cream in the Camp Cantina, which also had extra toiletries etc.

Camp complaints office where inmates could register complaints or make suggestions. Camp Commander Hoess had a standing order that any inmate could approach him personally to register a complaint about other inmates such as “Kapos” and even guards.* A system of strict discipline for guards and also for inmates, with severe punishment being handed out against those found guilty (for even slapping an inmate)

Auschwitz maternity ward – Over 3,000 live births were registered there, with not a single infant death while Auschwitz was in operation under German rule -

Auschwitz jail – Since the camp was a large, open facility, transgressors could be arrested, tried and jailed right in Auschwitz.    Jail

Auschwitz issues it’s own money

Prisoners were paid and could spend the money in canteens, brothels and stores.

* Auschwitz crematoria - These structures were hastily built by inmate labor after the first typhus epidemic caused thousands of deaths. (Burial of epidemic victims had caused the ground water to be contaminated causing infections among the German staff. Amongst the victims was an early camp commandant’s wife. Polish peasants from the surrounding district were also cremated here.)

* Auschwitz pregnancies took place because of the open nature of the facility.

.	*   International Red Cross visited monthly In a 1650 page report there was never a mention of gas chambers. Auschwitz_Death_records

Allies and Germans communicated about the camps Allies communicated with Germany and determined there were no murders. This is why they never bombed the RR leading to Auschwitz Actual correspondence
Ernst Zundel’s Holocaust TrialsZundel was a German Canadian who was put on trial in Canada for questioning the holocaust. He forced the Red Cross to produce their WW2 records, they showed approx. 280,000 total dead for all the camps. Red Cross document # 1 Red Cross document # 2

Rothschild Agent, Comrade Mao Zedong

From “The Identity of Interests between the Soviet Union and All Mankind,“1939.09.29 [Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1967, Vol. 2, p. 275-283]

Many people in China are bewildered by the fact that Soviet troops have entered Poland. The Polish question should be viewed from various angles, from that of Germany, of Britain and France, of the Polish government, of the Polish people and of the Soviet Union. Germany started the war in order to plunder the Polish people and smash one flank of the Anglo-French imperialist front. By its nature, Germany’s war is imperialist and should be opposed, not approved. As for Britain and France, they have regarded Poland as an object of plunder for their finance capital, exploited her to thwart the German imperialist attempt at a world re-division of the spoils, and made her a flank of their own imperialist front. Thus their war is an imperialist war, their so-called aid to Poland being merely for the purpose of contending with Germany for the domination of Poland, and this war, too, should be opposed, not approved. As for the Polish government, it was a fascist, reactionary government of the Polish landlords and bourgeoisie which ruthlessly exploited the workers and peasants and oppressed the Polish democrats; moreover, it was a government of Greater Poland chauvinists which ruthlessly oppressed the non-Polish minority nationalities — the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews, Germans, Lithuanians and others, who number more than ten million; it was itself an imperialist government. In the war, this reactionary Polish government willingly drove the Polish people to serve as cannon-fodder for British and French finance capital, and it willingly served as a sector of the reactionary front of international finance capital. For twenty years the Polish government consistently opposed the Soviet Union and, during the talks between Britain, France and the Soviet Union, it obstinately rejected the Soviet offer to help it with troops. Moreover, it was an utterly incompetent government, its huge army of over 1,500,000 collapsed at the first blow, and it brought the country to ruin in just two weeks, leaving the Polish people under the heel of German imperialism. Such were the towering crimes of the Polish government and it would be wrong for us to waste any sympathy on it. As for the Polish people, they are victims; they should rise up against the oppression of the German fascists and against their own reactionary landlord and bourgeois classes, and establish an independent, free and democratic Polish state. Without the slightest doubt, our sympathy must go out to the Polish people. As for the Soviet Union, its actions have been perfectly just. It was confronted by two problems. The first problem was whether to let the whole of Poland fall under the rule of German imperialism or to help the minority nationalities of eastern Poland win their liberation. It chose the second course. A vast stretch of territory inhabited by Byelorussians and Ukrainians had been snatched from the new-born Soviet state by the German imperialists as far back as 1918 when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, and it was later arbitrarily put under the rule of the reactionary Polish government by the Treaty of Versailles. What the Soviet Union has now done is merely to recover its lost territory, liberate the oppressed Byelorussians and Ukrainians and save them from German oppression. The news dispatches of the last few days show how warmly these minority nationalities are welcoming the Red Army with food and drink as their liberator, while not a single report of this kind has come in from western Poland which has been occupied by German troops or from the places in western Germany which have been occupied by French troops. This shows clearly that the Soviet Union’s war is a just and non-predatory war of liberation, a war helping to liberate weak and small nations and free the people. On the other hand, the war being waged by Germany and by Britain and France is an unjust, predatory and imperialist war for the oppression of other nations and peoples. The second problem confronting the Soviet Union was Chamberlain’s endeavour to continue his old anti-Soviet policy. His policy was, first, to impose a large-scale blockade on Germany and bring pressure on her from the west; second, to try to form an alliance with the United States and to buy over Italy, Japan and the countries of northern Europe so as to isolate Germany; and third, to bribe Germany with the offer of Poland, and even of Hungary and Rumania. In short, Chamberlain resorted to all kinds of intimidation and bribery to get Germany to renounce the Soviet-German non-aggression treaty and turn her guns on the Soviet Union. This intrigue has been going on for some time and will continue. The powerful Soviet army’s entry into eastern Poland, with the aim of recovering the Soviet Union’s own territory and liberating the weak and small nationalities there, was at the same time a practical move to prevent the forces of German aggression from expanding eastward and to frustrate Chamberlain’s intrigue. Judging by the news reports of the last few days, this Soviet policy has been most successful. It is a concrete manifestation of the identity of the interests of the Soviet Union with those of the overwhelming majority of mankind, including those of the oppressed people under reactionary Polish rule.

