Concluding Thoughts And A Challenge

So many questions remain unanswered. You will have your own. Do not give up on them. An issue which needs considerable examination is Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” With hindsight it ranks as one of the greatest mirage’s of all time, for it never was anything more than a clever deception, the lure which the Kaiser and his advisors swallowed. They made the devastating mistake of trusting the American government. What were they thinking? The Germans knew about Britain and France’s dependence on America, of the blatant lies which sank the Lusitania, and every other scandal, yet they were apparently willing to put their faith in Woodrow Wilson. Certainly the Americans had kept them fed through the abuses of the Belgian Relief program, and the Rockefeller/Rothschild axis ensured that their oil supply was not interrupted, but once the United States joined the war against Germany, surely the blinkers should have fallen?

But desperate times demanded desperate action. The promise of a just peace was too powerful for the Kaiser’s government to ignore. The German offensive from March to June 1918 is said to have pushed the allied armies on the Western Front closer to disaster than at any time since the first battle of the Marne in 1914 [1] but this last throw of Ludendorff’s dice was frustrated by “the enormous acceleration of the arrival of American troops.” [2] Like exhausted prize fighters who had fought to a standstill, the Allies and Germany stood in their corners feigning a readiness for the next round. But while Britain and France had almost limitless reserves on hand from America, Germany was truly spent. Wilson’s Fourteen Points appeared as the basis for a just and honourable settlement. It was a triumph of deceit over justice.

Truth is that Germany had sought a just peace many times since December 1914. The Allies simply did not want to know in 1915, 1916 and 1917. In fact, they did not want to know in 1918. There is ample evidence that preparations for war on the Western Front in 1919 and 1920 was discussed and anticipated by the British War Cabinet. The American presence changed every dynamic. Time was on the Allied side.

The failure of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to gain international support sucked the last breath of hope from the German leaders. Wilson had no power to stop his proposals being picked apart at Versailles, and returned to America a sick and disillusioned man. He had fulfilled his mission for the Elites by revoking his election stance of 1916 and bring- ing America into the war. He had confused the German leadership with his “idealism” and upset his political enemies in America by proposing a League of Nations [3] which was nominally adopted in the eventual Treaty of Versailles. Though the troubled, one might say dysfunctional, history of the League of Nations extends beyond our timescale, its very proposal caused the U.S. Congress to twice reject the Versailles Peace Treaty. [4] A cross section of American Senators were so determined to have no truck with Wilson’s League of Nations that they declared the Treaty ‘dead to stay dead’. [5] These words might well have served as an epitaph for Wilson’s political career. Having surrendered a devastating stroke in October 1919, his candidacy for a third term in office was rejected by the Democratic Party.

What too of Russia? When one considers the sacrifices made by the Russian people in their war against Germany, their absence at Versailles ought to have caused some embarrassment. For three long years Russia had battled the German and Austrians, inflicting great losses but absorbing even more. Undoubtedly the Russian front was critical. Without it Paris would have fallen in August 1914. [6] The long-standing promise that Russia would annex Constantinople and the Straits once Germany was destroyed was effectively and conveniently annulled when the Bolshevik government made peace with Germany in 1918. Lloyd George raised the hitherto unasked question of Russian involvement in the peace process in January 1919, [7] but there was no coherent or consistent agreement from a divided Supreme Council. Alarming tales circulating in Paris of the barbaric Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks, were dismissed as exaggeration by Lloyd George. [8] Indeed. The British prime minister was a master at dissembling. Basically he lied as and when necessary and his Memoirs are a masterclass in self-promotion. The all-embracing role of the British and American bankers was another factor which was not to be mentioned. What mattered in the end was that Constantinople remained outside Russian control and Russia no longer threatened Persia, India or a redrawn map of the Middle East.

History is not a just series of eras or neatly constructed timelines with-in which commentators try to explain events or construct their own given narrative. History lives and breathes and never stands still. It is our past and determines much of our future. Events, decisions and consequences ensure that it will always remain a fascinating basis through which we better understand where we currently are and how we got here. But the historical record is incomplete. It has been tampered with, remastered and abused by those with much to hide. Where there are gaps, suspect the motivation.

