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President Roosevelt's Campaign To Incite War in Europe: Mark Weber Major ceremonies were held in 1982 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With the exceptions of Washington and Lincoln, he was glorified and eulogized as no other president in American history. Even conservative President Ronald Reagan joined the chorus of applause. In early 1983, newspapers and television networks remembered the fiftieth anniversary of Roosevelt's inauguration with numerous laudatory tributes.
And yet, with each passing year more and more new evidence comes to light which contradicts the glowing image of Roosevelt portrayed by the mass media and politicians.
Much has already been written about Roosevelt's campaign of deception and outright lies in getting the United States to intervene in the Second World War prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Roosevelt's aid to Britain and the Soviet Union in violation of American neutrality and international law, his acts of war against Germany in the Atlantic in an effort to provoke a German declaration of war against the United States, his authorization of a vast "dirty tricks" campaign against U.S. citizens by British intelligence agents in violation of the Constitution, and his provocations and ultimatums against Japan which brought on the attack against Pearl Harbor -- all this is extensively documented and reasonably well known.[1]
Not so well known is the story of Roosevelt's enormous responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War itself. This essay focuses on Roosevelt's secret campaign to provoke war in Europe prior to the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939. It deals particularly with his efforts to pressure Britain, France and Poland into war against Germany in 1938 and 1939.
Franklin Roosevelt not only criminally involved America in a war which had already engulfed Europe. He bears a grave responsibility before history for the outbreak of the most destructive war of all time.
This paper relies heavily on a little-known collection of secret Polish documents which fell into German hands when Warsaw was captured in September 1939. These documents clearly establish Roosevelt's crucial role in bringing on the Second World War. They also reveal the forces behind the President which pushed for war.
While a few historians have quoted sentences and even paragraphs from these documents, their importance has not been fully appreciated. There are three reasons for this, I believe. First, for many years their authenticity was not indisputably established. Second, a complete collection of the documents has not been available in English. And third, the translation of those documents which has been available in English until now is deficient and unacceptably bad.
When the Germans took Warsaw in late September 1939, they seized a mass of documents from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a letter of 8 April 1983, Dr. Karl Otto Braun of Munich informed me that the documents were captured by an SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg, whom Braun knew personally. In a surprise attack, the brigade captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular German army. Von Kuensberg told Braun that his men took control of the Polish Foreign Ministry just as Ministry officials were in the process of burning incriminating documents. Dr. Braun was an official of the German Foreign Office between 1938 and 1945.
The German Foreign Office chose Hans Adolf von Moltke, formerly the Reich's Ambassador in Warsaw, to head a special Archive Commission to examine the collection and sort out those documents which might be suitable for publication. At the end of March 1940, 16 of these were published in book form under the title Polnische Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges ["Polish Documents on the Pre-History of the War"]. The Foreign Office edition was subtitled "German White Book No. 3." The book was immediately published in various foreign language editions in Berlin and some other European capitals. An American edition was published in New York by Howell, Soskin and Company as The German White Paper. Historian C. Hartley Grattan contributed a remarkably cautious and reserved foreword.[2]
The translation of the documents for the U.S. White Paper edition was inexcusably bad. Whole sentences and parts of sentences were missing and portions were grossly mistranslated. H. Keith Thompson explained to me why this was so during a conversation on 22 March 1983 and in a letter of 13 May 1983. A poor first draft English-language translation had been prepared in Berlin and sent to America. It was given to George Sylvester Viereck, a prominent pro-German American publicist and literary advisor to the German Library of Information in New York City. Thompson knew Viereck intimately and served as his chief aide and re-writer. Viereck had hurriedly redrafted the translation from Berlin into more readable prose but without any opportunity of comparing it to the original Polish text (which he could not read in any case) or even the official German-language version. In making stylistic changes for the sake of readability, the meaning of the original documents was thereby inadvertently distorted.
The matter was also discussed at a small dinner for Lawrence Dennis hosted by Thompson at Viereck's apartment in the Hotel Belleclaire in New York City in 1956. Viereck explained that he had been a highly paid literary consultant to the German government, responsible for the propaganda effect of publications, and could not be concerned with the translation groundwork normally done by clerks. Even the most careful translation of complicated documents is apt to distort the original meaning, and literary editing is certain to do so, Viereck said. Thompson agreed with that view.
In preparing the English-language text for this essay, I have carefully examined the official German translation and various other translations, and compared them with facsimiles of the original Polish documents.
Media Sensation
The German government considered the captured Polish documents to be of tremendous importance. On Friday, 29 March, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda confidentially informed the daily press of the reason for releasing the documents:
The German Foreign Office made the documents public on Friday, 29 March 1940. In Berlin, journalists from around the world, including the United States, were given facsimile copies of the original Polish documents and translations in German. journalists were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with an enormous pile of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry.
The release of the documents was an international media sensation. American newspapers gave the story large front page headline coverage and published lengthy excerpts from the documents. But the impact was much less than the German government had hoped for.