Mao Zedong

From, “Stalin is the true friend of the cause of liberation of the Chinese people.” 1939. 12.20

Stalin is the true friend of the cause of liberation of the Chinese people. No attempt to sow dissension, no lies and calumnies, can affect the Chinese people’s whole-hearted love and respect for Stalin and our genuine friendship for the Soviet Union.

With Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds having resigned from Renault just a week before the hearing into accusations that the team fixed the Singapore Grand Prix in 2008, allowing Fernano Alonso to win thanks to a pre-arranged Nelson Piquet crash, it’s clear that Formula One must tread carefully. But what is Max Mosley’s role? In this exclusive essay about Mosley, Robert Holmes looks at the FIA President and his controversial tactics.

Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, Andy Warhol and Max Mosley, what have all these men got in common? Give up?

The answer is the 78 year old billionaire, Bernie Ecclestone. Pourquoi? I hear you erstwhile Burgundians cry? Well, I will tell you.

The Formula One boss has provoked outrage by reportedly praising Adolf Hitler’s ability “to get things done“. The outgoing head of Formula One’s governing body expressed a preference for “strong leaders” like former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Max Mosley.

Mr Ecclestone went on to say “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done… In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn’t a dictator.”

What is it with short people and world domination? I believe it is known as the “Napoleon Complex”. Being tall myself, I have had no need to study in any great depth the psychological conditions that afflict the diminutive, so I might be wrong.

Ecclestone Towers?

Mr Ecclestone said democracy “hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries, including this one“.

He also said the West had been wrong to depose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, saying: “He was the only one who could control that country.”  Actually, he might have point there.

Labour MP Denis Mac Shane, chairman of the all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism, said: “If Mr Ecclestone seriously thinks Hitler had to be persuaded to kill six million Jews, invade every European country and bomb London then he knows neither history and shows a complete lack of judgment.”

At this point, you are probably wondering where the late Andy Warhol comes in to all this? His connection is purely visual. Personally, I cannot tell them apart and here’s a photo to prove it. One of them is Andy Warhol and the other is Bernie Ecclestone – separated at birth or what?

Ecclestone and Warhol

Bernie Ecclestone admires Max Mosley, whose father was Oswald Mosley (leader of the black shirted British fascist movement), who in turn admired Adolf Hitler. Thus, the connections are complete. Andy Warhol was the red herring, not that there’s anything red about this lot.

