The Great Coup of 1916: 5 The Sacrilege Of Peace

As the Monday Night Cabal and Milner’s wider circle of friends and associates continued their manoeuvres through much of 1916, the issue which above all others fired their fears, was talk of peace. To the Secret Elite who had invested in the war, who had funded the war and who facilitated the war, this was a pivotal moment. Their aims and objectives were nowhere in sight. Indeed, cessation of the war would a greater disaster than the huge loss of life if it continued.

The bloodletting across the western front was suitably reducing the masses who might be induced to rise against the middle-class plutocracies, but even in 1916 there was still a sense of denial about the human cost in the purified air of the upper echelons. In early February, Sir Edward Grey told President Wilson’s emissary from America, Colonel House, that Britain had not been seriously hurt by the war, ‘since but few of her men had been killed and her territory had not been invaded.’ [1] Whether this was a stupid lie or callous disregard for the tragedies suffered in every part of the land we will never know, but in that same month (February, 1916) the Times carried column after column of the lost legions of dead and missing every day. [2]

The cost of peace did not bear contemplation. Think of the massive and unprecedented loans that could only be repaid if there were spoils of victory to plunder. Think of the manufacturers whose investments in new plant, new infrastructure and expanded capacity was predicated upon a long war. There were billions of pounds and dollars to be made from extortionate prices, but that only followed a period of sustained and costly investment. The profiteers had initially bought into procuring the loans and providing the munitions because they had been promised a long war. Such are the prerequisites of greed

Nor would a negotiated peace safeguard the future of the Empire. Indeed it would have had the opposite effect. If Great Britain and the Empire and all of the Allies could not defeat the German/Austro-Hungarian/Ottoman powers, then the message would reverberate across the world that the old order had passed.

Given the massive loss of life already inflicted on the troops from Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, the outcry against a feeble Mother country that had given up the struggle would grow to a clamour. Any notion of a commonwealth of nations would dissolve in cynical spasms of derision. [3] And a negotiated peace would leave Germany free to continue her plans of expansion into the Near and Far East. The real reasons for war, the elimination go Germany as a rival on the world stage, would not be addressed at all. Peace would be a calamity for the Elite under such circumstances. To talk of it was sacrilege.

The flying of ‘Peace Kites’, as Maurice Hankey described Colonel Houses’s approaches, brought one benefit for Milner’s intriguers. Those members of Asquith’s coalition who were attracted to a negotiated peace exposed their lack of commitment to the ultimate goal. Reginald McKenna, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, felt that Britain would gain a ‘better peace now [January 1916] than later, when Germany is wholly on the defensive.’ [4] The Secret Elite were watching and listening. Literally.

As Asquith’s personal confidante and permanent secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence,[5] Maurice Hankey was privy to many confidences but even he was surprised to learn that the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Blinker Hall, [6] had in his possession American diplomatic codes and was monitoring the telegrams sent from Colonel House to President Wilson. What the Americans claimed was that they would broker ‘a reasonable peace’ [7] and call a conference. If Germany refused to attend, the USA would probably enter the war on the side of the Allies. [8] Note that the promise was definitely not absolute.

In late January, Hankey went to Hall at the Admiralty on another pretext [9] and discovered to his horror that Colonel House’s visit was a ‘peace stunt’. 1916 was, after all, an election year, and President Wilson had to appear to be a serious peace-broker. It was a sham. Worse still, Sir Edward Grey had given the Americans an assurance that he would trade Britain’s blockade, euphemistically called the ‘freedom of the seas’, against an end to German militarism. Hall claimed that this priceless secret information had not been shared with Arthur Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, which begs the question, with whom was it shared? The Foreign Secretary had made promises behind the backs of his cabinet colleagues, and we are expected to believe that Captain Hall told no-one? Grey was clearly mentally exhausted. Fearful that he might miss an opportunity to ‘get a decent peace’, if the war ‘went wrong’ Sir Edward Grey brought the American proposals before the War Committee in March 1916. They ignored it. When the Americans again pressed for a decision on the President’s offer to intervene in May 1916, the Cabinet was split. Asquith, Grey, McKenna and Balfour were apparently in favour; Lloyd George and the conservative leader Bonar Law, were against.

Alarm bells sounded. The Army Council, a body whose admiration for Alfred Milner could hardly have been stronger, threatened to resign if the War Council insisted on discussing ‘the peace question’, [10] but the threat had not passed.

Asquith was prepared to accept that ‘the time has come where it was very desirable’ to formulate clear ideas on proposals for peace and at the end of August suggested that individual members of his cabinet put their ideas on paper for circulation and discussion.[11] In September E. S. Montagu, then Minister for Munitions, advised that it was not safe to ignore the possibility of a sudden peace since no-one was more likely to ‘get out’ when the fight was up, than the Germans. [12] He also asked what an unqualified victory might mean. The General Staff brought forward their own Memorandum [13] which erroneously claimed that the French Prime Minister, Briand, would likely have ‘very decided views worked out, under his direction, by very clever people who swerve him and who do not appear on the surface of political life.’ They also offered their opinion on how an armistice might be managed to Britain’s advantage.

Foreign Office papers which were shared with the Cabinet in October 1916, showed that Germany was prepared to offer peace to Belgium irrespective of Britain’s position. Herbert Hoover who was running the scandalous Belgian Relief programme, [14] warned the Foreign Office that the German government intended to negotiate with the Belgian government in exile. He alleged that the Germans would evacuate the country, guarantee complete economic and political liberty and pay an indemnity for reconstruction purposes. Furthermore, in order to end the conflict with France, they were prepared to cede the whole of the province of Lorraine under the condition that the French would promise to supply five million tons of iron ore each year to Germany. Their ‘terms’ also included independence for Poland and an unspecified ‘arrangement’ in the Balkans. [15]

(A knowledgeable observer will have noted that in combining the Belgian Relief agency with the supplies of iron and steel from Briey and Longwy, two of the biggest scandals of the First World War were rolled together as a lure to peace.) [16] Hoover had no truck with such suggestions. When he next went to Brussels, the German-American member of the Belgian Comite Nationale, Danny Heinemann, approached him to try to find out what the British terms for peace might be. Hoover claimed that ‘he was not in the peace business’. He most certainly was not. He was in the business of profiteering from war. [17]

The more circumspect Lord Lansdowne, a member of Asquith’s coalition cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, asked a telling question on 13 November, 1916: ‘… what is our chance of winning [the war] in such a manner, and within such limits of time, as will enable us to beat our enemy to the ground and impose upon him the kind of terms we so freely discuss?’ [We might well read this as a ‘get-real’ moment, but when he continued by regretting that the Allied cause remained ‘partly vindictive and partly selfish’ to the extent that any attempt to get out of the impasse of a stalemate was viewed in negative terms, Lansdowne’s immediate future in politics was decidedly limited. [18]

Kitchener’s timely and suspicious death in June 1916 brought to an end any chance of his interference in what he looked forward to as a just peace, [19] but for the Secret Elite, their immediate problem focussed on politicians who clearly lacked the commitment to crush Germany. Asquith had run his course. His prevarications and capacity to ‘wait and see’ had no place at a time when the Secret Elite needed decisive firmness to see it through. Although Asquith went to considerable lengths in Parliament in October 1916 to shun any notion of a settlement, it was too late. His pain was heartfelt [20] when he declared:

‘The strain which the War imposes on ourselves and our Allies, the hardships which we freely admit it involves on some of those who are not directly concerned in the struggle, the upheaval of trade, the devastation of territory, the loss of irreplaceable lives—this long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by deathless examples of heroism and chivalry, cannot be allowed to end in some patched-up, precarious, dishonouring compromise, masquerading under the name of Peace.’ [21]

Less than two months later the men who had even considered defining peace had gone from government: Asquith, Grey, Lansdowne, Montagu and McKenna were disposed of. They had committed sacrilege. Their unforgivable sin was the contemplation of peace. There would be no peace.

[1] Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 1915-1917, p.175.
[2] By this time there were daily examples of the horrendous waste of life on the Western Front. one example amongst hundreds can be found in The Times 1 February, 1916, p.10.
[3] Alfred Milner and his associates in the Round Table group in Britain had from 1905 onwards worked tirelessly to promote the Empire and indeed prepare the Empire of r ‘the coming war’. See Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the first World War, pp. 153-160.
[4] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Volume 1, 1877-1918, p. 245.
[5] This secretive committee was originally formed in 1902 to advise the prime minister on matters of military and naval strategy. Maurice Hankey had been Assistant Secretary since 1908 and was the immensely authoritative Secretary from 1912 onwards.
[6] The nerve centre of British intelligence was in Room 40 at the Admiralty where the highly secretive Captain (later Rear- Admiral) William ‘Blinker’ Hall monitored radio and telegraphic messages from Germany and German ships. Britain had had possession of all German codes from the first months of the war. See Blog; Lusitania 1: The Tale of there Secret Miracles, 28 April 2015.
[7] House and Seymour, The Intimate Papers, p. 135.
[8] Ibid., p. 170.
[9] Allegedly, Hankey visited Hall on 27 January 1916 to discuss a ploy to put false German banknotes into circulation and the conversation just happened to wander into Mandell House’s visit to Sir Edward Grey. So they would have us believe. Roskill, Hankey, p. 247.
[10] CAB 42/14/12.
[11] CAB 42/18/ 8.
[12] CAB 42/18/ 7.
[13] CAB 42/18/10.
[14] See Blog; Commission For Relief in Belgium 13: As If It Had Never Happened. posted on 25 November 2015.
[15] FO 899 Cabinet Memoranda 1905-1918, Memorandum by Lord Eustace Percy, 26 September 1916.
[16] See our four Blogs on Briey from 12 November 2014 onwards.
[17] See Blog; Commission For Relief in Belgium 12: Hoover, Servant Not Master, posted on 18 November 2015.
[18] Harold Kurtz, The Lansdowne Letter, History Today, Volume 18 issue 2 February 1968.
[19] Randolph S Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, p. 210.
[20] Asquith had lost his son Raymond, on 15 September 1916, at the Somme. It was a crushing personal blow.
[21] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11 October 1916, vol 86 cc95-161.

The Great Coup of 1916: 1 Democracy: Roots of Poison

The Secret Elite scorn democracy. They always have. The following series of blogs trace the activities through which they eventually replaced a democratically elected government with one in which they themselves took complete control of the British  government from 1916. 

In the first years of the twentieth century, their most important influence, Alfred Milner, the passionate promoter of British Imperialism, [1] and favoured heir of Cecil Rhodes’s ideals, [2] held an absolute contempt for the British Parliamentary system [3] which he condemned as an ‘absurd waste of power’. [4] His acolyte, Philip Kerr, later lord Lothian, described his mentor’s attitude to democratic government thus:

‘In every fibre of his being he loathed the slipshod compromises, the optimistic “slogans”, the vote-catching half-truths with which democracy seemed to compromise the majestic governing art …’ [5]

Before he returned to Britain in 1905, Milner, a copious letter-writer, wrote to his future wife, then Lady Violet Cecil, that the system was hopeless. With a prescience which might make the reader today shudder, he predicted that, ‘Perhaps the great charlatan – political scallywag, buffoon, liar…and in other respects popular favourite – may someday arise, who is nevertheless a statesman…and who, having gained power by popular art, may use it for the nations ends. It is an off chance…’ [6]

(Ponder these prophetic words. Though expressed in a different era, you might be forgiven for thinking that Milner’s description fitted Tony Blair or David Lloyd George. Both were loyal servants of the Secret Elite in their day, posed as a socialist, or Liberal in Lloyd George’s case, misrepresented the reasons for promoting war, popular when first in office, considered by some to be statesmen – but not buffoons or political scallywags. No. Such words are utterly inadequate to catch their devious characters.)

Milner never accepted democratic government. He was convinced that a dedicated, hand-picked and trained elite was better-equipped to run Britain’s affairs. [7] He was an unreformed disciple of the Oxford philosopher, John Ruskin, who advocated that the control of the state should be restricted to a small ruling elite. Social order was to be built on the authority of superiors who would impose on their inferiors an absolute unquestioning obedience. [8]

With that mind-set and a determination to manipulate the political system, the highest echelons inside Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government had been successfully infiltrated before he became prime minister in 1908. [9] Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary from 1905-16), Richard Haldane (War Minister from 1906-10) and Asquith himself, all Secret Elite place-men, formed the triumvirate which steadfastly steered the British Empire into a predetermined war to crush Germany in 1914. [10] In this they were abetted by Winston Churchill and eventually David Lloyd George. [11] It would be ridiculous to imply that five mediocre British politicians were solely responsible for bringing about the world war.

They did not represent democracy in any shape or form. These men refused to be answerable to parliament or the people. They were, like many who have held top political positions in Britain over the century since, mere instruments of the power behind the scenes – the all-powerful, wealthy secret cabal whom we call the Secret Elite. This sham democracy was aided and abetted by the awesome power of the popular press, much of which was owned and controlled by the same men who wielded real power.

Few knew that a powerful group of newspaper editors and owners were closely associated with Milner and the Secret Elite. His personal network of journalists included George Buckle and later Geoffrey Dawson at the Times, Edmund Garrett at the Westminster Gazette, and ET Cook at the Daily News and Daily Chronicle. All were members of the Secret Elite. [12] Their greatest ally was Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, whom the Secret Elite approved as owner of the Times in 1908 after he had been closely vetted on their behalf by Lord Esher. [13] As owner of the Daily Mail (1896) the Daily Mirror (1903) the Observer (1905) and the Sunday Times, amongst other publications, Northcliffe’s role in the immediate pre-war years was to stir the populace against Germany. His biographers have translated this into an apparently less threatening response to the calls of Lord Milner and Lord Roberts [14] to ‘champion the cause of national defence on land, at sea and in the air.’ [15] He was the scaremonger chosen to undermine public confidence by constantly accusing Germany and the Kaiser of ill-intentions towards Britain and her Empire.

Northcliffe unleashed a torrent of fear deliberately aimed to prepare the nation for war against Germany. The Daily Mail carried concocted half-truths and downright lies to unnerve a people who had previously considered Germany no more than a friendly rival. The unrelenting propaganda spun its rabid negativity into the fabric of the nation in similar vein to the years of fear-inducing hostile headlines which led the British working classes to believe that the Brexit option in 2016 would stop the ill-perceived ‘menace’ of immigration. Falsehood became truth; reason was poisoned. Ludicrous stories filled the pages of the popular press. Little changes. [16]

Spy mania added to the sense of paranoia so cleverly promoted by Northcliffe’s stables. Ludicrous claims were made about German intentions and by default, German residents in Britain. Typical of unfounded scaremongering was Lord Roberts’s calculation that there were ‘80,000 Germans in the United Kingdom, almost all of them trained soldiers. They work many of the hotels at some of the chief railway stations, and if a German force once got into this country it would have the advantage of help and reinforcement such as no other army on foreign soil has ever before enjoyed’. [17] It was of course, nonsense, but how often has the true charlatan abused fear of immigrants to gather public support?

Milner and his associates also had backing from finance and business. He had access to Rhodes’s money and the fortunes of his South African backers, Alfred Beit and Abe Bailey. [18] Having earned the gratitude of the Rothschild family by instigating war against the Boers in order to seize their gold mines, his standing with the armaments and shipbuilding moguls could not have been higher. As increasing numbers of financiers from both sides of the Atlantic joined in associated exclusive clubs like the Pilgrims of the United States and the Pilgrims of Great Britain, [19] Milner’s influence, and consequent power, spread.