Leading U.S. government officials wasted no time in vehemently denouncing the documents as not authentic. Secretary of State Cordell Hull stated: "I may say most emphatically that neither I nor any of my associates in the Department of State have ever heard of any such conversations as those alleged, nor do we give them the slightest credence. The statements alleged have not represented in any way at any time the thought or the policy of the American government." William Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador to Paris who was particulary incriminated by the documents, announced: "I have never made to anyone the statements attributed to me." And Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington whose confidential reports to Warsaw were the most revealing, declared: "I deny the allegations attributed to my reports. I never had any conversations with Ambassador Bullitt on America's participation in war."[4]
These categorical public denials by the highest officials had the effect of almost completely undercutting the anticipated impact of the documents. It must be remembered that this was several decades before the experiences of the Vietnam war and Watergate had taught another generation of Americans to be highly skeptical of such official denials. In 1940, the vast majority of the American people trusted their political leaders to tell them the truth.
After all, if the documents made public to the world by the German government were in fact authentic and genuine, it would mean that the great leader of the American democracy was a man who lied to his own people and broke his own country's laws, while the German government told the truth. To accept that would be quite a lot to expect of any nation, but especially of the trusting American public.
Comment from Capitol Hill generally echoed the official government view. Senator Key Pittman, the Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the documents "unmitigated falsehood designed to create dissension in the United States." Senator Claude Peper, Democrat of Florida, declared: "It's German propaganda and shouldn't affect our policies in the least." Only a few were not impressed with the official denials. Representative Hamilton Fish of New York, the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for a Congressional investigation and declared in a radio address: "If these charges were true, it would constitute a treasonable act. If President Roosevelt has entered into secret understandings or commitments with foreign governments to involve us in war, he should be impeached."[5]
American newspapers stressed the high-level denials in reporting the release of the documents. The New York Times headline read: U.S. BRANDS AS FALSE NAZI DOCUMENTS CHARGING WE FOSTERED WAR IN EUROPE AND PROMISED TO JOIN ALLIES IF NEEDED. The Baltimore Sun headlined: NAZI DOCUMENTS LAYING WAR BLAME ON U.S. ARE ASSAILED IN WASHINGTON.[6]
Although the book of Polish documents was labeled "first series," no further volumes ever appeared. From time to time the German government would make public additional documents from the Polish archives. These were published in book form in 1943 along with numerous other documents captured by the Germans from the French Foreign Ministry and other European archives, under the title Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten Staaten ["Roosevelt's Way Into War: Secret Documents on the War Policy of the President of the United States"].[7]
An important unanswered question is: Where are the original Polish documents today? Unless they were destroyed in the conflagration of the war, they presumably fell into either American or Soviet hands in 1945. In view of recent U.S. government policy on secret archival material, it is very unlikely that they would still be secret today if they had been acquired by the United States. My guess is that if they were not destroyed, they are now either in Moscow or at the East German Central State Archives in Potsdam.
It is particularly important to keep in mind that these secret reports were written by top level Polish ambassadors, that is, by men who though not at all friendly to Germany nonetheless understood the realities of European Politics far better than those who made policy in the United States.
For example, the Polish ambassadors realized that behind all their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and expressions of love for the United States, the Jews who agitated for war against Germany were actually doing nothing other than ruthlessly furthering their own purely sectarian interests. Many centuries of experience in living closely with the Jews had made the Poles far more aware than most nationalities of the special character of this people.
The Poles viewed the Munich Settlement of 1938 very differently than did Roosevelt and his circle. The President bitterly attacked the Munich agreement, which gave self-determination to the three and a half million Germans of Czechoslovakia and settled a major European crisis, as a shameful and humiliating capitulation to German blackmail. Although wary of German might, the Polish government supported the Munich agreement, in part because a small Polish territory which had been a part of Czechoslovakia against the wishes of its inhabitants was united with Poland as a result of the Settlement.
The Polish envoys held the makers of American foreign policy in something approaching contempt. President Roosevelt was considered a master political artist who knew how to mold American public opinion, but very little about the true state of affairs in Europe. As Poland's Ambassador to Washington emphasized in his reports to Warsaw, Roosevelt pushed America into war in order to distract attention from his failures as President in domestic policy.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the complexities of German-Polish relations between 1933 and 1939 and the reasons for the German attack against Poland at dawn on the first day of September 1939. However, it should be noted that Poland had refused to even negotiate over self-determination for the German city of Danzig and the ethnic German minority in the so-called Polish Corridor. Hitler felt compelled to resort to arms when he did in response to a growing Polish campaign of terror and dispossession against the one and a half million ethnic Germans under Polish rule. In my view, if ever a military action was justified, it was the German campaign against Poland in 1939.
Poland's headstrong refusal to negotiate was made possible because of a fateful blank check guarantee of military backing from Britain -- a pledge that ultimately proved completely worthless to the hapless Poles. Considering the lightning swiftness of the victorious German campaign, it is difficult to realize today that the Polish government did not fear war with Germany. Poland's leaders foolishly believed that German might was only an illusion. They were convinced that their troops would occupy Berlin itself within a few weeks and add further German territories to an enlarged Polish state. It is also important to keep in mind that the purely localized conflict between Germany and Poland was only transformed into a Europe-wide conflagration by the British and French declarations of war against Germany.