I am probably going to alienate myself with the vast majority of my treasured and valued audience now. I am going to state that I have failed to see the entire point of Formula One, the love of Mr Ecclestone’s life. I can understand that a one-off event featuring a race between the fastest cars on the planet around a circuit might have some limited appeal. But, as I understand it, they have a total season of Grand Prix. Whereby, the exact same “set” of drivers races the exact same “set” of cars on a race track. The only variant in all of this is that they do it on a different racetrack each time, in Melbourne, Shanghai, Silverstone, Monte Carlo, you get the drift… It’s like being forced to watch the Williams sisters playing tennis every single week in a different venue. Eventually, it would seem utterly pointless. Besides, I never see the point of a “sport” whereby the only separation between the “winner” and the “loser” can often be a few hundredths of a second. Ho hum…

Anyway, I have been practicing hard for the Tour de France as you will see from this photo of me taken on the second stage of the tournament. I have the honour of the prestigious green jersey today; the yellow jersey continues to elude and is always several hundred kilometres out of reach.

Stefan III of Bordeaux

Irresistable to audiences in 1961, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" still sparkles today.

It was May 9, 1940, and Audrey Kathleen (Hepburn-) Ruston had just turned eleven. To celebrate, her mother, the wealthy Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra, had bought tickets for them to see a performance by the great English troupe, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Ella and her children had not been in the Netherlands very long. Ella had brought Audrey (1929-1993) and her two sons from England to her parents’ home in Arnhem nine months earlier, when Hitler had invaded Poland. Ella felt they would all be safe in Holland, a neutral country.

Audrey loved her grown-up dress for the ballet. “My mother had our little dressmaker make me a long taffeta dress,” said Audrey later. “It went all the way to the ground, and it rustled. The reason she got me this, at great expense, was that I was to present a bouquet of flowers at the end of the performance to…the director of the company.” She did precisely that. The spray of tulips and roses was hurriedly accepted, though, as the dancers hustled to leave Arnhem that very evening, advised by the British consul. (1)

Audrey Ruston (Hepburn) 1936

The very next day, Friday, May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands. Three days later they blasted Rotterdam with an air attack that killed 30,000 Dutch civilians. Incendiary bombs were dropped on the Hague. Holland surrendered. Nazi troops soon tore through Arnhem, looting and despoiling as they pleased. Audrey’s family was allowed to remain at their regal ancestral home. Over the next ten months, the van Heemstra bank accounts, securities, and jewelry would be confiscated by the Nazis. Rations were imposed on food and fuel which were soon in short supply for the suffering Dutch people. Food became completely nonexistent during the Hunger Winter of 1944 as the Germans cut off all imports of foods to punish the Dutch Resistance.During that time, Audrey confessed to eating tulip bulbs and baking grass into bread to keep from starving to death like 20,000 other Dutch citizens did that winter.

The German occupiers spread anti-English sentiment, banning the import of British jams and biscuits. Audrey Ruston was an English name and Audrey spoke English. She carried a British passport. Quickly, Audrey’s mother gave Audrey a new identity as a little Dutch girl. She changed her daughter’s name from Audrey Ruston to Edda van Heemstra. Audrey took Dutch lessons so she could pass as Dutch and not be arrested for being English. Audrey did not risk speaking English for the rest of the war.

Audrey Hepburn dancing in 1957 "Funny Face"

In 1941, Ella sent Audrey to the Arnhem Conservatory to study dance. It was then that Audrey decided that she wanted to grow up to become a ballerina. Her dream was to “wear a tutu and dance at Covent Garden.” Her mother made her ballet slippers from scraps of felt.

