A British masquerade to
entrap the Germans anew
‘
Nostra maxima culpa,’ ‘our gravest fault’: so reads the chapter title of one
of many books, all alike, devoted by British historians to that disturbing
season of their history known as ‘appeasement.’105 ‘Culpa’: ‘fault,’ ‘error,’
‘regrettable mistake’ – for having tried to appease a regime, Hitler’s, that
would not and could not be pacified by any amount of goodwill, however
profligate. A mistake at best, a shameful episode at worst – but a misjudgment
in any case.
Conjuring Hitler How Britain and
America Made the Third Reich
By Guido Giacomo Preparata
America Made the Third Reich
By Guido Giacomo Preparata
According to this myth, because her elite unexpectedly found itself deeply
torn over foreign policy into several antagonistic currents, Britain well meaning
but short-sighted was incapable of reading Nazism’s mind, and
ended up as a result bearing some of the guilt for the ensuing disasters. On
the surface of Britain’s political landscape, it is real factions that we’re made
to see, headed by real leaders, fighting with vehemence over a range of vital
points. Profiting from such political discordance, so goes the apologue,
Hitler gave full rein to his mad ambition.
The truth is different. The British establishment was a monolithic
structure: the dissension among the stewards, if any, was over policy, never
over principles and goals, which were the same for them all. The British
were never torn by disagreement as to what ought to be done with Hitler.
That much was obvious: destroy him in time, and raze Germany to the
ground – imperial logic demanded it. Rather, the point was a pragmatic
one: how could the Nazis be most suitably bamboozled into stepping, anew,
into a pitfall on two fronts? The answer: by dancing with them. And dance
the British would, twirling round the diplomatic ballroom of the 1930's,
always leading, and drawing patterns as they spun that followed in fact a
predictable trajectory.
The tactic they employed was to animate a variety of political formations,
as if laying out tools of differing gauges to be fitted to the task as the
opportunity arose.
Since Versailles, the elite fissured into three formations: (1) the anti-Bolsheviks,
(2) the Round Table group, and (3) the appeasers (see Figure
5.2). From 1919 to 1926, the first party, which included the leading foreign
expert, Sir Eric Simon; the Ambassador to Berlin, D’Abernon; and the
South African Imperial Minister, Jan Smuts, dominated the government:
in the early 1920's, they posed as the anti-French faction, which gave its
blessing to the secret rearmament of Germany with a view to revamping
the latter as ‘the bulwark’ against Communism.106 It was most probably
this gang that Veblen had in mind when in 1920 he alluded to the Elder
Statesmen conspiring at Versailles to restore German reaction against
Russian Bolshevism. But the plot was thicker than what even Veblen could
have imagined.
The true core of the imperial monolith was the Milner group, whose
word was printed in the monthly review The Round Table. This party also
included Simon and Smuts, as well as the editor of The Times, Geoffrey
Dawson; two key players of the Foreign Office, Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr)
and Lord Halifax (Edward Wood); and Samuel ‘Slippery Sam’ Hoare, an imperial factotum issued from an old banking family, who had spent time
in Russia during the war as a member of the British intelligence services
– ‘he was so expert at his job, the Czar accused him of foreknowledge of
the murder of Rasputin.’107
Between 1919 and 1924, this set controlled a fifth of the Cabinet members,
a quarter in 1931–35, and a third in 1935–40.108
To straddle and wait for events to unfold, The Round Table made a
pretense of endorsing as its official policy agenda the utterly spurious
scenario of the ‘world in three blocs,’ whereby a Germany free to roam
in Central Europe was to be hedged between the western embankment of
France and Britain, and the eastern defense of Russia’s ‘out-of-the-way…
scarcely survey-able’ empire.109
The Versailles Treaty (1919) and the Dawes Plan (1924), were prevalently the work of these two groups.110
Finally, the appeasers included a heterogeneous collection of back bencher's,
such as Churchill and Lloyd George, who recommended ‘peace with
honor,’111 ‘non-partisan’ technocrats like Norman, and segments of the
intelligentsia – publicists and writers like Keynes. All were keen to show
a benevolent face to the enemies of yesterday, and to tie new bonds with
them in the name of ‘sportsmanship.’
Thus by the middle of the Dawes period, the empire disposed of at
least three stock masks: the friendly face of appeasement, the dogged front
of anti-Communism, and the placid, middle-of-the-road approach of the
Round Table. Towards the end of the Weimar incubation, the anti-Bolsheviks
receded in the background, while the appeasers gathered steam – the poker
face of the Round Table reigned supreme, and even a pro-German fringe
promoted by Rolf Gardiner and similar ante diem deep ecologists sensitive
to the common heritage of Nordic folklore came into being (Figure 5.2).
This was a peripheral movement, however, devoid of popular support and
political clout.112 There was no genuine pro-German feeling in Britain,
only a burgeoning jungle of make-believe.
After Hitler’s first six months in power the masquerade really began.
On the diplomatic front, the Fuhrer started by signing an alliance with
Poland on January 26, 1934: this signaled the end of the old secret policy
of the German generals, who during Weimar had rearmed with Russia in
view of a joint assault against Poland, their common enemy. Hitler, instead,
would have liked to see Poland involved in an anti-Bolshevik campaign
spearheaded by Nazi Germany.
On April 9, 1934, Germany publicly announced that she was rearming
– against the provisions of Versailles. France worried. Meanwhile, the
Germans had guests: Royal Air Force Captain Winterbotham, the spy who had squired Rosenberg during his autumnal tour of the London clubs in
1931, was presently attended to by his former visitor and the Fuhrer himself:
Winterbotham was an asset of MI6, British counter-espionage, and of the
intelligence division of the Air Ministry. His was one of the first masks of the
mummery: he had been posing as an ‘admirer’ of the regime – as a staunch
appeaser – since the first Nazi electoral breakthrough, and by now he had
gained the complete confidence of his hosts. The Nazis told him everything:
they told him how, together with England, they would have destroyed
Communism, and how zealously they were preparing for Operation Otto,
later code named ‘Barbarossa,’ that is, the invasion of Russia.113
On July 25, 1934, a hapless vanguard of Austrian Nazis, trained by the SS
with the approval of Hitler, botched a coup in Vienna: they assassinated the
premier, Dolfuss, but could not go any further. The Italian leader, Mussolini,
who acted as the protector of Austria, alerted his divisions on the common
frontier; he then turned to France and Britain for coordinating a disciplinary
maneuver against the brash savagery of the new German regime. France
turned to Britain, and Britain said ‘no’: no military castigation of Germany –
it was not worth it. Britain, the French concluded, had written off Austria.114
And she had: Mussolini would not forget Britain’s betrayal, nor would Hitler
– gratefully: with Austria, he would try again later.
In the same month, Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, the fox who
would soon become Prime Minister (June 1935–May 1937), had ‘defended
Germany’s right to recreate and air force: “She has every argument in
her favor, from her defenseless position in the air, to make herself
secure”.’115
And in the summer of 1934, Churchill resurfaced from the parliamentarian
swamp with an important agenda: he wooed the Soviet Ambassador in
London, Maisky, singing to him of his love for the British empire – his ‘be-all
and end-all’ – and truncated the ode by inviting the Russians to join forces
with Britain against Hitler.116 Immediately thereafter, Churchill stormed
the House to diffuse a series of alarmist speeches, in which he ‘prophesied’
that in one seven-day attack on London by the German Luftwaffe, 30,000
people would be killed or maimed. Lloyd George would then be charged
by Baldwin to rebuke Churchill for ignoring how critical it was for Britain
to have Germany as a bulwark against Communism.117
Splendid maneuver: now a fourth mask was added to the British
panoply (Figure 5.2) – an anti-Nazi, pro-Russian nucleus coagulated round
Churchill, while the pacifiers behind Lloyd George rose in influence. It was a democratic, taut face that Britain was now showing to the world – a
face upon which expressions of cynical pragmatism (appeasement) were
somewhat tempered by the moderation of the Milner fraternity and the
open dissent of Churchill. It was the wholesome visage of pluralism.
In January 1935, Baron Wilhelm de Ropp, a Balt double agent working in Berlin for Winterbotham’s team, met with two of King George V’s four sons in London: Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales, and Prince George, the Duke of Kent, to ‘give them a complete picture of the qualities of Hess, Rosenberg, and the other leaders.’118
This was the overture of the masquerade’s most picturesque visual effect: the dressing of a pro-Nazi Peace Party crowned by a royal candidate. The intelligence services were now casting for a suitable foil among the regal offspring, someone to play the role of the antagonist in the hypothetical scenario whereby Britain would be split into a dominant anti-German War Party and an underground pro-Nazi Peace Party. Edward, then living easy as the world’s ageless teenage idol, seemed to fit the role to a T: his German was fluent, and he was always eager to evoke the sweetest summers of his childhood spent in the company of his favorite ‘Uncle Willi,’ the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, his father’s cousin.119 Edward passed the audition.
On March 6, 1935, in the face of German rearmament, France re-instituted military conscription. Ten days later, adducing the French decision as a pretext, Hitler did likewise – again, in violation of the provisions of Versailles. Britain ‘protested,’ though, curiously, she did not omit to inquire with the Nazi authorities: ‘Would the German government be still willing to receive Sir Eric Simon and Anthony Eden of the Foreign Office, as previously scheduled?’ – hardly the concern of an enemy. On March 25, the two British statesmen landed in Berlin. The German interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled Simon’s large brown eyes gazing paternally upon the Fuhrer, with fondness. Eden was more circumspect.
Before them, Hitler expatiated once more on the need to form a common front against Bolshevism, and – the novelty – he foreshadowed the possibility of coming to an understanding on rearmament ratios: say, to begin by allowing a tonnage for the German fleet 35 percent as large as that of the Royal Navy. The British did not say no.
The talks had been a success. They were concluded by a festive brunch at the British embassy, where the ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, had lined up his children to give Hitler and his train the Nazi salute, shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’ – a choreographic effort, so thought the German interpreter, that was ‘a little shameful.’120 All would have been perfect had Eden not taken leave to continue on to Moscow.
This was the earliest instance of the Foreign Office’s duplicitous mime; the Germans were shown two faces: the congenial countenance of Simon, and the skeptical brow of Eden; the former being presented in a higher position of authority, and the latter flying subsequently to Nazism’s enemy. The display was as much for the consumption of Germany as it was for that of European diplomacy: poised on this perennial ambivalence, Britain was best situated to carry out her plan.
As the follow-up to the March encounter, Hitler delegated the Anglophile Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former champagne dealer who had married into a wine dynasty and joined Nazism via von Papen, to seal in London the ‘35 percent deal’ for the German navy.
‘Never Forget,’ Ribbentrop was warned before the negotiation by the military attache of the Japanese embassy in London, Navy Captain Arata Oka, ‘that the British are the most cunning people on earth, and that they graduated to absolute masters in the art of negotiation as well as in that of manipulating the press and public opinion.’121 But neither Ribbentrop nor any other Nazi had the faintest idea of what sort of cunning they would be dealing with.
Talks commenced on May 24 at the Foreign Office in the presence of the benevolent Simon. Ribbentrop, as expected, demanded that the British acquiesce to the ratio advanced by Hitler in March. But Simon turned red; he glowed with fury: he found the request outrageous and such dilettante bluster unacceptable. That ended the discussion. Ribbentrop and his team were, to say the least, confused. Two days later, however, the German legation was conveyed to the wainscoted halls of the Admiralty, where Simon’s Deputy, Sir Robert Craigie, announced with composure that Britain accepted the German offer: Ribbentrop’s associates were speechless at their good fortune.122 Thereupon Hitler phoned Ribbentrop: ‘Good job,’ he thundered, ‘this is the most beautiful day of my life.’123 All would have been perfect had the Fellows not subsequently refused to admit Ribbentrop’s son to Eton.124
In the space of six months, spanning between the Norman-inspired Anglo-German Payments Agreement of late 1934, and the Naval Pact, officially signed on June 18, 1935, Hitler won from Britain no less than her official financial and military support. The Fuhrer was exultant.
And France, disheveled, didn’t know where to turn: in mid May 1935, in despair, she concluded pacts of mutual assistance with Russia and Czechoslovakia.
On June 19, 1935, Edward VIII made his debut as the pro-Nazi candidate when at Queen’s Hall he delivered a speech to the ex-combatants of the Legion inviting them to bury the animosity of the Great War between Britain and Germany forever. He was showered with a standing ovation, while all around the Union Jack mingled with the gamma-crossed standards of the German veterans. The speech made a splash, and King George was quite appropriately disturbed.125 A month later, it was Hitler who received the British combatants at the Chancellery: together they evoked the days of the trenches, reminiscing with passion, as if they had been brothers-in-arms firing from the same dugout.126
The biennium 1936–37 represented the apogee of appeasement. Its beginning was of promise: on January 19, 1936, King George V sank into his final sleep, which was shortened by an injection of morphine and cocaine, so that he might be declared dead in the morning edition of The Times. 127 He was succeeded by Edward, Prince of Wales, the Nazi candidate himself. The ceremony of the coronation was fixed for May of the following year.
Then in March 1936, Germany locked irreversibly into the path to war; she was ready to play her first gambit: the occupation of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. As seen earlier, the clause in the Versailles Treaty contemplated the consequences of such a move in no ambiguous language. If a single German soldier trespassed on the Rhineland buffer, it was war: Britain, Italy, and Belgium would have rushed at once with swords drawn to back up France.
The half-baked 1936 Wehrmacht of Hitler was in no case a match to France’s tested force de frappe: ‘France,’ General Jodl would confess at Nuremberg, ‘could have blown us into pieces.’128
Regardless, the Fuhrer ‘gambled.’ On March 7, denouncing the Franco-Soviet agreements, Hitler ordered three meager battalions to cross the Rhine. France’s wall, the Maginot Line, was on full alert; her North African troops massed on the border – all she needed was a signal from London. Von Neurath, Germany’s Foreign Secretary, was terrified; Hitler, trembling with emotion no less than his minister, spoke words of strength for them both: fear not, he whispered, Britain shall not budge.
And indeed she did not: by the evening of the seventh, her stewards were scrambling all over to shield the Nazi advance. The press magnates, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, who was also courting the Russians since June 1935 on behalf of his intimate Churchill,129 and Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, cheered loudly for Hitler and Germany. ‘[Hitler:] All the Beaverbrook-Rothermere circle came to me and said: “In the last war we were on the wrong side.”’130
From London, Lord Lothian and Lord Astor, intoning the usual refrain that Germany was the dam against Bolshevism, scolded their French colleagues for being so ‘quarrelsome’131 about Germany’s understandable desire to walk into ‘her own backyard.’132 Thereafter Eden and Lord Halifax flew to Paris to deliver France a double blow. Upon arrival, Eden enjoined: ‘refrain from any act conducive to war, England wants peace.’ And Halifax doubled: ‘settle the issue with negotiation.’ Flandin, France’s Foreign Minister, did not understand; ‘if England acts,’ he insisted, ‘she will lead Europe…this is her last chance. If she does not stop Germany now, all is lost…’
France had not read Mackinder.
All the British gave France after this decisive Nazi sortie, as a sop, was a public session in London at the Council of the League of Nations on March 14. On this occasion, Eden, in a perfect construct of Foreign Office double-speak phrased for the pleasure of Nazism, averred that the occupation of the Rhineland was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but did not represent a threat to peace. It compromised the power of France, but not her security. The French were stupefied.
Britain had flagrantly dishonored her pledge to guarantee the security of Europe. The following day, Eden, as if nothing had happened, invited Ribbentrop for breakfast to pore over some maps and canvass German geopolitics. On March 29, without wasting an instant, Goebbels appealed to the Rhineland with one more referendum to suffrage its incorporation into the Reich: 99 percent favorable.133
For the British set-up, the appeasing thrust could not but elicit an opposite reaction: after the Rhineland coup, the anti-Nazi faction led by Churchill was turned with Jewish funding into a faster, more articulate and most secret outfit known as The Focus. As was the expressed wish of its leader, no detailed record of the group’s formation and activities has ever been divulged.134
But Hitler was not in the least worried by Churchill’s party which, to him, was just an annoyance capable of nothing more than words. After March, the Nazis were ever more willing to indulge their British infatuation – with torrents of champagne, feasts, conferences, summer and winter Olympics, and the disclosure of military secrets. Yet the Fuhrer yearned for something of heavier symbolism – an encounter at the very top, say, with the Prime Minister, Baldwin. Baldwin knew better, and courteously declined the invitation.135 Instead, the Prime Minister fished Lloyd George from the extras of Britain’s appeasement and sent him off to meet the Fuhrer in his Eagle’s Nest in the Bavarian Alps.
Thus the event was charged with a symbolism of a different valence: on September 4, 1936, Hitler clasped hands not with his British opposite, but with one of Nazism’s most accomplished midwives: that same Lloyd George that had cut the deal in Versailles. The two conversed animatedly about the war, politics, and labor issues. Hitler, overawed by his guest, whom he described as a ‘genius,’ wished to display him at the party convention in a few days, but Lloyd George, with caution, refused, though he did not refrain from bad-mouthing the Czechs 136 – a hint.
In sum, the encounter was another success, and Lloyd George would thereafter extol the Fuhrer in the press, acknowledging him as the ‘greatest German of the age.’
With regard to this episode, the question has been raised: ‘Who fooled whom?’137 That the British government fooled the Germans is hardly disputable; whether Lloyd George was a conscious or an unconscious tool of such a manipulation is irrelevant – and the only striking certainty is that Hitler and the Nazis never fooled anyone.
And the foolery went on, ever more imaginatively. At this time Edward, the new king, had an American mistress: Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
In the last months of 1936, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with the complicit act of Edward, was about to carry off a phenomenal show. The Prince of Wales was most likely instructed to go about reciting the mantra ‘No marriage, no coronation,’ whereby he publicly conditioned his coronation on making Wallis, a twice-divorced American commoner, his Queen. Baldwin would have then seen to it that a press campaign and a query submitted to the Dominions as to appropriateness of the choice of bride would have gone against the marriage.138 And so it did on November 16; afterwards Edward faced three choices: (1) give up Mrs. Simpson and keep the throne, (2) dismiss Baldwin and his Cabinet, (3) abdicate.
Although Wallis implored the Prince to keep his throne, and her as his concubine almighty,139 Edward, for ‘love,’ chose the least sensible option and abdicated on December 10, 1936. ‘God save the King,’ he shouted at the end of his speech. Albert, the Duke of York, ascended to the throne as George VI: thus the royalty was split between a conventional regent and his brother, the ‘pro-Nazi’ Edward, who would thenceforth acquire the title of Duke of Windsor.
The Nazis mistook the abdication for the result of an inner struggle to purge the royalty of its alleged ‘pro-German’ sympathizers, which did not exist, and though the Fuhrer was distressed by the event,140 the aim of the ploy was to keep him always hanging with a tantalizing game of wink and brush-off – which was working perfectly.