After the war the Allied-appointed judges at the International Military Tribunal staged at Nuremberg refused to admit the Polish documents as evidence for the German defense. Had these pieces of evidence been admitted, the Nuremberg undertaking might have been less a victors' show trial and more a genuinely impartial court of international justice.
Authenticity Beyond Doubt
There is now absolutely no question that the documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw made public by the German government are genuine and authentic.
Charles C. Tansill, professor of American diplomatic history at Georgetown University, considered them genuine. "... I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic," he wrote.[8] Historian and sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes confirmed this assessment: "Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents."[9] In America's Second Crusade, William H. Chamberlin reported: "I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned."[10]
More importantly, Edward Raczynski, the Polish Ambassador in London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed the authenticity of the documents in his diary, which was published in 1963 under the title In Allied London. In his entry for 20 June 1940, he wrote:
In 1970 their authenticity was reconfirmed with the publication of Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939. This important work consists of the official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Lukasiewicz, the former Polish Ambassador to Paris who authored several of the secret diplomatic reports made public by the German government. The collection was edited by Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member, and later Professor Emeritus of Wellesley and Ripon colleges. Professor Jedrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine. He quoted extensively from several of them.
Mr. Tyler G. Kent has also vouched for the authenticity of the documents. He states that while working at the U.S. embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents and which confirmed their accuracy.
Two Key Diplomats
Two American diplomats who played especially crucial roles in the European crisis of 1938-1939 are mentioned often in the Polish documents. The first of these was William C. Bullitt. Although his official position was U.S. Ambassador to France, he was in reality much more than that. He was Roosevelt's "super envoy" and personal deputy in Europe.
Like Roosevelt, Bullitt "rose from the rich." He was born into an important Philadelphia banking family, one of the city's wealthiest. His mother's grandfather, Jonathan Horwitz, was a German Jew who had come to the United States from Berlin.[12] In 1919 Bullitt was an assistant to President Wilson at the Versailles peace conference. That same year, Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George sent him to Russia to meet with Lenin and determine if the new Bolshevik government deserved recognition by the Allies. Bullitt met with Lenin and other top Soviet leaders and upon his return urged recognition of the new regime. But he had a falling-out with Wilson and left diplomatic service. In 1923 he married Louise Bryant Reed, the widow of American Communist leader John Reed. In Europe Bullitt collaborated with Sigmund Freud on a psychoanalytical biography of Wilson. When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he brought Bullitt back into diplomatic life.[13]
In November 1933, Roosevelt sent Bullitt to Moscow as the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. His initial enthusiasm for the Soviet system gave way to a deep distrust of Stalin and Communism. In 1936 the President transferred him to Paris. He served there as Roosevelt's key European diplomat until 1940 when Churchill's assumption of leadership in Britain and the defeat of France made his special role superfluous.
In the Spring of 1938, all U.S. envoys in Europe were subordinated to Bullitt by an internal directive of the State Department.[14] As the European situation worsened in 1939, Roosevelt often spoke with his man in Paris by telephone, sometimes daily, frequently giving him precisely detailed and ultra-confidential instructions on how to conduct America's foreign policy. Not even Secretary of State Cordell Hull was privy to many of the letters and communications between Bullitt and Roosevelt.
In France, the New York Times noted, Bullitt "was acclaimed there as 'the Champagne Ambassador' on account of the lavishness of his parties, but he was far more than the envoy to Paris: He was President Roosevelt's intimate adviser on European affairs, with telephone access to the President at any hour."[15]
"Between these teammates," the Saturday Evening Post reported in March 1939,
In Europe, Bullitt spoke with the voice and the authority of President Roosevelt himself.
