The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Roosevelt sent Hitler a telegram on April 15, 1939, accusing him of aggression. In response, possibly viewing this as an opportunity to avoid warfare in Central Europe, Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag on April 28 in which he said, “I took the leadership of a state which was faced by complete ruin thanks to the promises of the outside world and the evil of its democratic regime… Billions of German savings accumulated in gold or foreign exchange during many years of peace were extorted from us. We lost our colonies. In 1933, I had in my country 7,000,000 unemployed, a few million part-time workers, millions of impoverished peasants, trade destroyed, commerce ruined; in short, general chaos.149

  “Since then, Mr. Roosevelt, I have only been able to fulfill one single task. I cannot feel myself responsible for a world, for this world took no interest in the pitiful fate of my people. I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery. Thus, for the past six and one half years, I have lived day and night for the single task of awakening the powers of my people in face of our desertion by the rest of the world, and of developing these powers to the utmost and for utilizing them for the salvation of our community.”150 The speech was printed in a booklet, available in Germany, America, and elsewhere. Radio stations broadcast it, and people heard it over much of the world. German consulates distributed translations of the speech.151

  Hitler’s speech addressed several issues that FDR raised in his cable. As sincere as President Woodrow Wilson might have appeared, Hitler pointed out that most of his Fourteen Points were never implemented anywhere. World War I brought death and disaster and left behind only the burdensome policies and the retaliation of the Versailles Treaty, which did not appear to benefit anyone. Hitler elaborated on the many opportunities wasted or sabotaged. He recognized that Poland, even under a military dictatorship, had a right to the sea. He said, “That politics should be controlled by men who had not fought in the war was recognized for the first time as a misfortune. Hatred was unknown to the soldiers, but not to those elderly politicians who had carefully preserved their own precious lives from the horrors of war, and who now descended upon humanity as in the guise of insane spirits of revenge.”152

  Further, Hitler said, “Hatred, malice and unreason were the intellectual forebears of the Treaty of Versailles. Territories and states with a history going back a thousand years were arbitrarily broken up and dissolved. Men who had belonged together since time immemorial were torn asunder… No one knows this better than the German people. For the Peace Treaty… imposed burdens on the German people, which could not have been paid off in a hundred years, although it has been proved conclusively by American teachers of constitutional law, historians and professors of history that Germany was no more to blame for the outbreak of the war than any other nation. It is hard to imagine a clearer and more concise summary of the massive errors at the end of the war, setting the stage for the next one.”153

  In mid-March 1939, Baruch invited Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins to Hobcaw Barony, his huge plantation near the coast in South Carolina. Baruch, an elder statesman, was not the least bit concerned about political or business issues but was thinking about the gathering storm in Europe. On March 10, he had ridiculed Chamberlain’s remark that “the outlook in international affairs is tranquil.” Baruch and Churchill knew that war was on the horizon. Churchill told Baruch, “War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you will be in it. You will be running the show over there, but I will be on the sidelines over here.” He was not on the sidelines but was in the thick of things. Baruch and Hopkins discussed the imminent events in Europe, and Hopkins then privately conferred with FDR. The previous year, Hopkins had complained to FDR about the amount of misinformation coming out of Europe. Later, Baruch said, “I think it took Harry a long time to realize how greatly we were involved in Europe and Asia—but once he did realize it, he was all-out for total effort.”154 That total effort meant total war against Germany.

  According to Britain’s calculations, America should refrain from fighting for at least three years to allow Germany to war against and exhaust the Soviets without the difficult diversion of fighting on another front. In exchange for restraining the United States, the Germans agreed to recall their troops from and to abandon their interests in the Mediterranean basin. Britain then abandoned its ruse against the primary victim of its thirty-year plot for Anglo-American supremacy and began large-scale warfare against Germany, the country it had targeted for ultimate collapse. Germany’s enemies intended to crush the country and financially ruin two enormous military forces by the end of the war.155

  Germany had acquired trading partners and increased its commercial opportunities. The worldwide media claimed that Germany’s living standard increased due to its rearmament in preparation for another war. In fact, German industry, minus the banks, disproved the Marxist theory of inevitable class struggle and showed that by taking the right steps any country could prosper without exploitation by capitalism or bolshevism, both funded by the same international bankers. Germany prospered without the bankers’ press and their culturally and morally degenerating entertainment.