As has been fully detailed in both our Hidden History, the Secret Origins of the First World War and over several blogs, [20] this combination of political power, media exploitation and financial backing bounced the British Empire into war with Germany in August 1914 in order to create the Anglo-American supremacy in a new world order.

Consider the awful failing of assumed democracy. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August on the basis of a package of outrageous lies, vile deception and gross exaggeration just as she did in Iraq almost a century later. Despite the presumed responsibility of government to serve the needs of its citizens and stand accountable for its actions, every check which might have stopped the war was circumvented or ignored. War with Germany was visited upon the British people and the British Empire without consent. The people were not consulted. Ironically, the Liberal government which had been elected in 1906 won a landslide victory based on ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’. [21] Further elections in 1910 returned a government whose foreign policy had not changed; officially.

Parliament was not consulted about a declaration of war in 1914, despite several reassurances from Sir Edward Grey that it would be. Asquith did not move for a vote in cabinet because he knew that the cabinet was weighed against any decision to go to war. While the Secret Elite marshalled its forces in the press, the Church of England and the hallowed halls of Oxford, opponents were caught flat-footed, disbarred from criticism as the newspapers joined ranks to exclude their views. In Parliament the substantial anti-war lobby was practically silenced when an open debate was denied them by prime minister Asquith himself. [22] Those who thought that they could turn to Lloyd George to stand firm against the war and lead a popular opposition to it were sorely disabused of the notion. Like many since, he lead the dissenters into a cul-de-sac and left them there. The Welsh firebrand welched.

Britain was railroaded into war by a government which was neither capable of running it nor elected to do so. The belief that her naval and economic power was sufficient to defeat the Germans was one of the fundamental premises which underpinned the widely held assumption in Britain that it would be ‘business as usual’. [23] Amongst a range of disinformation put about to assuage a gullible public was that the navy would protect Britain from invasion, strangle the German economy and win a low-cost war, safe behind a decade of naval investment. There was no invasion. Never at any stage in the proceedings did Germany plan for an invasion. A much vaunted blockade [24] was secretly reduced to tokenism. It would not be ‘business as usual’. Be of no doubt, and we have repeatedly made this point in our blogs, the war could have been over by the Spring/Summer of 1915 had that been the prime objective. It was not due to incompetence, though the government merited that tag, or miscalculation, that the war was outwardly mismanaged, but by very carefully executed strategies to supply the enemy and prolong the war. [25]

In fact, the Secret Elite’s men in government did a very capable job in prolonging the war. Asquith’s dithering indecision, his failure to change the nature of decision-making in cabinet proved to be a stranglehold on progress. Lloyd George acted under the supervision of the banking and financial sectors on both sides of the Atlantic and used their backing to obtain loans and munitions through the exclusive J P Morgan / Rothschild portal. [26] Sir Edward Grey’s men in the Foreign Office bent double to accommodate the American interests and completely nullify the brave and tireless efforts of the navy to run an effective blockade. They also rubber-stamped the secretive and illusionary ‘Belgian Relief’ programme which was run by Herbert Hoover to supply Germany with much needed food. [27] Churchill ran amok like a headless chicken frequently abandoning his duties at the Admiralty in favour of self-serving publicity.

Victory in the field was not the objective unless it was predicated upon the complete destruction of Germany as an economic rival, and that would take time and absolute commitment. Two very different approaches were underway. Most of the liberal cabinet set out on a loosely sketched journey believing that a short war would be won at sea, and a small army would suffice for the continental struggle; the Secret Elite’s men embarked on a long debilitating war which protected their interests, guaranteed great profits, and was backed by vast resources from the United States.

Even although the Liberal majority in Asquith’s cabinet were reluctant to abandon their laissez-faire principles, Lloyd George, recognised that control of the railway network and guarantees for the shipping insurance business were absolutely necessary to the survival of social order. [28] In other words, government in times of modern warfare required direct intervention. Tellingly, Lloyd George’s first actions were to protect the banks, the money markets and the business of war. He took credit for saving the city after embracing advice from Nathaniel Rothschild and ‘a section of the business and financial world’. [29] Of course he did. He was their man.

Liberal ideology, long mocked by Milner and his followers, proved ineffectual. Do not include Asquith, Grey and Lloyd George as ‘ liberals’. The first two had long sold their souls to the imperialist race patriots; Lloyd George had simply sold his soul. They were not proponents of a political theory or party, but obedient servants of an apolitical, (in the Party sense) anti-democratic, power-obsessed oligarchy. These political place-men of the Secret Elite (then as now) were labeled liberal for public consumption. In reality they were not what the people, and even fellow members of their own party, imagined.

Prolonging the war was of course very profitable, but winning the war was everything. By 1915, the Secret Elite realised that Asquith’s approach to war-management was failing. He and his ministers were no longer dealing with the political issues for which they had been elected and could not be trusted with the unequivocal drive to crush Germany. The Secret Elite required a government focussed on the destruction of Germany and these men were not up to it.

Hundreds of thousands of young men had already been killed. Prolonging the war required men with cold, hard hearts devoid of compassion, committed to the Secret Elite’s cause. How had Milner expressed the steel required to see war through to the ultimate destruction of the enemy? His chilling advice to Richard Haldane during the Boer War was to ‘disregard the screamers’. [30] It takes a special kind of ‘strength’ to ignore humanitarian issues, ignore the utter chaos caused by the sacrifice of so many and yet be willing to sacrifice many more. Milner had such cold steel in his core.

To the Secret Elite, Milner’s deep-rooted fears were completely vindicated. Democratic liberalism, watered down as it had been since the death of Campbell-Bannerman, [31] denied Britain a co-ordinated agency to direct the war effort. In Asquith’s cabinet, only Lloyd George, increasingly the sole candidate for Secret Elite support, grasped the need to shake up the traditional approach to government. Even a pretence of democracy would not deliver ultimate victory. It was poisoning their cause.

But how could they remove the prime minister who had done their bidding?

[1] Viscount Alfred Milner was from 1902-1925 leader of the Secret Society funded and promoted originally by Cecil Rhodes. Although he spurned elected position and championed preparations for war against Germany, once the war was underway , he and his associates wanted control of the government in wartime to control the post-war settlement was they envisaged it. See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp 4-14 and p.140.
[2] He envisaged his great purpose in life to expand the English-speaking sphere of influence until it was so powerful that no nation could challenge it. see Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 18.
[3] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden history, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 55.
[4] Thomas Packenham, The Boer War, p. 551.
[5] The Nation & Athenaeum, 23 May 1925.
[6] Milner to Lady Cecil as quoted in A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 46.
[7] Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[8] J A Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer, p. 187.
[9] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 101-2.
[11] Winston Churchill, World Crisis Vol 1, pp. 38-9.
[12] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 311-2.
[13] Lord Reginald Esher was one of the original members of Rhodes’s Secret Society. He was the confidante of Kings Edward VII and George V. His full role in vetting and approving Northcliffe’s acquisition of The Times see, J Lee Thompson, Northcliffe, Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922, pp. 151-3.
[14] Lord Fredrick Roberts had formerly been Commander-in-Chief of The Forces before his retiral. A close associate ofViscount Milner, with whom he shared many a platform, he avidly supported compulsory conscription to the armed forces.
[15] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 159.
[16] The worst of his kind was William Le Queux, a Walter Mitty character, his ridiculous anti-German propaganda was supported by Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. see Christopher Andrews, Secret Service, pp. 37-48.
[17] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 23 November 1908 vol 196, cc1691.
[18] Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[19] The Pilgrims Society was the embodiment of the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain. [Its centennial history was written by Anne Pimlott Baker.] Exclusive to all but the anglo-saxon elite on both sides of the Atlantic, the Pilgrims of the United States included the most pro- British and influential bankers and financiers.
[20] In particular see Blog of 17 June 2014, Secret Elite 3 : Building the Network.
[21] The great Liberal philosophy which was trumpeted by their parliamentary leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who fought and won the landslide Liberal victory of 1906.
[22] Hansard, House of Commons Debate 03 August 1914 vol 65 cc1831-2.
[23] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p.10.
[24] see Blogs on the sham of blockade, posted from 10 December 2014 to February 2015. Also E Keble Chatterton, The Big Blockade.
[25] Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling scandal of the First World War was Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium which ensured that war was prolonged by providing supplies, especially foodstuffs, to Germany from 1914-1917.
[26] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 90.
[27] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Ocuppee, p. 99 and p. 214.
[28] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p. 7.
[29] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 70.
[30] J Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 483.
[31] Henry Campbell-Bannerman died in 10 Downing Street on 22 April 1908 from a heart attack.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 13: As If It Had Never Happened

Herbert Hoover’s reputation could not have survived the war years without protection from his Secret Elite masters. Once he had been presented as the humanitarian face of the so-called relief programme, and his status transformed from unscrupulous and crooked mining-engineer to quasi-diplomat, he had access to the inner chambers of the American, British and German governments. Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) records show that  between 1914-1916 he had discussions with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey [1], Prime Minister Henry Asquith [2] and Chancellor Lloyd George, [3] yet interestingly they blank him entirely from their official memoirs. Why? US President Woodrow Wilson and various Secretaries of State discussed policy with Hoover, as did German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman [4] and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. [5] The Kings of Spain and Belgium and countless senior diplomats across Europe knew Hoover personally, yet their reticence on the subject of Belgian Relief speaks volumes

Critics were silenced, rebutted or otherwise dissuaded in order to protect his  reputation as the ‘great humanitarian’. The greater Hoover’s success at the CRB in prolonging the war, the stronger the Secret Elite’s cordon of protection was drawn around him. Almost everyone who spoke out or questioned him was crushed or discredited, beaten into submission or forced to retract their claims in the face of violent threats and legal retribution. It was as if his past history had never happened. Officially.

Convinced that Belgian Relief was  damaging the British war effort as early as April 1915, the Admiralty in London, asked naval intelligence to investigate Hoover’s background. Allegations were made that he was ‘untrustworthy, had sinister business connections with German mining corporations’, and that ‘his foodstuffs had passed into German hands.’ [6] His activities were subjected to a formal investigation headed by Sir Sidney Rowlatt who duly whitewashed his findings and gave his formal stamp of approval to the Foreign Office. Loyal member of the British establishment, Rowlatt was later responsible for the repressive Rowlatt Act in India which led to serious unrest in the Punjab and the shocking Amritsar Massacre in 1919. [7]

Hoover steadfastly lied about his business connections. Initially, he claimed to have resigned from his mining company directorships because the relief programme left him no time for private business. [8] He is famously quoted as saying, ‘let the fortune go to hell’, [9] yet records from Skinner’s Mining Manual show that he served on thirteen boards of directors in 1914 and on sixteen in 1915. By 1916 he not only remained on thirteen boards but was chairman of one and joint manager of both the Burma Corporation and Zinc Corporation. [10] His companies returned immense dividends during the war largely through the unprecedented increase in demand for metals and munitions. When rumours of his impropriety in the dealings of the Zinc Corporation surfaced in 1916, law suits followed. He approached the Foreign Office to directly intervene on his behalf, on the grounds that his work with the CRB was too important to the war effort. At his behest, the Ambassadors from Belgium and France wrote to the Foreign Office to stress Hoover’s vital role in Belgian Relief. The Foreign Office advised Hoover’s solicitor that, if ‘The Court’ sought their opinion about the importance of his work, they would willingly reply. The British establishment knew how to protect its assets.

In legal proceedings taken against his Burma Corporation, he attempted to pervert the course of justice by claiming to have previously resigned from the company. His ‘resignation’ was a sham, a temporary convenience to avoid court proceedings. Back on the Board of the Burma Corporation, Hoover brokered a deal in December 1917 with the head of the CRB office in New York and Ernest Oppenheimer to develop gold mines in the Rand. He organised the finance chiefly through the CRB’s bankers, J P Morgan & Company and Morgan’s Guaranty Trust Company of New York. Thus the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa was born, a mining giant in its field from day one. [11]

Consider these connections. Hoover used the CRB banking agencies [12] to  broker a deal that rewarded him with a huge shareholding (plus options) which reaped him yet another fortune. Who was greasing whose palm?  Hoover’s access to ‘insider-knowledge’ brought him an enormous stroke of ‘good fortune’. Like Lord Rothschild some time before, he liquidated almost all of his direct Russian holdings in late 1916, just in time to avoid the consequent take-overs obligated by the Russian Revolution. Every one of his former Russian enterprises was confiscated. [13], and other unfortunates had to bear the consequent loss. Lies and evasion, deceit and malpractice were laced into Hoover’s mentality. Yet his illegal business practices were successfully covered up by his Secret Elite minders.

At the end of the war Herbert Hoover was given one final task in Europe by the Secret Elite. Their role in causing the war and supplying the German army during the conflict had to be kept buried. Any evidence of CRB impropriety, of its complicity with the German government of occupation in Belgium and of its role in prolonging the war would have been ruinous. Hoover faced a massive undertaking. With registered offices in New York, London, Brussels, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Paris, Lille and Buenos Aires, [14] official documentation for purchasing agents, shipping agents, insurance brokers, bankers and auditors, statisticians and clothing buyers, the CRB had left in its wake a multiple tonnage of bank transactions, ledger entries, accounts, deposits and records of international exchange. The list was potentially endless, at least, theoretically, because no independent records ever saw the light of day. They were systematically taken after the war by Hoover’s agents and shipped to the west coat of America. Ponder long and hard on this fact; the evidence was physically removed from its point of origin. It was to be as if the illegal importations to Germany and the malpractices of Belgian bankers and speculators had never happened.

We do not know what has since been destroyed or what languishes in the darker recesses of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, but a very determined and successful attempt was made to rewrite history while presenting Hoover as a great saviour of humanity. Our research proves that, in reality, he was a ruthless opportunist – a liar and cheat who browbeat, bad-mouthed and took advantage of the weak while greatly increasing his personal fortune throughout the war. And, had there been no CRB to supply Germany, the war would have ended as early as the Spring of 1915. Millions died while he and other millionaires thrived.

Bad as Hoover’s manipulation and removal of the CRB’s records was, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of the historical record from all across Europe. In 1919 he was given this important task as the Secret Elite set about removing documentary evidence pertaining to the origins of the war. Once more he had to be re-invented. The ‘great humanitarian’ became a ‘lover of books and of history’ who wished to collect manuscripts and reports relating to the causes of the war because they would otherwise ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. [15] Hoover certainly made sure that anything incriminating ‘disappeared’.

On the basis that his involvement was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, went to Paris in April 1919 to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence, official and unofficial, and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Adams resolved to keep a diary, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was a too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [16] The task had to be undertaken immediately. Speed was of the essence. Adams was in Paris by 11 June with no plan of action, other than follow Hoover’s instructions that all the documentation was sent to Stanford University in California. It was about as distant a destination from the European theatre as could be imagined.

Nothing was too unimportant. Decisions about relevance would be left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [17] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [18] Of course it was. Who else knew where all the important evidence was buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [19] was the one man who knew exactly what had to be buried deep for all time.

Why have historians and investigative journalists failed to unmask this charade? Hoover and Francqui orchestrated the removal of documents that enabled the myth of Belgian Relief to flourish while masking its sinister role.

Hoover had many powerful friends. He persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest.  They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [20] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [21] Hoover allegedly donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. It would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not been possible for us to discover from what source the remaining nine-hundred men were paid.

Hoover’s backers claimed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’. According to Ephraim Adams, Hoover himself estimated that the process of ‘collecting’ would go on for twenty-five years [22] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace ’. [23] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. They were stealing history.