The second most important American diplomat in Europe was Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt's Ambassador at the Court of St. James. Like Bullitt he was a wealthy banker. But this Boston Catholic of Irish ancestry was otherwise a very different sort of man. Roosevelt sent Kennedy, an important Democratic party figure and father of a future President, to Britain for purely political reasons. Roosevelt disliked and distrusted Kennedy, and this sentiment grew as Kennedy opposed the President's war policies more and more vehemently. Moreover, Kennedy despised his counterpart in Paris. In a letter to his wife, he wrote: "I talk to Bullitt occasionally. He is more rattlebrained than ever. His judgment is pathetic and I am afraid of his influence on F.D.R. because they think alike on many things."[17]
The Documents
Here now are extensive excerpts from the Polish documents themselves. They are given in chronological order. They are remarkably lucid for diplomatic reports and speak eloquently for themselves. * * * * * On 9 February 1938, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, reported to the Foreign Minister in Warsaw on the Jewish role in making American foreign policy:
On 21 November 1938, Ambassador Potocki sent a report to Warsaw which discussed in some detail a conversation between himself and Bullitt, who happened to be back in Washington:
Ambassador Potocki's report from Washington of 9 January 1939 dealt in large part with President Roosevelt's annual address to Congress:
Of all the documents in this collection, the most revealing is probably the secret report by Ambassador Potocki of 12 January 1939 which dealt with the domestic situation in the United States. This report is given here in full:
On 16 January 1939, Polish Ambassador Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry on another lengthy conversation he had with Roosevelt's personal envoy, William Bullitt:
The Polish Ambassador to Paris, Juliusz (Jules) Lukasiewicz, sent a top secret report to the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw at the beginning of February 1939 which outlined U.S. policy towards Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:
On 7 March 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent a remarkably lucid and perceptive report on Roosevelt's foreign policy to his government in Warsaw. This document was first made public when leading German newspapers published it in German translation, along with a facsimile reproduction of the first page of the Polish original, in their editions of 28 October 1940. The main National Socialist party newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, published the Ambassador's report with this observation:
This report was not one of the Polish documents which was released in March 1940 and published as part of the "German White Book No. 3" (or the German White Paper). However, it was published in 1943 as part of the collection entitled "Roosevelt's Way Into War." As far as I can determine, this English translation is the first that has ever appeared. Ambassador Potocki's secret report of 7 March 1939 is here given in full:
Juliusz Lukasiewicz, Poland's Ambassador to France, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 about further conversations with U.S. envoy Bullitt in Paris. Lukasiewicz discussed Roosevelt's efforts to get both Poland and Britain to adopt a totally uncompromising policy towards Germany, even in the face of strong sentiment for peace. The report concludes with these words:
The Polish Ambassador in London, Count Edward Raczynski, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 on the continuing European crisis and on a conversation he had with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, his American counterpart. Kennedy's remarks to Raczynski confirmed Bullitt's reputation in diplomatic circles as an indiscreet big mouth:
This concludes the excerpts from the Polish reports. * * * * * The Path To War
While the Polish documents alone are conclusive proof of Roosevelt's treacherous campaign to bring about world war, it is fortunate for posterity that a substantial body of irrefutable complementary evidence exists which confirms the conspiracy recorded in the dispatches to Warsaw.
The secret policy was confirmed after the war with the release of a confidential diplomatic report by the British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay. During his three years of service in Washington, the veteran diplomat had developed little regard for America's leaders. He considered Roosevelt an amiable and impressionable lightweight, and warned the British Foreign Office that it should not tell William Bullitt anything beyond what it wouldn't mind reading later in an American newspaper.[18]
On 19 September 1938 -- that is, a year before the outbreak of war in Europe -- Roosevelt called Lindsay to a very secret meeting at the White House. At the beginning of their long conversation, according to Lindsay's confidential dispatch to London, Roosevelt "emphasized the necessity of absolute secrecy. Nobody must know I had seen him and he himself would tell nobody of the interview. I gathered not even the State Department." The two discussed some secondary matters before Roosevelt got to the main point of the conference. "This is the very secret part of his communication and it must not be known to anyone that he has even breathed a suggestion." The President told the Ambassador that if news of the conversation was ever made public, it could mean his impeachment. And no wonder. What Roosevelt proposed was a cynically brazen but harebrained scheme to violate the U.S. Constitution and dupe the American people.
The President said that if Britain and France "would find themselves forced to war" against Germany, the United States would ultimately also join. But this would require some clever maneuvering. Britain and France should impose a total blockade against Germany without actually declaring war and force other states (including neutrals) to abide by it. This would certainly provoke some kind of German military response, but it would also free Britain and France from having to actually declare war. For propaganda purposes, the "blockade must be based on loftiest humanitarian grounds and on the desire to wage hostilities with minimum of suffering and the least possible loss of life and property, and yet bring the enemy to his knees." Roosevelt conceded that this would involve aerial bombardment, but "bombing from the air was not the method of hostilities which caused really great loss of life."
The important point was to "call it defensive measures or anything plausible but avoid actual declaration of war." That way, Roosevelt believed he could talk the American people into supporting war against Germany, including shipments of weapons to Britain and France, by insisting that the United States was still technically neutral in a non-declared conflict. "This method of conducting war by blockade would in his [Roosevelt's] opinion meet with approval of the United States if its humanitarian purpose were strongly emphasized," Lindsay reported.[19]
The American Ambassador to Italy, William Phillips, admitted in his postwar memoirs that the Roosevelt administration was already committed to going to war on the side of Britain and France in late 1938. "On this and many other occasions," Phillips wrote, "I would like to have told him [Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister] frankly that in the event of a European war, the United States would undoubtedly be involved on the side of the Allies. But in view of my official position, I could not properly make such a statement without instructions from Washington, and these I never received."[20]
Carl J. Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner to Danzig, reported in his postwar memoirs on a remarkable conversation held at the end of 1938 with Anthony Drexel Biddle, the American Ambassador to Poland. Biddle was a rich banker with close ties to the Morgan financial empire. A thoroughgoing internationalist, he was an ideological colleague of President Roosevelt and a good friend of William Bullitt. Burckhardt, a Swiss professor, served as High Commissioner between 1937 and 1939.