Do not fall prey to the subtle weasel words of those who throw their hands in the air and claim that our narrative cannot be entirely proved because the evidence is no longer available. We know how these people work. Their operative DNA is now so transparent that any knowledgeable person will dismiss their protestations on the volume of circumstantial evidence alone. But they hide behind the pejorative cry of “conspiracy theory,” a convenience which protects the guilty. Year by year, even as we worked on this book, acknowledgements have been quietly conceded about Edith Cavell’s spy ring, on the RMS Lusitania’s real cargo manifest, of the gross over-exaggerations of the Bryce Committee. Yet the great lies persist and are regurgitated in the mainstream media.

Our books cover a period between 1890-1919 because within that timescale a group of elite politicians, influential power-brokers, rich financiers, determined opinion-moulders and their academic entourage made a concerted move to create a new world order under their control. In 1890 it was driven by upper-class English values and British domination of world trade, politics and influence. By 1919 clearer bonds between the Anglo-American Establishment, and the exhausting, deliberately pro-longed war, had moved the new world order towards an Atlantic Alliance and the enduring ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States.

And we do not accept that 1918 should be recognised as the year in which the war ended. We have clearly demonstrated in previous blogs that the fighting stopped but the economic war continued. It is essential that everyone understands that even 1919 was not an end-point. There was no sense of “job done.” Indeed not. What happened in 1919 was just another stepping stone, a building block towards a new order in the world. National boundaries changed in many parts of Europe.

New territorial responsibilities (the talk was of Mandates) were allocated to the victors. New countries were shaped. Economic interests were, as ever, to the fore. Old disputes re-emerged around lucrative parts of the dismembered Ottoman Empire. Germany had been defeated, humiliated and abused, but Germany survived. The politicians who disgraced humanity by claiming that the world war had saved civilisation escaped the scrutiny of justice. They wrote their memoirs, accepted their rewards, and lived well on the profits that ensued. Above them, the controllers of real power did not break step. They simply marched unchallenged along their chosen route.

If you feel that you now have a keener sense of who these people were and are, engage in Quigley’s challenge. He stated that ‘the evidence of their existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look.’ [9] They remain behind the scenes, influencing politicians and policy, buying public opinion, rewarding their own, falsifying media reports and protecting themselves from public scrutiny. History will continue to be controlled by them for as long as criticism can be ignored. You can shake this comfortable establishment set-up by continuing to question official versions and never allowing yourself to be easily satisfied with so-called truth.

Everything that we have described is a series of building blocks. The Secret Elite has metamorphosed into a much more modern phenomenon with the same objective – to be that new world order. The evidence of their existence is not hard to find.

1. Report of the Committee of Prime Ministers. Preliminary Draft. appended to the minutes for the Imperial War Cabinet 32B, 16 August 1918. p. 167.
2. Ibid.
3. The League of Nations was an international organization, created in 1920 as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points for a just peace in Europe, Congress refused to endorse the proposal.
4. Firstly on 19 November 1919, then again on 19 March 1920.
5. New York Times, 20 March 1920.
6. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed the World, p. 71.
7. FRUS, vol. 3 pp. 581-4.
8. National Archives, CAB 29/ 28.
9. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp ix-x.

War Without End 9: Clearing Up Before Clearing Out

One final task was required before these elites could safely move forward. They had to ensure that all the evidence of their complicity in deliberately starting the war in 1914 and prolonging it beyond 1915, was removed. The consequences had been horrendous but the blame had to be diverted elsewhere. The truth had to be buried. This task fell to Herbert Hoover, a trusted placement, who also had a proprietary interest in hiding his own fraudulent involvement in the Commission for Relief in Belgium. (see blogs on Belgian Relief) 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, was called to Paris to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence pertaining to the war and its true origins, from countries across Europe and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability.

Had Adams been genuine, or cared about protecting the original sources so precious to academic historians, he would have had no need for confidentiality. Indeed at the start of his secret mission he appeared to recognise that he had been given a wonderful opportunity to capture a unique experience for future researchers. Adams resolved to keep a diary, detailing the names of those whom he met and what they brought with them, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [1] 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 stolen or illegally procured 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 were left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue of the treasures he had syphoned off, on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [2] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [3] Of course it was. Who else knew where all of the skeletons from the Belgian Relief scandal were buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale, ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [4] was the one man who knew exactly what evidence had to be removed immediately. 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 ‘humanitarian’ relief 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’. [5] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [6] Hoover  donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. That would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not proved 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 [7] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. [8] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the czarist archives from the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ‘Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’ [9]

The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence from the old czarist regime that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on Sarajevo and Russia’s secret mobilisation. Likewise, damning correspondence between the Russian foreign ministry and its representatives in Paris and Belgrade has been ‘lost’ to posterity. All Russian diplomatic papers from 1914 were removed from their archives by an unknown person. These were documents of momentous importance that would have proved that Germany had not caused the First World War.