In June 1937, Edward and Wallis married in France, and in October they were invited to Germany for a grand tour of the Reich: everywhere the Duke and Duchess were hailed, and Edward requited the salute. On October 12, 1937, the day following their arrival, Edward was introduced in the house of Robert Ley, the Nazi Labor Secretary, to Himmler, Goebbels, and Hess 141 – an encounter for which the intelligence services had prepared him two and half years previously.
Finally, in November 1937, after all this profusion of geniality on the part of Britain, the time came to thrust the Fuhrer forward on to war. The mission of Lord Halifax on November 19 to the alpine residence of Hitler was the turning point in the dynamics leading to World War II. By this time, the broad aggregation of the appeasers dissolved into the two main ‘parties’ of Britain:142 the anti-Bolsheviks, who had regained the helm with Neville Chamberlain, and the Round Table, the two being relayed by the propaganda of the Peace Party, which fluctuated in their midst (Figure 5.2). The Nazis now stared at three different facets of a single front urging them to expand their European stronghold before aggressing the Soviets.
In synthesis, Halifax told Hitler that: (1) Britain considered Germany the bastion against Communism; (2) Britain had no objection to the German acquisition of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig; and (3) Germany should not use force to achieve her aims in Europe.
In the light of (1) the agenda set in Mein Kampf, which all British stewards had studied carefully, (2) the world’s full-fledged rearmament, (3) the steady and intense supply of British and American weapons the Nazis had received during the past four years, and (4) the Reich’s notorious preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler was justified in disregarding entirely the specious warning not to use force: in brief, Britain was urging him to go ahead. Ordinary Britons, and the rest of the world, were told nothing of this autumnal pact.
‘So oder so,’ ‘in one way or another,’ Hitler decided in January 1938 ‘to achieve self-determination for the Austrians’: in other words, he was going to annex the country. In February, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Sir Eric Simon, announced in the House of Commons that Great Britain could not be expected to support Austrian independence. This was the signal.
On March 12, Hitler marched into Austria and asked the Austrians thereafter to sanction the deed with a referendum: 99.7 percent swung to his side in favor of grossdeutsch unity – the Push to the East had begun. Czechoslovakia was next.
On April 21, 1938, General Keitel received orders from Hitler ‘to draft plans for invading Czechoslovakia.’143
It is important to emphasize that at this point not a single maneuver on the path to war was the fruit of Hitler’s strategy or imagination; the schemers of Versailles had prepared the route for him long ago, and the British stewards were now facilitating the progression.
By sequestering the 3.4 million Sudeten Germans (22 percent of the population) into the artificial creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918–20, the old treaty furnished the Fuhrer with the beautiful pretext of claiming these back into the Reich in the name of ‘ethnic self-determination’ – and so Hitler did.
The British press – again, the Daily Mail of the appeasing Rothermere – opened fire with a leader on May 6 denouncing Czechoslovakia as a hateful country, inhabited by rascals, whose treatment of the German speaking Sudeten was an outrage that Britain could not tolerate.144
Once more, France, the helpless Marianne forsaken by Britain, scurried around frantically to patch up some kind of belated common front against this Nazi juggernaut – whose 15-year incubation France’s mischievous pride had ultimately favored.
In May she supplicated the Russians to intervene on her side against Germany. She appeared to be utterly unaware that both Britain and Russia, who always seemed to be playing in tandem, had no intention whatever of stopping Hitler at this point.
Russia replied that she would do so as long as Poland and Romania afforded her the passage of Soviet troops in their territory (see Figure 5.3). Which was a bluff, because the Soviet Union did nothing to dissipate the rancor and seething hostility that divided her from Poland on one hand, and Romania on the other. France then implored both countries, but they refused: they did not trust the Russians, least of all in their home – ‘Give up,’ said Poland to France, ‘Czechoslovakia is dead.’
As France insisted, on May 20, 1938, Litvinov, Russia’s cunning Foreign Secretary, torpedoed once and for all France’s endeavors to convey Soviet divisions westward by raising the prospect of Russia attacking Poland: Russia might have to do so, fibbed Litvinov, to protect Czechoslovakia from the greed of Poland, which wanted to rob the former of the coal-rich district of Teschen. Thus the Soviets hamstrung France’s tangled skein of alliances. And once again, by the end of May, the ball was in Britain’s court.145
Poland was the keystone of the pre-war crisis because: (1) thanks to Versailles, by means of the Corridor, she might be set at variance with Germany; (2) she was allied to France; (3) but she was indeed hostile to Czechoslovakia, who was an ally of France; (4) she was temporarily allied to Germany, the enemy of France, and (5) she was sharply hostile to the USSR, the mortal enemy of Germany. Poland’s buffer position allowed Britain to buy precious time to direct the march of the Hitlerites.
The combined forces of Britain, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and France would have literally pulverized the Wehrmacht in 1938: all the powers involved knew this.146 Especially Britain, who, within two weeks of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, moved to emasculate Czechoslovakia and allow Hitler and herself to complete military preparations.
Already on March 24, Neville Chamberlain, sending another smoke signal to the Nazis, announced that Britain would refuse to lend assistance to the Czechs if they were attacked or to France if she went to their rescue.
At the end of May 1938, Hitler marked the date for striking at
Czechoslovakia: October 1. Then a group of generals clustered round the
Chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, hatched a plot in three
phases: (1) they would attempt to dissuade the Fuhrer from his plan; (2)
they enjoined Britain to stand firmly by Czechoslovakia and promised Hitler
that she would fight him; and (3) if Hitler persisted in his resolve to wage
war, they would proceed to assassinate him – the date was set for September
28, 1938. ‘Although message after message was sent to Britain in the first
two weeks of September…the British refused to cooperate.’147
Instead, the stewards – Halifax, Simon, Hoare, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, and the whole set – launched a disinformation/terror campaign in grand style: they began interminable and most intricate negotiations by which they sought to persuade the Czechs to surrender to the Reich the German-speaking Sudeten districts, upon which, most importantly, were erected first-class fortifications that would have posed a serious obstacle to a Nazi advance.
The argument they peddled for the purpose declared that: (1) Czechoslovakia would have been irremediably smashed in a war against Germany (which was false); (2) Russia’s military value was nil (which was false); (3) the Soviet Union wouldn’t have honored her alliance with the Czechs (which was true only insofar as Britain herself did not intervene); and (4) Germany would have been merely satisfied with the Sudeten regions (false) and with the Polish Corridor (true). ‘To make their aims more appealing they emphasized the virtues of “autonomy” and “self determination.”’148
The British plan, clearly, was to dismember Czechoslovakia which, with 34 sterling divisions, 1 million men, well trained, and with a high morale, could very well stall Hitler in the middle of Europe.
Meanwhile, to sell these catastrophic lies to the public, the stewards unleashed a bogus terror campaign, which the Peace Party amplified, by grossly exaggerating Germany’s bellicose potential, misrepresenting the fighting assets of the Czechs, and presaging the absurd threat of an aerial attack by the Luftwaffe, accompanied by gas attacks: in the first weeks of September, Londoners were fitted with gas masks and were taught air raid shelter drills.149
Then, to shield Hitler from General Beck’s conspiracy, in September Chamberlain flew to Germany twice, on the 15th and 22nd, to reach an agreement that would prevent the Nazis from going to war over Czechoslovakia – for their own good. An elderly British Prime Minister boarding a plane for the first time in his life…to rush to Germany. Unheard of. ‘[During the Czech crisis, Chamberlain] used secret messengers to let Hitler know that he should ignore tough official statements that might emerge in the next few days from Britain and France regarding Czechoslovakia.’150
The talks would lead to Chamberlain’s infamous radio speech of September 27: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’
The following day, the day the generals were going to pull the trigger on the Fuhrer, France, Germany, England, and Italy convened in Munich to carve up Czechoslovakia, without consulting anyone, least of all the Czechs: the homeland that the Anglo-French had granted the Czechs in 1919 as a reward for their provocation in Siberia they now took away. In four stages, Germany occupied the designated and fortified areas, while the rump of Czechoslovakia was to be guaranteed by France and Britain – the guarantee would never be given. The Czech army disbanded, and on October 10, the Czechs surrendered another piece of their mangled estate to the Poles.
On October 21, Hitler issued orders to invade the rump and turn it into a protectorate, which punctually came to pass on March 14, 1939 – the Czechs offered no resistance. And Montagu Norman, picking the pockets of the senseless victims, remitted to the Reichsbank, treacherously, £6 million of Czech gold held in custody at the Bank of England. That Norman was in close contact with the Chamberlain faction is certain (it couldn’t have been otherwise), but the nature and content of their interaction have never been revealed.151
Now, to finish off Versailles, only Poland remained – and after that, Germany would be at the gates of the Soviets: Captain Winterbotham, the British spy, had recently returned from Eastern Prussia, where the district leader had confided to him that Barbarossa should have been operational by May 1941.152 There was nothing that England did not know.
The stewards changed costumes once more (Figure 5.2). Appeasement, as a public stance, was finished: after the Czech invasion, it could no longer be ‘sold’ to the masses. So a different configuration emerged: the pro-Nazi Peace Party took the back-seat to posture as an elitist den of frondeurs, while the Round Table and the anti-Bolsheviks fused in an informal ‘diarchy,’ whereby the visible front, led by Halifax, made a pretense of enforcing tough-dealing with the Nazis, while the secret front, staffed with the Chamberlain group, continued to bestow upon Hitler concessions and ‘friendly’ assurances that Britain wouldn’t fight.153
Hitler had gone as far as he had been allowed, and it was time for Britain to set him up on the Western Front and thus precipitate the war. On March 31, 1939, ‘Exactly half-way between the public break-off and the secret resumption of…economic negotiations with Germany,’154 Chamberlain informed the House of Commons that ‘in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, His majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’
This was an extraordinary assurance. The British government since 1918 had resolutely refused any bilateral agreement guaranteeing any state in Europe. Now they were making a unilateral declaration in which they obtained nothing but in which they guaranteed a state in eastern Europe, and they were giving that state the responsibility of deciding when the guarantee would take effect, something quite unprecedented.155
No matter how shrewd as to realization and timing, the strategy of Britain was always the same: that is, pit foe against foe and secure her own involvement by priming satellite nations like land mines encircling the enemy of choice – in this case, the Germans. What she had done by guaranteeing Belgium on the eve of World War I, she now replayed with Poland.
Hitler had begun talks with Poland in October 21, 1938, by asking, predictably, for the city of Danzig and a kilometer-wide strip across the Polish Corridor to provide a highway and a four-track railroad under German sovereignty. These, indeed modest, requests were made to the Polish ally in an atmosphere as cordial as possible; they were the last, paltry shreds of Germany lost at Versailles: Hitler had no desire to overrun Poland, but rather to engage her in the forthcoming onslaught against Russia.156 Yet by late March, Poland turned litigious, and at first, the Fuhrer, not realizing that Britain had made clandestine overtures to Warsaw, could not fathom ‘Poland’s newfound resilience.’157
Not content with duping the Nazis, the British inveigled the Poles as well by making them believe that Britain and France would have unbridled a full-scale offensive against Germany, should the latter have decided to strike at Poland. But in the late spring of 1939 no aid worthy of the name, consisting of either men or munitions, was seen traveling from the Allied countries to Poland: ‘Britain had stalled when Poland requested economic help and military equipment to prepare to deal with a German invasion.’158 By May, Hitler readied his generals to consider Britain, for a time, the proximate enemy.
From London, the Chamberlain group continued to dance with the Nazis, promising as late as August a ‘full-bodied political partnership’ in exchange for peace,159 while the Round Table persisted in urging the Poles not to back down.
Hitler refused to believe that the Anglo-French were in earnest – it was a put-on, he concluded. He was fully armed, he had lost the Poles, he needed to strike – he was going to have the war that he wanted.
In the spring of 1939, Roosevelt’s clandestine emissary, Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter – who was close to the American Jewish Committee, which, in turn, stood ‘at one or two removes’ behind The Focus – visited London. Soon after his departure an extravagant publicity campaign began on Churchill’s behalf.160 The War Party was thus catapulted to the vanguard of British policy (Figure 5.2), eager to meet Hitler on the battlefield. In May 1937, when Germany had dismissed Churchill as a political lightweight, the bulldog had warned Ribbentrop: ‘Do not underrate England…She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War she will bring the whole world against you.’161
Before commencing, however, the Fuhrer had to think the unthinkable: to sign a truce with none other than Bolshevik Russia to sweep Poland out of the way.
Russia underwent her first Five-Year Plan in October 1928, four years later than Germany’s: from the latter the Soviets imported large amounts of capital equipment and machine tools; Krupp and the aircraft-maker Junkers possessed installations in anti-capitalist Russia, as did such jewels of corporate enterprise as Standard Oil, the enthusiastic Nazi-phile Henry Ford, and a variety of other Anglo-American concerns involved in the extraction of gold and oil. Stalin planned on trebling the production of iron, coal, and oil. To justify the forced industrialization of the country, he raised the spook of a forthcoming aggression from the West, and proceeded to consummate the endeavor at the expense of 25 million peasant households – the Kulaks. Five million of them were obliterated while their estates were shattered and collectivized. The environmental and economic repercussions, let alone the human strain of such a sacrifice led Stalin’s Russia by 1930 to such a disastrous impasse that only the capitalist rescue of the West enable him to tide over his dictatorial caravan to the next and last stage of the great pre-war mummery. For instance, the dam on the Dniepr – the greatest of such salvaging investments – was funded by US money and fitted by a British concern.163
When Hitler came to power, Stalin observed. He watched the suppression of the German Communists with utter detachment – such was the deserved fate of what had been all along an expendable crew since the early 1920's. And in June when the Fuhrer purged the dissenters in his bosom, then Stalin realized that the incubation was terminated, and that Adolf Hitler was indeed the piper conjured at Versailles who would be leading the German hordes into Russia.
Presently, he too had to appease. Britain’s game was transparent: as in World War I, she wanted Russia to win the war in Eurasia for her by swallowing the Nazis into the steppes and devour them, like the Whites, in a drawn-out and prolonged effusion of blood. To Churchill, Baldwin would thus sum it up in July 1936: ‘If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.’164
It was understood that the fighting should have been to the detriment of Germany rather than Russia, as Veblen had wrongly assumed. And the USSR, ever the imaginary foe of the Anglo-American oligarchy, would oblige. For that, though, the path had to be cleared of any kind of disagreement, of any kind of old Bolshevik talk – the talk, say, of Trostky and of all those who wanted to fight too soon and too far afield, overstepping the present entrenchment of Russia, which was in line with the designs of the Sea Powers, and in the name of junkyard bywords such as ‘world revolution’ or ‘Socialist brotherhood.’ A corps not of doctrinaires, but of two-faced tacticians was what was needed in the Red Army and the Politburo. And Hitler, with his fire and night of the long knives, provided the Red Czar with the inspiration.
In the wake of the holocaust of the Kulaks and the ensuing catastrophes, the majority of the army, the peasantry, the commissars, and 90 percent of the party machine had come to stand foursquare against Stalin’s regime.165
The pressure was about to reach breaking point when, suddenly, on December 1, 1934, the Stalinist nomenclature moved to head off the opposition. Laying hold of another useful idiot, the secret police of Leningrad ‘oriented’ this obscure and allegedly ‘hysterical’166 student by the name of Nikolaev into the corridors of the Smolny Institute.* There, Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s old comrade, and at the time his leading rival, was shot dead by the young unknown: twice Nikolaev had been found by the local police wandering around the Institute, armed, and twice upon higher and veiled orders he had been released, till Kirov fell.
* The school for noblewomen from which Lenin directed the Bolshevik coup d’état on 25 October 1917, and which was later taken over by the Communist Party of Leningrad.
Stalin rushed to Leningrad to find, as Hitler did in Berlin the year before, that the intelligence services were serving him a ‘fire’ and ‘the arsonist’ on a silver platter. And the arsonist, as the Russian public was subsequently dis-informed, was but the tip of a vast terrorist network woven by a gang of Trostkyite saboteurs, in cahoots with the German Reaction – a variation on the usual ‘terrorist lie’ that generally inaugurates a coup carried from within by the most conservative and unscrupulous fringe of a despotic regime.
Two days after the assassination, Nikolaev ‘accidentally’ perished in a Leningrad police van while the first wave of the great Stalinist purge washed over the apparatus of the Soviets: hundreds were immediately rounded up, laboriously tortured and killed; hundreds of thousands were shipped off to Siberia. This was only the beginning of a five-year slaughter, which shaded off into delirium during the great Show Trials of the Stalinist era.
Not coincidentally, the first season of such theatrical trials was produced by Stalin within a few days after the German occupation of the Rhineland, in March 1936: before the much aroused audiences of the world, the former apparatchiks first accused themselves and one other of being foul, shifty vermin, and then shambled to the wall. Face to face with the firing squad, they died shouting hails for Stalin and the Revolution – as if echoing the mutinous SA, who had fallen in June 1934 yelling ‘Sieg Heil!’
By such ways, the old Leninist Guard was flushed down the drain, one faction after another standing trial to betray the next with false accusations planted in pre-packaged scripts recited by a chorus of inquisitors methodically cast for the role. The peak of British appeasement, 1937, marked the paroxysm of the Stalinist Terror, which was but the second cycle of the cleansing mass sacrifices inaugurated by Lenin after the Civil War to keep the conquered beehive of Russia chronically malleable.
As one of Trotsky’s men, Radek, too, was doomed. The sinuous propagandist of much Russo-German incestuous dealing and one of the privileged few selected to accompany Lenin in that famous voyage across Germany arranged by Parvus in 1917, Radek was called to the dock, and as all the others before him had done to shield their own families, he lent himself to the sham. On January 23, 1937, in the course of his ‘confession,’ Radek, summoned by the prosecutor to shed light on his alleged network of ‘complicity,’ dropped the names of Putna and Tukhachevsky.
Putna was a little known general, but Tukhachevsky was a celebrity. The
former was in fact one of the top brains of the Red Army, serving at this
time as the military attache at the Russian embassy in London, whereas
the latter was the Red Army’s most prestigious commander – the glorious
Tukhachevsky. Born a Muscovite patrician in 1893, he joined the Great
War as a czarist officer. Captured twice by the enemy in 1915 and 1916, he
managed to escape from his German captors by improvising such utterly
reckless getaways that romanesque tales of the boldness and soldierly
brilliance of this Slav Monte Cristo preceded his return to Russia. It was with
the profoundest dismay that Tukhachevsky witnessed the collapse of the Russian armies during the Kerensky intermezzo, and when the Bolsheviks
seized power, he was one of those officers who, unlike the Whites, pitched
their sabers in the water and donned the Red Star, resigned in their hearts
that the world they had known would never come back, and that Russia
had to be created anew.