Nine months before the outbreak of armed conflict, on 2 December 1938, Biddle told Burckhardt
The fateful British pledge to Poland of 31 March 1939 to go to war against Germany in case of a Polish-German conflict would not have been made without strong pressure from the White House.
On 14 March 1939, Slovakia declared itself an independent republic, thereby dissolving the state known as Czechoslovakia. That same day, Czechoslovak President Emil Hacha signed a formal agreement with Hitler establishing a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech portion of the federation. The British government initially accepted the new situation, but then Roosevelt intervened.
In their nationally syndicated column of 14 April 1939, the usually very well informed Washington journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported that on 16 March 1939 Roosevelt had "sent a virtual ultimatum to Chamberlain" demanding that henceforth the British government strongly oppose Germany. According to Pearson and Allen, who completely supported Roosevelt's move, "the President warned that Britain could expect no more support, moral or material through the sale of airplanes, if the Munich policy continued."[22] Chamberlain gave in and the next day, 17 March, ended Britain's policy of cooperation with Germany in a speech at Birmingham bitterly denouncing Hitler. Two weeks later the British government formally pledged itself to war in case of German-Polish hostilities.
Bullitt's response to the creation of the German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia was to telephone Roosevelt and, in an "almost hysterical" voice, urge him to make a dramatic denunciation of Germany and immediately ask Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act.[23]
In a confidential telegram to Washington dated 9 April 1939, Bullitt reported from Paris on another conversation with Ambassador Lukasiewicz. He had told the Polish envoy that although U.S. law prohibited direct financial aid to Poland, it might be possible to circumvent its provisions. The Roosevelt administration might be able to supply war planes to Poland indirectly through Britain. "The Polish Ambassador asked me if it might not be possible for Poland to obtain financial help and aeroplanes from the United States. I replied that I believed the Johnson Act would forbid any loans from the United States to Poland but added that it might be possible for England to purchase planes for cash in the United States and turn them over to Poland."[24]
On 25 April 1939, four months before the outbreak of war, Bullitt called American newspaper columnist Karl von Wiegand, chief European correspondent of the International News Service, to the U.S. embassy in Paris and told him: "War in Europe has been decided upon. Poland has the assurance of the support of Britain and France, and will yield to no demands from Germany. America will be in the war soon after Britain and France enter it."[25]
In a lengthy secret conversation at Hyde Park on 28 May 1939, Roosevelt assured the former President of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Edvard Benes, that America would actively intervene on the side of Britain and France in the anticipated European war.[26]
In June 1939, Roosevelt secretly proposed to the British that the United States should establish "a patrol over the waters of the Western Atlantic with a view to denying them to the German Navy in the event of war." The British Foreign Office record of this offer noted that "although the proposal was vague and woolly and open to certain objections, we assented informally as the patrol was to be operated in our interests."[27]
Many years after the war, Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister in 1939, confirmed Bullitt's role as Roosevelt's deputy in pushing his country into war. In a letter to Hamilton Fish dated 26 March 1971, Bonnet wrote: "One thing is certain is that Bullitt in 1939 did everything he could to make France enter the war."[28] An important confirmation of the crucial role of Roosevelt and the Jews in pushing Britain into war comes from the diary of James V. Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. In his entry for 27 December 1945, he wrote:
When Ambassador Potocki was back in Warsaw on leave from his post in Washington, he spoke with Count Jan Szembek, the Polish Foreign Ministry Under-Secretary, about the growing danger of war. In his diary entry of 6 July 1939, Szembek recorded Potocki's astonishment at the calm mood in Poland. In comparison with the war psychosis that had gripped the West, Poland seemed like a rest home.
"In the West," the Ambassador told Szembek, "there are all kinds of elements openly pushing for war: the Jews, the super-capitalists, the arms dealers. Today they are all ready for a great business, because they have found a place which can be set on fire: Danzig; and a nation that is ready to fight: Poland. They want to do business on our backs. They are indifferent to the destruction of our country. Indeed, since everything will have to be rebuilt later on, they can profit from that as well."[30]
On 24 August 1939, just a week before the outbreak of hostilities, Chamberlain's closest advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, went to Ambassador Kennedy with an urgent appeal from the British Prime Minister for President Roosevelt. Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself in March to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned in despair to Roosevelt as a last hope for peace. He wanted the American President to "put pressure on the Poles" to change course at this late hour and open negotiations with Germany. By telephone Kennedy told the State Department that the British "felt that they could not, given their obligations, do anything of this sort but that we could." Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to possibly save the peace of Europe, Roosevelt rejected Chamberlain's desperate plea out of hand. At that, Kennedy reported, the Prime Minister lost all hope. "The futility of it all," Chamberlain had told Kennedy, "is the thing that is frightful. After all, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe."[31]
Roosevelt liked to present himself to the American people and the world as a man of peace. To a considerable degree, that is still his image today. But Roosevelt cynically rejected genuine opportunities to act for peace when they were presented.