It might at first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. [10] According to the New York Times, Hoover’s team bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, [11] but there were darker forces at play. As we have previously documented, the Bolshevik leaders were beholden to American bankers closely linked to the Secret Elite and were in the process of selling off the best of Russian resources to them.

The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’, a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, [12] but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of court documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the Kaiser’s preparations for war should France and Russia mobilise against her. Where then is the vital evidence to prove Germany’s guilt? Had there been proof it would have been released immediately. There was none.

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ was so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. [13] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and a key to the padlock were allowed access. In 1941, 22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that few if any war historians have ever written about this illicit theft of European documents relating to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history, and their concealment in California. Why? They were stealing history to protect themselves.

In a sense this whole protracted world war, justified by lies, prolonged by profiteers and politicians with hidden agendas, subjected to false histories, suffered by nations in debt and by ordinary people through irreparable loss, did not end. All of the consequences of war were sucked into the vortex of a grossly unfair peace. Furthermore, the ‘hidden powers’, the ‘money-power’, ‘the power behind the curtain’ who had ordained the war were more secure in their control of the developed world by the end of 1919. Versailles did not mark the end. It provided a forum for the new elite to regroup and draw breath. Worse was to come.

1. Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360.
2. Ibid.
3. Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36.
4. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/
5. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D
6. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
7. Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5.
8. Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041.
9. Chambers, Hoover Library at http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
10. Ibid.
11. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
12. Chambers, Hoover Library, as above.
13. New York Times, 5 February 1921.

War Without End 8: The Old Order Changeth

The Treaty of Versailles, signed eventually on 28 June 1919, was uncompromising. Its legacy reaped a bitter harvest. Germany lost nearly one seventh of its territory and one tenth of its population. Half the iron ore and one quarter of the coal production as well as one seventh of agricultural production were taken from her. German colonies and all foreign possessions of the Reich were lost. Most of her commercial fleet had to be handed over and long-term economic discrimination endured. But on a deeper level, Germany lost more than just her wealth and her possessions. She lost a confidence in herself which created a political vacuum; a space for opportunism to grow like a cancerous tumour.

The army and navy were considerably reduced. The Rhineland was de-militarised, split in three zones and occupied by Allied forces for five to fifteen years. The Saarland was put under the mandate of the League of Nations. The coal mines went to France. Gdansk and its surrounding area was turned into a Free City of Poland with special rights. The independence of Austria, whose National Assembly had voted to accept the connection to the German Reich, was to be guaranteed in perpetuity. The amount of reparations was to be determined at a later time. That the sum to be compiled would be very high, was beyond doubt. The murdered Kitchener must have spun in his watery grave. This was not a just peace.

Before the signing of the treaty, President Wilson said that if he were a German, he would not sign it. His Foreign Minister Lansing considered the conditions imposed on Germany as unutterably hard and abasing, many of which could not possibly be met. His adviser, Mandell House wrote in his diary on 29 June that the treaty was bad and should never have been concluded; its execution would bring no end of difficulties over Europe. [1] As an understatement, Houses’s prediction stands absolutely proven.The real victors would not be swayed. The final Treaty stands testament to how little real influence Woodrow Wilson wielded in Europe.

The Versailles Peace Settlement was a stepping stone in itself to future wars. Diplomat-historian George F Kenan later wrote that the peace treaty ‘had the tragedies of the future written into it as if by the devil’s own hand.’  [2] As we have pointed out, by accepting Article 231, Germany was obliged to bear the burden of guilt for causing the war. Old Empires were dismantled and choice pickings reallocated. Gone was the German Empire and Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Kaiser. The Imperial Russian Empire was no more, its Czar Nicholas II, cousin of Britain’s King George V, executed by the very Bolsheviks whom American and British bankers had financed. The Ottoman Empire, ripped apart by the victors, offered the opportunity to redraw the Middle East with the lure of oil and prime strategic locations. The British Empire survived, but at a cost. Britain had sold off at least a quarter of its dollar investments and borrowed over £1,027,000,000 from the United States. [3] Consequently, the flow of capital from America to Europe reversed the pattern which had dominated the previous century. These immense changes represented a long-term financial realignment in favour of Wall Street.