  Not only did Germans exist without this influence, but their culture flourished. If the rest of the world had discovered Germany’s secret, the international bankers, along with their enslaving usury, would have become extinct. To avoid fading into the dust and being exposed as liars, the bankers had to destroy Germany and all evidence of its accomplishments. They had to extinguish the new homes, the lush gardens, the new factories, hospitals, and transportation systems, and above all, Germany’s revitalized hope and faith. Total war would be the most effective way.156 Massive war deaths would prevent future efforts and make the Germans resent Hitler, the person who had invigorated their country.

  To preserve their empire, the British elite were quite willing to partner with the United States, whose government antagonists had usurped a few decades earlier. The elites in both countries belonged to the same imperialistic secret associations like the Pilgrims Society. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “The ends justify the means,” a maxim applied to government-authorized mass murder for plunder and profit.

  PREWAR MANEUVERS

  Birobidjan, a Jewish Sanctuary

  In 1939, David Bergelson, a Hasidic Jew born in a Ukrainian shtetl who became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, wrote the pamphlet The Jewish Autonomous Region. He said that the Jews had suffered tremendously under the czarist government but that with the establishment of the communist system, “every trace of national oppression was destroyed on the territory of the Soviet Union.” The government wiped out “every vestige of national and racial inequality,” “swept away all artificial barriers,” and helped a backward people to advance culturally and economically. He said this was especially true for the Jewish people, “the most oppressed and persecuted in the Russia of the Czars.” With the Soviet takeover, Jews participated in every “phase of economic life and activity,” Bergelson said.157

  Contrary to popular myth, top Soviet officials were not anti-Semitic. Vyacheslav Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was Jewish. Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s key men, was Jewish. Stalin told a Jewish reporter, “Anti-Semitism is cannibalism.” People accused of it received the death penalty in Russia.158 After the revolution, Russia became the world’s first country to criminalize anti-Semitism.159 On July 27, 1918, Lenin outlawed all anti-Semitism; the law, if broken, might result in execution.160 The reason for this law may have been to prevent skeptical citizens from openly associating the Jews with what had befallen the nation.

  Bergelson wrote, “In the twenty-one years of Soviet power the Jews, like every other people in the Soviet Union, have enjoyed every opportunity of developing all branches of their national culture, literature, theatrical art, science, etc., throughout the territory of the Soviet Union, as well as in their own national distr
icts in the Ukraine and Crimea.”161 Jews were disproportionately represented in supervising government agencies and in the government-controlled media. As in other communist countries, Jews reigned supreme in every aspect of perception management.

  The Soviet Union’s collectivization of agriculture intrigued many American agriculturists. The Soviet farm crisis of the 1920s gave them a chance to reevaluate agricultural production. The Soviets advertised in the American farm press, looking for farm experts who would be willing to reside in the Soviet Union for a year or more to help the country modernize its farming techniques and upgrade its antiquated technology. The postwar economic slump had taken a terrible toll on many farmers, and they were eager for the chance to work in the Soviet Union. Soviet officials visited America and placed orders for farm machinery with companies like Caterpillar Tractor and International Harvester. These companies provided individuals such as Edward J. Stirniman, an engineer from the University of California, and Leonard J. Fletcher, an engineer from Caterpillar, who agreed to go to the Soviet Union for two years to instruct the Soviets on how to assemble and use the machinery.162

  In 1923, to reconstruct the Jewish agricultural colonies destroyed by warfare, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) had eighty-six American tractors delivered to Ukraine. Inspired by the success of this project, Dr. Joseph Rosen, the director of the JDC’s Russian branch, and Soviet officials devised a program to facilitate the transition of hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken Jews into farmers. In 1924, the JDC and the Soviet government created the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation (Agro-Joint) to agrarianize the Jews.163