At only 26, he was made a general in Trotsky’s converted divisions – thereupon he would lash at the Whites like Nemesis incarnate, thrashing in sequence the Czech legion and Kolchak in Siberia, and finally dealing the decisive blow in the South to Denikin’s loyalist armies. On the home front, he brought to heel rebellious peasant formations even by using poisonous gas. And by the mid 1920's he emerged as the unrivaled prince of the spets, the new vanguard of young ‘specialists’ that dream of transforming the old imperial army into a new mechanized fighting device. It was not by chance that he would be chosen to form the strongest link of that subterranean connection that tied the Red Army to the German military–industrial complex from 1926 to 1932. The Russians learned much from the Germans: revolutionary theories on tank warfare from General Guderian, and many other prized secrets from the rest of the Reichswehr’s top brass: Schleicher, Bredow, Blomberg…
By 1935, the spets had so advanced the metamorphosis of the old Russian army into the hierarchic Moloch of their dreams that Stalin conferred upon the ambitious Tukhachevsky, whom he nicknamed ‘Napoleonchik,’167 and a handful of other ‘Kommandirs’ the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union – Tukhachevsky being, at 42, the youngest.
By this time, knowledgeable as he was of Germany after nesting for the best part of the Nazi incubation within her officer caste, Tukhachevsky guessed correctly, point by point, the objectives and the timetable of the Hitlerites. There was not an instant to lose: Russia, France, Czechoslovakia, and Britain had to unite and crush Nazism in a major offensive.
In January 1936, following the death of George V, Tukhachevsky was sent to London as Stalin’s representative to attend the funeral of the king. Magnificent opportunity: thereafter, in fact, he counted on meeting exponents of the British General Staff, whom Putna had contacted on his behalf. Utterly deceived like everyone else as to the nature and aims of the British empire, he believed that he would need little time to seduce the British generals with what appeared to be an irresistible proposal.168
Citing precise numbers, Tukhachevsky invited the British to consider that by 1937 the rearmament pace of Germany would find itself significantly behind the joint production of weaponry by France and Czechoslovakia. And what was more, Russia’s scaled-up manufacture of fighter planes, tanks, and cannons, which could have been deployed in Czechoslovakia by means of a spectacular ‘aerial bridge’ across Poland and Romania, would have made the Allied defense arsenal such that even a preemptive blitz against Germany could have neutralized the Nazis without excessive damage.
And the British? They listened politely and shook their heads – not interested. To justify the snub, they would craft the lie that Tukhachevsky had inflated his numbers, the same lie that the stewards upheld when in 1938 they moved to declaw the Czechs. And hadn’t Lord Lothian in 1935 confidently assured a group of visiting Ministers from Germany that ‘they would cut through Russia as through butter’?
Disheartened, Tukhachevsky left London. And tried again in Paris. But the French showed no inclination to fight at this time, and preferred to repose behind their fortified lines. ‘But it’ll be too late,’ expostulated Tukhachevsky. Only two months later, after the Rhineland coup, France’s Foreign Secretary, Flandin, would cry out to the British the exact same words.
Defeated, the young Marshal returned to Moscow – in time to partake in the reunion of the Soviet Supreme. Listening to the speeches of the Foreign Secretary, Litvinov, and of the Prime Minister, Molotov, he was literally struck, if not provoked by the mild, and almost kind words that were spoken towards Germany.
Then Tukhachevsky took the stand and slung around barbs that were meant to cut deep: trenchant words aimed not just at the Nazis, but also at the party grandees that inexplicably soothed them. He spoke exuding the assurance of a general backed by the whole of a powerful army.
If there ever was anybody Stalin should have feared among the warriors, Napoleonchik was always the one: temerarious and naturally situated to attract any coherent build-up of insubordination, Tukhachevsky was now putting the whole of Stalin’s and Britain’s, appeasement at risk.
According to a story, dismissed by some as fantastic, through the White central of Russian émigrés in Paris, the Soviet secret police (the GPU) obtained a dossier falsified by the conniving Nazi intelligence services (the Gestapo), which provided Stalin with ‘crushing evidence’ that Tukhachevsky, Putna, and their confederates had not ceased to betray Russia for more than a decade by passing on to Germany Soviet classified information.169
On June 12, 1937, a laconic communique featured on the last page of the press organs reported that Tukhachevsky and Putna had been executed. There followed the liquidation of 35,000 additional officers – about half the commanding corps. All in all, the Stalinists cannibalized with the purges two-thirds of the governing class – roughly 1 million individuals.
Legend has it that Stalin decapitated the Red Army with a view to repelling from Russia the eventual Nazi onslaught and diverting it towards the West – Britain and France – where, as he hoped, the Wehrmacht would crumble, prostrate. But if that were so, why was he so keen on making the Nazi war machine as strong as possible by pursuing doggedly since 1935 a policy of economic cooperation with the Reich?
In fact, while Anthony Eden reached Moscow from Berlin in March 1935, Soviet envoys were in Berlin negotiating with Schacht a long-term loan of 200 million marks, which Stalin would have flaunted as ‘his greatest triumph.’170 On the basis of this and further, larger availments of credit, the Nazis extended technical know-how for a steady and much more significant counterpart of Russian oil, grain, rubber, and manganese, without which, as is widely recognized, the Wehrmacht would have never been in a position to strike in 1939.171 The collusion was so intense that in April 1937, Kandelaki, Stalin’s chief economic legate, was received by the Fuhrer in person. Russian convoys laden with war supplies would be regularly sent to Germany until the very day of the Nazi attack, Operation Barbarossa’, June 22, 1941.172
In sum, Britain from the right and the USSR from the left had been fitting and rousing this Nazi construction since 1919: the former with diplomatic cunning, American loans, appeasement, the imperial markets, and the support of the Bank of England; the latter with the Red Terror, the sabotage of the Left opposition and vital materials in the run-up to war. Russia and Britain did move in sync. Alone the Nazis would have gone nowhere.
In March 1938, the Soviets acknowledged the Anschluss without protest, and in May, as seen, they undermined France’s belated efforts to assemble a coalition against Germany. On March 10, 1939, as he broached the question of its late annexations, Stalin displayed such good humor toward the Nazi Reich that three days later Hitler despoiled the rump of Czechoslovakia.
And in the spring of 1939 the masquerade spiraled into the last act.
On one side were the appeasing schemers of Britain, who kept on making all sorts of alluring promises to the Nazis, and who renewed their deceitful oaths on March 16, 1939, by ratifying a master commercial agreement with Germany.173 On the other was the Churchillian War Party, which pushed for an immediate entente with Russia and France: but it was out of office, and its antics, thus far, were for display only.
On May 19, Chamberlain, responding to Churchill, refused officially to bind Britain in any alliance, and seized the moment to laud Poland, grotesquely – Poland, that ‘virile nation,’ he orated with a straight face, that ‘is bound to give us all the aid…it can.’
While the deceptive lure of a British partnership was kept dangling before the eyes of the Nazis until early August (and beyond), from April 1939 Britain conducted mock negotiations with Russia and France – mock negotiations, whose sole intent was to hoodwink the French into believing that Britain was serious about confronting Hitler in the immediate future, and which Britain would finally sap by conveying to Moscow on August 11 a legation of second-rank generals devoid of decision power.174
Russia was no fool to any of these games – in fact she readied herself to deal directly with the Nazis in early May, when Molotov was appointed Foreign Secretary to replace Litvinov, who was Jewish, and was therefore not suitable for negotiating with a Nazi envoy.
Things came to a head on August 19. On that day, Poland, ever more heedless, refused once and for all to allow the passage of Russian troops in her territory, although Romania had agreed to do so; Germany and Russia signed a commercial pact, and Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow was announced.
On August 23, 1939, Hitler’s new Foreign Secretary landed in Moscow, and by the late evening it was done: Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia undersigned the stunning Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of Non-Aggression. The gem of the document was the secret protocol that envisioned the partition of Poland between the two signatories – just a respite before the great butchery.
Then, in the presence of his Nazi guests, the Red Czar drank to the health of the Fuhrer, waited for Ribbentrop to depart, and finally muttered to the intimate circle: ‘Of course, it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who tricked him…War would passes us by a little longer…’175
World War II was less than a week away.
On August 12, a mere fortnight before the Russo-German truce, Ernst Jünger completed the final draft of On the Marble Cliffs, which would be published later in the fall. This was the central novel of the Third Reich, written by the rhapsodic of its warrior caste.176 Reading it allegorically, the book disclosed an esoteric narrative of the German vicissitudes from the end of the Great War until the vigil of World War II, whose symbolism the Hitlerites would temporarily turn to political use.
On the Marble Cliffs told the story of two brothers, who, after taking part as knights in the campaign of Alta Plana gave up the sword and retired to a life of contemplation within the walls of a monastic retreat. The sanctum of the cloister – the venue of rituals untold – was matted by vipers that periodically untangled to form the blazon of the flaming fire-wheel – the swastika.
The brothers had once been initiated into a fraternity, called the Order of the Mauretanians.177 Power was the principle worshiped in their lodges, and the brotherhood demanded that domination be exercised dispassionately, whether in insurrection or in order – no surprise then if members of parties otherwise mortally hostile were seen conversing amicably in the underground walkways of Mauretania: all of them were pupils of the same master. Such a master was the Chief Ranger, an ogre larger than life, half-giant, half-beast – a tyrant terrible, earthly yet seduced by the ways of ‘technique’.
Nestled into the marble cliffs, which looked down upon the prosperous counties of the Marina, the hermitage afforded a vista over Burgundy to the south, and the isle of Alta Plana, enveloped by glaciers. To the north, at the back of the cliffs, ran the marches of the Campagna, which turned into marshland as they neared the long sickle-shaped thickets of the Ranger’s sylvan domains. There, in what was known as Flayer’s Copse, the monstrous retinue of the Ranger might be espied dispatching sacrificial victims in ways indescribable.
The war on the borders of Alta Plana had forever disrupted the order that reigned over the coastal dominions: gone was the rough core of honor. The Marina was now ridden by crime, and agents and spies, who had descended upon it from the northern dark woods. Biedenhorn, the chief of the army, thus acquired significant clout. In the turmoil, the clans sought him out, as did the woodland riffraff, with whom he compromised by ceding to them the control of several districts. Evil blood thus spread from the forests in the veins of the world and the weak rebelled against the laws that had been issued for their very protection. Resisting the rebellious rage whipped up by the huntsmen and the even cruder foresters stood the proud Belovar, a chief herdsman of the Campagna often seen in the cloister, whose farm was a home to many sons of the land bent on opposing these powers of darkness.
One day, Braquemart, a Mauretanian obsessed by dreams of resurrecting the sun temples of an old race of gods, reached the hermitage, accompanied by a silent young prince, to speak of a plan. Braquemart confided to his hosts his desire to embark on an adventure, to the north, where he would put into practice his theory that in the new hive masters were to be separated from slaves and never allowed to cross-breed again.
Against the counsel of a mysterious priest, the head of a matriarchal church hovering behind the scenes, Braquemart and the prince, joined by the brothers, pushed on and invaded the demoniacal forest. They were backed by Belovar and Sombor – his corpulent son – who sicked on the mastiffs of the Ranger their two packs of snarling molossi, roused by blood they had licked off the flags of their masters.
The hounds of Belovar – the pride of the old man – fought bravely across the ungodly brushes, but the red dogs of the Ranger, whose chilling laugh might be heard from afar, had numbers on their side. Chiffon Rouge, the enormous molossus leading the red pack, came rumbling down upon Belovar and his dogs in charges so violent that soon ill-omened signs of cracking could be seen in the ranks of the herdsmen. They were overwhelmed: one by one they were slain. As they retreated, the brothers discovered the severed heads of Braquemart and the prince impaled upon spikes in a clearing bordering the Copse. When they repaired to the Marina, it was too late: a spectacle of devastation opened before the narrator, who cast a long, lewd glance upon the ruins of the cities that lay smoldering, sparkling with fire like a necklace of rubies.
In the twilight finale of Jünger’s fantasia, Chiffon Rouge led the conclusive attack against the hermitage perched on the cliffs, but as the dogs from hell fumbled into the crypt, the sanctuary’s snakes wrapped the beasts into their coils and strangled them all.
Meanwhile the villagers hustled in droves to abandon the ravaged Marina in ships overladen headed to Burgundy and to Alta Plana. On one of these vessels the brothers embarked and reached the ice ring of the visible isle, where they were received in the farmstead of hospitable friends – friends that once had been knights whom the brothers had fought in that distant campaign. On seeing their shelter, the narrator concluded, ‘we felt we had come home.’
The narrator was Ernst Jünger himself and ‘Brother Otho’ was his younger sibling Friedrich Georg, both of whom had fought with conviction as commissioned officers on the Western Front during World War I, the ‘campaign’ against Britain – the icy Albion depicted as Alta Plana, which faced Burgundy, that is, France. The Marina was Germany, and the hermitage was something of a Thule Lodge: the elitist, and occultist, vantage point secured by the counter-initiates of the New Germany – the proto-Nazis like Jünger, who had been originally inducted into the great network of power. The order of Mauretania appeared to be an antipodal Freemansonry, which bred tyranny in all its forms, hence the possibility of chancing in its corridors upon Nationalists slumming with Bolsheviks and professional revolutionaries: possibly men, say, like Parvus and Trebitsch.
The state of decay in which the Marina found itself after the war was a transparent allusion to the corruption of the puppet republic of Weimar: Germany had been turned overnight into a house of sin, where delinquents mixed with the helots, the huntsmen, and foresters. The huntsmen were the Socialists, with whom Biedenhorn, the Chief of the Reichswehr (Groener, Seeckt, Schleicher…), sealed on behalf of the clans (the upper classes) the lurid compact for the suppression of the Councils’ Republics. These Councils were in turn infiltrated by the foresters, that is, the Communist agents that had descended from the forests – the sickle-shaped and bloody woods of Bolshevik Russia – into the plains of the Campagna: Central Europe.
Standing guard against these hellish hordes was Belovar, with his son Sombor and their two packs of hounds: that is, Hitler, the honorary member of Thule, the portly Goring, and the SA and the SS, who marched behind banners maculated with the blood of the martyrs of November 9, 1923* – a consecration ritual introduced by Hitler in 1926.178
*On Sunday morning took place the most singular ceremony of the Third Reich, that of the consecration of the flags. One would bring before the Führer “the flag of blood,” that which was carried by the militants killed at the time of the aborted putsch of 1923, in front of the Feldherrenhalle of Munich…With one hand, the Chancellor clasped the banner of blood, and the pennants to be consecrated with the other. He supposedly acted as the vector of a fl uid unknown, and thus the blessings of the martyrs were bestowed upon the new symbols of the German Fatherland. Purely symbolic ceremony? I don’t think so. There truly lives in the thought of Hitler as in that of the Germans the idea of a sort of mystical transfi guration, analogous to that of the benediction of the water by the priest, – if not to the Eucharist. Whoever fails to discern in the consecration of the fl ags the analogue of the consecration of the bread is not likely to understand anything about Nazism. I don’t know what was the Germany of yore. She is today a great, strange country, more removed from us than either India or China. The fl ag itself accentuates thus stunning oriental impression…’ (Robert Brasillach, Les sept couleurs (Paris: Plon, 1939) pp. 123–4).
The setting was thus laid for the coming expedition of Braquemart and the prince: the invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa – led by the top echelons of the SS (Braquemart and his fixation with ancestral archeology), and the Junkers of the Wehrmacht, symbolized by the mute prince, whose silence was the tragic presentiment of a forthcoming doom. Jünger, seeing it as his duty to join this brigade,† was yet certain that the ‘herdsmen’ of Germany would be routed in the deep maws of Stalin – Chiffon Rouge – who appeared to be cheered by the Devil himself – the Chief Ranger. In the end, the Bolsheviks laid waste the whole of Europe while the Nazi initiates forsook the marble cliffs and ‘came home’ to the oak groves of their knightly brethren in Britain. The defeatist narration of the coming battle against Stalin prompted several party censors, including Goebbels,to demand that the book be banned and the author punished, but Hitler intervened personally in the matter, forbidding anyone to molest the bard. Such an allegory, painted by a writer who was at the time imposing himself as one of the greatest literary talents of the twentieth century, with its emphasis on: (1) the religious hatred for the Red Empire in the East, (2) the certainty of spiritual victory over the enemy – the snake smothering the hound – and (3) the hand conclusively outstretched towards the racial brethren of Britain, was precisely the sort of coded message the Führer wished to diffuse in the direction of what he believed to be the British allies of the Peace Party. As they were to take their preliminary steps towards war in a most uncertain environment, whose shifting sands were the work of Britain’s unceasing dissimulation, the Nazis endeavored to the best of their ability to secure this elusive partnership with the British empire, which they saw as the fundamental prerequisite for founding their Aztec beehive in the plains of Ukraine
† He would indeed be re-enlisted in World War II as an officer, who would see active duty fi rst in occupied Paris and then briefl y on the Eastern Front.
But even the metaphors of Jünger were powerless to alter a decision made long before Stalin would reach the marble cliffs, by men that never had and never would befriend the Germans.
And with its trumpeted unilateral promise to guarantee the independence of this ‘virile nation,’ what did noble Britain do? Nothing. She watched impassively.
Everything repeated itself: when war broke out, Churchill was summoned by Chamberlain to resume the command of the Admiralty – the very same post from which in 1915 no less impassively he had let the Lusitania sink in the hope of drawing the United States into the conflict.
Formally, Britain was now bound to declare war upon Russia too, but of course, she didn’t. And Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador in London, who was fascinated by the twisted pattern of British diplomacy, asked Churchill why. The latter replied: ‘The danger to the world is Germany, and not Russia…’179
[Right because it was Germany that locked half of Europe behind an iron curtain for 40 years,while England played King and Queens on their little piece of shit island DC]
During the Polish campaign, the Franco-British contingent numbered 1.5 million troops on the Western Front, where Hitler had stationed a mere 350,000 men – clearly there was no willingness to fight the Nazis. Instead of bombs, leaflets were dropped from planes assuring the German population that the Allies had no quarrel with them, but only with their rulers.180 Strict orders were issued to the Royal Air Force not to bomb any German land forces – such orders would remain unchanged until April 1940: ‘When some Members of Parliament put pressure on the government to drop bombs on German munitions factories in the Black Forest, Sir Kingsley Wood [the Air Minister] rejected the suggestion with asperity: “Are you aware it is private property?”’181 [Given what happened some 2-3 years later to Germany's cities,this asshole could not have said that with a straight face DC]
And this time the blockade round Germany was perfunctory: throughout the war the Nazi regime would restock its facilities via countless channels from all over the world.
On October 12, Hitler addressed the first of his peace speeches to Britain: along with the desire to come to an understanding, he envisaged the possibility of relegating the Jews in the Polish rump under German control. Britain rejected the overture.
On February 10, 1939, Pope Pius XI died; Pacelli, the diplomatic fox of the Vatican and former nuncio to Germany, succeeded him as Pius XII on March 12.