Hoover was the US Secretary of State for Commerce from 1921 and as a fitting reward for all of his sterling efforts on behalf of the Secret Elite, he became their chosen candidate in the US presidential election of 1928. His critics in America were systematically harassed or squashed. Books that exposed his malpractices were removed from shelves and whole editions pulped. Hoover had long employed sophisticated public relations to curry favour with the media. Pliant biographers and party hacks were supplemented by use of the FBI to perform background checks on would-be unsolicited authors. [24]

A campaign of determined denigration was launched against the crusading journalist Walter Liggett, whose well researched book, The Rise of Herbert Hoover stands testament to Hoover as a criminal businessman and opportunist, who strove to manipulate and remove the records of his past wrong-doing. [25] Liggett, a fearless reporter and newspaper editor who represented the best of American investigative journalism, was later gunned down for exposing syndicated crime. [26]

Tracy Kittredge, a loyal insider who worked with the CRB in Belgium, wrote a very comprehensive  history of the Commission for Relief in Belgium – now entitled the Primary Source Edition – in 1919. [27] Hoover didn’t like its content, so it remained unpublished. In 1942 he claimed that Kittredge’s work  was deemed ‘inaccurate and unreliable’ and was not be shown to anyone without clarification. [28] Hoover did not explain what the inaccuracies were, but we suspect that Kittredge’s criticism of Francqui and the bad blood between both the CRB and the CNSA was the cause. He ordered an associate to collect and destroy all copies of the unpublished work which had progressed as far as a bound proof. Fortunately for researchers, a few survived the cull. [29] Even when faced with official records from those who were there, the Secret Elite endorsed the party line; nothing irregular had ever happened. Any view to the contrary had to be suppressed.

The biography which most disturbed Hoover was John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags. [30] It was a hugely controversial expose which resulted in an outpouring of indignation from the Hoover lobby who damned the book as a complete fabrication. Shortly after its launch, Hoover’s legal team reported that Hamill had signed a one hundred and eighty-four page repudiation, admitting ‘false conclusions’. Interestingly Hamill refused in court to admit that his work was entirely false and only went as far as to say that ‘my interpretations were in error in some instances.’ [31] It has since been suggested that Hoover’s own agent, George Barr Baker, wrote the repudiation using strong-arm tactics and thuggery. That is the same George Barr Baker who penned articles published in the New York Times about starving Belgian children, and visited the Pope as the CRB envoy. [32]

Hamill’s conclusion chimes absolutely with ours: ‘The whole scheme of Belgian Relief was planned for the purpose of securing the enormous food supplies of Belgium for Germany. The Belgian Relief …. was the cause of the prolongation of the dreadful war, with all its horrors and miseries, and the loss of millions of lives, including our more than 126,000 brave American boys (not to mention the wounded and crippled).’ [33] It was, and the extent to which the Anglo-American establishment went to cover all traces of its complicity, remains awesome.

And who today has heard of the Commission for Relief in Belgium? Where does it sit in the role of honour for World War 1? No-where. It has been systematically buried; as if it never happened at all. But there was one major political consequence.

On 4 March 1929 the great Belgian Relief ‘humanitarian’ was sworn is as President of the United States of America.

[1] George I Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 18, p. 19.
[2] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, pp. 69-70.
[3] George I Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 147 , p. 266.
[4] Ibid., Document 134, pp. 241-2.
[5] Ibid., Document 140, pp. 252-255.
[6] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 176.
[7] For further information on the Massacre at Amritsar in 1919, known also as the Jallianvala Bagh Massacre, see; http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/jbagh.html
[8] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 270.
[9] Walter Liggett, The Rise of Herbert Hoover, p. 209.
[10] Ibid., pp. 210-211.
[11] http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Anglo_American_Corp._of_South_Africa_Limited.aspx
[12] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921 p. 86
http://libcudl.colorado.edu/wwi/pdf/i71185215.pdf
[13] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 274.
[14] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921.
[15] Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[16] Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360
[17] Ibid.
[18] Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36.
[19] After 1918, the Societe Generale continued its expansion, founding Banque Générale du Luxembourg. Banque Belge pour L’Etranger also grew, opening new branches in New York, Istanbul, and Hong Kong, among other cities. In addition, SG had banking interests in Portugal, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe. The year before its 100th anniversary, in 1922, the bank’s books showed credits amounting to BFr 4.1 billion and debits of BFr 2.1 billion. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/
[20] WhittakerChambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D
[21] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[22] Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5.
[23] Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/ publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[24] Roseanne Sizer, Herbert Hoover and the Smear Books, 1930-32, State Historical Society of Iowa, Vol. 47, (Speing 1984) no. 4, p. 347.
[25] Walter Liggett’s The Rise of Herbert Hoover was published in 1932 by the H W Fly company. it can be read on; https://archive.org/details/riseofherberthoo011467mbp
[26] Stopping The Presses, the Murder of Walter Liggett by Martha Liggett Woodbury, his daughter, is an excellent expose of the corruption and sleeze in the USA in the 1920s and 30s and details the victimisation and persecution of a respected journalist who unmasked, amongst other crooks, Herbert Clark Hoover.
[27] Tracy Barrett Kittredge was a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1914-1917. The Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives includes his correspondence, reports, writing and newspaper clippings, but makes no mention of the book which Hoover ordered to be pulped. See Charles G Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution, p. 126.
[28] G Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, pp. 449-50.
[29] A copy held in the Library of the Free University of Brussels contains a note to the reader in French. It states that ‘the work is both a rare book and a document of real historical interest’. First printed in London in 1920 under the auspices of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, the note states that Mr Kittrege’s writings included some criticism of ‘certain Belgian persons’ so it was decided, in the interest of good Belgian-American, ‘metre au pilon’ literally, to pound it to dust. The note is dated July, 1964.
[30] John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover under Two Flags, was published by W. Faro in 1931.
[31] New York Times, 5 January, 1933.
[32] New York Times, 21 December, 1916.
[33] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 306.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 12: Hoover, Servant Not Master

One of the essential skills that the shrewd investor requires is the ability to recognise the moment to sell and move on. The really successful investor has an additional edge; insider information. Herbert Hoover was blessed with well concealed contacts who advised and directed his career paths so that he was guided into safe waters from the storm that would surely follow the closure of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Towards the end of 1916 Hoover wanted out. For nearly two and a half years he had fronted the international funding for the relief programme and had accrued good impressions upon which he intended to build.

Herbert Hoover could rightly claim to number among his friends, Sir Edward Grey and his acolytes in the British Foreign Office [1] and President Wilson’s special advisor, Colonel Edward Mandel House and Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The Secret Elite on both sides of the Atlantic knew that Hoover had doggedly mastered the successful implementation of Belgian Relief to the advantage of all. His New York office manager, William Honnold told him confidentially that President Wilson intended to create a Relief organisation in America to co-ordinate and collect funds. Hoover instantly saw this as an opportunity for a position within the Wilson government. He confided to an associate in November 1916, ‘I would like to get out of Europe and I would like to get out with dignity’. [2]

In the post-Somme aftermath the war took a desperate turn for Germany. Britain began to apply its naval blockade seriously and Germany struggled through a damagingly poor harvest thanks to their access to Belgian foodstuffs and Romanian grain. In a global context, grain prices continued to rise alarmingly and the Allies found it increasingly onerous to fund relief for Belgium.

Hoover tried to set up a new mode of finance for the CRB which would remove the burden from Britain and France who were financing the Commission with loans from America. The solution was to raise an American loan rather than continuing to channel funds firstly to Britain and France which they then fed into the CRB. JP Morgan and his banking associates knew well that the Allies could not continue to support Belgium indefinitely and they advised Hoover to suggest a more direct approach. [3] In December 1916, he confidently reported that: ‘The bankers include Morgans, Guaranty Trust, and all other important groups, who are acting entirely out of good feeling’ were prepared to support the loan. Bankers acting entirely out of good feeling … an oxymoron surely? Hoover then proceeded to advise his men in Europe that the French and Belgian governments should settle the details with Morgan’s bank in London. [4] Clearly it was impossible for JP Morgan to advocate a relief loan which his banks could fund through the Federal Reserve System, from which they would make considerable profit, but if the suggestion came from the head of the CRB, it had much more chance of being approved by Congress.

When Hoover set off for America on 13 January 1917 with the clear objective of refocusing his career, the omens for the CRB were not auspicious. The Miners’ Battalion from New South Wales formally requested that their State Relief Fund Committee stop sending money to support Belgian Relief because they could see that the Germans were seizing the food supplies. [5] Apart from New Zealand, the people of New South Wales had contributed more per head of the population than any other state in the world and this was publicly recognised by King Albert of the Belgians. [6] According to one report, Australian soldiers had seen so many instances of relief food going to the German troops that the CRB was asked to return $220,000 of as yet unspent money. [7] Several continents away, Hoover’s men ignored the Australians’ serious and well-founded allegations and produced a ‘barrage’ of positive, fawning articles in the New York Times in recognition of their leader’s achievements. [8]

Herbert Hoover always appeared to be in the right place at the right time. He had been in London at the outbreak of war in 1914, in Berlin with Arthur Zimmerman and the banker Max Warburg in 1915, [9] and in Brussels during Edith Cavell’s trial. [10] Back in Washington on 31 January 1917, he met with President Wilson on the same evening that Germany announced the commencement of its unrestricted submarine warfare. [11] Within three days two CRB ships, the Euphrates and the Lars Cruse carrying 2,300 tons of Maize had been sunk. [12] All Relief shipping was suspended. In the ensuing rush to safe harbour two CRB ships made it to Rotterdam, a further two were torpedoed, and the remainder sought refuge in British ports

The British government declared that it would be ‘a crime on their part’ to allow cargoes of foodstuffs, which were needed immediately in Britain, to be put at risk from German torpedoes and duly ordered that the food be unloaded. [13] Twenty-five thousand tons of merchandise purchased in Britain was instantly held back. Forty-five thousand tons of foodstuffs was ‘unavoidably’ detained and a further forty thousand tons already on the high seas destined for Belgium was ordered into British ports. [14] Allegedly the food was to be held in storage, though not indefinitely, until the Germans gave cast-iron guarantees of their safe transportation. [15] At a stroke, one hundred thousand tons of food was lost to Belgium and sold to, or requisitioned by Britain. [16]

Hoover was faced with an immediate personal dilemma. What would the consequences be for him if he disbanded the CRB? His distrust of Francqui and the CNSA was profound. He sent an urgent cable to London: ‘I wish to make it absolutely clear: the CRB must be liquidated and disappear’, except as a purely benevolent soliciting agency in the USA. ‘The whole of the files must be transferred to New York’. [17] He insisted that a definitive break had to be made if relief was to continue, that the separation had to involve the complete ‘dissolution’ of the original CRB, and that he would ‘positively refuse’ to surrender its money, its organisation or its ships, on any other terms. [18] Who did he think he was? On his instruction alone, the international relief programme was to be liquidated. All the files had to be gathered together and sent to New York. What motivated Herbert Hoover was self-preservation. To hell with Belgian Relief; so much for the starving poor. This was the action of an endangered dictator whose first thought was to close down the operation and remove all evidence of wrong-doing. What caused this panic? Did he suddenly realise that if someone else took charge, the CRB’s true purpose would be unmasked?

That same evening he attended a special dinner in the Astor Hotel in New York as chief guest of five hundred of the State’s most prominent citizens. Though not an official Pilgrims Society meeting, it boasted all the trappings of the elite. In the full knowledge of his absolute instructions to London, the speech he apparently improvised was cynically disingenuous: ‘If we must retire … then other neutrals must take up this work. The world cannot stand by and witness the starvation of the Belgian people and the Belgian children … the obligation of the American people towards Belgium continues.’ He stood on the platform of the Astor Hotel and delivered these words, having just ordered that the whole programme be liquidated. His gall knew no bounds. In justifying what had taken place he declared that ‘the German army has never eaten one tenth of one per cent of the food provided. The Allied governments would never have supplied us with $200,000,000 if we were supplying the German army’. [19] The assembled elite audience swallowed every syllable of the lie.

We do not know what pressure was brought to bear on him, but next morning Hoover sent a second urgent cable to London to stop the liquidation. Everyone was instructed to stay at their posts. Hoover had erred. The ‘great humanitarian’ had over-recached himself. He was answerable to a higher authority. The Secret Elite would decide if and when the CRB and the feeding of Germany would come to an end.

Herbert Hoover found it difficult to stomach the fact that the CRB was not his to dissolve. In Brussels, Brand Whitlock, the head of the American Legation, wanted to leave the relief programme intact under the control of the Spanish and Belgian agencies. Hoover, who passionately disliked and distrusted Francqui and the CNSA, advocated a Dutch takeover. The confusion continued with a flurry of instructions to Brand Whitlock and the CRB office in Brussels, but on 5 March 1917 Hoover wrote a long and confidential letter to Vernon Kellogg in Belgium which betrayed his real objective. A full month before America declared war on Germany, Hoover primed his key men in Belgium for the eventuality. They were instructed to ‘do nothing to create the impression that he [Hoover] was running away from the Relief.’ He had clearly been briefed by the Secret Elite to adopt their basic tactic of making sure that the blame would be pinned on Germany, or the State Department if it ordered the Americans to leave. If the CRB was ‘compelled to abandon its mission’, Hoover instructed that it was to be ‘absolutely’ liquidated as a business and released from all financial obligations.[20]

When this instruction reached Brussels, Whitlock believed that ‘Hoover must be losing his head’. [21] He raged that though Hoover was three thousand miles away, he thought that he knew better than the men on the ground in Belgium, and ‘was able to impose his brutal will on the [State] Department.’ [22] To an extent he was. Hoover had cultivated his friendship with the President’s Advisor, Edward Mandel House, another Secret Elite agent close to the Morgan banking influence. Furthermore, Hugh Gibson, his strongest ally in every way, had been dispatched from the American Embassy in London to the State Department in Washington. Once again his trusted right hand man was employed where Hoover wanted him; at the heart of American foreign policy.

And so it came to pass as they ordained. On 23 March, three CRB ships were sunk, and the US State Department ordered Brand Whitlock and all American members of the CRB to withdraw from Belgium. [23] When the diplomatic staff departed on 2 April, Prentiss Grey and three CRB accountants were left behind ‘to close the books’ and train up their successors. [24] Hoover himself dealt with the business end of his London office. Euphemistically, his purpose was to wrap up the loose ends. The wrap-up became a full-blown disposal of incriminating evidence.

On 6 April, 1917, America declared war on Germany.

A solution was found for the CRB, one which Hoover could still control yet took him out of the direct firing line. He (more probably his Anglo-American patrons) proposed the establishment of a ‘Comite Neutre de Protection et Secours’ under the high patronage of the King of Spain and the Queen of Holland, and the immediate patronage of the Ambassadors and ministers of Spain and Holland. They were to provide the guarantees formerly undertaken by the Americans. The Commission for Relief in Belgium proposed to continue its financial control over the purchasing and shipping of food and the supplies would be turned over to the CNSA in Belgium and Comite Francais in the north of France. [25] Hoover, again reversing all that he had originally proposed, decided to remain as overall chairman of the Commission.