As a child of war, Audrey learned to cope with hunger, fear, and deprivation through art, music, and dance. Soon, though, she and some other dancers began staging private, secret dance shows to raise money for the Dutch Resistance. “I designed the dances myself,” Audrey recalled, remembering the performances. “I had a friend that played the piano, and my mother made the costumes. They were very amateurish attempt – but…it amused people. The recitals were given in houses with windows and doors closed, and no one outside knew what was going on. Afterward, money was collected and turned over to the Dutch Underground.” To keep from being discovered, the audiences did not clap. “The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”

Sometimes at these “black performances,” resistance workers attended. They gave the young performers money and folded messages to be stuffed into the children’s shoes and transported the next day to resistance workers. The children risked death to save the lives of resistance workers and Audrey was one of these children.

One winter day, Audrey was walking along a city street when three truckloads full of German soldiers toting rifles stopped suddenly. The soldiers ordered all the girls in their sight to line up and get in the trucks. Audrey did as she was told. As the trucks drove off, Audrey kept saying the Lord’s Prayer to herself in Dutch. Then the convoy stopped unexpectedly. Some soldiers jumped out and began abusing some Jews. Audrey said:

I remember hearing the dull sound of a rifle butt hitting a man’s face. And I jumped down, dropped to my knees, and rolled under the truck. I then skittered out, hoping the driver would not notice me – and he didn’t.”

And where was Audrey’s father all this time? Shortly after lunching with Hitler in Munich in May of 1935, Joseph Ruston deserted Audrey, her mother, and Ella’s two sons and never returned. Later Ruston was arrested in England and accused of peddling Nazi propaganda for the notorious leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Ruston remained under house arrest for the duration of the war on the Isle of Man with other suspected Nazi sympathizers. After the war, he added the name Hepburn to his surname, becoming Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, Hepburn being his maternal grandmother’s maiden name and one linked to royalty. Audrey did the same and dropped the Ruston, becoming Audrey Hepburn.

Audrey Hepburn's childhood artwork

(1) Spoto, Donald. Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn. (New York: Harmony Books, 2006)

Il grande vecchio del laburismo di sinistra, Tony Benn, replica sul Guardian ad un precedente articolo del deputato del Labour Frank Field che ha proposto, in caso di emergenza, di creare un National Government, in pratica un governo di “larghe intese” aperto ai Tories e a tutte le altre forze politiche.

Nel suo intervento Field, di fatto, riproponeva – aggiornata – la soluzione adottata nel Regno Unito nel 1931, quando conservatori, liberali e laburisti (anche se della componente che faceva capo a MacDonald) formarono un governo di unità nazionale per superare le difficoltà provocate dagli effetti della crisi del ‘29.

Quella soluzione – dice Benn – fu una disgrazia perché non solo non risolse i problemi ma rappresentò una grave ferita per le regole democratiche, aprendo per giunta la strada a movimenti di ispirazione fascista come le camice nere – la BUF – di Oswald Mosley (fino a pochi anni prima l’enfant prodige proprio del Labour). Era sbagliata allora,  sarebbe sbagliata  oggi.

Qui a dit que le droit est ennuyant? Il est vrai que le droit des sûretés letton, un peu, peut-être, mais enfin, il est tout de même des moments où ce n’est pas si assomant que ça.

Vous connaissez mon intérêt pour le droit anglo-saxon. Voilà un jugement qui vous décevra pas.

De quoi s’agit-il? Des moeurs sexuelles de Max Mosley, président de nationalité britannique de la Fédération internationale de l’automobile (qui organise les courses de Formule 1). Un de ces tabloïds anglais qui font la honte de Fleet Street, News of the World, avait jugé bon de publier un article, avec photos à la clé (et vidéo sur son site) d’une séance de sado-masochisme de quelques heures que Max Mosley (68 ans quand même) avait eu avec cinq femmes rémunérées pour cela – il apparaîtrait que les activités sexuelles au sens conventionnel du terme étaient périphériques, illustrant ainsi l’admirable excentricité des moeurs sexuelles anglaises, qui a tant contribué aux succès du KGB…

Or, une des cinq professionnelles était munie d’une caméra installée dans son soutien-gorge par News of the World – dont une équipe technique était installée dans une camionnette en bas de l’immeuble où se tenait cette aimable séance – en échange de 25.000£ – mais le crime ne payant pas, elle ne fût finalement rétribuée qu’à hauteur de 12.000£…