In late November, Pacelli decided to redeem somewhat the damning mistakes of the past. And he went far. He consented to serve as the liaison between the Catholic resistance in Germany and the British Foreign Office for what was another serious attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer. ‘The hazardous nature of such a plot for the Pope, the Curia, and all those associated with the Vatican can be hardly exaggerated.’182 On December 5 he summoned the British Minister, Osborne, to the Vatican and passed on to him the following information from the German anti-Nazis: (1) in the coming spring Hitler was about to launch a major campaign in the West, and (2) this offensive would not occur if a nucleus of Wehrmacht generals succeeded in overthrowing the Hitlerites – for that, the German rebels conditioned, it was imperative that Britain guaranteed an honorable peace for Germany.
Osborne relayed this to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who in turn reported to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. These plots to assassinate Hitler were always a nuisance and a source of embarrassment to Britain: she did not want the fruit of her conjuration dead just yet;certainly not at this early stage. And so the stewards sabotaged this plot as well. Osborne complained to the Pope that the coup was ‘hopelessly vague,’ and Halifax, as disingenuous as could be, lamented that Britain would not collaborate unless the German conspirators showed their faces and submitted a definitive program outlining their intentions. The Pope persisted, but Osborne, cued by his superiors, cut the secret talks short: ‘If you want to proceed with a change of government,’ he retorted curtly to Pacelli, ‘get on with it. I don’t see how we can make peace so long as the German military machine remains intact.’183
And still no fighting from the Allies – the people called it the ‘drôle de guerre,’ the ‘funny,’ ‘phony,’ or ‘sitting’ war – Bitzkrieg.
Between April and May 1940, Hitler occupied Norway and Denmark. And on May Day he launched the invasion of France and the Low Countries. The nine months of the Bitzkrieg came to an end.
At long last the War Party, which had been pining for action since 1934, was picked as the first mask of the masquerade: the time of Winston Churchill had arrived (Figure 5.2). Contrary to what transpired from the public debate, the changing of the guard between Chamberlain and Churchill was smoothest: it was indeed a conspiracy of these two to bring about what had been a foregone conclusion for years:184 On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill took the helm of the empire as Prime Minister and chief stalwart of the anti-Nazi crusade. Surprisingly, the vast majority of Liberal historians have seldom if ever wondered: if all such fights and feuds within the British Establishment about Germany were real and not feigned, why would Churchill, the staunch anti-German, retain in the Cabinet and in key Intelligence positions most of Chamberlain’s entourage?185 In fact, he kept the very appeasers, the alleged pro-Nazis of yesteryear, many of whom were always ‘his men’ (for example, Sam Hoare), to do what they had continually done for years with unsurpassed ability, that is, delude the Nazis with the prospect of an alliance – a delusion designed to redirect the Reich towards Russia and gain time before the Americans were drawn into the war.
On May 15 Holland fell. With clemency, on May 24 Hitler allowed the evacuation to Britain of the drifting Franco-British contingent at Dunkirk – 375,000 men, a third of whom were French. Belgium surrendered on the 27th, and the Nazis marched into Paris on June 14, 1940.
After dynamiting the commemorative car at Compiègne near Paris, in which Erzberger had signed Germany’s humiliating surrender in November 1918, the Germans proceeded to occupy the north of France so as to keep Britain in watchful view, and surrender the remainder of the country to their French Collabos under General Pétain, possibly as a reward for making the victory of the Nazis so suspiciously speedy.
As Prime Minister, Churchill also became the chief choreographer of the masquerade: with over three decades of intelligence operations behind him and an extraordinary talent for theatrical mendacity, he was eminently qualified to direct the final and riskiest steps of the dance. Now was the time to play the Windsor trump card again.
The plot was to create a counterfeit zone of British appeasement in the Iberian peninsula. Windsor would be the bait. Edward was presently serving as Major General of the British Army in the Allied Command stationed in Paris. On May 16, he ‘suddenly deserted his post without authorization – a court-martial offense – and took the Duchess to the South of France.’186 What looked like a mad scramble to escape from the advancing Nazi divisions was instead a secret mission to the neutral terrain of Spain. On June 20, Edward was in Barcelona.
Meanwhile, on May 19 Churchill had dispatched Samuel Hoare as British Ambassador to Madrid: a former ‘appeaser’ whom the Nazis did trust.
Furthermore, by way of Sweden, the British dis-informed the Hitlerites in late May that a core of pacifiers, opposed to Churchill was coalescing around Halifax.187 The counterfeit bisection of the British establishment into adversary clans, which had been employed for the Trebitsch dupery of 1920, was presently re-adapted on a giant scale to the last stage of Britain’s great deception of the Third Reich (Figure 5.2) – and, not by chance, the same man, Churchill, was behind both operations.
At that time the Nazis were told by double-agents like de Ropp that not until after a major battle, which ‘left no doubt about German military might,’ would the Peace Party be in a position to topple the Churchill Cabinet.188
And the Nazis believed everything: for years they had looked into the eyes of this party, a party which appeared to cast an enormous shadow over the whole of British society: the diplomatic corps, the intelligence services, the intelligentsia, the upper class. All of them seemed engulfed in an assortment of Fascist movements bent on overthrowing the throne should Britain have been invaded and sued for peace. At the grassroots, these groups were variously called The Link, The Right Club, The Nordic League…189 Few, if any, were genuine.
On July 3 Windsor was in Lisbon – there he lay in wait for the Nazis. He was hosted by rich Portuguese friends, who were linked to the spying web of the Germans. The prince talked much, and the German embassy in Lisbon relayed the conversation to Ribbentrop in Berlin. On July 12, Edward was allegedly heard recommending that the Nazis bomb Britain severely to make her ready for signing an immediate peace with Hitler.190
Since July 10, the Luftwaffe had been bombing British ports and logistic positions. Appealing ‘once more to reason and common sense’, Hitler offered Britain peace in his address of July 19, 1940. And once more Britain rejected it. Three days earlier, the Fuhrer had alerted his generals, theatrically, to ‘prepare’ for the cross-Channel invasion of England – that great Nazi hoax referred to as Operation Sea Lion (Seelöwe): naturally, Hitler would never make good on it. And Churchill knew it.191
And then, towards the end of July, the high-level Nazi envoys landed in Lisbon. The documentation pertaining to this mission was suppressed by Churchill himself;192 only a few coded records survived. From one creditable reconstruction, it emerges that Walter Schellenberg, one of the top agents of the Nazi intelligence services, was joined in Lisbon by his chief, Reinhardt Heydrich, to escort none other than the Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who had flown from Germany to complete a round of secret preliminary negotiations with the Duke – Hess’ old acquaintance from 1937.193
What they negotiated on July 28 is not known, though it might be easily guessed from the subsequent developments of the war and the further declarations of the Duke to his entourage: namely, that he was not willing to risk civil war in Britain by reclaiming his throne just yet, but that bombing sense into Britain at this stage might have prepared the terrain for his swift return from the Bahamas, whose governorship he had for the time being accepted at the suggestion of Churchill. On August 1, 1940, the Windsors embarked in Lisbon on a liner headed for the Caribbean and stepped down from the stage.
‘Unhappy with the Luftwaffe’s limited results, [on that very day, Hitler] announced his intention to accelerate the campaign and ordered a massive and continuous onslaught, which he code-named Adlerangriff, or Eagle Attack’.194 This was staged as some kind of thundering preamble to the imaginary land-invasion of Britain, which, having always been in the nature of a bluff, was accordingly postponed by the Fuhrer sine die. The aerial battle over Britain, which Hitler patently undertook with the greatest reluctance, began on August 13. He had never wanted to fight Britain, nor was he obviously prepared to do so at this time: Germany had but ten submarines in the Atlantic and her bombers were wholly unsuited for independent warfare against Britain. ‘Clearly her aircraft had never been designed for that purpose.’195 Not surprisingly, Eagle Attack was a fiasco – it was aborted on September 17, just 36 days after its beginning, and de facto terminated on May 10, 1941, after a swap of desultory air raids between enemies.
Windsor had served his purpose in the hands of Chuchill perfectly: he had provoked Hitler into triggering those ‘air massacres’ that Churchill had been invoking like manna from heaven since 1934, and that since the fall of 1939 he held up to the Americans as the chief lure to drag them into the war. For almost two years Churchill tried to blackmail the United States, threatening that Britain might have had to surrender her fleet to Hitler if the latter had bombed her into submission. ‘Every hour will be spent by the British,’ US Ambassador Kennedy predicted, ‘in trying to figure out how we can be gotten in.’196
The truth was also that the war was costing Britain $1.5 billion per month – this was World War I all over again: America had to be stirred to join, once more, Britain’s Eurasian intrigues. But Roosevelt and the clubs behind him needed no persuasion – they had rearmed on a colossal scale since 1938; whatever the New Deal could not do was solved by rearmament: after playing the Russian roulette with Montagu Norman in 1929, America reaped in the subsequent decade 10 million men without work. Eventually, it picked them up, one at a time, and clothed them in khaki, so that by 1940 the reserve army of the jobless had become a drilled fighting corps of 11 million G.Is. The United States was dying to fight.
After the inglorious end of the German Reparations in 1932, the Americans had sworn they would sell no weapons to belligerents, and whatever they sold, they would sell for cash. In 1939, however, they revised the legislation and resumed the sale of arms to warring nations; and by the end of 1940, pressured by the British, who were nearly insolvent, they agreed to do so on credit. ‘Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire,’ Roosevelt tauntingly addressed the American public on December 17, 1940, ‘I don’t say to him…“my hose cost me $15…I don’t want $15 – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over”.’197 This piece of fireside wisdom was turned into law on January 6 1941, as the Lend-Lease Agreement and ratified two months later by Congress – Churchill, immensely pleased, would categorize it as ‘the most unsordid act in the history of our nation.’ ‘We must be,’ Roosevelt concurred, ‘the great arsenal of democracy.’198
Afterwards, the US Administration did not even bother to deviate from the routine of 1916: it insisted, in fact, on establishing American naval escort of supply ships to Britain with a view to setting off a ‘shooting war’ with the Nazi U-boats.199 This, however, would not be necessary, for Hitler would declare war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941.
Meantime, between January and April 1941, the fake Peace Party in England continued to signal to the Nazis.200
The preparation for Barbarossa was completed by December 18, 1940; the tentative date for the invasion was set for mid May 1941.
In April 1941, the British informed Stalin of the coming German storm. ‘Let them come,’ replied the Red Czar, ‘we will be ready for them!’201
Yet between March and June 1941, the German maneuver in the Mediterranean basin was so successful that the British Foreign Office was seriously preoccupied by the eventuality of a wholesale collapse of its Middle Eastern defensive apparatus. In May 1941, victorious with Rommel in Cyrenaica,* and in Crete, the Germans landed aircraft in Iraq: a further deployment by Germany of airborne troops across Syria, Iraq, and Iran would have cut off Britain from her oil supply, and thereby afforded the Reich, by way of India, a much feared connection to the Japanese armies battling in the theaters of Asia.
*Eastern Libya.
But on May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess disappeared.
Where he vanished, and how, and what happened to him afterwards, is not known. The story that fearing a war on two fronts and furiously jealous of the blooming intimacy between his deputy Bormann, and Hitler, the lunatic Hess on a whim flew a ponderous jet over Scotland to rendezvous a cabal of appeasers, strayed off course, ejected himself perilously from the cockpit, landed on a field nearby, twisted his ankle, and presented himself as Captain Alfred Horn to a bewildered Scottish plowman, is a cheap myth. A fabrication which neither the Nazis nor the British, or their loyal archivists, ever endeavored to dispel.
In fact, there appear to be two Hesses,202 two planes leaving from different locations,203 two uniforms,204 an alleged impostor in the prison of Spandau,205 and an amnesiac, stuporous defendant at Nuremberg,206 who was alternatively classified by the Allied staff psychiatrists as a ‘dull witted, autistic psychopath,’ a ‘sham,’ an ‘enigma,’ or ‘a schizoid.’207 A man who refused to see his wife for 28 years, and who died mysteriously – most probably strangled by ‘specialists’208 – the day before his release in 1987.
Whatever the truth of the case, the facts speak clearly. After Hess vaporized:
1. The German deployment in the Far East ceased – Rommel was forsaken at the gates of Egypt; the directive to march to the southeast and the expeditions against Malta and Cyprus were rescinded, definitively. All available German forces were hastily conveyed towards Russia.
Had Rommel succeeded in North Africa…had he reached Suez and penetrated the Near East to make juncture with Japanese forces…The global strategy of the Nazi General Staff would have been immensely advanced towards its goal of global victory…The failure of the Nazi campaign in North Africa must take its place among the great ‘ifs’ of history.209
2. The night of Hess’s disappearance coincided with the final aerial raid conducted by the Luftwaffe against Britain. On June 22, 1941, a little over a month after the event, at 3:30 am, while German planes bombed Byelorussia, Hitler’s ‘herdsmen’ invaded the Russian forest – they made up a highly mechanized legion of 3 million Germans, Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians – with the SS sting in the tail. Awaiting them was an equally large pack of ‘red dogs’, which in the heat of the clash would grow to be four times as numerous.
The Nazis surrendered Hess as some form of collateral, and the British ‘appeasers’ appeared to keep their end of the bargain. Churchill and his military staff would prevent the Americans from opening a western front for a period of three years of unspeakable carnage: they granted the Nazis their yearned ‘free hand’ in the East. 210 They gave the Germans some time to sink in the Russian quagmire, before coming with the Americans to finish them off and conquer at last the prized booty of the German Fatherland.211
Already on July 26, 1941, Stalin requested an immediate Allied intervention in Western Europe. Churchill refused.212 In April of 1942, General Marshall of the US Army was in London to discuss the plan of a cross-Channel invasion; Churchill was ‘reluctant.’ In January 1943, at Casablanca, the American generals again pressed the British to act. Not even in November 1943, when the ‘big three’* met in Tehran, would Churchill allow discussion of the western closure before mooting territorial tradeoff's. 213
* Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
Sir Alan Brooks, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, opposed all plans for such an assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an attack indefinitely…The Americans…advocated a [cross-Channel attack] on the largest possible scale at the earliest possible time.214
Instead, from the Allies the Russians would get $10 billion worth of guns, and afterwards, as Baldwin had explained to Churchill, who needed no explication, one was to let the ‘Bolshies’ slowly blow the Nazis to pieces. The deception was sustained unabatedly for the whole duration of Barbarossa: in January 1942 Hitler might still be heard wishing that Hoare would take power,215 or hoping in the autumn of 1943 that Windsor would overthrow his brother.216 The Fuhrer would remain a victim of the most astounding illusions till the end.
Not until May 1944 would the British agree to open the Western Front with the cross-Channel operation (Overlord), which had been timidly prefaced by the Mafia assisted debarkation of the Americans in Sicily – Operation Husky of July 1943. By then the Nazis’ invading corps had been so ravaged that ‘it became obvious that the Soviet Union was capable of destroying Nazi Germany on her own.’217
Then and then only did Britain deem that the time had finally come to dispatch this Nazi creature, by now mortally wounded, that she had nurtured for over a quarter of a century for the sake of her Eurasian ambition.
next...conclusion 280s
notes
105. Gilbert, Appeasement, pp. 138–50.
106. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 581.
107. Gunther, Inside Europe, p. 278.
108. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden (San Pedro, CA: GSG & Associates Publishers, 1981), pp. 227–8.
109. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 653.
110. Ibid., p. 582.
111. Gilbert, Appeasement, pp. 79–80.
112. Ibid., p. 120.
113. Louis Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception. The Dark Secret that Destroyed Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 117.
114. François-Poncet, Fateful Years, pp. 152–3.
115. Quoted in Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time. The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 23.
116. Ivan Maisky, Who Helped Hitler? (London: Hutchinson, 1964 [1962]), p. 55.
117. David Irving, Churchill’s War: Vol. 1, The Struggle for Power (Bullsbrook, Australia: Veritas Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 39–40.
118. Charles Higham, The Duchess of Windsor. The Secret Life (New York: McGraw & Hill, 1988), p. 109.
119. Peter Allen, The Windsor Secret. New Revelations of the Nazi connections (New York: Stein & Day Publishers, 1984), p. 34.
120. Paul Schmidt, Da Versaglia a Norimberga (Roma: L’arnia, 1951), pp. 271–80. Preparata 03 chap06 290 10/3/05 12:01:24 pm Notes 291
121. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 263.
122. Schmidt, Da Versaglia, p. 291.
123. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 267.
124. Hanfstaengl, Missing Years, p. 228.
125. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 117.
126. Schmidt, Da Versaglia, p. 293.
127. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 130.
128. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 68.
129. Maisky, Who Helped Hitler?, p. 57.
130. Hitler, Secret Conversations, pp. 556–7.
131. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 769.
132. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 69.
133. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, pp. 286–95.
134. Irving, Churchill’s War, pp. 54–5.
135. Alfred Smith, Rudolf Hess and Germany’s Reluctant War, 1939–1941 (Sussex: Book Guild Ltd., 2001), p. 61.
136. George Lentin, Lloyd George and the Lost Peace. From Versailles to Hitler, 1919–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 103.
137. Ibid., p. 99.
138. Lord Beaverbrook, The Abdication of King Edward VIII (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 63.
139. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 188.
140. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 97.
141. Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor. The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson (New York: Citadel Press, 1999), p. 280.
142. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 583.
143. Ibid., p. 777.
144. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 5, p. 307.
145. Ibid., Vol. 5, pp. 340–5.
146. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 286–8.
147. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 631. 148. Ibid., p. 627.
149. Ibid., p. 633.
150. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 144.
151. Ibid., p. 182.
152. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 253.
153. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 642–3.
154. Ibid., p. 646.
155. Ibid., p. 648.
156. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 6, p. 179.
157. David Irving, The War Path: Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (London: Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 193.
158. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 208.
159. Ibid., pp. 256, 232.
160. Irving, Chuchill’s War, pp. 167–8.
161. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 124.
162. Simon S. Montefi ore, Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), p. 307.
163. Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria delle Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 533.
164. Irving, Chuchill’s War, p. 61.
165. Ibid., p. 162.
166. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 323. Preparata 03 chap06 291 10/3/05 12:01:25 pm 292 Conjuring Hitler
167. Montefi ore, Stalin, p. 222.
168. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 4, pp. 210–70.
169. W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000 [1941]), pp. 205–8.
170. Ibid., p. 12.
171. Edward E. Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle. Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Westport, CA: Praeger, 1999), p. 182, and Thamer, Terzo Reich, p. 793.
172. David Irving, Hitler’s War (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 360.
173. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 298.
174. Maisky, Who Helped Hitler?, p. 171.
175. Montefi ore, Stalin, p. 312.
176. Jünger, Marble Cliffs, 1947.
177. For a study of Jünger’s Mauretanians, see Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l’histoire: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Ernst Jünger (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1978), p. 191.
178. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 23.
179. Irving, Chuchill’s War, p. 193.
180. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 109.
181. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 667.
182. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope. p. 236.
183. Ibid., p. 238.
184. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 138.
185. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 231.
186. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 276.
187. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 231.
188. Ibid., p. 229.
189. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 265. 190. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 200.
191. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 379; Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 306. 192. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 376.
193. Allen, Windsor Secret, pp. 224–33, and Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 245.
194. Michael Veranov (Ed.), The Mammoth Book of the Third Reich at War (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc. 1997), p. 141.
195. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 55.
196. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 193.
197. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 715.
198. Irving, Churchill’s War, pp. 483–9.
199. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 720.
200. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 270.
201. Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 358.
202. Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979).
203. Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (London: Frederick Muller, 1969), p. 319.
204. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 261.
205. Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness. The True story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 152–3.
206. International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 14 November 1945– 1 October 1946, Vol. XXII (Nuremberg, 1948), pp. 368–72.
207. John K. Lattimer, Hitler & the Nazi Leaders. A Unique Insight into Evil (New York: Hippocene Books, Inc., 2001), pp. 109–17.
208. Smith, Rudolf Hess, pp. 457–8. Preparata 03 chap06 292 10/3/05 12:01:25 pm Notes 293
209. Edmund Walsh, Total Power. A Footnote to History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948), p. 9.
210. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 283.
211. A recent book by Martin Allen entitled The Hitler/Hess Deception (London: HarperCollins, 2004) claims to have at long last solved the Hess mystery. We wish it were so. Allen has ‘discovered’ additional archival documents that prove that the Peace Party that signaled to the Germans until the departure of Hess was indeed a pretense, the creation of Britain’s Secret Service. Allen further argues that all the diplomatic feints, shams, and wiles performed in 1940 and 1941 by ‘eminent marionettes’ (p. 219) such as Hoare, Halifax & Co. to entice the Nazis formed the essential complement to the deception orchestrated from the secret retreat at Woburn Abbey, the headquarters of a shady branch of the intelligence division for Special Operations. The deception was in fact aimed at diverting the Nazis’ urge for devastation away from the Middle East and the Mediterranean seaboard, and reorienting it towards Soviet Russia. So it appears that Allen’s fi ndings do nothing but confi rm what had been an easy supposition in this fi eld of research for at least a couple of decades. For instance, Louis Kilzer had already guessed this much in Churchill’s Deception, which Allen duly ignores. Moreover, Kilzer, most importantly, wondered whether those three terrible years of unhampered Nazi activity in the East (1941–44) were not in fact the British reward for the surrender of Hess. Allen broaches none of these key problems, nor does he explain how the Nazis were in fact duped if the Hess mission in the end proved to be a failure, which is what the author, not deviating from the standard account of Hess’s Scottish impromptu, contends. In other words, it is not at all clear why Hitler resolved nonetheless to push ahead with Barbarossa, even though he had not received any token reassurance from Britain that his back would be covered in the West if he attacked in the East. We don’t know why the author has dragged us one more time into a retelling of the story of ‘the Nazi bigwig that parachuted himself over the Dungavel estate’ if we are to rate that episode, ever anew, as a diplomatic fi asco. Finally, Allen is careful to circumscribe this admittedly horrible deception (it would cost the lives of tens of millions of people) to the ‘desperate’ circumstances affl icting the British empire in the spring of 1941; we are to take it as the cynical policy of self-defense resorted to by the stewards of the empire to ‘survive the fi ghting season’ (pp. 72, 140). The thesis of The Hitler/Hess Deception appears to be that such a deception, which worked god knows how, was the worthy price to pay for keeping the British empire standing until Nazism, other than which nothing is worse (the ever-present tacit caption), would be defeated with the prop of America in the West, and that, somewhat less willing, of Russia in the East. To this we may respond that even if the situation in 1941 had been truly critical for the British empire, it was nonetheless a situation entirely of Britain’s making – and clearly not an accidental one. It was a terrifying turn of events that had arisen from a mad bet placed at Versailles in 1919, and which Britain managed as best as she could (very well indeed), until she fi nally crowned her western ambition by destroying Germany and subjecting Europe to Anglo-American domination.
212. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), p. 485.
213. Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 497.
214. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 758.
215. Hitler, Secret Conversations, p. 208.
216. Michael Bloch, Operation Willi. The Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, July 1940 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 223.
217. Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 485.
In January 1935, Baron Wilhelm de Ropp, a Balt double agent working in Berlin for Winterbotham’s team, met with two of King George V’s four sons in London: Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales, and Prince George, the Duke of Kent, to ‘give them a complete picture of the qualities of Hess, Rosenberg, and the other leaders.’118
This was the overture of the masquerade’s most picturesque visual effect: the dressing of a pro-Nazi Peace Party crowned by a royal candidate. The intelligence services were now casting for a suitable foil among the regal offspring, someone to play the role of the antagonist in the hypothetical scenario whereby Britain would be split into a dominant anti-German War Party and an underground pro-Nazi Peace Party. Edward, then living easy as the world’s ageless teenage idol, seemed to fit the role to a T: his German was fluent, and he was always eager to evoke the sweetest summers of his childhood spent in the company of his favorite ‘Uncle Willi,’ the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, his father’s cousin.119 Edward passed the audition.
On March 6, 1935, in the face of German rearmament, France re-instituted military conscription. Ten days later, adducing the French decision as a pretext, Hitler did likewise – again, in violation of the provisions of Versailles. Britain ‘protested,’ though, curiously, she did not omit to inquire with the Nazi authorities: ‘Would the German government be still willing to receive Sir Eric Simon and Anthony Eden of the Foreign Office, as previously scheduled?’ – hardly the concern of an enemy. On March 25, the two British statesmen landed in Berlin. The German interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled Simon’s large brown eyes gazing paternally upon the Fuhrer, with fondness. Eden was more circumspect.
Before them, Hitler expatiated once more on the need to form a common front against Bolshevism, and – the novelty – he foreshadowed the possibility of coming to an understanding on rearmament ratios: say, to begin by allowing a tonnage for the German fleet 35 percent as large as that of the Royal Navy. The British did not say no.
The talks had been a success. They were concluded by a festive brunch at the British embassy, where the ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, had lined up his children to give Hitler and his train the Nazi salute, shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’ – a choreographic effort, so thought the German interpreter, that was ‘a little shameful.’120 All would have been perfect had Eden not taken leave to continue on to Moscow.
This was the earliest instance of the Foreign Office’s duplicitous mime; the Germans were shown two faces: the congenial countenance of Simon, and the skeptical brow of Eden; the former being presented in a higher position of authority, and the latter flying subsequently to Nazism’s enemy. The display was as much for the consumption of Germany as it was for that of European diplomacy: poised on this perennial ambivalence, Britain was best situated to carry out her plan.
As the follow-up to the March encounter, Hitler delegated the Anglophile Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former champagne dealer who had married into a wine dynasty and joined Nazism via von Papen, to seal in London the ‘35 percent deal’ for the German navy.
‘Never Forget,’ Ribbentrop was warned before the negotiation by the military attache of the Japanese embassy in London, Navy Captain Arata Oka, ‘that the British are the most cunning people on earth, and that they graduated to absolute masters in the art of negotiation as well as in that of manipulating the press and public opinion.’121 But neither Ribbentrop nor any other Nazi had the faintest idea of what sort of cunning they would be dealing with.
Talks commenced on May 24 at the Foreign Office in the presence of the benevolent Simon. Ribbentrop, as expected, demanded that the British acquiesce to the ratio advanced by Hitler in March. But Simon turned red; he glowed with fury: he found the request outrageous and such dilettante bluster unacceptable. That ended the discussion. Ribbentrop and his team were, to say the least, confused. Two days later, however, the German legation was conveyed to the wainscoted halls of the Admiralty, where Simon’s Deputy, Sir Robert Craigie, announced with composure that Britain accepted the German offer: Ribbentrop’s associates were speechless at their good fortune.122 Thereupon Hitler phoned Ribbentrop: ‘Good job,’ he thundered, ‘this is the most beautiful day of my life.’123 All would have been perfect had the Fellows not subsequently refused to admit Ribbentrop’s son to Eton.124
In the space of six months, spanning between the Norman-inspired Anglo-German Payments Agreement of late 1934, and the Naval Pact, officially signed on June 18, 1935, Hitler won from Britain no less than her official financial and military support. The Fuhrer was exultant.
And France, disheveled, didn’t know where to turn: in mid May 1935, in despair, she concluded pacts of mutual assistance with Russia and Czechoslovakia.
On June 19, 1935, Edward VIII made his debut as the pro-Nazi candidate when at Queen’s Hall he delivered a speech to the ex-combatants of the Legion inviting them to bury the animosity of the Great War between Britain and Germany forever. He was showered with a standing ovation, while all around the Union Jack mingled with the gamma-crossed standards of the German veterans. The speech made a splash, and King George was quite appropriately disturbed.125 A month later, it was Hitler who received the British combatants at the Chancellery: together they evoked the days of the trenches, reminiscing with passion, as if they had been brothers-in-arms firing from the same dugout.126
The biennium 1936–37 represented the apogee of appeasement. Its beginning was of promise: on January 19, 1936, King George V sank into his final sleep, which was shortened by an injection of morphine and cocaine, so that he might be declared dead in the morning edition of The Times. 127 He was succeeded by Edward, Prince of Wales, the Nazi candidate himself. The ceremony of the coronation was fixed for May of the following year.
Then in March 1936, Germany locked irreversibly into the path to war; she was ready to play her first gambit: the occupation of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. As seen earlier, the clause in the Versailles Treaty contemplated the consequences of such a move in no ambiguous language. If a single German soldier trespassed on the Rhineland buffer, it was war: Britain, Italy, and Belgium would have rushed at once with swords drawn to back up France.
The half-baked 1936 Wehrmacht of Hitler was in no case a match to France’s tested force de frappe: ‘France,’ General Jodl would confess at Nuremberg, ‘could have blown us into pieces.’128
Regardless, the Fuhrer ‘gambled.’ On March 7, denouncing the Franco-Soviet agreements, Hitler ordered three meager battalions to cross the Rhine. France’s wall, the Maginot Line, was on full alert; her North African troops massed on the border – all she needed was a signal from London. Von Neurath, Germany’s Foreign Secretary, was terrified; Hitler, trembling with emotion no less than his minister, spoke words of strength for them both: fear not, he whispered, Britain shall not budge.
And indeed she did not: by the evening of the seventh, her stewards were scrambling all over to shield the Nazi advance. The press magnates, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, who was also courting the Russians since June 1935 on behalf of his intimate Churchill,129 and Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, cheered loudly for Hitler and Germany. ‘[Hitler:] All the Beaverbrook-Rothermere circle came to me and said: “In the last war we were on the wrong side.”’130
From London, Lord Lothian and Lord Astor, intoning the usual refrain that Germany was the dam against Bolshevism, scolded their French colleagues for being so ‘quarrelsome’131 about Germany’s understandable desire to walk into ‘her own backyard.’132 Thereafter Eden and Lord Halifax flew to Paris to deliver France a double blow. Upon arrival, Eden enjoined: ‘refrain from any act conducive to war, England wants peace.’ And Halifax doubled: ‘settle the issue with negotiation.’ Flandin, France’s Foreign Minister, did not understand; ‘if England acts,’ he insisted, ‘she will lead Europe…this is her last chance. If she does not stop Germany now, all is lost…’
France had not read Mackinder.
All the British gave France after this decisive Nazi sortie, as a sop, was a public session in London at the Council of the League of Nations on March 14. On this occasion, Eden, in a perfect construct of Foreign Office double-speak phrased for the pleasure of Nazism, averred that the occupation of the Rhineland was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but did not represent a threat to peace. It compromised the power of France, but not her security. The French were stupefied.
Britain had flagrantly dishonored her pledge to guarantee the security of Europe. The following day, Eden, as if nothing had happened, invited Ribbentrop for breakfast to pore over some maps and canvass German geopolitics. On March 29, without wasting an instant, Goebbels appealed to the Rhineland with one more referendum to suffrage its incorporation into the Reich: 99 percent favorable.133
For the British set-up, the appeasing thrust could not but elicit an opposite reaction: after the Rhineland coup, the anti-Nazi faction led by Churchill was turned with Jewish funding into a faster, more articulate and most secret outfit known as The Focus. As was the expressed wish of its leader, no detailed record of the group’s formation and activities has ever been divulged.134
But Hitler was not in the least worried by Churchill’s party which, to him, was just an annoyance capable of nothing more than words. After March, the Nazis were ever more willing to indulge their British infatuation – with torrents of champagne, feasts, conferences, summer and winter Olympics, and the disclosure of military secrets. Yet the Fuhrer yearned for something of heavier symbolism – an encounter at the very top, say, with the Prime Minister, Baldwin. Baldwin knew better, and courteously declined the invitation.135 Instead, the Prime Minister fished Lloyd George from the extras of Britain’s appeasement and sent him off to meet the Fuhrer in his Eagle’s Nest in the Bavarian Alps.
Thus the event was charged with a symbolism of a different valence: on September 4, 1936, Hitler clasped hands not with his British opposite, but with one of Nazism’s most accomplished midwives: that same Lloyd George that had cut the deal in Versailles. The two conversed animatedly about the war, politics, and labor issues. Hitler, overawed by his guest, whom he described as a ‘genius,’ wished to display him at the party convention in a few days, but Lloyd George, with caution, refused, though he did not refrain from bad-mouthing the Czechs 136 – a hint.
In sum, the encounter was another success, and Lloyd George would thereafter extol the Fuhrer in the press, acknowledging him as the ‘greatest German of the age.’
With regard to this episode, the question has been raised: ‘Who fooled whom?’137 That the British government fooled the Germans is hardly disputable; whether Lloyd George was a conscious or an unconscious tool of such a manipulation is irrelevant – and the only striking certainty is that Hitler and the Nazis never fooled anyone.
And the foolery went on, ever more imaginatively. At this time Edward, the new king, had an American mistress: Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
In the last months of 1936, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with the complicit act of Edward, was about to carry off a phenomenal show. The Prince of Wales was most likely instructed to go about reciting the mantra ‘No marriage, no coronation,’ whereby he publicly conditioned his coronation on making Wallis, a twice-divorced American commoner, his Queen. Baldwin would have then seen to it that a press campaign and a query submitted to the Dominions as to appropriateness of the choice of bride would have gone against the marriage.138 And so it did on November 16; afterwards Edward faced three choices: (1) give up Mrs. Simpson and keep the throne, (2) dismiss Baldwin and his Cabinet, (3) abdicate.
Although Wallis implored the Prince to keep his throne, and her as his concubine almighty,139 Edward, for ‘love,’ chose the least sensible option and abdicated on December 10, 1936. ‘God save the King,’ he shouted at the end of his speech. Albert, the Duke of York, ascended to the throne as George VI: thus the royalty was split between a conventional regent and his brother, the ‘pro-Nazi’ Edward, who would thenceforth acquire the title of Duke of Windsor.
The Nazis mistook the abdication for the result of an inner struggle to purge the royalty of its alleged ‘pro-German’ sympathizers, which did not exist, and though the Fuhrer was distressed by the event,140 the aim of the ploy was to keep him always hanging with a tantalizing game of wink and brush-off – which was working perfectly.
In June 1937, Edward and Wallis married in France, and in October they were invited to Germany for a grand tour of the Reich: everywhere the Duke and Duchess were hailed, and Edward requited the salute. On October 12, 1937, the day following their arrival, Edward was introduced in the house of Robert Ley, the Nazi Labor Secretary, to Himmler, Goebbels, and Hess 141 – an encounter for which the intelligence services had prepared him two and half years previously.
Finally, in November 1937, after all this profusion of geniality on the part of Britain, the time came to thrust the Fuhrer forward on to war. The mission of Lord Halifax on November 19 to the alpine residence of Hitler was the turning point in the dynamics leading to World War II. By this time, the broad aggregation of the appeasers dissolved into the two main ‘parties’ of Britain:142 the anti-Bolsheviks, who had regained the helm with Neville Chamberlain, and the Round Table, the two being relayed by the propaganda of the Peace Party, which fluctuated in their midst (Figure 5.2). The Nazis now stared at three different facets of a single front urging them to expand their European stronghold before aggressing the Soviets.
In synthesis, Halifax told Hitler that: (1) Britain considered Germany the bastion against Communism; (2) Britain had no objection to the German acquisition of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig; and (3) Germany should not use force to achieve her aims in Europe.
In the light of (1) the agenda set in Mein Kampf, which all British stewards had studied carefully, (2) the world’s full-fledged rearmament, (3) the steady and intense supply of British and American weapons the Nazis had received during the past four years, and (4) the Reich’s notorious preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler was justified in disregarding entirely the specious warning not to use force: in brief, Britain was urging him to go ahead. Ordinary Britons, and the rest of the world, were told nothing of this autumnal pact.
‘So oder so,’ ‘in one way or another,’ Hitler decided in January 1938 ‘to achieve self-determination for the Austrians’: in other words, he was going to annex the country. In February, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Sir Eric Simon, announced in the House of Commons that Great Britain could not be expected to support Austrian independence. This was the signal.
On March 12, Hitler marched into Austria and asked the Austrians thereafter to sanction the deed with a referendum: 99.7 percent swung to his side in favor of grossdeutsch unity – the Push to the East had begun. Czechoslovakia was next.
On April 21, 1938, General Keitel received orders from Hitler ‘to draft plans for invading Czechoslovakia.’143
It is important to emphasize that at this point not a single maneuver on the path to war was the fruit of Hitler’s strategy or imagination; the schemers of Versailles had prepared the route for him long ago, and the British stewards were now facilitating the progression.
By sequestering the 3.4 million Sudeten Germans (22 percent of the population) into the artificial creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918–20, the old treaty furnished the Fuhrer with the beautiful pretext of claiming these back into the Reich in the name of ‘ethnic self-determination’ – and so Hitler did.
The British press – again, the Daily Mail of the appeasing Rothermere – opened fire with a leader on May 6 denouncing Czechoslovakia as a hateful country, inhabited by rascals, whose treatment of the German speaking Sudeten was an outrage that Britain could not tolerate.144
Once more, France, the helpless Marianne forsaken by Britain, scurried around frantically to patch up some kind of belated common front against this Nazi juggernaut – whose 15-year incubation France’s mischievous pride had ultimately favored.
In May she supplicated the Russians to intervene on her side against Germany. She appeared to be utterly unaware that both Britain and Russia, who always seemed to be playing in tandem, had no intention whatever of stopping Hitler at this point.
Russia replied that she would do so as long as Poland and Romania afforded her the passage of Soviet troops in their territory (see Figure 5.3). Which was a bluff, because the Soviet Union did nothing to dissipate the rancor and seething hostility that divided her from Poland on one hand, and Romania on the other. France then implored both countries, but they refused: they did not trust the Russians, least of all in their home – ‘Give up,’ said Poland to France, ‘Czechoslovakia is dead.’