Make no mistake, the provisioning of Germany continued. In his half yearly report to Berlin from February to July, 1917, Baron von der Lancken wrote: ‘we have continued successfully to export to Germany, or distribute to our troops, appreciable quantities of food. Certain parts of the agreement have been voluntarily exploited [by the Belgians]. The advantages which Germany accrues through the relief work continues to grow.’ [26]

In May 1917, America agreed to appropriate $75,000,000 to support the revised Commission. Although credited to the British and French governments, the funds were to be spent, as before, by the CRB. The only matter to which Congress would not give its approval was a $2,000,000 gift which Hoover requested to cover his administrative expenses. [27] He knew no shame. In formally withdrawing his request, Hoover cited the alternative solution to cover his costs. ‘As we have been compelled to resell a large quantity of foodstuffs bought but which we were unable to ship due to the suspension of our operations for a period at the outset of the submarine war, we have made a considerable profit on these goods against which we can debit the Commission’s overhead costs …’ [28] In other words, when Congress refused to pay for his administrative costs, he used the money from the sale of foodstuffs earmarked for the ‘starving poor’ of Belgium. So much for charitable giving.

Does anyone still think that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was anything other than a convenient front to prolong the agony of war while the racketeers made their fortunes?

Herbert Hoover was appointed Food Commissioner for the United States by President Wilson in May 1917, [29] ‘fresh from his triumph on the Belgian Relief Committee’. [30] It was but another step in his corrupt ascent to the 31st Presidency of the United States of America.

[1] George H Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 298.
[2] Ibid., p. 300.
[3] George I Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 158, p. 278.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hawara and Normanby Star, Vol. LXXII, 6 January, 1917, p. 4.
[6] Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February, 1934 in the obituary for William A Holman, President of the New South Wales Belgian Relief Fund.
[7] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags, p. 348.
[8] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 311.
[9] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Documents 134 -137, pp. 241-248.
[10] Brand Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 9 October 1915. http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bwTC.html
[11] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 312.
[12] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 240, p. 361.
[13] Ibid., p. 354.
[14] The Times, 17 March, 1917, p. 8.
[15] Sir Maurice de Bunsen statement to the Associated Press, New York Times, 6 March 1917.
[16] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 348.
[17] Hoover cable 93 to CRB-London office, 13 February 1917.
[18] Nash,The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 320.
[19] New York Times, 14, February, 1917.
[20] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 326.
[21] Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 4 March, 1917.
[22] Ibid., 13 March, 1917.
[23] Tracy Barrett Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1914-1917, primary source edition, p. 418.
[24] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 339.
[25] Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, pp. 435-442.
[26] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Occupee, p. 298.
[27] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 358.
[28] Gay and Fisher, Document 168, p. 286.
[29] New York Times, 4 May, 1917.
[30] The Times, 20 July, 1917, p. 5.

The Commission For Relief In Belgium 11: When Thieves Fall Out

Despite the backing of the most powerful and influential men in Britain, France and America, the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) frequently ran into both international and local squabbles which threatened to undermine its prime objective; to prolong the war by feeding both Belgium and the German army. Personal relationships, human frailty, including jealousy, and the lure of making even more from the rich pickings, motivated a greed which could well have back-fired in many different ways.

Rumblings at Westminster tended to be muted in the early stages of the war, but by 1916 more and more MPs voiced their concerns about the Relief programme. They asked questions about the total value in Belgium of the foodstuffs imported by the Neutral Relief Commission (another name for the CRB) and the amount of contributions made by the United States, by other neutrals, by the British Empire and by other allied governments. [1] Critics quickly became swamped by an avalanche of information that included the tonnage of foodstuffs, including bacon and lard being exported to Belgium. Lard was of particular interest because glycerine for high explosives could be extracted from it. Statistics were produced to show that in November 1914, 67 metric tons had been imported into Belgium and Northern France; in October 1915 this had risen to over 6,000 metric tons. [2] Parliamentary suspicions were entirely justified. Food was certainly flowing into the German ranks whether by the requisition of home grown products or resale of imports by unscrupulous Belgians but overwhelmingly by secret agreement between the CRB / CNSA and the German government. Baron von der Lancken’s official reports proved that without a doubt. [3]

On 21 January 1916 Lord Eustace Percy at the foreign office, wrote an alarming letter to Herbert Hoover about the volume of rice which had been stockpiled in Belgium by the CRB. He was ‘much disturbed’ to find that large quantities had been re-exported to Germany through Holland and been sold to the Germans ‘by the Relief Committee in Belgium’ [4] Emile Francqui assured Hoover that the matter had been investigated and that the ‘information’ from Lord Percy was exaggerated. Apparently it was the fault of a private German company which bought the food from a Belgian dealer who purchased the rice from ‘consumers’. Hoover’s problem was that while he had foreign office approval to import 5,000 tons of rice per month, between September and November around 34,000 tons had been landed, much more than double the agreed amount. Percy consequently threatened to ban the import of rice until the Germans handed over an equivalent amount from their own stock. Hoover’s response in February was firstly to rebut the statistics used by the foreign office and added that ‘some of the local committees, finding the fabulous price at which they could sell rice, have done so entirely in innocence of heart and have invested the money in potatoes….’ [5] It beggars belief.

In March 1916 Lord Percy wrote another detailed and worrying letter to Hoover. He had received reports from an ‘unusually trustworthy’ source that as much as half of the food imported by the Commission to the district of Ghent was going directly to the German army or being redirected to Breslau in Germany. Between November 1915 and January 1916, British sources claimed that seven boatloads of coffee, rice, beans, flour and oil nuts, some 4,200 tons in total had reached Germany through Holland. Lord Percy named one particular mill-owner in Brussels who was extracting oil from the milling process and selling it to the Germans ‘for munitions purposes’. [6] Hoover’s standard reply was to insist that the total leakage was very small and that the smuggling of overseas material through Holland was much greater than previously believed. [7] Deny, deflect and deceive were his watchwords, but constant complaints that the concession to the CRB was indeed feeding the enemy, gathered volume.

There is a further aspect to this that appears to have been scrupulously ignored. Belgians knew that the system was being abused by their own countrymen. At first the Comite National made little effort to monitor the day to day workings of the provincial committees but by December 1915 they had to acknowledge the ‘innumerable breakages of their instructions’ were leading to serious abuses which had caused adverse comment abroad. The CSNA conceded in their Report on general operations in 1915 that imported foodstuffs were not being exclusively sold in their appointed shops or being distinctively identified as relief produce, [8] which had been part of the basic agreement. In other words, his focus was limited to Belgians who were ignoring the rules and selling or reselling food to the Germans. By so doing, attention was drawn away from the greater scandal – Hoover’s faustian pact with the German government.

In Parliament, honourable members began to sharpen their questions especially when the German government of occupation began to use food provision as an inducement to encourage unemployed Belgians to work for them. ‘What action was the Government going to take in view of the admitted facts that the importation of foodstuffs by the Neutral Relief Commission makes Belgian products available for the Germans, and the distribution of these foodstuffs is being used as a means of obtaining forced labour in Belgium?’ [9] The answer from Lord Robert Cecil, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs was curt. ‘I cannot agree that the alleged facts are admitted’. Later in the same debate he was asked if he knew the exact amount of proceeds from the sale of foodstuffs in Belgium. All he said was ‘No Sir, I cannot answer that without notice’. [10] The foreign office simply closed down discussion.

MPs were also rightly anxious about the volume of maize and other feeding stuffs imported into Holland (the inference being that such product was then re-exported to Germany ) The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs assured them that ‘according to the Dutch statistics, only 2 tons of vegetable or animal oils’ had been exported to Germany that year. [11] Two tons. This was simply ridiculous. Time after time valid questions were answered with weak assurances or avoidance. Eventually, in August 1916 , two years into the war, the blunt question was put;

‘Is his Majesty’s Government satisfied that the funds of the National Committee for Relief in Belgium are in fact devoted to the relief of loyal Belgians in the occupied territories, and not to that of Germans or of Belgians working for the German Army?’ [12]

Lord Robert Cecil’s reply was hardly convincing. He blustered on about ‘satisfactory guarantees covering all domestic foodstuffs’ but was obliged to concede that ‘violations of these guarantees by the Germans still arise’ although the ‘United States, Spanish and Netherlands Representatives at Brussels are taking energetic steps, [to stop this] and the Germans are well aware that a continuance of such violations will endanger the whole work.’ Was that a serious intention? Did assurances mean anything? He insisted that ‘His Majesty’s Government are satisfied that the foodstuffs imported by the Relief Commission run no risk of appropriation by the enemy.’ [13] Satisfied? He knew what was happening. The Foreign Office had evidence of the German appropriations, of railway trucks rolling from Holland to Germany, of the disappearance of food stocks, but of course admitted nothing. How could it, given the complicity of the Secret Elite?

There was a stock reply. ‘His Majesty’s Government have assisted the relief work in response to the wishes of the Allies, including the Belgian Government, and in the interests of the whole population.’ [14] If necessary, when challenged about the volume of imports into Belgium, the answer was tantamount to, ‘our figures very often do not agree with those published elsewhere’ [15] The policy was being pursued despite loudly voiced complaint and problematic questions. And the Germans continued to feed their army and their civil population from the well-stocked nest that was occupied Belgium. In mid-November the CRB reported to the American Legation that ‘the Germans were shipping 3,000 head of cattle per week in to Germany, and much grease’. [16] This was not a leakage, it was a torrent behind which a desperate struggle for power was waged.

Tensions between the CRB and the Comite National in Brussels heightened in 1916. By that time the system had been more or less established and the Belgians felt that too much praise had been heaped on the Americans while their immense efforts often went unrecognised. They were jealous. A bitter battle of wills developed with Hoover and his right hand man, Hugh Gibson in one corner and Francqui and the Comite National in the other. It never bodes well when thieves fall out. The Belgian government in exile at Le Havre agreed to recognise the CNSA, or ‘Francqui and Company’ as Brand Whitlock sarcastically dubbed them, as its representative in Belgium, and in return Francqui ‘agreed to abdicate when the king returns’. [17] In the eyes of the head of the American Legation, ‘ Francqui assumed the power and rank of a dictator and has even told Hoover that the CNSA must be shown the respect due to a government.’ [18] While recognising that Whitlock was partisan, his outburst when Francqui declared that Belgium wanted no more charity from America and that the Americans were ‘invaders’, was classic. He found ‘the chicanery, the double-dealing, the black treachery of some participants’ to be so loathsome that words failed him. [19] Yet the world understood that the CRB and its Belgian arm, the CNSA, were as one, united to feed the needy and destitute of Belgium. It was no less than a global scam.

The stakes were enormous. The CNSA bankers were well aware that it was Hoover’s CRB which could cream off the profits from international transportation and trade in foodstuffs and gifts of clothing. They wanted their fair share.

Hoover had admitted to Whitlock in August 1916 that the CRB had accumulated a vast profit running into millions of dollars. He claimed to have suggested to Francqui that it should be used after the war to fund a scholarship for Belgian boys in American Universities and vice-versa. [20] The parallel with Cecil Rhodes and his Oxford University scholarships must have been music to Secret Elite ears.

In private, the name-calling was slanderous. Hoover called Francqui a ‘financial pirate’ and the CRB’s head of the Department of Inspection, Joseph Green, accused Francqui of leading a corrupt financial ring in Brussels, claiming that his dubious reputation ‘was known in financial circles on three continents’. [21] Note the clear emphasis on finance. When the squabbling was reduced to basics, it was all about money, power and control.

Hoover became further embroiled in a heated argument with the Belgian Government in exile when he presented them with an audited account for $65,000,000 which the CRB claimed to have spent to the end of 1915, money that had been channelled from the Allied borrowing in America to the Belgian government. Aloys van de Vyvere, the Belgian finance minister said that he would not finally discharge the claim until the government in exile returned to Brussels and could verify the data. To have automatically  approved Hoover’s accounts without careful scrutiny would have been a dereliction of duty. Herbert Hoover was outraged. His organisation was, in his view, answerable to no government and in a petulant memorandum to Walter Page, which he expected the Ambassador to sign, [22] he asserted that he had no legal liability to the Belgian government and the charitable gifts given to his organisation were his to dispose of as he saw fit. [23] Francqui and Hoover were both hewn from the same rotten elm. Their arrogance was unrestrained.

Both agencies, the CRB and the Comite National behaved like mobsters goading, name-calling and threatening dire consequences as they struggled to assert their domination over the same territory. But it was Hoover who had the protection of big brother. The Foreign Office laid down the law. Sir Edward Grey, recently ennobled as Lord Grey, ordained that the CRB must have undivided responsibility not just for the importation of food, but its distribution and use of the money raised from sales. [24] Lord Eustace Percy joined the attack by warning that British officials were of the opinion that the Comite National was not fulfilling its duty of inspection to ensure that the Germans did not abuse the importation of food. He was right. The Comite’s processes were corrupt and allowed widespread abuse.

Francqui ordered the Prosecuteurs du Roi to stop sending information to the CRB about charges brought against Belgian citizens for violating food regulations. Such reports had to be sent directly to his offices, and any request for information was to be routed through the CNSA. From August 1916 onwards, he entirely suppressed important cases and adjusted and amended official figures so that no-one could accurately measure the extent of Belgian malpractice in selling food to Germany. [25] By October, the CNSA had begun to replace American flags and bill-boards indicating ‘American Relief’ with their own banners at distribution centres. It may seem petty today but Ambassador Page in London was offended. He demanded that the message be clearly understood: ‘The Comite National is not the pivot upon which relief work revolves in Belgium.’ [26]

Every ounce of Secret Elite muscle was brought to bear on Francqui’s stance and by mid-December 1916 the Belgian government changed tack and agreed that the CRB should control the distribution of food in Belgium. Hoover won but Francqui was not cowed. He had to accept the British decision to back Hoover, but in doing so revealed his own ace card. He told the head of the American Legation that he had written a 600 page history of the Belgian Relief, and asked if Hoover ‘wished to risk being shown in his true colours in a book that will remain a standard history?’ [27] According to Brand Whitlock, Francqui added that ‘there is even a chapter on the role of the protective ministers’. Such an expose would have blown away more than Herbert Hoover. Unfortunately the promised book never saw the light of day. The quarrel was glossed over in a barely disguised stand-off, but relationships remained strained.

Thus the flow of food to Germany was protected, and the Secret Elite made clear their confidence in Herbert Hoover. Meanwhile, the real war continued.

[1] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 10 July 1916 vol. 84 c7.
[2] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 18 July 1916 vol. 84 c818.
[3] Micheal Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner en Belgique occupee, Oscar von der Lancken-Wakenitz – Rappports D’activite 1915-1918. pp 55- end.
[4] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Percy to Hoover, 26 January 1916, Document 46, p.79.
[5] Ibid., Document 48, pp. 80-81.
[6] Ibid., Document 49, pp. 81-82.
[7] Ibid., Document 50, pp. 82-83.
[8] Rapport General sur le functionement et les operations du Comite National de Secours et Alimentation, 1914-1919, p. 35.
[9] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 20 July 16 vol. 84 cc1158-60.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Hansard, House of Commons, Debate, 27 July1916 Vol. 84 cc1841-2.
[12] Mr Evelyn Cecil MP, Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 10 August 1916 vol. 85. cc1201-2.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 23 Nov 1916, Vol. 87 cc1547-8.
[15] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 31 Dec 1916, Vol. 88 cc1588-9.
[16] Brand Whitlock, The Letters and Journal,  Chapter VII, 17 November, 1916,
http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bw07.html
[17] Whitlock, Letters and Journal, Chapter VII, 6 November 1916.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Whitlock, Letters and Journal, Chapter VII, 1 August 1916.
[21] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian p. 219.
[22] Memorandum drafted to Walter Hines Page, 3 May, 1916.
[23] Nash and Fisher, Herbert Hoover, p. 204.
[24]Tracy B Kittredge, The history of the Commission for the Relief in Belgium, 1914-1917, p. 364.
[25] Ibid., p. 371.
[26] Ibid., p. 374.
[27] Whitlock,  Letters and Journal, Chapter VII, 17, 6 November, 1916.