  In 1917, Julius Rosenwald established the Chicago-based Rosenwald Fund for “the well-being of mankind.” Rosenwald, along with philanthropists Henry H. Rogers, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, funded educational efforts for blacks in the South. Rosenwald was a part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company, a founder of the Museum of Science and Industry, and a founder of the NAACP.164 In 1926, he and other American Jews created the organization Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union (ICOR), possibly tied to the American Communist Party. Their goal was to raise funds for Jewish collectives in the Crimea, a peninsula of Ukraine on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Rosenwald gave more than $2 million to ICOR, whose main objective, long before Hitler came to power, was the creation of Birobidjan to “save the European Jews from the future Holocaust.”165 How did ICOR leaders know in 1926 about a holocaust to come? Were they reviving a story from World War I?

  Paul Scheffer, the Moscow correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, wrote about the bread riots and food shortages in Russia that began in 1928. By early 1930, he could envision a developing catastrophe. He wrote, “The days of famine are already sounding their approach. The present disorganization will not show its full effects till the coming harvest. It is still five months till that time, months in which hunger can only increase.” He added that Stalin’s “brutal policy of beating down all opposition everywhere shows that at that early date he had already foreseen the economic crisis that would result from the collapse of the New Economic Policy (NEP), and that he had discounted it.”166

  The Committee for the Settlement of Jewish Laborers on the Land, working on behalf of the government, dispensed free land, along with tax benefits, to Jews in Crimea and Ukraine. In 1928, the JDC appointed James N. Rosenberg as chairman of its newly created American Society for Jewish Farm Settlements in Russia to acquire financial sponsorship. Julius Rosenwald was the society’s principle backer. Despite the worldwide depression, Agro-Joint, with sufficient financing from the society, maintained its project in Soviet Union even when though the JDC had to terminate its endeavors in other countries.167

  On March 28, 1928, to accommodate the Jews in the Soviet Union, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union officially designated Birobidjan, in the Russian Far East, away from the area designated for imminent warfare, as a socialist republic for Jewish settlement. The government, with the first Five-Year Plan (1929-33), also conspired to collectivize, demoralize, and starve the independent middle-class farmers in Ukraine where the Jews were then living. The Soviets formalized this decision for the safe settlement of Jews on August 20, 1930. The Birobidjan site was a virtually vacant area of 22,369 square miles, much larger than Palestine. The town of Birobidjan, the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), borders Khabarovsk Krai and Amur Oblast of Russia and the Heilongjiang province of China.

  In 1929, Milburn L. Wilson spent six months instructing the Soviets on large-scale collectivized wheat farming. As many as four hundred thousand acres of wheat were planned at a time when the average American farmer still used animals to plow and to harvest and typically had a farm of 160 acres. Few American farmers had industrial-size or corporate-style farms. Agricultural machine manufacturers would sell more equipment to those with industrial-size farm. Other interests desired to get rid of farmers and replace them with machines.168

  John Q. McDonald taught Soviet farmers the proper use of machinery for each crop. J. Brownlee Davidson of Iowa State College went to Birobidjan to determine the area’s agricultural suitability for an autonomous Jewish state.169 Franklin S. Harris, an agricultural scientist with a doctorate from Cornell, served as president of Brigham Young University from 1921 to 1945 and was also president of Utah State University; he was president of the Utah State Agricultural College from 1945 to 1950. In 1929, as chairman of the American delegation evaluating the prospective territory for Jewish colonization, Harris led the ICOR Commission to the Soviet Union and was involved in the founding of Birobidjan. Kiefer B. Sauls, BYU’s purchasing agent, was Harris’s secretary for the trip.170

  The Soviet-based Organization for Jewish Colonization and an American-based Jewish Communist organization encouraged Jewish immigration. More than a thousand immigrants from outside of Russia immigrated to the area. George A. Koval, later a Soviet intelligence officer, born to Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa, moved with his parents to the JAR as an adult in 1932. He later returned to the United States where he infiltrated the Manhattan Project. According to the Russian government, he transmitted information about the project and descriptions of weapon production sites. He also sent the Soviets huge amounts of polonium, plutonium, and uranium. Following World War II, he went to Europe for a vacation and never returned to America.