As France insisted, on May 20, 1938, Litvinov, Russia’s cunning Foreign Secretary, torpedoed once and for all France’s endeavors to convey Soviet divisions westward by raising the prospect of Russia attacking Poland: Russia might have to do so, fibbed Litvinov, to protect Czechoslovakia from the greed of Poland, which wanted to rob the former of the coal-rich district of Teschen. Thus the Soviets hamstrung France’s tangled skein of alliances. And once again, by the end of May, the ball was in Britain’s court.145
Poland was the keystone of the pre-war crisis because: (1) thanks to Versailles, by means of the Corridor, she might be set at variance with Germany; (2) she was allied to France; (3) but she was indeed hostile to Czechoslovakia, who was an ally of France; (4) she was temporarily allied to Germany, the enemy of France, and (5) she was sharply hostile to the USSR, the mortal enemy of Germany. Poland’s buffer position allowed Britain to buy precious time to direct the march of the Hitlerites.
The combined forces of Britain, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and France would have literally pulverized the Wehrmacht in 1938: all the powers involved knew this.146 Especially Britain, who, within two weeks of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, moved to emasculate Czechoslovakia and allow Hitler and herself to complete military preparations.
Already on March 24, Neville Chamberlain, sending another smoke signal to the Nazis, announced that Britain would refuse to lend assistance to the Czechs if they were attacked or to France if she went to their rescue.
Instead, the stewards – Halifax, Simon, Hoare, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, and the whole set – launched a disinformation/terror campaign in grand style: they began interminable and most intricate negotiations by which they sought to persuade the Czechs to surrender to the Reich the German-speaking Sudeten districts, upon which, most importantly, were erected first-class fortifications that would have posed a serious obstacle to a Nazi advance.
The argument they peddled for the purpose declared that: (1) Czechoslovakia would have been irremediably smashed in a war against Germany (which was false); (2) Russia’s military value was nil (which was false); (3) the Soviet Union wouldn’t have honored her alliance with the Czechs (which was true only insofar as Britain herself did not intervene); and (4) Germany would have been merely satisfied with the Sudeten regions (false) and with the Polish Corridor (true). ‘To make their aims more appealing they emphasized the virtues of “autonomy” and “self determination.”’148
The British plan, clearly, was to dismember Czechoslovakia which, with 34 sterling divisions, 1 million men, well trained, and with a high morale, could very well stall Hitler in the middle of Europe.
Meanwhile, to sell these catastrophic lies to the public, the stewards unleashed a bogus terror campaign, which the Peace Party amplified, by grossly exaggerating Germany’s bellicose potential, misrepresenting the fighting assets of the Czechs, and presaging the absurd threat of an aerial attack by the Luftwaffe, accompanied by gas attacks: in the first weeks of September, Londoners were fitted with gas masks and were taught air raid shelter drills.149
Then, to shield Hitler from General Beck’s conspiracy, in September Chamberlain flew to Germany twice, on the 15th and 22nd, to reach an agreement that would prevent the Nazis from going to war over Czechoslovakia – for their own good. An elderly British Prime Minister boarding a plane for the first time in his life…to rush to Germany. Unheard of. ‘[During the Czech crisis, Chamberlain] used secret messengers to let Hitler know that he should ignore tough official statements that might emerge in the next few days from Britain and France regarding Czechoslovakia.’150
The talks would lead to Chamberlain’s infamous radio speech of September 27: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’
The following day, the day the generals were going to pull the trigger on the Fuhrer, France, Germany, England, and Italy convened in Munich to carve up Czechoslovakia, without consulting anyone, least of all the Czechs: the homeland that the Anglo-French had granted the Czechs in 1919 as a reward for their provocation in Siberia they now took away. In four stages, Germany occupied the designated and fortified areas, while the rump of Czechoslovakia was to be guaranteed by France and Britain – the guarantee would never be given. The Czech army disbanded, and on October 10, the Czechs surrendered another piece of their mangled estate to the Poles.
On October 21, Hitler issued orders to invade the rump and turn it into a protectorate, which punctually came to pass on March 14, 1939 – the Czechs offered no resistance. And Montagu Norman, picking the pockets of the senseless victims, remitted to the Reichsbank, treacherously, £6 million of Czech gold held in custody at the Bank of England. That Norman was in close contact with the Chamberlain faction is certain (it couldn’t have been otherwise), but the nature and content of their interaction have never been revealed.151
Now, to finish off Versailles, only Poland remained – and after that, Germany would be at the gates of the Soviets: Captain Winterbotham, the British spy, had recently returned from Eastern Prussia, where the district leader had confided to him that Barbarossa should have been operational by May 1941.152 There was nothing that England did not know.
The stewards changed costumes once more (Figure 5.2). Appeasement, as a public stance, was finished: after the Czech invasion, it could no longer be ‘sold’ to the masses. So a different configuration emerged: the pro-Nazi Peace Party took the back-seat to posture as an elitist den of frondeurs, while the Round Table and the anti-Bolsheviks fused in an informal ‘diarchy,’ whereby the visible front, led by Halifax, made a pretense of enforcing tough-dealing with the Nazis, while the secret front, staffed with the Chamberlain group, continued to bestow upon Hitler concessions and ‘friendly’ assurances that Britain wouldn’t fight.153
Hitler had gone as far as he had been allowed, and it was time for Britain to set him up on the Western Front and thus precipitate the war. On March 31, 1939, ‘Exactly half-way between the public break-off and the secret resumption of…economic negotiations with Germany,’154 Chamberlain informed the House of Commons that ‘in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, His majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’
This was an extraordinary assurance. The British government since 1918 had resolutely refused any bilateral agreement guaranteeing any state in Europe. Now they were making a unilateral declaration in which they obtained nothing but in which they guaranteed a state in eastern Europe, and they were giving that state the responsibility of deciding when the guarantee would take effect, something quite unprecedented.155
No matter how shrewd as to realization and timing, the strategy of Britain was always the same: that is, pit foe against foe and secure her own involvement by priming satellite nations like land mines encircling the enemy of choice – in this case, the Germans. What she had done by guaranteeing Belgium on the eve of World War I, she now replayed with Poland.
Hitler had begun talks with Poland in October 21, 1938, by asking, predictably, for the city of Danzig and a kilometer-wide strip across the Polish Corridor to provide a highway and a four-track railroad under German sovereignty. These, indeed modest, requests were made to the Polish ally in an atmosphere as cordial as possible; they were the last, paltry shreds of Germany lost at Versailles: Hitler had no desire to overrun Poland, but rather to engage her in the forthcoming onslaught against Russia.156 Yet by late March, Poland turned litigious, and at first, the Fuhrer, not realizing that Britain had made clandestine overtures to Warsaw, could not fathom ‘Poland’s newfound resilience.’157
Not content with duping the Nazis, the British inveigled the Poles as well by making them believe that Britain and France would have unbridled a full-scale offensive against Germany, should the latter have decided to strike at Poland. But in the late spring of 1939 no aid worthy of the name, consisting of either men or munitions, was seen traveling from the Allied countries to Poland: ‘Britain had stalled when Poland requested economic help and military equipment to prepare to deal with a German invasion.’158 By May, Hitler readied his generals to consider Britain, for a time, the proximate enemy.
From London, the Chamberlain group continued to dance with the Nazis, promising as late as August a ‘full-bodied political partnership’ in exchange for peace,159 while the Round Table persisted in urging the Poles not to back down.
Hitler refused to believe that the Anglo-French were in earnest – it was a put-on, he concluded. He was fully armed, he had lost the Poles, he needed to strike – he was going to have the war that he wanted.
In the spring of 1939, Roosevelt’s clandestine emissary, Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter – who was close to the American Jewish Committee, which, in turn, stood ‘at one or two removes’ behind The Focus – visited London. Soon after his departure an extravagant publicity campaign began on Churchill’s behalf.160 The War Party was thus catapulted to the vanguard of British policy (Figure 5.2), eager to meet Hitler on the battlefield. In May 1937, when Germany had dismissed Churchill as a political lightweight, the bulldog had warned Ribbentrop: ‘Do not underrate England…She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War she will bring the whole world against you.’161
Before commencing, however, the Fuhrer had to think the unthinkable: to sign a truce with none other than Bolshevik Russia to sweep Poland out of the way.
A Soviet tale of Madness and Sacrifice
All appeased the Nazis: the Pope for fear, the British by design, and the
Russians to buy time. Stalin, too, had read Mein Kampf 162 – he harbored
no illusions: the Nazis would come to him sooner or later. Russia underwent her first Five-Year Plan in October 1928, four years later than Germany’s: from the latter the Soviets imported large amounts of capital equipment and machine tools; Krupp and the aircraft-maker Junkers possessed installations in anti-capitalist Russia, as did such jewels of corporate enterprise as Standard Oil, the enthusiastic Nazi-phile Henry Ford, and a variety of other Anglo-American concerns involved in the extraction of gold and oil. Stalin planned on trebling the production of iron, coal, and oil. To justify the forced industrialization of the country, he raised the spook of a forthcoming aggression from the West, and proceeded to consummate the endeavor at the expense of 25 million peasant households – the Kulaks. Five million of them were obliterated while their estates were shattered and collectivized. The environmental and economic repercussions, let alone the human strain of such a sacrifice led Stalin’s Russia by 1930 to such a disastrous impasse that only the capitalist rescue of the West enable him to tide over his dictatorial caravan to the next and last stage of the great pre-war mummery. For instance, the dam on the Dniepr – the greatest of such salvaging investments – was funded by US money and fitted by a British concern.163
When Hitler came to power, Stalin observed. He watched the suppression of the German Communists with utter detachment – such was the deserved fate of what had been all along an expendable crew since the early 1920's. And in June when the Fuhrer purged the dissenters in his bosom, then Stalin realized that the incubation was terminated, and that Adolf Hitler was indeed the piper conjured at Versailles who would be leading the German hordes into Russia.
Presently, he too had to appease. Britain’s game was transparent: as in World War I, she wanted Russia to win the war in Eurasia for her by swallowing the Nazis into the steppes and devour them, like the Whites, in a drawn-out and prolonged effusion of blood. To Churchill, Baldwin would thus sum it up in July 1936: ‘If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.’164
It was understood that the fighting should have been to the detriment of Germany rather than Russia, as Veblen had wrongly assumed. And the USSR, ever the imaginary foe of the Anglo-American oligarchy, would oblige. For that, though, the path had to be cleared of any kind of disagreement, of any kind of old Bolshevik talk – the talk, say, of Trostky and of all those who wanted to fight too soon and too far afield, overstepping the present entrenchment of Russia, which was in line with the designs of the Sea Powers, and in the name of junkyard bywords such as ‘world revolution’ or ‘Socialist brotherhood.’ A corps not of doctrinaires, but of two-faced tacticians was what was needed in the Red Army and the Politburo. And Hitler, with his fire and night of the long knives, provided the Red Czar with the inspiration.
In the wake of the holocaust of the Kulaks and the ensuing catastrophes, the majority of the army, the peasantry, the commissars, and 90 percent of the party machine had come to stand foursquare against Stalin’s regime.165
The pressure was about to reach breaking point when, suddenly, on December 1, 1934, the Stalinist nomenclature moved to head off the opposition. Laying hold of another useful idiot, the secret police of Leningrad ‘oriented’ this obscure and allegedly ‘hysterical’166 student by the name of Nikolaev into the corridors of the Smolny Institute.* There, Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s old comrade, and at the time his leading rival, was shot dead by the young unknown: twice Nikolaev had been found by the local police wandering around the Institute, armed, and twice upon higher and veiled orders he had been released, till Kirov fell.
* The school for noblewomen from which Lenin directed the Bolshevik coup d’état on 25 October 1917, and which was later taken over by the Communist Party of Leningrad.
Stalin rushed to Leningrad to find, as Hitler did in Berlin the year before, that the intelligence services were serving him a ‘fire’ and ‘the arsonist’ on a silver platter. And the arsonist, as the Russian public was subsequently dis-informed, was but the tip of a vast terrorist network woven by a gang of Trostkyite saboteurs, in cahoots with the German Reaction – a variation on the usual ‘terrorist lie’ that generally inaugurates a coup carried from within by the most conservative and unscrupulous fringe of a despotic regime.
Two days after the assassination, Nikolaev ‘accidentally’ perished in a Leningrad police van while the first wave of the great Stalinist purge washed over the apparatus of the Soviets: hundreds were immediately rounded up, laboriously tortured and killed; hundreds of thousands were shipped off to Siberia. This was only the beginning of a five-year slaughter, which shaded off into delirium during the great Show Trials of the Stalinist era.
Not coincidentally, the first season of such theatrical trials was produced by Stalin within a few days after the German occupation of the Rhineland, in March 1936: before the much aroused audiences of the world, the former apparatchiks first accused themselves and one other of being foul, shifty vermin, and then shambled to the wall. Face to face with the firing squad, they died shouting hails for Stalin and the Revolution – as if echoing the mutinous SA, who had fallen in June 1934 yelling ‘Sieg Heil!’
By such ways, the old Leninist Guard was flushed down the drain, one faction after another standing trial to betray the next with false accusations planted in pre-packaged scripts recited by a chorus of inquisitors methodically cast for the role. The peak of British appeasement, 1937, marked the paroxysm of the Stalinist Terror, which was but the second cycle of the cleansing mass sacrifices inaugurated by Lenin after the Civil War to keep the conquered beehive of Russia chronically malleable.
As one of Trotsky’s men, Radek, too, was doomed. The sinuous propagandist of much Russo-German incestuous dealing and one of the privileged few selected to accompany Lenin in that famous voyage across Germany arranged by Parvus in 1917, Radek was called to the dock, and as all the others before him had done to shield their own families, he lent himself to the sham. On January 23, 1937, in the course of his ‘confession,’ Radek, summoned by the prosecutor to shed light on his alleged network of ‘complicity,’ dropped the names of Putna and Tukhachevsky.
At only 26, he was made a general in Trotsky’s converted divisions – thereupon he would lash at the Whites like Nemesis incarnate, thrashing in sequence the Czech legion and Kolchak in Siberia, and finally dealing the decisive blow in the South to Denikin’s loyalist armies. On the home front, he brought to heel rebellious peasant formations even by using poisonous gas. And by the mid 1920's he emerged as the unrivaled prince of the spets, the new vanguard of young ‘specialists’ that dream of transforming the old imperial army into a new mechanized fighting device. It was not by chance that he would be chosen to form the strongest link of that subterranean connection that tied the Red Army to the German military–industrial complex from 1926 to 1932. The Russians learned much from the Germans: revolutionary theories on tank warfare from General Guderian, and many other prized secrets from the rest of the Reichswehr’s top brass: Schleicher, Bredow, Blomberg…
By 1935, the spets had so advanced the metamorphosis of the old Russian army into the hierarchic Moloch of their dreams that Stalin conferred upon the ambitious Tukhachevsky, whom he nicknamed ‘Napoleonchik,’167 and a handful of other ‘Kommandirs’ the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union – Tukhachevsky being, at 42, the youngest.
By this time, knowledgeable as he was of Germany after nesting for the best part of the Nazi incubation within her officer caste, Tukhachevsky guessed correctly, point by point, the objectives and the timetable of the Hitlerites. There was not an instant to lose: Russia, France, Czechoslovakia, and Britain had to unite and crush Nazism in a major offensive.
In January 1936, following the death of George V, Tukhachevsky was sent to London as Stalin’s representative to attend the funeral of the king. Magnificent opportunity: thereafter, in fact, he counted on meeting exponents of the British General Staff, whom Putna had contacted on his behalf. Utterly deceived like everyone else as to the nature and aims of the British empire, he believed that he would need little time to seduce the British generals with what appeared to be an irresistible proposal.168
Citing precise numbers, Tukhachevsky invited the British to consider that by 1937 the rearmament pace of Germany would find itself significantly behind the joint production of weaponry by France and Czechoslovakia. And what was more, Russia’s scaled-up manufacture of fighter planes, tanks, and cannons, which could have been deployed in Czechoslovakia by means of a spectacular ‘aerial bridge’ across Poland and Romania, would have made the Allied defense arsenal such that even a preemptive blitz against Germany could have neutralized the Nazis without excessive damage.
And the British? They listened politely and shook their heads – not interested. To justify the snub, they would craft the lie that Tukhachevsky had inflated his numbers, the same lie that the stewards upheld when in 1938 they moved to declaw the Czechs. And hadn’t Lord Lothian in 1935 confidently assured a group of visiting Ministers from Germany that ‘they would cut through Russia as through butter’?
Disheartened, Tukhachevsky left London. And tried again in Paris. But the French showed no inclination to fight at this time, and preferred to repose behind their fortified lines. ‘But it’ll be too late,’ expostulated Tukhachevsky. Only two months later, after the Rhineland coup, France’s Foreign Secretary, Flandin, would cry out to the British the exact same words.
Defeated, the young Marshal returned to Moscow – in time to partake in the reunion of the Soviet Supreme. Listening to the speeches of the Foreign Secretary, Litvinov, and of the Prime Minister, Molotov, he was literally struck, if not provoked by the mild, and almost kind words that were spoken towards Germany.
Then Tukhachevsky took the stand and slung around barbs that were meant to cut deep: trenchant words aimed not just at the Nazis, but also at the party grandees that inexplicably soothed them. He spoke exuding the assurance of a general backed by the whole of a powerful army.
If there ever was anybody Stalin should have feared among the warriors, Napoleonchik was always the one: temerarious and naturally situated to attract any coherent build-up of insubordination, Tukhachevsky was now putting the whole of Stalin’s and Britain’s, appeasement at risk.
According to a story, dismissed by some as fantastic, through the White central of Russian émigrés in Paris, the Soviet secret police (the GPU) obtained a dossier falsified by the conniving Nazi intelligence services (the Gestapo), which provided Stalin with ‘crushing evidence’ that Tukhachevsky, Putna, and their confederates had not ceased to betray Russia for more than a decade by passing on to Germany Soviet classified information.169
On June 12, 1937, a laconic communique featured on the last page of the press organs reported that Tukhachevsky and Putna had been executed. There followed the liquidation of 35,000 additional officers – about half the commanding corps. All in all, the Stalinists cannibalized with the purges two-thirds of the governing class – roughly 1 million individuals.
Legend has it that Stalin decapitated the Red Army with a view to repelling from Russia the eventual Nazi onslaught and diverting it towards the West – Britain and France – where, as he hoped, the Wehrmacht would crumble, prostrate. But if that were so, why was he so keen on making the Nazi war machine as strong as possible by pursuing doggedly since 1935 a policy of economic cooperation with the Reich?