News of the World ne s’était pas contenté d’annoncer au monde les détails de la vie sexuelle de Max Mosley, mais avait axé la publicité donnée à cette affaire, qui fît la une du journal (“F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers – Son of Hitler-loving fascist in sex shame“) , sur les déguisements nazis des participants et un jeu de rôle autour d’une thématique “camp de concentration”. Pour ceux qui ne le sauraient pas, Max Mosley est le fils du leader fasciste britannique, Sir Oswald Mosley, chef du British Union of Fascists puis l’Union Movement, interné durant la seconde guerre mondiale pour ses connivences avec l’Allemagne nazie et Hitler, ce dernier l’ayant marié par ailleurs marié à l’aristocrate nazie Diana Mitford, membre des légendaires Mitford Sisters – l’une des soeurs se prénommait Unity Valkyrie et fût une intime de Hitler, tandis qu’une autre, Jessica, fût journaliste communiste aux Etats-Unis dans un temps où la question la plus terrifiante qu’on pouvait se voir poser était “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” – vous voyez, quand je parlais d’excentricité, ce n’était pas une clause de style…

Max Mosley, né en 1940, fût jusqu’à l’âge de vingt ans militant de l’Union Movement de son père, avant de prendre publiquement ses distances avec l’idéologie fasciste. Comme vous vous en doutez, il attaqua en justice News of the World, invoquant la violation de sa vie privée résultant de la violation de la confiance (“breach of confidence“) qu’il pouvait légitimement placer dans le fait que la femme indélicate garde leur session sado-masochiste confidentielle.

La High Court a déterminé sa décision sur l’allégation de nazisme autour de la séance de sado-masochisme litigieuse – selon Mr Justice Eady, le juge ayant tranché l’affaire, seul cet aspect là aurait mérité d’être porté à l’attention du public – encore eût-il fallu que cette allégation soit vraie. Or, examinant le film pris clandestinement par l’informatrice de News of the World, le juge n’a pu décelé d’aspect indiquant une connotation nazie – si Max Mosley, germanophone (eh oui…), parlait bien en allemand à certains moments des ébats, c’est parce qu’une des cinq femmes dont il s’était entouré l’était également.

Mais il faut ici que je vous donne un exemple de ce qu’est un jugement anglo-saxon. Je ne suis pas un admirateur inconditionnel du droit français, et encore moins des tribunaux de ce pays (à l’exception des tribunaux administratifs), et la lecture d’un jugement ou d’un arrêt français, souvent lapidaire, offre rarement des bonheurs de lecture (Stendhal affirmait lire une page du Code civil de 1804 – il est vrai admirablement rédigé – chaque soir avant de se coucher afin de trouver de l’inspiration en matière de style – il n’aurait pu écrire Le Rouge et le Noir en s’inspirant de la prose stérile et ésotérique de la Cour de Cassation…). Rien de tel au Royaume-Uni. Il faudra donc une cinquantaine de pages pour Mr Justice Eady pour accueillir l’action de Max Mosley et lui accorder 60.000£ de dommages-intérêts.

Et ça nous permet ainsi de lire ceci (point 53 du jugement):

Mr Thurlbeck also relied upon the fact that the Claimant was “shaved”. Concentration camp inmates were also shaved. Yet, as Mr Price pointed out, they had their heads shaved. The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved – apparently for its own sake rather than because of any supposed Nazi connotation. He explained to me that while this service was being performed he was (no doubt unwisely) “shaking with laughter”. I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.

Traduction libre:

Mr Thurlbeck (1) s’appuyait également sur le fait que le demandeur (2) était rasé. Le demandeur, pour des raisons connues de lui seul, aime se faire raser le derrière – apparemment sans lien avec de prétendues connotations nazies. Il m’a explique que pendant que ce service était presté, “il était secoué” – sans doute imprudemment – “par une crise de fou rire”. Je ne pouvais naturellement pas vérifier sur le DVD, puisque ce n’était pas son visage qui était filmé.

So British!

(1) Le journaliste de News of the World ayant écrit les articles incriminés.

(2) Max Mosley.