In 1938 he refused even to answer requests by French Foreign Minister Bonnet on 8 and 12 September to consider arbitrating the Czech-German dispute.[32] And a year later, after the outbreak of war, a melancholy Ambassador Kennedy beseeched Roosevelt to act boldly for peace. "It seems to me that this situation may crystallize to a point where the President can be the savior of the world," Kennedy cabled on 11 September from London. "The British government as such certainly cannot accept any agreement with Hitler, but there may be a point when the President himself may work out plans for world peace. Now this opportunity may never arise, but as a fairly practical fellow all my life, I believe that it is entirely conceivable that the President can get himself in a spot where he can save the world ..."
But Roosevelt rejected out of hand this chance to save the peace of Europe. To a close political crony, he called Kennedy's plea "the silliest message to me that I have ever received." He complained to Henry Morgenthau that his London Ambassador was nothing but a pain in the neck: "Joe has been an appeaser and will always be an appeaser ... If Germany and Italy made a good peace offer tomorrow, Joe would start working on the King and his friend the Queen and from there on down to get everybody to accept it."[33]
Infuriated at Kennedy's stubborn efforts to restore peace in Europe or at least limit the conflict that had broken out, Roosevelt instructed his Ambassador with a "personal" and "strictly confidential" telegram on 11 September 1939 that any American peace effort was totally out of the question. The Roosevelt government, it declared, "sees no opportunity nor occasion for any peace move to be initiated by the President of the United States. The people [sic] of the United States would not support any move for peace initiated by this Government that would consolidate or make possible a survival of a regime of force and aggression."[34]
Hamilton Fish Warns The Nation
In the months before armed conflict broke out in Europe, perhaps the most vigorous and prophetic American voice of warning against President Roosevelt's campaign to incite war was that of Hamilton Fish, a leading Republican congressman from New York. In a series of hard-hitting radio speeches, Fish rallied considerable public opinion against Roosevelt's deceptive war policy. Here are only a few excerpts from some of those addresses.[35]
On 6 January 1939, Fish told a nationwide radio audience:
On 5 March, Fish spoke to the country over the Columbia radio network:
Fish addressed the listeners of the National Broadcasting Company network on 5 April with these words:
On 21 April, Fish again spoke to the country over nationwide radio:
In his radio address of 26 May, Fish stated:
On 8 July 1939, Fish declared over the National Broadcasting Company radio network:
Powers Behind The President
President Roosevelt could have done little to incite war in Europe without help from powerful allies. Behind him stood the self-serving international financial and Jewish interests bent on the destruction of Germany. The principal organization which drummed up public support for U.S. involvement in the European war prior to the Pearl Harbor attack was the cleverly named "Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies." President Roosevelt himself initiated its founding, and top administration officials consulted frequently with Committee leaders.[36]
Although headed for a time by an elderly small-town Kansas newspaper publisher, William Allen White, the Committee was actually organized by powerful financial interests which stood to profit tremendously from loans to embattled Britain and from shrewd investments in giant war industries in the United States.
Some of the important figures active in the Committee were revealed by Holt: Frederic R. Coudert, a paid war propagandist for the British government in the U.S. during the First World War; Robert S. Allen of the Pearson and Allen syndicated column; Henry R. Luce, the influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines; Fiorella LaGuardia, the fiery half-Jewish Mayor of New York City; Herbert Lehman, the Jewish Governor of New York with important financial holdings in war industries; and Frank Altschul, an officer in the Jewish investment firm of Lazard Freres with extensive holdings in munitions and military supply companies.
If the Committee succeeded in getting the U.S. into war, Holt warned, "American boys will spill their blood for profiteers, politicians and 'paytriots.' If war comes, on the hands of the sponsors of the White Committee will be blood-the blood of Americans killed in a needless war."[37]
In March 1941 a list of most of the Committee's financial backers was made public. It revealed the nature of the forces eager to bring America into the European war. Powerful international banking interests were well represented. J.P. Morgan, John W. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and others of the great Morgan banking house were listed. Other important names from the New York financial world included Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Felix M. and James F. Warburg, and J. Malcolm Forbes. Chicago department store owner and publisher Marshall Field was a contributor, as was William Averill Harriman, the railroad and investment millionaire who later served as Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow.