In fact, while Anthony Eden reached Moscow from Berlin in March 1935, Soviet envoys were in Berlin negotiating with Schacht a long-term loan of 200 million marks, which Stalin would have flaunted as ‘his greatest triumph.’170 On the basis of this and further, larger availments of credit, the Nazis extended technical know-how for a steady and much more significant counterpart of Russian oil, grain, rubber, and manganese, without which, as is widely recognized, the Wehrmacht would have never been in a position to strike in 1939.171 The collusion was so intense that in April 1937, Kandelaki, Stalin’s chief economic legate, was received by the Fuhrer in person. Russian convoys laden with war supplies would be regularly sent to Germany until the very day of the Nazi attack, Operation Barbarossa’, June 22, 1941.172
In sum, Britain from the right and the USSR from the left had been fitting and rousing this Nazi construction since 1919: the former with diplomatic cunning, American loans, appeasement, the imperial markets, and the support of the Bank of England; the latter with the Red Terror, the sabotage of the Left opposition and vital materials in the run-up to war. Russia and Britain did move in sync. Alone the Nazis would have gone nowhere.
In March 1938, the Soviets acknowledged the Anschluss without protest, and in May, as seen, they undermined France’s belated efforts to assemble a coalition against Germany. On March 10, 1939, as he broached the question of its late annexations, Stalin displayed such good humor toward the Nazi Reich that three days later Hitler despoiled the rump of Czechoslovakia.
And in the spring of 1939 the masquerade spiraled into the last act.
On one side were the appeasing schemers of Britain, who kept on making all sorts of alluring promises to the Nazis, and who renewed their deceitful oaths on March 16, 1939, by ratifying a master commercial agreement with Germany.173 On the other was the Churchillian War Party, which pushed for an immediate entente with Russia and France: but it was out of office, and its antics, thus far, were for display only.
On May 19, Chamberlain, responding to Churchill, refused officially to bind Britain in any alliance, and seized the moment to laud Poland, grotesquely – Poland, that ‘virile nation,’ he orated with a straight face, that ‘is bound to give us all the aid…it can.’
While the deceptive lure of a British partnership was kept dangling before the eyes of the Nazis until early August (and beyond), from April 1939 Britain conducted mock negotiations with Russia and France – mock negotiations, whose sole intent was to hoodwink the French into believing that Britain was serious about confronting Hitler in the immediate future, and which Britain would finally sap by conveying to Moscow on August 11 a legation of second-rank generals devoid of decision power.174
Russia was no fool to any of these games – in fact she readied herself to deal directly with the Nazis in early May, when Molotov was appointed Foreign Secretary to replace Litvinov, who was Jewish, and was therefore not suitable for negotiating with a Nazi envoy.
Things came to a head on August 19. On that day, Poland, ever more heedless, refused once and for all to allow the passage of Russian troops in her territory, although Romania had agreed to do so; Germany and Russia signed a commercial pact, and Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow was announced.
On August 23, 1939, Hitler’s new Foreign Secretary landed in Moscow, and by the late evening it was done: Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia undersigned the stunning Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of Non-Aggression. The gem of the document was the secret protocol that envisioned the partition of Poland between the two signatories – just a respite before the great butchery.
Then, in the presence of his Nazi guests, the Red Czar drank to the health of the Fuhrer, waited for Ribbentrop to depart, and finally muttered to the intimate circle: ‘Of course, it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who tricked him…War would passes us by a little longer…’175
World War II was less than a week away.
On August 12, a mere fortnight before the Russo-German truce, Ernst Jünger completed the final draft of On the Marble Cliffs, which would be published later in the fall. This was the central novel of the Third Reich, written by the rhapsodic of its warrior caste.176 Reading it allegorically, the book disclosed an esoteric narrative of the German vicissitudes from the end of the Great War until the vigil of World War II, whose symbolism the Hitlerites would temporarily turn to political use.
On the Marble Cliffs told the story of two brothers, who, after taking part as knights in the campaign of Alta Plana gave up the sword and retired to a life of contemplation within the walls of a monastic retreat. The sanctum of the cloister – the venue of rituals untold – was matted by vipers that periodically untangled to form the blazon of the flaming fire-wheel – the swastika.
The brothers had once been initiated into a fraternity, called the Order of the Mauretanians.177 Power was the principle worshiped in their lodges, and the brotherhood demanded that domination be exercised dispassionately, whether in insurrection or in order – no surprise then if members of parties otherwise mortally hostile were seen conversing amicably in the underground walkways of Mauretania: all of them were pupils of the same master. Such a master was the Chief Ranger, an ogre larger than life, half-giant, half-beast – a tyrant terrible, earthly yet seduced by the ways of ‘technique’.
Nestled into the marble cliffs, which looked down upon the prosperous counties of the Marina, the hermitage afforded a vista over Burgundy to the south, and the isle of Alta Plana, enveloped by glaciers. To the north, at the back of the cliffs, ran the marches of the Campagna, which turned into marshland as they neared the long sickle-shaped thickets of the Ranger’s sylvan domains. There, in what was known as Flayer’s Copse, the monstrous retinue of the Ranger might be espied dispatching sacrificial victims in ways indescribable.
The war on the borders of Alta Plana had forever disrupted the order that reigned over the coastal dominions: gone was the rough core of honor. The Marina was now ridden by crime, and agents and spies, who had descended upon it from the northern dark woods. Biedenhorn, the chief of the army, thus acquired significant clout. In the turmoil, the clans sought him out, as did the woodland riffraff, with whom he compromised by ceding to them the control of several districts. Evil blood thus spread from the forests in the veins of the world and the weak rebelled against the laws that had been issued for their very protection. Resisting the rebellious rage whipped up by the huntsmen and the even cruder foresters stood the proud Belovar, a chief herdsman of the Campagna often seen in the cloister, whose farm was a home to many sons of the land bent on opposing these powers of darkness.
One day, Braquemart, a Mauretanian obsessed by dreams of resurrecting the sun temples of an old race of gods, reached the hermitage, accompanied by a silent young prince, to speak of a plan. Braquemart confided to his hosts his desire to embark on an adventure, to the north, where he would put into practice his theory that in the new hive masters were to be separated from slaves and never allowed to cross-breed again.
Against the counsel of a mysterious priest, the head of a matriarchal church hovering behind the scenes, Braquemart and the prince, joined by the brothers, pushed on and invaded the demoniacal forest. They were backed by Belovar and Sombor – his corpulent son – who sicked on the mastiffs of the Ranger their two packs of snarling molossi, roused by blood they had licked off the flags of their masters.
The hounds of Belovar – the pride of the old man – fought bravely across the ungodly brushes, but the red dogs of the Ranger, whose chilling laugh might be heard from afar, had numbers on their side. Chiffon Rouge, the enormous molossus leading the red pack, came rumbling down upon Belovar and his dogs in charges so violent that soon ill-omened signs of cracking could be seen in the ranks of the herdsmen. They were overwhelmed: one by one they were slain. As they retreated, the brothers discovered the severed heads of Braquemart and the prince impaled upon spikes in a clearing bordering the Copse. When they repaired to the Marina, it was too late: a spectacle of devastation opened before the narrator, who cast a long, lewd glance upon the ruins of the cities that lay smoldering, sparkling with fire like a necklace of rubies.
In the twilight finale of Jünger’s fantasia, Chiffon Rouge led the conclusive attack against the hermitage perched on the cliffs, but as the dogs from hell fumbled into the crypt, the sanctuary’s snakes wrapped the beasts into their coils and strangled them all.
Meanwhile the villagers hustled in droves to abandon the ravaged Marina in ships overladen headed to Burgundy and to Alta Plana. On one of these vessels the brothers embarked and reached the ice ring of the visible isle, where they were received in the farmstead of hospitable friends – friends that once had been knights whom the brothers had fought in that distant campaign. On seeing their shelter, the narrator concluded, ‘we felt we had come home.’
The narrator was Ernst Jünger himself and ‘Brother Otho’ was his younger sibling Friedrich Georg, both of whom had fought with conviction as commissioned officers on the Western Front during World War I, the ‘campaign’ against Britain – the icy Albion depicted as Alta Plana, which faced Burgundy, that is, France. The Marina was Germany, and the hermitage was something of a Thule Lodge: the elitist, and occultist, vantage point secured by the counter-initiates of the New Germany – the proto-Nazis like Jünger, who had been originally inducted into the great network of power. The order of Mauretania appeared to be an antipodal Freemansonry, which bred tyranny in all its forms, hence the possibility of chancing in its corridors upon Nationalists slumming with Bolsheviks and professional revolutionaries: possibly men, say, like Parvus and Trebitsch.
The state of decay in which the Marina found itself after the war was a transparent allusion to the corruption of the puppet republic of Weimar: Germany had been turned overnight into a house of sin, where delinquents mixed with the helots, the huntsmen, and foresters. The huntsmen were the Socialists, with whom Biedenhorn, the Chief of the Reichswehr (Groener, Seeckt, Schleicher…), sealed on behalf of the clans (the upper classes) the lurid compact for the suppression of the Councils’ Republics. These Councils were in turn infiltrated by the foresters, that is, the Communist agents that had descended from the forests – the sickle-shaped and bloody woods of Bolshevik Russia – into the plains of the Campagna: Central Europe.
Standing guard against these hellish hordes was Belovar, with his son Sombor and their two packs of hounds: that is, Hitler, the honorary member of Thule, the portly Goring, and the SA and the SS, who marched behind banners maculated with the blood of the martyrs of November 9, 1923* – a consecration ritual introduced by Hitler in 1926.178
*On Sunday morning took place the most singular ceremony of the Third Reich, that of the consecration of the flags. One would bring before the Führer “the flag of blood,” that which was carried by the militants killed at the time of the aborted putsch of 1923, in front of the Feldherrenhalle of Munich…With one hand, the Chancellor clasped the banner of blood, and the pennants to be consecrated with the other. He supposedly acted as the vector of a fl uid unknown, and thus the blessings of the martyrs were bestowed upon the new symbols of the German Fatherland. Purely symbolic ceremony? I don’t think so. There truly lives in the thought of Hitler as in that of the Germans the idea of a sort of mystical transfi guration, analogous to that of the benediction of the water by the priest, – if not to the Eucharist. Whoever fails to discern in the consecration of the fl ags the analogue of the consecration of the bread is not likely to understand anything about Nazism. I don’t know what was the Germany of yore. She is today a great, strange country, more removed from us than either India or China. The fl ag itself accentuates thus stunning oriental impression…’ (Robert Brasillach, Les sept couleurs (Paris: Plon, 1939) pp. 123–4).
The setting was thus laid for the coming expedition of Braquemart and the prince: the invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa – led by the top echelons of the SS (Braquemart and his fixation with ancestral archeology), and the Junkers of the Wehrmacht, symbolized by the mute prince, whose silence was the tragic presentiment of a forthcoming doom. Jünger, seeing it as his duty to join this brigade,† was yet certain that the ‘herdsmen’ of Germany would be routed in the deep maws of Stalin – Chiffon Rouge – who appeared to be cheered by the Devil himself – the Chief Ranger. In the end, the Bolsheviks laid waste the whole of Europe while the Nazi initiates forsook the marble cliffs and ‘came home’ to the oak groves of their knightly brethren in Britain. The defeatist narration of the coming battle against Stalin prompted several party censors, including Goebbels,to demand that the book be banned and the author punished, but Hitler intervened personally in the matter, forbidding anyone to molest the bard. Such an allegory, painted by a writer who was at the time imposing himself as one of the greatest literary talents of the twentieth century, with its emphasis on: (1) the religious hatred for the Red Empire in the East, (2) the certainty of spiritual victory over the enemy – the snake smothering the hound – and (3) the hand conclusively outstretched towards the racial brethren of Britain, was precisely the sort of coded message the Führer wished to diffuse in the direction of what he believed to be the British allies of the Peace Party. As they were to take their preliminary steps towards war in a most uncertain environment, whose shifting sands were the work of Britain’s unceasing dissimulation, the Nazis endeavored to the best of their ability to secure this elusive partnership with the British empire, which they saw as the fundamental prerequisite for founding their Aztec beehive in the plains of Ukraine
† He would indeed be re-enlisted in World War II as an officer, who would see active duty fi rst in occupied Paris and then briefl y on the Eastern Front.
But even the metaphors of Jünger were powerless to alter a decision made long before Stalin would reach the marble cliffs, by men that never had and never would befriend the Germans.
Fake war in the West,
true push in the East
Poland refused to negotiate and Germany declared war on her on September
1, 1939. On September 27 Warsaw surrendered. As agreed by her barbarous
invaders, the country was torn in the middle and its population treated
like refuse – the Germans did what they did, and the Russians applied
their methods by a preliminary round-up of 22,000 members of the Polish
intelligentsia – officers, intellectuals, officials – whom they shot, one after
the other, in the nape of the neck before dumping them in the ditches of
Katyn. And with its trumpeted unilateral promise to guarantee the independence of this ‘virile nation,’ what did noble Britain do? Nothing. She watched impassively.
Everything repeated itself: when war broke out, Churchill was summoned by Chamberlain to resume the command of the Admiralty – the very same post from which in 1915 no less impassively he had let the Lusitania sink in the hope of drawing the United States into the conflict.
Formally, Britain was now bound to declare war upon Russia too, but of course, she didn’t. And Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador in London, who was fascinated by the twisted pattern of British diplomacy, asked Churchill why. The latter replied: ‘The danger to the world is Germany, and not Russia…’179
[Right because it was Germany that locked half of Europe behind an iron curtain for 40 years,while England played King and Queens on their little piece of shit island DC]
During the Polish campaign, the Franco-British contingent numbered 1.5 million troops on the Western Front, where Hitler had stationed a mere 350,000 men – clearly there was no willingness to fight the Nazis. Instead of bombs, leaflets were dropped from planes assuring the German population that the Allies had no quarrel with them, but only with their rulers.180 Strict orders were issued to the Royal Air Force not to bomb any German land forces – such orders would remain unchanged until April 1940: ‘When some Members of Parliament put pressure on the government to drop bombs on German munitions factories in the Black Forest, Sir Kingsley Wood [the Air Minister] rejected the suggestion with asperity: “Are you aware it is private property?”’181 [Given what happened some 2-3 years later to Germany's cities,this asshole could not have said that with a straight face DC]
And this time the blockade round Germany was perfunctory: throughout the war the Nazi regime would restock its facilities via countless channels from all over the world.
On October 12, Hitler addressed the first of his peace speeches to Britain: along with the desire to come to an understanding, he envisaged the possibility of relegating the Jews in the Polish rump under German control. Britain rejected the overture.
On February 10, 1939, Pope Pius XI died; Pacelli, the diplomatic fox of the Vatican and former nuncio to Germany, succeeded him as Pius XII on March 12.
In late November, Pacelli decided to redeem somewhat the damning mistakes of the past. And he went far. He consented to serve as the liaison between the Catholic resistance in Germany and the British Foreign Office for what was another serious attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer. ‘The hazardous nature of such a plot for the Pope, the Curia, and all those associated with the Vatican can be hardly exaggerated.’182 On December 5 he summoned the British Minister, Osborne, to the Vatican and passed on to him the following information from the German anti-Nazis: (1) in the coming spring Hitler was about to launch a major campaign in the West, and (2) this offensive would not occur if a nucleus of Wehrmacht generals succeeded in overthrowing the Hitlerites – for that, the German rebels conditioned, it was imperative that Britain guaranteed an honorable peace for Germany.
Osborne relayed this to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who in turn reported to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. These plots to assassinate Hitler were always a nuisance and a source of embarrassment to Britain: she did not want the fruit of her conjuration dead just yet;certainly not at this early stage. And so the stewards sabotaged this plot as well. Osborne complained to the Pope that the coup was ‘hopelessly vague,’ and Halifax, as disingenuous as could be, lamented that Britain would not collaborate unless the German conspirators showed their faces and submitted a definitive program outlining their intentions. The Pope persisted, but Osborne, cued by his superiors, cut the secret talks short: ‘If you want to proceed with a change of government,’ he retorted curtly to Pacelli, ‘get on with it. I don’t see how we can make peace so long as the German military machine remains intact.’183
And still no fighting from the Allies – the people called it the ‘drôle de guerre,’ the ‘funny,’ ‘phony,’ or ‘sitting’ war – Bitzkrieg.
Between April and May 1940, Hitler occupied Norway and Denmark. And on May Day he launched the invasion of France and the Low Countries. The nine months of the Bitzkrieg came to an end.
At long last the War Party, which had been pining for action since 1934, was picked as the first mask of the masquerade: the time of Winston Churchill had arrived (Figure 5.2). Contrary to what transpired from the public debate, the changing of the guard between Chamberlain and Churchill was smoothest: it was indeed a conspiracy of these two to bring about what had been a foregone conclusion for years:184 On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill took the helm of the empire as Prime Minister and chief stalwart of the anti-Nazi crusade. Surprisingly, the vast majority of Liberal historians have seldom if ever wondered: if all such fights and feuds within the British Establishment about Germany were real and not feigned, why would Churchill, the staunch anti-German, retain in the Cabinet and in key Intelligence positions most of Chamberlain’s entourage?185 In fact, he kept the very appeasers, the alleged pro-Nazis of yesteryear, many of whom were always ‘his men’ (for example, Sam Hoare), to do what they had continually done for years with unsurpassed ability, that is, delude the Nazis with the prospect of an alliance – a delusion designed to redirect the Reich towards Russia and gain time before the Americans were drawn into the war.
On May 15 Holland fell. With clemency, on May 24 Hitler allowed the evacuation to Britain of the drifting Franco-British contingent at Dunkirk – 375,000 men, a third of whom were French. Belgium surrendered on the 27th, and the Nazis marched into Paris on June 14, 1940.
After dynamiting the commemorative car at Compiègne near Paris, in which Erzberger had signed Germany’s humiliating surrender in November 1918, the Germans proceeded to occupy the north of France so as to keep Britain in watchful view, and surrender the remainder of the country to their French Collabos under General Pétain, possibly as a reward for making the victory of the Nazis so suspiciously speedy.
As Prime Minister, Churchill also became the chief choreographer of the masquerade: with over three decades of intelligence operations behind him and an extraordinary talent for theatrical mendacity, he was eminently qualified to direct the final and riskiest steps of the dance. Now was the time to play the Windsor trump card again.
The plot was to create a counterfeit zone of British appeasement in the Iberian peninsula. Windsor would be the bait. Edward was presently serving as Major General of the British Army in the Allied Command stationed in Paris. On May 16, he ‘suddenly deserted his post without authorization – a court-martial offense – and took the Duchess to the South of France.’186 What looked like a mad scramble to escape from the advancing Nazi divisions was instead a secret mission to the neutral terrain of Spain. On June 20, Edward was in Barcelona.
Meanwhile, on May 19 Churchill had dispatched Samuel Hoare as British Ambassador to Madrid: a former ‘appeaser’ whom the Nazis did trust.
Furthermore, by way of Sweden, the British dis-informed the Hitlerites in late May that a core of pacifiers, opposed to Churchill was coalescing around Halifax.187 The counterfeit bisection of the British establishment into adversary clans, which had been employed for the Trebitsch dupery of 1920, was presently re-adapted on a giant scale to the last stage of Britain’s great deception of the Third Reich (Figure 5.2) – and, not by chance, the same man, Churchill, was behind both operations.