Edith Cavell 7: The Victim

In 1919 Edith Cavell’s body was disinterred from its unmarked grave in Brussels and given a formal memorial service in the Gard du Nord in the presence of the Allied Commanders. The coffin was loaded with all reverence onto a special train draped in black and covered with beautiful flowers. Her remains were met with great ceremony in England, and Queen Alexandra attended the military service at Westminster Abbey. Finally, Edith was laid to rest outside Norwich Cathedral with all the panoply of a grateful nation. [1] Let it be clearly understood that she was a patriot who willingly gave her life to save other brave men. Her self-sacrifice is beyond doubt and worthy of high honour. They called her a martyr, and amid the holy pomp and circumstance of the iconic cathedral, she was lauded in triumph. [2] On the other hand we now know that Edith was knowingly and unrepentantly a key figure in a Belgian resistance network which was spying for the allies and sending military intelligence to London. [3] Furthermore, she had a tale to tell.

And the deliberate myth-making, the manipulation of her contribution, contrived to deflect criticism away from the Commission for the Relief of Belgium (CRB) and the Comite National de Secours et Alimentation (CNSA) and the fact that through these organisations the allies were effectively feeding the German army. With the Cavell/de Croy organisation broken, the flow of adverse criticism from Belgium was somewhat stemmed. There would be no more compromising letters from the Berkendael Institute. The supply of food available to the German army continued; so too did the fighting. The British Foreign Office and War Office, the German Foreign Office and the elites who ordained the war, needed to sustain the flow of foodstuffs through Belgium. The CRB’s massive international organisation comprising bankers and financiers, shipping magnates and grain exporters could breathe more easily. So too could the Belgian bankers. The whistleblower had been silenced.

In addition there was an ironic bonus for the Secret Elite. With her body buried in an unmarked Belgian grave in 1915, the monsters of propaganda twisted Edith Cavell’s Christian values so that the protective Angel of Mercy was translated into an Avenging Angel. [4] The Bishop of London pronounced that ‘the blood of this brave woman will be the seed of armed men’ [5] Recruitment posters appeared with Edith’s image set against an emboldened background which proclaimed ‘Murdered by the Hun’. Sadly her example of selflessness was transformed into a rallying call for enlistment. Her life’s purpose had been to save others but her image was rebranded and distorted to send tens of thousands to their graves on the Western Front. A recent estimate claims that 40,000 more men, or somewhere between two and three infantry divisions were formed on the strength of the Cavell propaganda. [6] It was such perfect timing, for the flow of volunteers to Kitchener’s rallying call was fast drying up. Edith’s sacrifice smoothed the path to conscription in 1916. And it was all based on vile propaganda.

The British War Cabinet set up a secret committee under the Attorney-General in November 1918 to ‘Enquire into the Breaches of the Laws of War’ committed by the German army, and considered the case of Nurse Edith Cavell. In a report that was kept buried deep, the committee duly found that the court-martial (Feldgericht) was justified in finding that she had committed the offences of which she was charged, and had the power in law to condemn her to death. [7] In the cool reflection of a two-year old victory, the secret report of 26 February 1920 decided that; ‘it seems impossible to say that the tribunal which tried Miss Cavell, or the persons which carried out its sentence, were guilty of a war crime’ [8] and there was ‘no prospect that the prosecution of any of the persons concerned in the trial of Miss Cavell would result in a conviction.’ Having buried the truth, the Secret Elite had no interest in any further debate. So much for Lord Desart’s rhetoric of ‘tried in cold blood’. [9] Edith was a patriot, but she was guilty of the charge the Germans chose not to bring against her. Espionage.

Edith Cavell was certainly a victim of war, but whose victim?

Let us recap the main points raised over the course of our blogs. Nurse Cavell was a strong-minded, principled woman who, when war was declared, chose to return to her teaching post in Brussels. From August 1914 she became part of an underground network which was structured to aid and repatriate British, French and Belgian soldiers stranded behind enemy lines. The network, which was originally led by Prince Reginald de Croy, also spied on German trench positions, armaments stores, and general morale and passed information back to London.

Despite the ban on sending mail between Belgium and Britain, Edith was a regular correspondent, and defied German edicts by writing both to her family and the press. The image of Edith, bedecked in red-cross uniform, and tied to her office in Brussels suits the propagandists but evidence proves that she secretly met Marie de Croy in Ghent in April 1915. [10] She was very conscious of the dangers that surrounded the network, but would not abandon her involvement.

Senior officials close to the Secret Elite knew of her activities. At least two different departments of government in London, the Foreign Office and the War Office supported the de Croy network. British Intelligence was linked to Edith’s underground group through Harry Barton, and the French Intelligence service through Herman Capiau. [11] Who was running the show? Capiau named the ‘grand chef’, the controller of networks, as Dr. Bull, a person about whom little was known until his identity was confirmed in a recent BBC Radio broadcast. In the programme, Stella Rimington, formerly Director-General of MI5, named Dr Tollemache Bull as a senior British intelligence officer in charge of several spy networks. [12] According to a report in an American newspaper in 1922, Tollemache Bull was a dental physician who regularly met with Edith Cavell in Brussels during the war. [13] Bull was also related by marriage to the Whitlocks. (see Edith Cavell 3:) He was arrested and tried by the Germans in 1916 for providing Edith with funds and was defended by Maitre Braun. Not only did this British secret agent meet her regularly, but he was also channeling funds to her. [14] His cover was perfect. Who would have suspected a dentist as the link between several spy networks? This was not opportunistic or occasional espionage, but a carefully managed intelligence organisation that lead directly to London.

And Edith’s work delved into ever more clandestine activity. When the soldiers she had helped save landed back in Britain, they were extensively debriefed by intelligence officers from the War Office [15] before returning to their regiments. Many were inadvertently carrying secret messages sewn into their clothing, penned in microscopic handwriting. [16] Interestingly, Edith sewed her own diary, written in microscopic handwriting, into a cushion. Sadly only a fragment survived, [17] but it is surely instructive to realise that Edith used the art of miniature calligraphy herself. Was this one of the threads of her espionage?

The Americans also knew what was going on. By March 1915, her letters were routed through the American Legation in Brussels where they had every opportunity to read her mail. We know that her surviving letters became more openly incautious, [18] possibly because of the confidence she had misplaced in the diplomatic safety afforded by the Americans. Edith contributed her second report from Brussels for the Nursing Mirror, dated 29 March 1915. The editor, clearly annoyed that something had been removed, told his readers that the postmark on the envelope was 15 April, and that it had arrived at his offices four days later ‘torn open on both sides and resealed by the General Post Office.’ In other words he believed that he had not received everything that Edith had sent him. Having read and several times reread both the editor’s notes, placed on page one, and the anodyne article that followed, we cannot help but suspect that something much more controversial had been removed. What could Edith have written that upset British Intelligence? The article spoke of a very calm and unremarkable Brussels, far from the extreme alarm for a starving population which had been circulated by Hoover, Whitlock and the CRB. But given the knowledge she garnered from all of her underground contacts, the word her nurses heard on the street and what she saw for herself on her visits outside the capital, did she also write about the abuses of food being imported into Belgium through the CRB for the German army? It makes sense. Was it a question of what she wrote about Belgian Relief, or spoke about German food supplies to Dr Bull, that alarmed the Secret Elite in London? It may well have been both.

Herbert Hoover, as head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, spent much of March and April fire-fighting the angry claims from Britain that the CRB was feeding the German army. He was most indignant at ‘the rumours in England of misuse of food supplies by Germans’ and the ‘severe drilling’ he had been given at the Foreign Office. [19] Unquestionably the War Office and British Intelligence knew precisely what was going on in Belgium, but not the general public. A strict embargo was placed on such information. Every soldier who made it back was not only debriefed but, under the Official Secrets Act, was strictly forbidden to tell anyone about their experiences. [20]

Hoover was in Brussels during Edith Cavell’s trial. He lunched with Brand Whitlock on 6 October and had discussions with Baron von der Lancken on the afternoon of 8 October. [21]  The Chairman of the CRB left the city on 9 October, the very Saturday on which the German Judges sat in secret session to decide the sentences of the military court [22] and only three days before Edith Cavell’s execution.

It may already be apparent to our regular readers that every aspect of Edith Cavell’s arrest, imprisonment and execution was framed by the CRB or its Belgian partner, the CNSA. All the received histories have built their accounts of Edith’s fate on ‘evidence’ presented by members of the American Legation who were associated with the CRB. Furthermore, this ‘evidence’ is still accepted as fact. Thus the lies continue.

And they grow darker. The German military governor who ordered that Edith be shot at dawn on 12 October 1915, General Traugott Martin von Sauberzweig, was a burly, aggressive brute of a man who endorsed violence as a tactic. [23] His stay in Brussels was so comparatively short that one can but conclude that he was specifically sent there on a mission. Sauberzweig was allegedly unknown to Brand Whitlock, who claimed never to have met him. On the day before Edith’s execution, Whitlock noted in his diary that von der Lancken ‘Finally telephoned the Military Governor, a new one, I must get his name…’ [24] We are asked to believe that the Head of the American Legation did not know the name of the recently appointed German military governor when so many Belgian citizens were being tried by a military court? Perhaps Whitlock’s memory had simply failed him once again. By 2 November, Sauberzweig was reported to have been removed from office and replaced, [25] but that may have been wishful thinking. Other sources claim that he held on to his post until June 1916. [26] Whichever, we believe that he was parachuted in as military governor to ensure that Edith Cavell was silenced.

How strange it all was, but no stranger than the later meeting that the cursed General apparently requested with Herbert Hoover and his CRB colleague, Vernon Kellogg, when they ‘happened to be in Berlin’ in August 1916. According to Hoover, Sauberzweig, haunted by remorse, [27] asked to speak with him and confessed that he had been responsible for having Edith Cavell shot before there was any time for an effective appeal. How convenient for Hoover and the CRB that Sauberzweig should accept full responsibility, referring to himself as ‘the murderer’. [28] Here for the historical record was their ‘proof’ that Cavell’s death had nothing to do with the CRB.

In his account, Vernon Kellogg painted a very different image of Sauberzweig’s remorse. He was drunk, ‘on his nth whisky’, and had just come from his son’s hospital bed where the young man was lying blinded and disfigured. ‘And the sight of his son – and the memory of Miss Cavell made him remark that this was a horrible war.’ [29] He repeatedly referred to ‘Die Cavell’; that ‘Die Cavell was a thing that interfered with German control of Belgium. It had to be got rid of, so I had her shot’. [30] Not much remorse there, no matter how you read it, but what did Sauberzweig mean by stating that Edith Cavell interfered with German control of Belgium? After his stay in Brussels, Sauberzweig was appointed Quartermaster-General at the Imperial German Supreme Headquarters. [31] Who better to understand the importance of the unfettered CRB supplies reaching his troops than the man responsible for feeding the German army?

No matter how it was dressed up in fraught meetings and bitter recriminations, the CRB’s relationship with the German war effort could only be described as collaboration. Anyone who endangered the status quo was indeed interfering with the war effort, but not just Germany’s. A sense of a multi-layered self-interest pervaded the Commission and its work. We believe that decisions were taken at the highest levels of real power which embraced America, Britain, France and Germany. Had the CRB collapsed, the American economy would have been immediately damaged. So much had been invested through the Morgan – Rothschild axis, the Kuhn, Loeb and Co. banking house, through Bethlehem Steel and America’s blossoming armaments industry, that any action which risked a sudden end to the war would have affected them all. Some writers have claimed that the decision to have Edith Cavell killed could be traced back to the British Head of the Secret Service in New York, Sir William Wiseman. Not so. Wiseman was recuperating in Britain from gas poisoning inflicted on him in Flanders earlier in 1915, and when he was posted to the United States in December, Edith Cavell had been dead for two months. [32] Never the less, the American connection was spread much further than Herbert Hoover and the Brussel’s Legation.

Nor should we imagine that British hands were clean. Though they never acknowledged Edith’s role as a spy (no government would) we have shown that she worked for the Intelligence Services. One hundred years later the former Director-General of MI5, Stella Rimington, admitted so in public. [33] Most of all, the Foreign Office in the personages of Sir Edward Grey and Lord Eustace Percy knew about the vast tonnage of food and thousands of livestock which were transferred into Germany while the CRB maintained its ‘humanitarian’ front. They knew the pressure that Hoover’s men were under to stop such information reaching London. This is a matter of record. [34] They were all in collusion.

On her way to prison in Germany, Princess Marie de Croy, sat on her cases in a railway station and inadvertently summed up this whole episode with a single observation.

‘The sergeant told me he was going on holiday and, like all the German soldiers whom I saw travelling, he was loaded with provisions to take home. Although a promise had been made to America that food should not be taken out of Belgium, which was the condition the United States had made for provisioning the population, this was certainly done.’ [35]

The Committee for Relief in Belgium was not supplying provisions for the sole use of the ‘starving’ Belgian population. It was feeding Germany too; feeding the German army and sustaining the German population. In dissecting the myriad of lies which have been woven around Edith Cavell, the conclusion we have come to is that the German, American, Belgian and British authorities colluded in her murder. Had she lived to expose the truth behind the CRB, the consequences for the Secret Elite would have been catastrophic. Her death ensured that the agony of a miserable war was prolonged.

[1] The Times, 16 May 1919 pp. 13-14.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Phil Tomaselli, BBC History, September 2002, p. 6.
[4] Hugo Lueders, https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close
[5] A G Gardner, The Guardian,  23 October 1915; quoted in Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War, p. 231.
[6] Dame Stella Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 15/09/2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069wth6
[7] National Archives, PRO / CP 1813, p. 424.
[8] Ibid., p. 428.
[9] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 October 1915, vol. 19 cc. 1100-1104.
[10] Again we are indebted to Hugo Lueders, an independent policy analyst in Brussels for advice and up to the moment research he is undertaking.
[11] See blog Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Threat.
[12] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[13] The Batavia Times, April 22, 1922. http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/Batavia%20NY%20Times/Batavia%20NY%20Times%201921-1925%20Grayscale/Batavia%20NY%20Times%201921-1925%20Grayscale%20-%200555.pdf
[14] http://whitlockfamilyassociation.com.s3.amazonaws.com/sources/newspapers/NP0261.pdf
[15] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 187.
[16] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[17] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 229.
[18] Ibid., p. 248.
[19] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 33, page 52.
[20] Beaumont, Old Contemptible, pp. 187-8.
[21] Brand Whitlock, The Letters and Journals of Brand Whitlock, Chapter V,  6-9 October 1915.
[22] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 346.
[23] Ibid., p. 320.
[24] Whitlock, The Letters and Journals, Chapter 5, 11 October 1915.
http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bw05.html
[25] New York Times, 2 November 1915.
[26] Sophie Schaepdrijver, Gabriel Petit, The Death and Life of a Female Spy, p. 92.
[27] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, p. 198.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Vernon Kellogg, Fighting Starvation, p. 66.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Schaepdrijver, Gabriel Petit, p. 92.
[32] The Times, 18 June 1962, p.14;  Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Sir William Wiseman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Christopher Andrews, Secret Service, The Making of the British Intelligence Service, p. 209.
[33] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[34] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Documents, 46-50 pp. 79-84.
[35] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 204.