Of course, Jewish names made up a substantial portion of the long list. Hollywood film czar Samuel Goldwyn of Goldwyn Studios was there, along with David Dubinsky, the head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The William S. Paley Foundation, which had been set up by the head of the giant Columbia Broadcasting System, contributed to the Committee. The name of Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman, wife of the New York Governor, was also on the list.[38]
Without an understanding of his intimate ties to organized Jewry, Roosevelt's policies make little sense. As Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz noted: "Roosevelt himself brought into his immediate circle more Jews than any other President before or after him. Felix Frankfurter, Bernard M. Baruch and Henry Morgenthau were his close advisers. Benjamin V. Cohen, Samuel Rosenman and David K. Niles were his friends and trusted aides."[39] This is perhaps not so remarkable in light of Roosevelt's reportedly one-eighth Jewish ancestry.[40]
In his diary entry of 1 May 1941, Charles A. Lindbergh, the American aviator hero and peace leader, nailed the coalition that was pushing the United States into war:
Joseph Kennedy shared Lindbergh's apprehensions about Jewish power. Before the outbreak of war he privately expressed concerns about "the Jews who dominate our press" and world Jewry in general, which he considered a threat to peace and prosperity. Shortly after the beginning of hostilities, Kennedy lamented "the growing Jewish influence in the press and in Washington demanding continuance of the war."[42]
Betrayal, Failure, Delusion
Roosevelt's efforts to get Poland, Britain and France into war against Germany succeeded all too well. The result was untold death and misery and destruction. When the fighting began, as Roosevelt had intended and planned, the Polish and French leaders expected the American president to at least make good on his assurances of backing in case of war. But Roosevelt had not reckoned on the depth of peace sentiment of the vast majority of Americans. So, in addition to deceiving his own people, Roosevelt also let down those in Europe to whom he had promised support.
Seldom in American history were the people as united in their views as they were in late 1939 about staying out of war in Europe. When hostilities began in September 1939, the Gallup poll showed 94 percent of the American people against involvement in war. That figure rose to 96.5 percent in December before it began to decline slowly to about 80 percent in the Fall of 1941. (Today, there is hardly an issue that even 60 or 70 percent of the people agree upon.)[43]
Roosevelt was, of course, quite aware of the intensity of popular feeling on this issue. That is why he lied repeatedly to the American people about his love of peace and his determination to keep the U.S. out of war, while simultaneously doing everything in his power to plunge Europe and America into war.
In a major 1940 re-election campaign speech, Roosevelt responded to the growing fears of millions of Americans who suspected that their President had secretly pledged United States support to Britain in its war against Germany. These well-founded suspicions were based in part on the publication in March of the captured Polish documents. The speech of 23 October 1940 was broadcast from Philadelphia to the nation on network radio. In the most emphatic language possible, Roosevelt categorically denied that he had
We now know, of course, that this pious declaration was just another one of Roosevelt's many brazen, bald-faced lies to the American people.
Roosevelt's policies were more than just dishonest-they were criminal. The Constitution of the United States grants authority only to the Congress to make war and peace. And Congress had passed several major laws to specifically insure U.S. neutrality in case of war in Europe. Roosevelt continually violated his oath as President to uphold the Constitution. If his secret policies had been known, the public demand for his impeachment would very probably have been unstoppable.
The Watergate episode has made many Americans deeply conscious of the fact that their presidents can act criminally. That affair forced Richard Nixon to resign his presidency, and he is still widely regarded as a criminal. No schools are named after him and his name will never receive the respect that normally goes to every American president. But Nixon's crimes pale into insignificance when compared to those of Franklin Roosevelt. What were Nixon's lies compared to those of Roosevelt? What is a burglary cover-up compared to an illegal and secret campaign to bring about a major war?
Those who defend Roosevelt's record argue that he lied to the American people for their own good -- that he broke the law for lofty principles. His deceit is considered permissible because the cause was noble, while similar deception by presidents Johnson and Nixon, to name two, is not. This is, of course, a hypocritical double standard. And the argument doesn't speak very well for the democratic system. It implies that the people are too dumb to understand their own best interests. It further suggests that the best form of government is a kind of benevolent liberal-democratic dictatorship.
Roosevelt's hatred for Hitler was deep, vehement, passionate -- almost personal. This was due in no small part to an abiding envy and jealousy rooted in the great contrast between the two men, not only in their personal characters but also in their records as national leaders.
Superficially, the public fives of Roosevelt and Hitler were astonishingly similar. Both assumed the leadership of their respective countries at the beginning of 1933. They both faced the enormous challenge of mass unemployment during a catastrophic worldwide economic depression. Each became a powerful leader in a vast military alliance during the most destructive war in history. Both men died while still in office within a few weeks of each other in April 1945, just before the end of the Second World War in Europe. But the enormous contrasts in the lives of these two men are even more remarkable.
Roosevelt was born into one of the wealthiest families in America. His was a life utterly free of material worry. He took part in the First World War from an office in Washington as UnderSecretary of the Navy. Hitler, on the other hand, was born into a modest provinicial family. As a young man he worked as an impoverished manual laborer. He served in the First World War as a front line soldier in the hell of the Western battleground. He was wounded many times and decorated for bravery.
In spite of his charming manner and soothing rhetoric, Roosevelt proved unable to master the great challenges facing America. Even after four years of his presidency, millions remained unemployed, undernourished and poorly housed in a vast land richly endowed with all the resources for incomparable prosperity. The New Deal was plagued with bitter strikes and bloody clashes between labor and capital. Roosevelt did nothing to solve the country's deep, festering racial problems which erupted repeatedly in riots and armed conflict. The story was very different in Germany. Hitler rallied his people behind a radical program that transformed Germany within a few years from an economically ruined land on the edge of civil war into Europe's powerhouse. Germany underwent a social, cultural and economic rebirth without parallel in history. The contrast between the personalities of Roosevelt and Hitler was simultaneously a contrast between two diametrically different social-political systems and ideologies.