  On February 27, 1934, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City, William W. Cohen, a banker/stockbroker serving as a congressman from New York, and others organized the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan, with an office on Madison Avenue. Speakers at that meeting included Lord Marley, Dudley Aman, who was a British MP and a leading spokesman for the Birobidjan project in Britain. He was the honorary president of the organization with Cohen as vice president. Jacob M. Budish, author of The Changing Structure of the Working Class: The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry, and People’s Capitalism; Stock Ownership and Production, and other books, played a key role behind the scenes in Birobidjan. He was a member of the Communist Party USA and an employee of Amtorg, the New York-based Soviet foreign trade office in the United States.

  On May 7, 1934, Josef Stalin officially created the autonomous Jewish state in Birobidjan as an alternative to Theodor Herzl’s vision of a socialist state in the British mandate of Palestine. The American Birobidjan Committee, with Albert Einstein as president, promoted Birobidjan as a Jewish homeland. A Jewish homeland in Palestine ran counter to Soviet views of nationalism. Rather, Stalin’s regime envisioned a new “Soviet Zion,” where Jews could create a proletarian Jewish culture, speak Yiddish instead of Hebrew, and develop new socialist literature and arts to replace religion as the principal feature of their identity.

  In February 1936, Chicago attorney Jacob Grossberg, a founder of the American Jewish Congress (AJC), and other leading Chicago Jews established a local chapter of Ambijan, the New York-based organization supporti
ng Birobidjan. While many Jews promoted and funded settlement in Palestine, Grossberg and other Ambijan leaders and the founders of ICOR, such as Julius Rosenwald, “believed that moving Jews from Europe to Birobidjan would protect them from persecution and future disaster.”171 Later, the Ambijan (Birobidjan) Committee for Emergency Aid to the Soviet Union pressured the JDC to assist in the care and rehabilitation of 3,500 Jewish war orphans whom the Soviets planned to evacuate from other parts of Russia to Birobidjan. The JDC declined to participate.172

  The American-based Agro-Joint, with access to millions of dollars, provided agricultural equipment, seed, and cattle to 150,000 Jewish settlers in 250 newly founded communities while skilled agronomists taught them modern farming techniques. Agro-Joint constructed a factory in Dzhankoy to maintain and repair the agricultural machinery. In addition to spending at least $16 million, Agro-Joint extended long-term credits. In the 1930s, as the Soviet system increased collectivization, unemployment decreased, reducing the number of Jewish farmers. Concurrently, Agro-Joint, with access to 370 funds, provided loans and credits to Jews in urban areas to help them develop industry, medical facilities, and technical schools. Agro-Joint also subsidized Jewish organizations devoted to cultural and religious activities. Agro-Joint discontinued its work in the Soviet Union in 1938 after authorities arrested some of its participants.173

  The JDC did not favor the Birobidjan proposition. However, with the advent of National Socialist power in Germany, locating new homes for Jewish refugees became a major issue. Therefore Agro-Joint, consisting of Paul Baerwald, M. B. Hexter, Joseph Hyman, M. A. Leavitt, Evelyn M. Morrissey, R. Pilpel, E. C. Ropes, Dr. Joseph A. Rosen, James N. Rosenberg, and M. C. Troper, reassessed resettlement projects in Birobidjan. In 1936, the Soviet government took full responsibility for the operation and management of all activities there and restricted all foreign assistance and supervision. During the Stalinist purges of 1936 to 1938, officials liquidated several Jewish leaders in Birobidjan.174