Edith Cavell 6: The Instant Cover-Up

By 1915 Belgian citizens felt that their voice was better represented by the Comite National de Secours et Alimentation (CNSA) than the King or the Government-in-Exile. They referred to it as ‘le government provisoire’, the temporary or provisional government. [1] Created in September 1914, the CNSA liaised directly with the German authorities in Belgium. It had been constituted in Brussels under the chairmanship of Ernest Solvay, and the patronage of the Head of the American Legation, Brand Whitlock and the Spanish minister, the Marquis de Villalobar. In addition, Herbert Hoover’s disciple, and key member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), Hugh Gibson, was present in his capacity as First Secretary of the U.S. Legation. [2] They formed an elite cabal of influence, so immensely powerful that it failed to save Edith Cavell. Strange indeed, though these men went to great lengths to present a story which gave birth to the myth that the CRB and CNSA did everything that could possibly be done to stop her execution.

In his later account, Hugh Gibson made much of his remonstrations with Baron von der Lancken on the eve of Edith Cavell’s execution, but Gibson, first and foremost a Hoover man, was merely going through the motions. The focus of Gibson’s ‘evidence’ centres on himself, Brand Whitlock, the Marquis of Villalobar and the Belgian lawyer, Maitre Gaston de Leval, but he knew that the most important and influential person in Belgium was Emile Francqui, the President of the executive committee of the CNSA. Francqui resented Hoover’s interference in Belgian affairs on a personal level, but if any individual could have taken effective steps at the last minute to save Edith Cavell, it was him. He did not lift a finger to help her. Why? You might well ask, did Edith Cavell’s death suit the needs of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and the CNSA? Had she had been identified as the source of critical articles in the British press? Was there detailed information about the German abuses of Belgian Relief inside the parcel which had been ripped open and examined before it reached the editor of the Nursing Mirror? [3] We should remember that Hoover had demanded that such leaks must stop.

What too of the inventive Maitre Gaston de Leval, wrongly described by the New York Times as ‘legal advisor to Edith Cavell’? [4] That very claim inferred that Edith had been given legal council, but she was never properly represented by those charged with her safety and did not speak with Leval at any point. He was a company man and played a major part in concocting the impression that Brand Whitlock and his American associates had tried every avenue to save her from the firing squad. Leval was invited to address a meeting of the Secret Elite’s inner sanctum in New York, the Pilgrims of America, on 26 January 1916 at which Lord Bryce, author of the Bryce Report on German Atrocities in Belgium, was present. [5] Co-incidence? What fate brought together the author of the greatest single piece of anti-German propaganda and lies in the opening years of the war, and the man who claimed to represent Edith Cavell and whose false testament appeared to clear the Americans of any charge of complicity?

Feted in the United States, Gaston de Leval’s story grew in the telling and he repeated his accusations against Edith’s real lawyer, Sadi Kirschen. He claimed that Kirschen had deliberately kept him in the dark and had been mysteriously unavailable on the night that Edith was sentenced. True, Sadi Kirschen had left Brussels for the weekend having been assured that nothing would happen to the prisoners. As he grew bolder, De Leval’s allegations became increasingly malicious. His nefarious slanders were circulated in the press. He alleged that Thomas Braun had asked to be replaced as Edith Cavell’s lawyer and Kirschen was depicted as an Austrian and a spy. De Level claimed that Edith had been abandoned in her hour of need and handed over to an enemy lawyer. [6]

Sadi Kirschen’s reputation lay in tatters, and he literally took the matter into his own hands, confronted Leval in the Palais de Justice in Brussels on Christmas Eve 1918 and knocked him to the ground. Kirschen accused Leval of slander and in the resulting court case, the Brussels Bar Council adjudged that Leval had made no attempt to meet Kirschen between 8 – 11 October 1915. In other words it was Leval who had lied. He was guilty of slander. No matter; he had served the Americans well. He was a man without honour whose courtship with fame knew no bounds. Gaston de Level presented himself as one of the chief mourners at Edith’s later internment in England. He joined the official family group following her coffin into Westminster Abbey on 15 May, 1919. [7] He had never met, nor spoken to, nor represented her in court, but lived the lie that he had tried everything to save Edith. Despicable.

There was one further incident that is generally ignored by historians. When the Foreign Office decided to publicise the letters and reports from Leval and Brand Whitlock in The Times, the German authorities, and Baron von der Lancken in particular, were appalled. He summoned Whitlock to his office on Monday 25 October 1915, and demanded that the head of the American Legation retract his lies and make a formal apology. He was particularly enraged by Gaston de Leval’s so-called ‘report’, which as we have demonstrated, was laced with lies. Von der Lancken threatened to have the Belgian lawyer sent to a concentration camp in Germany. [8] He was visibly incensed by the totally inaccurate version released by Hugh Gibson and Whitlock and pointed to the lies contained in the reports. He told Brand Whitlock to his face that he, as Head of the American Legation had NOT made frequent enquires about Edith Cavell’s condition and representation, [9] and he insisted that the American Legation had never asked to be kept informed about the legal process. [10] Von der Lancken demanded that an immediate retraction be written. Notices were published in the streets of Brussels denying that Whitlock was kept ignorant that the death sentence had been pronounced, or that the German Authorities, by proceeding rapidly, had prevented him from intervening in favour of the accused. [11] Thus, the official version, published and approved by the Foreign Office, was lambasted as utterly false. Brand Whitlock never changed his story, but received permission from Washington to issue Gaston de Leval with an American passport to get him urgently out of Belgium. After all, they could hardly have allowed him to be interrogated by the secret police.

The fallout did not stop with de Leval’s expulsion. Hugh Gibson was not forgiven by the Germans for his jaundiced report of Edith Cavell’s trial. He became persona non grata. [12] Though he lingered at the Brussels’s legation, antagonism to him steadily grew until on 7 February, 1916 Von der Lanken arrived at Brand Whitlock’s door and demanded that Gibson leave ‘today or at the latest, tomorrow’. [13] The reason noted by Whitlock was quite specific. ‘His [Gibson’s] firm stand in the Edith Cavell affair, and his statements upon it afterwards, had now resulted in a crisis. It was felt desirable to give him leave of absence.’ [14] It says much that Whitlock made no serious protest about the loss of his secretary. In this intricate web of complicity, Hugh Gibson, a young man-on-the-make of the type with whom Hoover surrounded himself, who had proved his loyalty to the CRB, found himself promoted to the American Embassy in London. Hoover arranged the prestigious appointment personally through Ambassador Page. [15]

And what of the British Government? In this amazing litany of Pontius Pilots, all lining up to distance themselves from the execution, the Foreign Office also played its part. It firstly claimed that it was powerless to intervene, but confidently trusted that the American Legation in Brussels would see that Edith had a fair trial. Sir Horace Rowland at the Foreign Office ‘was afraid that it was likely to go hard with Miss Cavell’. In documents that only saw the light of day in 2005, Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, wrote in words that paraphrased de Levall’s excuse, that ‘any representation by us will do her more harm than good.’ [16] In other words, they did nothing. However, after Edith had been executed, the Foreign Office took the unprecedented step of publishing all of the reports and letters received from the American Legation in Brussels. It used Reuters to guarantee a world wide audience. The daily editorial and an entire page [17] inside the Times was given over to Brand Whitlock’s false account. He, Gibson and de Leval were duly praised for their ‘chivalrous zeal’ in trying to save ‘our countrywoman’s life’. [18]  What shameless hypocrisy.

Once dead, Edith Cavell presented the British propaganda machine with the perfect cause celebre; the patriot-saint, a matron dressed in martyr’s robes, transformed in death into a rallying call against the evil Hun. In the House of Lords, the public mood was caught by Lord Desart (from the Committee of Imperial Defence) in an outraged condemnation. ‘She was tried in cold blood; she was convicted in cold blood; she was executed in cold blood.’ Lord Lansdowne assured everyone ‘that the representatives of the United States and of Spain at Brussels up to the very last moment neglected no opportunity or effort in order to obtain a commutation of the death sentence passed on Miss Cavell, or even to obtain at least a period of suspense before that sentence was carried into effect.’ [19]

It was such a cleverly worded absolution which inferred that the American and Spanish representatives had done everything they possibly could for Edith. We know now that they had moved so painfully slowly that any chance of assistance came too late. Edith’s links with the de Croys, and her letters to the Nursing Mirror were carefully airbrushed from history and replaced with ridiculous stories and downright lies. [20] Most importantly, they deflected criticism from the CRB. Indeed, they removed the Commission’s name from any association with Edith’s death. Propaganda posters spawned myths, but their value for recruitment, for justification of war, and for the agitation of the American public was priceless.

For a century these sad lies have been allowed to persist promoted by establishment historians. They are regurgitated now despite the fact that contemporary research has unmasked the fraudulent claims and deliberate obfuscations. We share the concerns of those who have asked what was the real purpose behind Edith Cavell’s ‘martyrdom’? Our next blog will deal with some answers.

[1] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouvernor En Belgique Occupee, p. 39.
[2] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, vol 1. p. 2.
[3] See Edith Cavell: 3 The Constant Threat published on 30/09/2015.
[4] New York Times, 10 July 1917.
[5] Harry Brittain, Pilgrim Partners, Forty Years of British American Fellowship, pp. 110-11.
[6] Charles Tytgat, Nos Fusilles (recruiters et espions), p. 66.
[7] The Times, 16 May, 1919.
[8] Brand Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, vol. 2., p. 49.
[9] Ibid., p. 51.
[10] Amara et Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Occupee, p.124.
[11] Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, vol. 2., p. 55.
[12] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover the Humanitarian, p. 201.
[13] Whitlock, The Letters and Journals, Chapter 6. (7 February 1916.)
[14] Ibid., note 7, chapter 6.
[15] George H Nash, Herbert Hoover the Humanitarian, p. 201.
[16] Richard Norton Taylor, The Guardian, 12 October 2005.
[17] The Times, 20 October 1915, editorial and Page 9.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 October 1915, cc. 1100-1104.
[20] William Thomson Hill, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, The Life Story of the Victim of Germany’s Most Barbarous Crime (With Illustrations).

Edith Cavell 5: The Circus Of Denials

Of the 70 people initially arrested by the German secret police, 35 were tried together in the Senate House in Brussels on 7th and 8th October 1915. The 22 men and 13 women were charged with a variety of related crimes including, conveying soldiers to the enemy, assisting with their safe-keeping, circulating seditious pamphlets and illegally carrying letters and correspondence. [1] It was a closed trial, and neutral observers were not permitted to attend. The five German judges were unnamed, but the central prosecutor, Kriegsgerichtsrat Eduard Stoebar, had allegedly been ‘brought to Brussels especially for this case as he was known as a hanging judge’. [2]

Edith pled guilty to the charge laid against her, namely aiding enemy soldiers to return to their homeland and was not questioned about her other activities. The precise nature of the charge under paragraph 68 of the German military penal code included ‘conducting soldiers to the enemy’ which carried the death sentence, [3] though no-one apparently expected it to go that far. We know that she was a prolific correspondent, and the Germans had in their possession a letter that had been recently delivered to her through the American Legation, but though she was clearly in possession of illegal correspondence, Edith was not accused of illegally sending or receiving mail. What embarrassment would that letter have caused had it been produced in court? Yet no reference was made to it at all. Why? It has been suggested that in her plea of guilty, she took the opportunity ‘to conceal greater and more serious activities, including spying’. [4]

While that is an interesting way of suggesting that Edith somehow set the parameters of the charges she faced, the responsibility for framing the trial lay entirely with the German court. The pertinent question would ask why she was not interrogated about the content of the letters she had sent or the frequency of such correspondence? She was known to be an honest, frank, God-fearing woman who would not have lied under oath. Had she been asked, would Edith have spoken out about the German use of the food imports facilitated through the CRB? Was this what she meant when she told her mother that she ‘could tell you many things, but must save them till later?’ [5] Could the Germans or the Commission for Relief in Belgium have afforded to take that risk?

Edith was not the only non-Belgian, nor even the only English woman on trial. The highest profile female prisoner, Princess Marie de Croy, was born in London, a fact recorded on her charge sheet, and made known to the court. [6] If the purpose of the exercise was to frighten or subdue the population and stop the repatriation of refugee soldiers, then the execution of that noblewomen alone would have sufficed. She was both English and of Belgian aristocracy. Her brother was held to be the leader of the underground movement. But they spared Marie de Croy and executed the English nurse and one unlucky other, Philippe Baucq, the man responsible for La Libre Belgique which had lampooned General von Bissing. The Spanish Ambassador, the King of Spain [7] and even Pope Benedict XV became involved in international pleas for mercy. The remaining members of the network who were condemned to death with Edith had their sentences remitted to imprisonment with hard labour. Only  Edith and Philippe Baucq were summarily shot by firing squad. Members of the CRB, the American Legation and the CSNA would have us believe that they did everything humanly possible to save Edith Cavell. Judge that for yourself, please.

Brand Whitlock was unwell and kept himself out of the action. He did however know about Edith Cavell’s dire circumstances. In his journal, Whitlock casually recorded on 11 October, ‘I don’t remember whether I mentioned her in my notes before of not. She was arrested weeks ago….’ [8] He could not remember whether he had mentioned her before? Amazing. Apart from the convenience of poor recall, Whitlock was admitting prior interest in Edith’s fate, though nothing about her was included in his earlier diaries or journals. However, at the eleventh hour, he sprang into action. If the accounts from Hugh Gibson and Gaston de Leval are to be believed, and these are the sources from which historians have drawn their conclusions, the charade of last minute pleadings went as follows.

Whitlock records that he was brought news of Edith’s death sentence at 9.00 pm on 11 October by his friend and confidante, de Leval who had ‘just heard from the nurses who were keeping him informed…that the sentence of death had been pronounced on Miss Cavell at two o’clock that afternoon and that she was to be shot next morning.’ [9]. In his later account, Belgium Under German Occupation, Whitlock altered the timing to read, ‘the sentence of death had been pronounced on Miss Cavell at half-past four in the afternoon and she was to be shot at two o’clock the next morning.’ [10]

Perhaps he just wanted to heighten the tension. There is a further point. No-one has ever explained how these nurses knew what was happening, yet the most influential men in the land apparently did not. But that is not all. With divine prescience or, more likely, in the expectation of such news, Brand Whitlock, on the advice of Maitre Gaston de Level, had that very afternoon signed a plea for clemency to the Governor General (von Bissing) and a ‘letter of transmittal’ to be given to the head of the German Political Department,  Baron von der Lancken. Whitlock described it as a ‘premonition’ [11] They claimed not to know about the court’s verdict, but had prepared letters of appeal in advance. What amazing foresight.

As the circus gathered, key figures could not be found. General von Bissing was at his chateaux at Trois Fontaine, apparently playing bridge. Hugh Gibson and Gaston de Leval found the Spanish Ambassador, Marquis de Villalobar at Baron Lambert’s house in the company of the most powerful banker in Belgium and the executive president of the CNSA, Emile Francqui. Happily the meal was not greatly ruined since they were already at coffee. All, save Francqui, rushed round to Baron von der Lancken’s empty offices at Rue Lambermont, only to be told he was at ‘Le Bois Sacre’, a seedy variety theatre. [12] Von der Lancken insisted on waiting until the end of the performance. He dismissed claims of Edith’s impending execution as ‘impossible’, but was prevailed upon to phone the prison. He claimed that it was only at that point that he learned Edith was indeed to be executed in the dark of night. Or so the story was written by the Americans. Let us recap here. Von der Lancken claimed not to have known about the decision to shoot Edith Cavell and Philippe Baucq. Von Bissing was at his chateaux playing cards. The most important figure in Belgian politics and finance, Emile Francqui chose to remain at his friend’s house and finish his coffee while the others rushed about like headless chickens. At what point did coincidence collide with convenience and mutate into fiction?