The conclusion to First World War was not the beginning of the end but a building block towards disasters that were to come. A new Elite intended to control the peace and exert its influence through organisations which it created specifically to determine how that would be done. During the Peace Conference in Paris, Alfred Milner’s chief acolyte, Lionel Curtis, organised a joint conference of British and American ‘experts’ on foreign affairs at the Hotel Majestic. [4] The British contingent came almost exclusively from men and women identified by Professor Carroll Quigley as members of what we have termed The Secret Elite. [5] The American ‘experts’ came from banks, universities and institutions dominated by J.P. Morgan and members of the Carnegie Trust. [6] This alliance of international financial capitalism and political thinkers and manipulators began a new phase in the life of the secret cabal as they continued their drive to establish a new world order.

They took the successful Round Table Group and remodelled it into The Institute of International Affairs. Smothered in words which when decoded meant that they would work together to determine the future direction of a fast-changing world, Lionel Curtis advocated that ‘National Policy ought to be shaped by a conception of the interests of society at large.’ [7] By that he meant the interests of the Anglo-American Establishment. He talked of the settlements which had been made in Paris as a result of public opinion in various countries, and spelled out the need to differentiate between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ public opinion. With chilling certainty he announced that ‘Right public opinion was mainly produced by a small number of people in real contact with the facts who had thought out the issues involved.’139 He talked of the need to ‘to cultivate a public opinion in the various countries of the world’ and proposed the creation of a ‘strictly limited’ high-level think-tank comprising the like minded ‘experts’ from the British and American Delegations. A committee of selection, dominated entirely by Secret Elite agents was organised [8] to avoid ‘a great mass of incompetent members.’ What quintessentially British ruling-class thinking. A new Anglo-American Elite of approved membership was self-selected.

Thus the Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, was formally established in July 1920 and was granted a Royal charter in 1926. [9] Its first decision was to write a history of the Peace Conference. A committee to supervise these writings, in other words, ensure that the official history recorded only their version of events, was funded by a gift of £2,000 from Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan. Follow the money you will always trace the power behind the politicians. At the same time Institute’s sister organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), was created with J.P. Morgan money. Acting in close cooperation and funded by similar sources, the CFR and Chatham House ensured that the Britain and the United States followed similar foreign policies.

It is important to bear in mind that Curtis and his new updated organisation invited speakers to discuss and develop the ‘right’ opinion. That would have been why the first fully recorded meeting which was published in The Round Table Journal 142 in 1921 was given by D.G. Hogarth who served on the Arab Bureau during the war. He was a friend of T.E. Lawrence and Sir Mark Sykes, the men who betrayed the Arabs. Hogarth spoke on the Arab States an indication that this was one specific area for which the ‘right’ opinion had to be endorsed. [10] In 1922, Chaim Weizmann gave an address on Zionism. [11] His must have been the ‘right’ opinion too.

1. Professor Hans Fenske, A Peace to End All Peace https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com//?s=Fenske&search=Go
2. Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, p. 357.
3. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, pp. 362-3.
4. The inaugural meeting to establish the Institute took place on 30 May 1919.
5. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, p.18.
6. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 182-183.
7. M.L. Dockrill, The Foreign Office and the ‘Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919’ International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 56, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 667.
8. Ibid., p. 666.
9. All of the senior organisers have been identified as members of the Secret Elite many times over; Lord Robert Cecil, Valentine Chirol, foreign editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, G. W. Prothero etc.
10. Dockrill, The Foreign Office and the ‘Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919’ International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 56, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 671.
11. Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, chapter 11, pp. 153-160.
12. Both Hogarth and T.E. Lawrence were largely responsible for The Bulletin, a secret magazine of Middle East politics. Lawrence edited the first number on 6 June 1916 and thereafter sent numerous reports to it, enabling readers to follow, week by week, the Arab Revolt, which ended Ottoman domination in the Arabian peninsula. The British Foreign Office described it as: ‘A remarkable intelligence journal so strictly secret in its matter that only some thirty copies of each issue were struck off… Nor might the journal be quoted from, even in secret communications. http://www.archiveeditions.co.uk/titledetails.asp?tid=7
13. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 185.