At that time the Nazis were told by double-agents like de Ropp that not until after a major battle, which ‘left no doubt about German military might,’ would the Peace Party be in a position to topple the Churchill Cabinet.188
And the Nazis believed everything: for years they had looked into the eyes of this party, a party which appeared to cast an enormous shadow over the whole of British society: the diplomatic corps, the intelligence services, the intelligentsia, the upper class. All of them seemed engulfed in an assortment of Fascist movements bent on overthrowing the throne should Britain have been invaded and sued for peace. At the grassroots, these groups were variously called The Link, The Right Club, The Nordic League…189 Few, if any, were genuine.
On July 3 Windsor was in Lisbon – there he lay in wait for the Nazis. He was hosted by rich Portuguese friends, who were linked to the spying web of the Germans. The prince talked much, and the German embassy in Lisbon relayed the conversation to Ribbentrop in Berlin. On July 12, Edward was allegedly heard recommending that the Nazis bomb Britain severely to make her ready for signing an immediate peace with Hitler.190
Since July 10, the Luftwaffe had been bombing British ports and logistic positions. Appealing ‘once more to reason and common sense’, Hitler offered Britain peace in his address of July 19, 1940. And once more Britain rejected it. Three days earlier, the Fuhrer had alerted his generals, theatrically, to ‘prepare’ for the cross-Channel invasion of England – that great Nazi hoax referred to as Operation Sea Lion (Seelöwe): naturally, Hitler would never make good on it. And Churchill knew it.191
And then, towards the end of July, the high-level Nazi envoys landed in Lisbon. The documentation pertaining to this mission was suppressed by Churchill himself;192 only a few coded records survived. From one creditable reconstruction, it emerges that Walter Schellenberg, one of the top agents of the Nazi intelligence services, was joined in Lisbon by his chief, Reinhardt Heydrich, to escort none other than the Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who had flown from Germany to complete a round of secret preliminary negotiations with the Duke – Hess’ old acquaintance from 1937.193
What they negotiated on July 28 is not known, though it might be easily guessed from the subsequent developments of the war and the further declarations of the Duke to his entourage: namely, that he was not willing to risk civil war in Britain by reclaiming his throne just yet, but that bombing sense into Britain at this stage might have prepared the terrain for his swift return from the Bahamas, whose governorship he had for the time being accepted at the suggestion of Churchill. On August 1, 1940, the Windsors embarked in Lisbon on a liner headed for the Caribbean and stepped down from the stage.
‘Unhappy with the Luftwaffe’s limited results, [on that very day, Hitler] announced his intention to accelerate the campaign and ordered a massive and continuous onslaught, which he code-named Adlerangriff, or Eagle Attack’.194 This was staged as some kind of thundering preamble to the imaginary land-invasion of Britain, which, having always been in the nature of a bluff, was accordingly postponed by the Fuhrer sine die. The aerial battle over Britain, which Hitler patently undertook with the greatest reluctance, began on August 13. He had never wanted to fight Britain, nor was he obviously prepared to do so at this time: Germany had but ten submarines in the Atlantic and her bombers were wholly unsuited for independent warfare against Britain. ‘Clearly her aircraft had never been designed for that purpose.’195 Not surprisingly, Eagle Attack was a fiasco – it was aborted on September 17, just 36 days after its beginning, and de facto terminated on May 10, 1941, after a swap of desultory air raids between enemies.
Windsor had served his purpose in the hands of Chuchill perfectly: he had provoked Hitler into triggering those ‘air massacres’ that Churchill had been invoking like manna from heaven since 1934, and that since the fall of 1939 he held up to the Americans as the chief lure to drag them into the war. For almost two years Churchill tried to blackmail the United States, threatening that Britain might have had to surrender her fleet to Hitler if the latter had bombed her into submission. ‘Every hour will be spent by the British,’ US Ambassador Kennedy predicted, ‘in trying to figure out how we can be gotten in.’196
The truth was also that the war was costing Britain $1.5 billion per month – this was World War I all over again: America had to be stirred to join, once more, Britain’s Eurasian intrigues. But Roosevelt and the clubs behind him needed no persuasion – they had rearmed on a colossal scale since 1938; whatever the New Deal could not do was solved by rearmament: after playing the Russian roulette with Montagu Norman in 1929, America reaped in the subsequent decade 10 million men without work. Eventually, it picked them up, one at a time, and clothed them in khaki, so that by 1940 the reserve army of the jobless had become a drilled fighting corps of 11 million G.Is. The United States was dying to fight.
After the inglorious end of the German Reparations in 1932, the Americans had sworn they would sell no weapons to belligerents, and whatever they sold, they would sell for cash. In 1939, however, they revised the legislation and resumed the sale of arms to warring nations; and by the end of 1940, pressured by the British, who were nearly insolvent, they agreed to do so on credit. ‘Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire,’ Roosevelt tauntingly addressed the American public on December 17, 1940, ‘I don’t say to him…“my hose cost me $15…I don’t want $15 – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over”.’197 This piece of fireside wisdom was turned into law on January 6 1941, as the Lend-Lease Agreement and ratified two months later by Congress – Churchill, immensely pleased, would categorize it as ‘the most unsordid act in the history of our nation.’ ‘We must be,’ Roosevelt concurred, ‘the great arsenal of democracy.’198
Afterwards, the US Administration did not even bother to deviate from the routine of 1916: it insisted, in fact, on establishing American naval escort of supply ships to Britain with a view to setting off a ‘shooting war’ with the Nazi U-boats.199 This, however, would not be necessary, for Hitler would declare war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941.
Meantime, between January and April 1941, the fake Peace Party in England continued to signal to the Nazis.200
The preparation for Barbarossa was completed by December 18, 1940; the tentative date for the invasion was set for mid May 1941.
In April 1941, the British informed Stalin of the coming German storm. ‘Let them come,’ replied the Red Czar, ‘we will be ready for them!’201
Yet between March and June 1941, the German maneuver in the Mediterranean basin was so successful that the British Foreign Office was seriously preoccupied by the eventuality of a wholesale collapse of its Middle Eastern defensive apparatus. In May 1941, victorious with Rommel in Cyrenaica,* and in Crete, the Germans landed aircraft in Iraq: a further deployment by Germany of airborne troops across Syria, Iraq, and Iran would have cut off Britain from her oil supply, and thereby afforded the Reich, by way of India, a much feared connection to the Japanese armies battling in the theaters of Asia.
*Eastern Libya.
But on May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess disappeared.
Where he vanished, and how, and what happened to him afterwards, is not known. The story that fearing a war on two fronts and furiously jealous of the blooming intimacy between his deputy Bormann, and Hitler, the lunatic Hess on a whim flew a ponderous jet over Scotland to rendezvous a cabal of appeasers, strayed off course, ejected himself perilously from the cockpit, landed on a field nearby, twisted his ankle, and presented himself as Captain Alfred Horn to a bewildered Scottish plowman, is a cheap myth. A fabrication which neither the Nazis nor the British, or their loyal archivists, ever endeavored to dispel.
In fact, there appear to be two Hesses,202 two planes leaving from different locations,203 two uniforms,204 an alleged impostor in the prison of Spandau,205 and an amnesiac, stuporous defendant at Nuremberg,206 who was alternatively classified by the Allied staff psychiatrists as a ‘dull witted, autistic psychopath,’ a ‘sham,’ an ‘enigma,’ or ‘a schizoid.’207 A man who refused to see his wife for 28 years, and who died mysteriously – most probably strangled by ‘specialists’208 – the day before his release in 1987.
Whatever the truth of the case, the facts speak clearly. After Hess vaporized:
1. The German deployment in the Far East ceased – Rommel was forsaken at the gates of Egypt; the directive to march to the southeast and the expeditions against Malta and Cyprus were rescinded, definitively. All available German forces were hastily conveyed towards Russia.
Had Rommel succeeded in North Africa…had he reached Suez and penetrated the Near East to make juncture with Japanese forces…The global strategy of the Nazi General Staff would have been immensely advanced towards its goal of global victory…The failure of the Nazi campaign in North Africa must take its place among the great ‘ifs’ of history.209
2. The night of Hess’s disappearance coincided with the final aerial raid conducted by the Luftwaffe against Britain. On June 22, 1941, a little over a month after the event, at 3:30 am, while German planes bombed Byelorussia, Hitler’s ‘herdsmen’ invaded the Russian forest – they made up a highly mechanized legion of 3 million Germans, Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians – with the SS sting in the tail. Awaiting them was an equally large pack of ‘red dogs’, which in the heat of the clash would grow to be four times as numerous.
The Nazis surrendered Hess as some form of collateral, and the British ‘appeasers’ appeared to keep their end of the bargain. Churchill and his military staff would prevent the Americans from opening a western front for a period of three years of unspeakable carnage: they granted the Nazis their yearned ‘free hand’ in the East. 210 They gave the Germans some time to sink in the Russian quagmire, before coming with the Americans to finish them off and conquer at last the prized booty of the German Fatherland.211
Already on July 26, 1941, Stalin requested an immediate Allied intervention in Western Europe. Churchill refused.212 In April of 1942, General Marshall of the US Army was in London to discuss the plan of a cross-Channel invasion; Churchill was ‘reluctant.’ In January 1943, at Casablanca, the American generals again pressed the British to act. Not even in November 1943, when the ‘big three’* met in Tehran, would Churchill allow discussion of the western closure before mooting territorial tradeoff's. 213
* Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
Sir Alan Brooks, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, opposed all plans for such an assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an attack indefinitely…The Americans…advocated a [cross-Channel attack] on the largest possible scale at the earliest possible time.214
Instead, from the Allies the Russians would get $10 billion worth of guns, and afterwards, as Baldwin had explained to Churchill, who needed no explication, one was to let the ‘Bolshies’ slowly blow the Nazis to pieces. The deception was sustained unabatedly for the whole duration of Barbarossa: in January 1942 Hitler might still be heard wishing that Hoare would take power,215 or hoping in the autumn of 1943 that Windsor would overthrow his brother.216 The Fuhrer would remain a victim of the most astounding illusions till the end.
Not until May 1944 would the British agree to open the Western Front with the cross-Channel operation (Overlord), which had been timidly prefaced by the Mafia assisted debarkation of the Americans in Sicily – Operation Husky of July 1943. By then the Nazis’ invading corps had been so ravaged that ‘it became obvious that the Soviet Union was capable of destroying Nazi Germany on her own.’217
Then and then only did Britain deem that the time had finally come to dispatch this Nazi creature, by now mortally wounded, that she had nurtured for over a quarter of a century for the sake of her Eurasian ambition.
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notes
105. Gilbert, Appeasement, pp. 138–50.
106. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 581.
107. Gunther, Inside Europe, p. 278.
108. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden (San Pedro, CA: GSG & Associates Publishers, 1981), pp. 227–8.
109. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 653.
110. Ibid., p. 582.
111. Gilbert, Appeasement, pp. 79–80.
112. Ibid., p. 120.
113. Louis Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception. The Dark Secret that Destroyed Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 117.
114. François-Poncet, Fateful Years, pp. 152–3.
115. Quoted in Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time. The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 23.
116. Ivan Maisky, Who Helped Hitler? (London: Hutchinson, 1964 [1962]), p. 55.
117. David Irving, Churchill’s War: Vol. 1, The Struggle for Power (Bullsbrook, Australia: Veritas Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 39–40.
118. Charles Higham, The Duchess of Windsor. The Secret Life (New York: McGraw & Hill, 1988), p. 109.
119. Peter Allen, The Windsor Secret. New Revelations of the Nazi connections (New York: Stein & Day Publishers, 1984), p. 34.
120. Paul Schmidt, Da Versaglia a Norimberga (Roma: L’arnia, 1951), pp. 271–80. Preparata 03 chap06 290 10/3/05 12:01:24 pm Notes 291
121. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 263.
122. Schmidt, Da Versaglia, p. 291.
123. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 267.
124. Hanfstaengl, Missing Years, p. 228.
125. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 117.
126. Schmidt, Da Versaglia, p. 293.
127. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 130.
128. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 68.
129. Maisky, Who Helped Hitler?, p. 57.
130. Hitler, Secret Conversations, pp. 556–7.
131. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 769.
132. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 69.
133. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, pp. 286–95.
134. Irving, Churchill’s War, pp. 54–5.
135. Alfred Smith, Rudolf Hess and Germany’s Reluctant War, 1939–1941 (Sussex: Book Guild Ltd., 2001), p. 61.
136. George Lentin, Lloyd George and the Lost Peace. From Versailles to Hitler, 1919–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 103.
137. Ibid., p. 99.
138. Lord Beaverbrook, The Abdication of King Edward VIII (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 63.
139. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 188.
140. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 97.
141. Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor. The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson (New York: Citadel Press, 1999), p. 280.
142. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 583.
143. Ibid., p. 777.
144. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 5, p. 307.
145. Ibid., Vol. 5, pp. 340–5.
146. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 286–8.
147. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 631. 148. Ibid., p. 627.
149. Ibid., p. 633.
150. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 144.
151. Ibid., p. 182.
152. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 253.
153. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 642–3.
154. Ibid., p. 646.
155. Ibid., p. 648.
156. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 6, p. 179.
157. David Irving, The War Path: Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (London: Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 193.
158. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 208.
159. Ibid., pp. 256, 232.
160. Irving, Chuchill’s War, pp. 167–8.
161. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 124.
162. Simon S. Montefi ore, Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), p. 307.
163. Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria delle Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 533.
164. Irving, Chuchill’s War, p. 61.
165. Ibid., p. 162.
166. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 323. Preparata 03 chap06 291 10/3/05 12:01:25 pm 292 Conjuring Hitler
167. Montefi ore, Stalin, p. 222.
168. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 4, pp. 210–70.
169. W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000 [1941]), pp. 205–8.
170. Ibid., p. 12.
171. Edward E. Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle. Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Westport, CA: Praeger, 1999), p. 182, and Thamer, Terzo Reich, p. 793.
172. David Irving, Hitler’s War (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 360.
173. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 298.
174. Maisky, Who Helped Hitler?, p. 171.
175. Montefi ore, Stalin, p. 312.
176. Jünger, Marble Cliffs, 1947.
177. For a study of Jünger’s Mauretanians, see Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l’histoire: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Ernst Jünger (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1978), p. 191.
178. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 3, p. 23.
179. Irving, Chuchill’s War, p. 193.
180. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 109.
181. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 667.
182. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope. p. 236.
183. Ibid., p. 238.
184. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 138.
185. Leibovitz and Finkel, In Our Time, p. 231.
186. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 276.
187. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 231.
188. Ibid., p. 229.
189. Higham, Duchess of Windsor, p. 265. 190. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 200.
191. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 379; Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 306. 192. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 376.
193. Allen, Windsor Secret, pp. 224–33, and Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 245.
194. Michael Veranov (Ed.), The Mammoth Book of the Third Reich at War (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc. 1997), p. 141.
195. Smith, Rudolf Hess, p. 55.
196. Irving, Churchill’s War, p. 193.
197. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 715.
198. Irving, Churchill’s War, pp. 483–9.
199. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 720.
200. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 270.
201. Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 358.
202. Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Rudolf Hess (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979).
203. Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (London: Frederick Muller, 1969), p. 319.
204. Allen, Windsor Secret, p. 261.
205. Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness. The True story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 152–3.
206. International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 14 November 1945– 1 October 1946, Vol. XXII (Nuremberg, 1948), pp. 368–72.
207. John K. Lattimer, Hitler & the Nazi Leaders. A Unique Insight into Evil (New York: Hippocene Books, Inc., 2001), pp. 109–17.
208. Smith, Rudolf Hess, pp. 457–8. Preparata 03 chap06 292 10/3/05 12:01:25 pm Notes 293
209. Edmund Walsh, Total Power. A Footnote to History (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948), p. 9.
210. Kilzer, Churchill’s Deception, p. 283.
211. A recent book by Martin Allen entitled The Hitler/Hess Deception (London: HarperCollins, 2004) claims to have at long last solved the Hess mystery. We wish it were so. Allen has ‘discovered’ additional archival documents that prove that the Peace Party that signaled to the Germans until the departure of Hess was indeed a pretense, the creation of Britain’s Secret Service. Allen further argues that all the diplomatic feints, shams, and wiles performed in 1940 and 1941 by ‘eminent marionettes’ (p. 219) such as Hoare, Halifax & Co. to entice the Nazis formed the essential complement to the deception orchestrated from the secret retreat at Woburn Abbey, the headquarters of a shady branch of the intelligence division for Special Operations. The deception was in fact aimed at diverting the Nazis’ urge for devastation away from the Middle East and the Mediterranean seaboard, and reorienting it towards Soviet Russia. So it appears that Allen’s fi ndings do nothing but confi rm what had been an easy supposition in this fi eld of research for at least a couple of decades. For instance, Louis Kilzer had already guessed this much in Churchill’s Deception, which Allen duly ignores. Moreover, Kilzer, most importantly, wondered whether those three terrible years of unhampered Nazi activity in the East (1941–44) were not in fact the British reward for the surrender of Hess. Allen broaches none of these key problems, nor does he explain how the Nazis were in fact duped if the Hess mission in the end proved to be a failure, which is what the author, not deviating from the standard account of Hess’s Scottish impromptu, contends. In other words, it is not at all clear why Hitler resolved nonetheless to push ahead with Barbarossa, even though he had not received any token reassurance from Britain that his back would be covered in the West if he attacked in the East. We don’t know why the author has dragged us one more time into a retelling of the story of ‘the Nazi bigwig that parachuted himself over the Dungavel estate’ if we are to rate that episode, ever anew, as a diplomatic fi asco. Finally, Allen is careful to circumscribe this admittedly horrible deception (it would cost the lives of tens of millions of people) to the ‘desperate’ circumstances affl icting the British empire in the spring of 1941; we are to take it as the cynical policy of self-defense resorted to by the stewards of the empire to ‘survive the fi ghting season’ (pp. 72, 140). The thesis of The Hitler/Hess Deception appears to be that such a deception, which worked god knows how, was the worthy price to pay for keeping the British empire standing until Nazism, other than which nothing is worse (the ever-present tacit caption), would be defeated with the prop of America in the West, and that, somewhat less willing, of Russia in the East. To this we may respond that even if the situation in 1941 had been truly critical for the British empire, it was nonetheless a situation entirely of Britain’s making – and clearly not an accidental one. It was a terrifying turn of events that had arisen from a mad bet placed at Versailles in 1919, and which Britain managed as best as she could (very well indeed), until she fi nally crowned her western ambition by destroying Germany and subjecting Europe to Anglo-American domination.
212. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), p. 485.
213. Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 497.
214. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 758.
215. Hitler, Secret Conversations, p. 208.
216. Michael Bloch, Operation Willi. The Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, July 1940 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 223.
217. Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 485.
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