While Hugh Gibson, de Leval and the Marquis de Villalobar appealed for clemency or at worst, the postponement of the death sentence, a different round of buck-passing began. Baron von der Lancken claimed that von Bissing, though Governor-General, had no power to over-rule the new Military Governor, General von Sauberzweig, on matters decided by a military court, and it was up to him to grant a stay of execution. Von Sauberzweig refused. He had been appointed only days before, and his temporary stay in Brussels raises questions which will be considered in a future blog. Interestingly he later became quarter-master for the German army, which suggests that von Sauberzweig had more than a passing interest in the work of the CRB.

The token appeals for clemency were dismissed about midnight and, according to Hugh Gibson, two hours later Edith Cavell faced the firing squad. [13] The phrase ‘you couldn’t make it up’ summarises Gibson’s account. Edith was executed at dawn on 12 October 1915, in the company of another hero, Philippe Baucq. In her last hours with the British chaplain, the Reverend H Stirling Gahan, she calmly reflected: ‘I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.’ [14] She died as she lived, a heroine and a patriot … and a key member of a successful underground network working against the German invaders.

Spies were regularly shot and it was not unknown for women spies to suffer the same fate. The French authorities had executed Marguerite Schmidt and Ottillie Voss for spying in March and in May 1915, [15] but Edith Cavell had not been charged with espionage. Though she was later referred to as the ‘Spy Cavell’ by the German authorities, no-one appeared to have expected that the military court would pass the death sentence even though warnings about the consequences of harbouring enemy soldiers had been widely posted across Brussels. Spies were shot, yes; smuggling soldiers across the border was cause for imprisonment. Not this time.

The German Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmerman, issued a formal press release from Berlin about Edith Cavell’s execution. It stated: ‘no war court in the world could have given any other verdict, for it was not concerned with a single emotional need of one person, but a well thought out plot, with many far-reaching ramifications, which for nine months succeeded in doing valuable service to our enemies to the great detriment of our armies.’ [16]

This claim was perfectly fair. He added that her execution was regrettable but necessary and just, because as a result of the underground activities, ‘countless Belgian, French and English soldiers are again fighting in the ranks of the allies’ thanks to the group ‘whose head was the Cavell woman.’ [17] The German authorities in Belgium knew that Edith Cavell was not in charge of the network. Von Bissing, wrote a letter to his cousin on 23 October 1915 in which he categorically stated that ‘the brother of the princess (Reginald de Croy) was the leader of the organisation and, if arrested, would undoubtedly have been condemned to death.’ [18] So the Germans knew that Edith Cavell was directly involved but not the leader of the organisation. Did the German Under-Secretary lie, or was he not made party to all the facts?

Governor General von Bissing was not interested in clemency. Marie de Croy thought that she saw him sitting amongst other officers in the Royal Box in the Senate House during the first day of the trial, ‘but later it was announced that he was out of Brussels at the time’ [19] What a strange denial. Why would the German authorities need to distance the General from the trial? Unless of course his complicity goes far deeper than historians have recorded. And of what were they so scared that they sentenced Edith to death in camera, and carried out the sentence almost immediately? These are questions on which we should ponder, for the consequence of Edith Cavell’s execution was far reaching. It stirred violent emotion and the cycle of blame was rapidly twisted into a whirlwind of propaganda, lies, and contempt for Germany, much of which is being repeated as truth in the current centenary commemorations.

Now, as then, there is a darker purpose. Edith’s death deflected attention away from the CRB and its role in feeding the German army. A role which Belgian historians seem determined to suppress.

[1] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 325.
[2] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 176.
[3] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, Vol. 2, p. 11.
[4] Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage – The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavel, p. 29.
[5] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 249.
[6] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 179.
[7] Ibid., p.190.
[8] Brand Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 11 October, 1915. http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bw05.html
[9] Ibid.
[10] Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, vol. 2., p 15.
archive.org/stream/belgiumundergerm02whit#page/68/mode/2up/search/edith+cavell
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p 19.
[13] Hugh Gibson, ‘A Journal from our Legation in Belgium’.
[14] firstworldwar.com Primary Documents – The Rev H. Stirling Gahan on the execution of Edith Cavell. Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923.
[15] Exchange Telegraph, Paris, November 2, 1915.
[16] firstworldwar.com- Primary Documents-Alfred Zimmern on the execution of Edith Cavell
[17] Ibid.
[18] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 165.
[19] Ibid., p. 176.

Edith Cavell 4: The Constant Lies

Edith Cavell was arrested in her office at the Berkendael Institute in Brussels on Thursday 5 August 1915. [1]

In his self-serving memoirs, Hugh Gibson, first secretary to the American Legation in Brussels and close friend of Herbert Hoover, claimed that Edith was ‘quietly arrested’ and that ‘it was some time’ before the news reached the Legation. [2] That is simply untrue. Edith was escorted from her office by Otto Mayer, head of the German Secret Police, and her distraught nursing staff witnessed the deed. She had expected to be arrested. Her associates in the underground network, Louise Thuliez and Philippe Baucq, had been taken into custody on Saturday 31 July and news of their fate spread fast. Realising that the whole network had been compromised, Reginald de Croy rushed to Brussels to warn Edith, and other members of the group to destroy all evidence. This was no quiet affair. For a start, Edith was just one of seventy initially imprisoned of whom thirty-five were charged with harbouring soldiers and conducting them back to the enemy. [3] Marie de Croy’s arrest followed soon afterwards, but to the chagrin of the German authorities her brother Reginald, Prince de Croy, escaped their clutches. To claim that the arrest and imprisonment of such distinguished people went unnoticed by members of the CRB is utterly ridiculous.

Edith was first held in a communal women’s cell in Brussel’s main police station at the Kommandantur, opposite the Royal Park, and held there for two days until she was transferred across the city to the harsher quarters of  St Gilles prison. Hugh Gibson’s claim that he did not know about Edith Cavell’s arrest becomes even more preposterous when weighed against the fact that she was initially incarcerated barely one street away from Hoover’s headquarters. At the end of December 1914, Herbert Hoover had moved his commission’s offices from 48, Rue de Naples to take possession of three floors of the magnificent Societe Generale building at 66, Rues de Colonies. [4] It had formerly served as the headquarters of the Banque Belge pour L’ Etranger and comprised a glorious sweep of imperial grandeur on the hill leading to the Kommandantur. They were virtually neighbours, barely 200 yards apart.

From the very beginning, everyone officially associated with the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) denied knowledge of what was happening. Given that the de Croy’s network had close ties to the Americans, [5] that when arrested, Edith had in her possession a letter sent through the American Legation [6] and the general stir caused by the flurry of arrests, it is simply incredible that Hugh Gibson and his colleagues did not know what was happening around them. But that was their claim; a claim accepted without demur by the British government. It formed the basis of their justification for being unable to take steps with sufficient speed to save Edith Cavell.

What unfolded was no less that a macabre pantomime in which all of the key players who might have influenced the Germans managed to delay their intervention sufficiently long enough to ensure that Edith could not be saved from her fate. The American Legation had accepted international responsibility for all British citizens in Belgium after the German occupation and thus had a legal duty of care for Edith Cavell. The senior diplomat responsible for her safety, and head of the American Legation, Brand Whitlock, ‘was ill in his bed at this time’. [7] His role was assumed by Hoover’s loyal agent at the Legation, the aforementioned Hugh Gibson. He had been a member of the CRB in Brussels from October 1914.

A formal letter from Maitre Gaston de Leval, the Belgian legal advisor who had worked for the Americans for many years, was sent to Brand Whitlock, the chief of the United States Legation, on 12 October 1915, the day Edith was executed. It claimed: ‘As soon as the Legation received an intimation that Miss Cavell was arrested, your letter of August 31st was sent to Baron von der Lancken’ [8] (who was in charge of German political department in Brussels.) De Leval clearly felt it necessary to send a formal letter to his friend and employer, Whitlock, to have it appear on the record that the American legation did not hear of Edith’s arrest until more than three weeks after the event. The immediate American reaction to her execution was to cover their own backs.  The letter served to excuse, retrospectively, their studied inaction.

Others, on the other hand, immediately tried to have Edith released. The loyal nurses who witnessed her arrest rushed to the Kommandantur but were subjected to ridicule by the guards. On 10 August they learned that Edith had been transferred to the prison at St Gilles and  turned to the one friend  ‘in whom we could confide or from whom we could ask information’, Maitre van Alteren. He was the lawyer who represented the governors of the Nursing School and he agreed to plead her cause with the military authorities. Van Alteren was promptly arrested and imprisoned. [9] The medical confraternity in Brussels knew of Edith’s arrest, as did the governors of the Nursing School, but de Leval alleged that the American Legation knew nothing  for almost a month.

Consider the implication of the timing of these events. Edith Cavell had been arrested on 5 August in plain daylight, yet the Legation, itself fully aware of the de Croy network, claimed not to have known for 26 days. This is not just unlikely, it is impossible. Networks by their very essence, connect, and breaks to the connection become immediately apparent. Edith’s own family in England were notified by a Dutch source that she had been imprisoned. They even knew that the date of her arrest was 5 August. Having heard no more than that, her brother-in-law, Dr Longworth Wainwright wrote directly to Sir Edward Grey at the foreign office on 24 August. The British Foreign Secretary, Grey, formally asked Walter Page, the American Ambassador in London to investigate what had happened in Brussels. [10] Page cabled Brand Whitlock on 27 August, yet the official record later released by the Foreign Office and published in great detail in The Times [11] would have us believe that it was 31 August before the American legation knew about the arrest and contacted the German authorities. Hugh Gibson’s published journal clearly claimed that that was the case. Again, it was an outrageous lie.

It beggars belief that it took the Legation a further ten days before their lawyer, Maitre de Leval, officially requested permission to visit Edith Cavell in prison. Two days later, according to him, the German authorities refused. [12] Edith’s legal representation was an orchestrated farce. De Leval neither met with her nor represented her, though ‘history’ was to claim otherwise. As ever, when the Secret Elite bury their involvement, facts and circumstances become mired in confusion. So it was with Edith’s legal representation.  While it was the duty of the American Legation to represent  British citizens in Belgium who might be in trouble, for some unfathomable reason in Edith’s case that duty was assumed by Emile Francqui’s Comite Nationale de Secours et Alimentation (CNSA). One of its senior committee members, Eugene Hanssens, agreed to defend her. [13]

However, since he was a constitutional lawyer, Hanssens had no accreditation to plead before a military tribunal. He in turn chose as his substitute, Thomas Braun of the CNSA. [14] Braun hailed from a distinguished legal family and his father, himself an eminent lawyer, had been appointed to represent Princess Marie de Croy. The crucial point to note is that Hanssens and  Braun were senior members of the CNSA and can be identified in the Belgian war-time records of the Comite National in session.  [15] Despite the claims of ignorance made by the Americans and their paid counsellor, the men from the CNSA with whom they met on a regular, often daily basis, had put together a legal team to represent the de Croy / Cavell network. The men with whom they shared responsibility for the daily disbursement of foodstuffs had stepped forward to protect the captive network … including Edith Cavell.

Matters became mystifyingly convoluted. According to the documents and letters released by Brand Whitlock, when the Legation wrote to Baron von der Lancken for clarification about Edith Cavell on 31 August, [16] it was informed that the legal representation for Miss Edith Cavell was in the hands of Advocate Braun, who ‘has already been in touch with the competent German authorities’. This official reply from von der Lancken was written on 12 September, [17] but there was a fatal and worrying flaw to his claim. ‘Advocate’ Braun had previously been removed from the case. Braun had received a letter from the German government of occupation dated 1 September, 1915 accusing him of improper behaviour in defaming them in court, being incapable of objectivity and of using his position to his own political advantage. [18] As of 1 September, Thomas Braun was banned from representing anyone, by order of the German Military. Yet Whitlock could produce a letter from von der Lancken dated ten days later, which claimed that Edith’s case was being represented by Braun, her appointed lawyer. Either one or both were lying.

Thus at a stroke, in a crucial twenty-four hour period between 31 August and 1 September, Edith Cavell was cut off from any representation associated directly with the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Once the American Legation was obliged to admit that they knew about Edith’s arrest, the Germans banned Thomas Braun from the case. Was this an act of collusion? These had been trying months for Hoover. His negotiations with London and Berlin to keep the funds flowing and the food pouring into Rotterdam, despite the  mounting allegations in Britain that the Germans were greatly benefitting from it, had been fraught with dangerous allegations in newspapers. We have already established Edith’s links to both the press and the War Office in London. Furthermore, the threats  she made in her letters that she had damning information which would one day be made public [19] would have caused great concern, assuming that more than just her family read her mail. We have to ask whether the timing was chance or were the Germans asked to extricate the CRB /CNSA from any responsibility for Edith’s fate? Suddenly, no-one even loosely associated with Herbert Hoover was directly involved in attempting to save her.

Next in line for this poisoned chalice was an established member of the Brussels’ Bar, Maitre Sadi Kirschen, who was approached by both Hanssens and Braun on 7 September. [20.] Kristen was not involved with the CNSA. Sadi Kirschen wrote to ask Edith if she would accept him as her defence replacement, but his letter never reached her. Furthermore, the Germans decided to deny Maitre Kirschen access to Edith immediately before the trial [21] and he was not given sight of the prosecution’s evidence. Sadi Kirschen discussed the case with his legal colleagues, and the unanimous opinion was that the worst she might expect was five or so years in prison. [22]

In his later report, which was no better than a litany of excuses, Gaston de Leval made great play of his willingness to attend the trial in person and of being advised not to do so by Mr Kirschen lest the Germans be affronted by his presence.  Apparently de Leval’s attendance might have prejudiced Edith’s case! What a bizarre excuse. Every sentence in de Leval’s Report was written to absolve himself, the Americans and key figures of the CRB from responsibility or complicity. [23]

Why did the Americans go to such lengths to protect themselves but not Edith? Their constant denials begin to grate. By wrapping themselves around their own supposedly legal statement which was rapidly published by the British government, repeated in Gibson’s diary and apparently ‘authenticated’ by Brand Whitlock, these men wrote their own version of history; a version that goes uncontested, even although it is ridiculous. Their story became even more ridiculous.

In Brand Whitlock’s second volume about his years in Belgium, written in 1919, he opened his account of Edith Cavell’s tragic betrayal with the following words: ‘Early in August Brussels had heard, and all Belgium – or at least all that part of Belgium that lived in chateaux – had heard that Princess Marie de Croy and the Countess of Belleville had been arrested.’ [24] While concentrating on the Belgian noblewomen, he mentioned ‘Mademoiselle Thuliez, and certain others’ and claimed that the Princess did not know what became of the allied soldiers they were protecting ‘after they reached Brussels.’ Then with carefully chosen words, he stated: ‘One day in August it was learned at the Legation that an English nurse named Edith Cavell had been arrested.’ [25] To coin a phrase, this was utter drivel, a blatant attempt to misrepresent events to cover his back.

By relegating his knowledge of her predicament until ‘One day in August’ Whitlock sought to alter history so that he could acknowledge that ‘all Belgium’ knew about the aristocrats and the demise of the underground network, yet distance himself from the responsibility he held for Edith Cavell. That it was the twenty-seventh day apparently slipped his mind. The lies simply got ever more ridiculous. His bold claim that Marie de Croy knew nothing about the fate of these soldiers once they reached Brussels is absurd. Princess Marie de Croy wrote a precisely detailed book when she returned from captivity, in which she detailed the underground work overseen by her brother Reginald.  This included her visit to Edith and and his admiration for her dedication. [26] Recent evidence doggedly researched by Hugo Lueders and his associate in Brussels has unearthed proof that Edith Cavell and Marie de Croy met together in Ghent in April 1915 at La Ville D’ Audenarde. Edith Cavell stayed several times at the guest-house, known to be an important hub for members of the Belgian and French resistance movements as well as profiteers associated with the relief movement. [27] Marie knew what she was talking about.