And yet, it would be incorrect to characterize Roosevelt as merely a cynical politician and front man for powerful alien interests. Certainly he did not regard himself as an evil man. He sincerely believed that he was doing the right and noble thing in pressuring Britain and France into war against Germany. Like Wilson before him, and others since, Roosevelt felt himself uniquely qualified and called upon by destiny to reshape the world according to his vision of an egalitarian, universalist democracy. He was convinced, as so many American leaders have been, that the world could be saved from itself by remodeling it after the United States.
Presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt view the world not as a complex of different nations, races and cultures which must mutually respect each others' separate collective identities in order to live together in peace, but rather according to a selfrighteous missionary perspective that divides the globe into morally good and evil countries. In that scheme of things, America is the providentially permanent leader of the forces of righteousness. Luckily, this view just happens to correspond to the economic and political interests of those who wield power in the United States.
President Roosevelt's War
In April 1941, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota prophetically predicted that one day the Second World War would be remembered as Roosevelt's war. "If we are ever involved in this war, it will be called by future historians by only one title, 'the President's War,' because every step of his since his Chicago quarantine speech [of 5 October 1937] has been toward war.[45]
The great American historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, believed that war could probably have been prevented in 1939 if it had not been for Roosevelt's meddling. "Indeed, there is fairly conclusive evidence that, but for Mr. Roosevelt's pressure on Britain, France and Poland, and his commitments to them before September 1939, especially to Britain, and the irresponsible antics of his agent provocateur, William C. Bullitt, there would probably have been no world war in 1939, or, perhaps, for many years thereafter."[46] In Revisionism: A Key to Peace, Barnes wrote:
One of the most perceptive verdicts on Franklin Roosevelt's place in history came from the pen of the great Swedish explorer and author, Sven Hedin. During the war he wrote:
Officially orchestrated praise for Roosevelt as a great man of peace cannot conceal forever his crucial role in pushing Europe into war in 1939. * * * *
* It is now more than forty years since the events described here took place. For many they are an irrelevant part of a best-forgotten past. But the story of how Franklin Roosevelt engineered war in Europe is very pertinent -- particularly for Americans today. The lessons of the past have never been more important than in this nuclear age. For unless at least an aware minority understands how and why wars are made, we will remain powerless to restrain the warmongers of our own era.
Notes
Sources and References Listed here are the published editions of the Polish documents, the most important sources touching on the questions of their authenticity and content, and essential recent sources on what President Roosevelt was really-as opposed to publicly-doing and thinking during the prelude to war. Full citations for all references in the article will be found in the notes. Beschloss, Michael R. Kennedy and Roosevelt. New York: Norton, 1980. Bullitt, Orville H. (ed.). For the President: Personal and Secret. [Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt.] Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Germany. Foreign Office Archive Commission. Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1943. Germany. Foreign Office. The German White Paper. [White Book No. 3.] New York: Howell, Soskin and Co., 1940. Germany. Foreign Office. Polnische Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges. [White Book No. 3.] Berlin: F. Eher, 1940. Koskoff, David E. Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Lukasiewicz, Juliusz (Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, ed.). Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Wirsing, Giselher. Der masslose Kontinent: Roosevelts Kampf um die Weltherrschaft. Jena: E. Diederichs, 1942.This item was first presented at the Fourth IHR Conference in Chicago, September 1982. It was first published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983 (Vol. 4, No. 2), pages 135-172.
For Further Reading Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War'. New York: Crown, 2008. William H. Chamberlain, America's Second Crusade. Chicago: 1950. Benjamin Colby, 'Twas a Famous Victory. New Rochelle: 1979. Matthew DeFraga, "March
1939: America's Guarantee to Britain," Ex Post Facto: Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University.
1998, Vol. VII. Hamilton Fish, Tragic Deception: FDR and America’s Involvement in World War II. Devin-Adair, 1983. Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers' War: Franklin Roosevelt and the War Within World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2001. J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World. New York: 1987. Vol. 3, esp. pp. 372-375, 411-419. Germany, Auswärtiges Amt [German Foreign Office]. Documents on the Events Preceding the Outbreak of the War. New York: 1940. Adolf Hitler. Reichstag
speech of Dec. 11, 1941. (Declaration of war against the USA) David L. Hoggan. The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed. IHR, 1989. Herbert C. Hoover, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath (George H. Nash, ed.). Stanford Univ., 2011. Friedrich Stieve. What the World Rejected: Hitler's Peace Offers 1933-1939 Viktor Suvorov (pseud.), The Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008 A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War. New York: 1983. John Toland, Adolf Hitler. Doubleday & Co., 1976. Mark Weber,
"Roosevelt's 'Secret Map' Speech," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985 (Vol. 6, No. 1), pp.
125-127. Mark Weber, "The 'Good War' Myth of World War Two." May 2008. Enter content here Enter content here Enter content here |
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