Whitlock didn’t  …

Marie de Croy’s autobiographical account of the trial added yet another twist to the tale. She was represented by Alexander Braun whose services had been employed by her many influential friends in Brussels, but she specifically identified his son, Thomas Braun as part of the defence team for all the accused.  He led the final defence summary  ‘with a fine appeal’  pleading that the Belgian defendants had been faced with the choice between helping their countrymen or denouncing them. [28] Thus Thomas had been removed from representing Edith, but retained as a leading player in the defence team. This astounding piece of evidence lends credence to the fact that the CRB wanted Edith’s defence distanced from their associates.

Let this blog end on a very worrying note. Maitre Gaston Leval’s report on the Execution of Edith Cavell is currently being presented on the net by firstworldwar.com as a Primary Document for readers, schools and universities. It is little more than a bundle of misleading, self-serving assertions that do not stand up to scrutiny.  It is part of the propaganda to which the British government was happy to accede in 1915. One hundred years later, it is still presented as the truth.

[1] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 271.
[2] Project Gutenberg, A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium, by Hugh Gibson, The Case of Miss Edith Cavell. http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/legation/Gibson8.htm
[3] First World War Primary Documents, Maitre Gaston de Leval on the Execution of Edith Cavell  http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_deleval.htm
[4] Tracey Kittredge, The history of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, p. 97.
[5] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, pp. 173-4.
[6] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 271.
[7] Princess Marie de Croy, War Memories, p.192. https://archive.org/details/warmemories00croyuoft
[8] Charles F Horne, Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed., National Alumni, 1923. firstworldwar.com – Primary Documents – Maitre G. de Level on the Execution of Edith Cavell.
[9] Jacqueline Van Til, With Edith Cavell in Belgium, pp.125-131. https://archive.org/details/withedithcavelli00vant%5D
[10] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 313.
[11] The Times, Friday 22 October 1915, p. 9.
[12] First World War.com – Primary Documents – Hugh Gibson on the Execution of Edith Cavell
[13] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover, Under Two Flags, p. 333.
[14] Charles Tytgat, Nos Fusilles (raconteurs et espions) p. 67. http://www.bel-memorial.org
[15] La Belgique et la guerre. Georges Rancy Edition Henri Bertels 1927 http//www.1914-1918.be/photo.php?image=photos2/president hoover/president hoover 006.jpg
[16] Brand Whitlock to von Der Lancken, 31 August 1915 as quoted in Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under the German Occupation vol. 2, p. 4.
[17] Baron von Der Lancken to Mr Whitlock, 12 September, 1915 as quoted in Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under the German Occupation Vol. 2, p. 5.
[18]  Tytgat, Nos Fusilles, pp. 68-69
[19] See previous blog: Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Correspondent.
[20] Sadi Kirschen,  Devant les Conseils de Guerre Allemands, p.54.
[21] ibid., p. 136.
[22] Kirschen, Devant les Conseils de Guerre Allemands, p.55.
[23] firstworldwar.com – Primary Documents, Maitre G. de Leval on the execution of Edith Cavell, 12 October 1915.
[24] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, vol. 2, p. 2. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_deleval.htm
[25] Ibid., p. 3.
[26]  Marie de Croy, War Memories, pp. 127-8. https://archive.org/details/warmemories00croyuoft
[27] Antoine Redier, La Guerre des Femmes, Histoire de Louise de Bettignes et de ses compagnes, p. 30.
[28] Ibid., p. 186.

Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Threat

The German secret police became increasingly suspicious of the de Croy organisation and they in turn became aware of this. As 1915 wore on, it was evident that the police were watching them and their safe houses. In April of that year they met secretly in Ghent. Both Marie de Croy and Edith Cavell suffered the indignity of having their homes searched and realised the great danger they were facing. Marie wanted to close down the network, but Edith would not take her advice, insisting that ‘if one of these men got caught and shot, it would be our fault’. [1] A compromise was agreed whereby no more allied soldiers would be sent to her clinic, but Edith would continue to organise and direct the guides who ran the escape routes to Holland. It was too late.

Inevitably, traps were set and, betrayed by a collaborator, Gaston Quien, most of the members of the network were apprehended. In all, the secret police arrested 70 suspects in a wide sweep around Brussels and the surrounding area. [2] The first to be apprehended were Phillipe Baucq and Louise Thuliez.  Baucq was an architect and committed patriot who printed and disseminated free newspapers which carried anti-German stories. His clandestine news sheet, La Libre Belgique, incensed the German Governor-General with its sarcasm and jibes. [3] Indeed von Bissing took personal umbrage at being lampooned. [4] Louise Thuliez , a school teacher, was one of the principal guides who ferried lost soldiers across Belgium to safety in Holland.

Thuliez was originally condemned to death, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. On return from captivity in Germany in 1918 she penned a long report on what she termed ‘The Cavell Organisation’ in which she admitted that, while working with Edith Cavell, she had actively sought out military intelligence about a supply dump at Cambrai in German occupied territory in north east France. [5] This evidence clearly indicated that Edith was operating inside a Belgian spy ring. But it ran deeper. Matron Cavell ‘was closely connected to Britain’s intelligence services’. [6]

Henry Baron, a British agent in France, was ‘working with the Cavell Organisation’. [7] When he later learned that his former contact, Louise Thuliez, was about to publish a booklet ‘on the Cavell affair’, Baron reported his fears to British Intelligence. Her revelation not only implicated Edith Cavell in spying but also ‘speaks about the participation of members of the agency in the Cambria spy affair’. [8] Such explosive information had to be suppressed. Knowing that proof of Edith’s involvement in espionage would blow apart the official British narrative, publication was forbidden. Baron was instructed that the British military authorities considered it ‘highly undesirable that anything that implicated Edith Cavell in ‘matters of espionage’ should be published until after the Versailles Treaty had been finalised. [9] It never was.

Yet another source of incriminating evidence was recently unearthed from private archives in the Royal Museum of the Army and History of War in Brussels. [10] Herman Capiau was part of the de Croy / Cavell underground network in 1915, and like Louise Thuliez was arrested, tried and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to 15 years hard labour. [11]

Before his arrest, Capiau wrote a secret report in which he identified another agent linked to the underground network’s spying activities and yet again, Edith Cavell knew and approved. He wrote: ‘ … In agreement with Miss Cavell and Mademoiselle Thuliez, I sent the French government, through the intelligence agent Paul Godefroy, a request for material assistance for large-scale organisation of an evacuation service for young French recruits. …’ So not only were British intelligence services supporting Edith’s work in Brussels, but the French government was directly approached for support and aid. This was likely to be financial since repatriation was an expensive business. Although the majority of Belgian citizens willingly helped the underground network without personal gain, some looked for payment. [12]

But Capiau’s report revealed that the network’s activities went beyond helping stranded soldiers to escape: ‘… whenever it was possible to send interesting intelligence on military operations, this information was forwarded to the English intelligence service punctually and rapidly’. [13] Spying was not an occasional activity. Capiau was clearly admitting that at every opportunity, information about German military activity was passed to British Intelligence, ‘punctually and rapidly’. By May 1915,  precise information on trench formations, vehicle and troop movements, arms caches and aircraft manoeuvres around Valenciennes was sewn into the clothes of soldiers who were being repatriated. [14]

Herman Capiau cited Paul Godefroy as his link with the secret services, but unfortunately Godefroy died in the Rheinbach prison in 1916. [15] After the war the prison was occupied temporarily by British military units and his files disappeared. How often is the truth denied through such action? Herman Capiau also left a handwritten note, now in the archives of the Royal Museum of the Army and History of War in Brussels under the title, ‘L’Affaire Cavell’ which names Edith, Louise Thuliez, Paul Godefroy and himself as members of the ‘organisation’ with a further list of names attached. [16] In addition to its recognised work on behalf of displaced soldiers this was a clandestine organisation which was spying on Germany.

Capiau’s lists also placed Edith as the prime link in the Brussels hub of the network whose ‘grand chef’, literally ‘big chief’ was Dr Bull, War Office. (see above) Doctor Tellemache (or Telemachus) Bull was, according to the Whitlock family archives, King Albert’s personal  dentist, and a relation by marriage to Brand Whitlock. [17] He appears to have remained  inexplicably airbrushed from the Edith Cavell story until relatively recently, when a BBC Radio 4 programme, Secrets and Spies  [18] identified Bull as a British Secret Service operator who ran a number of networks from Belgium. He was arrested by the German secret police, charged firstly with treason and tried in Antwerp on May 19, 1916, but received an extremely light sentence of 3 months imprisonment and a five thousand mark fine. [19] No matter how distant, his family connections with the Whitlocks seems remarkably coincident. The head of the American Legation was preparing to throw a party for Doctor Bull to celebrate his release in July when he discovered that Bull was to face a second trial directly related to his involvement with Edith Cavell. [20] This took place on 16 October 1916 with a representative from the American legation present. Bull and sixteen others were charged with conspiring to help Edith Cavell in ‘aiding young men to cross the frontier’, and of supplying her with funds to assist them. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment. [21]

Apart from any further and as yet unknown connections, Bull’s direct involvement means that Edith’s activities were part of an ongoing War Office and Secret Service clandestine operation. Edith Cavell was deeply involved in more than nursing the wounded and the Brussels she wrote home about must have been on a planet far distant from that portrayed by Herbert Hoover.

The very survival of Hoover’s CRB was at risk in the first quarter of 1915. Continued support was threatened by the bad press it was receiving in Britain and the awkward questions raised in the House of Commons about the foodstuff ‘taken’ by the German army. Herbert Hoover was certainly suspicious that his organisation was being undermined by individuals inside Belgium. In a letter to Brand Whitlock dated 6 March 1915, he complained that he had been severely grilled about the amount of food which was requisitioned by the German army of occupation and was alarmed that the London government intended to follow up claims to that effect which had originated in Belgium. He berated the ‘constant lying reports which appear in the English press with regard to our foodstuffs being taken by the Germans or devoted to their requisitions in the operation zone …’ [22]

Who was this coming from? Who in Belgium had the contacts and confidence to make such damning allegations? Who would be so morally outraged that, if the government appeared to be doing nothing, they could write directly to their contacts in the British press? These were not ‘constant lying reports’, but the products of good intelligence.

Hoover was himself a consummate liar and master of press manipulation. Lies were his stock-in-trade. The CRB’s propaganda campaigns were immediately stepped up. A special meeting in the Carnegie Hall in New York, called in support of the Allies by American fund-raisers, heard a message from Brand Whitlock stating: ‘Supply of food now in Belgium is sufficient only to last through this month, and that after April 1st, the need of food and clothing would be as pressing as ever, and that the entire Belgian population must continue to depend for subsistence on the generosity of the American People’. [23]

The entire Belgian population? What nonsense; but a terrific sound-bite.

Yet the Nursing Mirror reported in April 1915 that in Edith Cavell’s Brussels, the cafes were open and cigars were still being smoked. [24] Some commentators have claimed that Cavell’s article exposed the fact that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was feeding the German army. This is not so. Having carefully checked her published report in the Royal College of Nursing in Edinburgh, we can categorically state that no mention is made of the CRB. Not a word. Nothing about starving children. How strange is that in itself? Please remember that in our last blog we explained that when the editor of the Nursing Mirror received the correspondence from Edith Cavell, it had been opened and resealed. Which brings us back to the question of what other information was originally included?

What Cavell’s article did demonstrate was at complete odds with Hoover’s alarmist reports.

Can you imagine how angry the vested interests in the CRB were when they were made aware of this? The woman was dangerous. What would she write next? Given her intelligence contacts all over Belgium, what else did she know? What else had she already reported? If the network was indeed the ‘Cavell Organisation’, as Herman Capiau suggested, rather than the more aristocratic ‘de Croy organisation’, then Edith’s role must have been more proactive. To whom was she reporting?

In June 1915, Hoover left the comfort of his London home to go to Belgium in person to meet with Baron von der Lanken, head of the German political department in Brussels, and a key German figure in the international liaison of the CRB. It is important to remember that the leading members of the CRB and the Belgian Comite National de Secours and Alimentation (CNSA) moved naturally within the highest circles of the German administration in Belgium. Hoover was there to negotiate the fate of the coming harvest, a role he assumed, though the CNSA strongly objected to his presence. [25] He was well aware that London wanted an end to the press stories about German abuse of the relief organisation. So too did the Germans. Their war effort had become dependant on the food supplies they accessed through Belgium. 

In view of the strong links between the underground network for which Edith worked and its direct connections with the War Office, the Foreign Office and British intelligence that were facilitated by the de Croys, Edith was in a prime position to provide regular information to London. We know she wrote directly to the Nursing Mirror, and to the editor of The Times, [26], but given the evidence of Edith’s complicity in espionage, the British Secret Service would have known that and much more. She would have reported to them. Such knowledge would also be the concern of the CRB and the American Legation, for those were prime conduits for the transfer of information to London. Had Edith become a potentially dangerous thorn in the side of the CRB and the Secret Elite? Matron Cavell was a well-known professional figure who carried weight in the British press. Her word could poison their whole venture. She was a constant threat.

And the American, Belgian, British and German authorities knew it.

[1] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 127.

[2] Brand Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, a personal narrative, vol.2, p. 46.

[3] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 199.

[4] La Libre Belgique, issue 30, June 1915.

[5] Phil Tomaselli, BBC History Magazine, September 2002, p. 6.

[6] Public Records Office papers released in 2001-2 and quoted in the above.

[7] Tomaselli, BBC History Magazine, September 2002, p. 6.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Our thanks here to our colleague in Belgium,  Hugo Lueders,  who shared his personal research with us. Hugo does sterling work on centenarynews.com https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close

[11] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 192.

[12] Ibid., p. 172.

[13] Emmanuel Debruyne and Jehanne Paternostre, “La résistance au quotidien 1914-1918, Témoignages inédites”, Racine, Brussels, 2009: ‘Trois échelons vers la Hollande’, pp. 45-51 (here: page 51) as cited by Hugo Leuders, see below.

[14] Dame Stella Rimington, BBC Radio 4, Secrets and Spies, broadcast on 15/09/2015.

[15] Hugo Lueders, Edith’s Wonderland, footnote 35 p. 15. https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close

[16] Undated hand-written note by Capiau, private archives Herman Capiau, Centre de documentation, Musée Royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire militaire, Brussels.

[17] See relevant page from website below. whitlockfamilyassociation.com.s3amazonaws.com/sources/newspapers/NP0261.pdf

[18]Dame Stella Rimington, BBC Radio 4, Secrets and Spies, broadcast on 15/09/2015.

[19] Brand Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, a personal narrative, vol.2, pp. 138-9.

[20] Ibid., p. 183.

[21] Ibid., pp. 225-6.

 [22] Hoover to Whitlock, 6 March 1916, Document 33, Gay and Fisher, The Public Relations of the Commission for Belgian Relief, p. 52. http://www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/CRB/CRB1-TC.htm

[23] New York Times, 18 March, 1915.

[24] Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal, vol. XXI no. 526, p. 64.

[25] George H Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, The Great Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 136.

[26] The Times, 15 August 1914, p. 8.