War Without End 7: The Advance Of The Vested Interests

For some students of history, the claim that international bankers had influenced and supported the British Secret Elite and their political agents to prolong the war will induce cognitive dissonance. It grates awkwardly against mainstream history taught in the classroom, read in the newspapers or watched on film and television versions of the First World War. The realisation that we have been lied to, opens the way to a new level of appreciation of what was actually happening. It may take time. For example, consider the American and British delegations to the armistice/preparatory peace talks in Paris in 1919. When the British economist, John Maynard Keynes arrived in January to be housed with the British delegation in the luxurious Hotel Majestic, ‘no one yet knew what the Conference was doing or whether it had started’. [1] There were numerous officials who attended informal meetings many of which were not recorded. Paris swarmed with self-interest from around the globe. Britain was formally represented by the eventual signatories to the Treaty, David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Milner, Andrew Bonar Law and Georges Barnes who were all closely linked to, or approved by the Secret Elite. But there was a plethora of hangers-on.

Leo Amery, Milner’s parliamentary secretary, shuttled back and forth between London and Paris for five months. His task was to influence and advise on the discussions about the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and direct negotiations with France over the future of the Arabs and the Zionists, the latter whose cause he strongly supported. [2] William Ormsby-Gore was present, a member of the Secret Elite, who had been Alfred Milner’s parliamentary private secretary and an assistant secretary to Sir Mark Sykes. Lord Robert Cecil, a cousin of Alfred Balfour had been given charge of the Blockade from 1916 and had direct links with Herbert Hoover. He was tasked to liaise with President Wilson on his ideas for a League of Nations [3] and ensured the Empire’s interests were safeguarded. Cecil was later appointed Chair of the Supreme Economic Council and drew his advice from Robert Brand, a Milner man from his Boer War reconstruction years. Brand was managing director of the merchant bank, Lazard Brothers, and a Director of Lloyd’s Bank. [4] Keynes himself was the Treasury advisor appointed to assist Cecil’s team, and as an outsider his observations were not coloured by secret loyalties.

Consider this assembly of imperial loyalists, all of whom were committed to the ultimate victory of the English ruling-class in a struggle for one world domination. These heirs to Cecil Rhodes’s dream marched on Versailles with serious purpose. Protect, strengthen and enlarge the Empire for ‘the benefit of mankind’. They had a staunch ally inside the American camp, an academic historian whom Professor Carroll Quigley named as a member of the Secret Elite, George Louis Beer. [5] Beer strongly supported the Mandate system which would allow Britain to take responsibility for Palestine. He was a member of the Round Table and Milner had him named as the head of the Mandate Department of the League of Nations.

The official members of the American Commission included, President Woodrow Wilson and Colonel Edward Mandel House, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Henry White, a former Ambassador at Rome and Paris and General Talisker Bliss. [6] Strange to relate, these men were probably the least important of the Americans in Paris. Certainly Wilson and House shared the limelight, and that, as ever, suited the real powers behind the curtain. But the President had been severely weakened.  Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious political blow in the 1918 mid-term elections to the Senate and House of Representatives in the United States. The Democrats had lost control of both Houses of Congress to the Republican Party which did not bode well for Wilson’s chance of a third term in office. [7]

Of much more importance was the entourage of vested interest from the banking community which chose to accompany him. These included, Thomas Lamont a senior partner in J.P. Morgan and Bernard Baruch, who left Wall Street in 1916 to advise Wilson. Baruch served on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defence, became the chairman of the War Industries Board in the USA in 1918, and successfully managed America’s economic mobilisation through which he reputedly netted a personal fortune of $200 million. [8] His origins were Wall Street and war industries and he was believed to be a Rothschild agent. [9]

Herbert Hoover hovered around the conferences, aided and advised by the team which worked with him in Belgium. Other important financiers from the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, [10] J.P. Morgan’s bank in Boston, the International Harvester Company (owned from 1902 by J.P. Morgan) and several others, whose fortunes were linked to Hoover’s malpractice in Belgium, became major contributors. Vance McCormick, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Chair of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace (1919) was nominally a simple politician, but he also served as head of the War Trade Board (1916 to 1919). Links to industry and finance, mainly J.P. Morgan, dovetailed at every point.

High level profiteering by major banks was not an exclusive American domaine. One example of how rich European bankers had also become, may be gauged from the post war success of Emile Francqui’s Societe Generale bank in Brussels. Having made an exorbitant fortune through its link with Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief programme and its internal association with the Bundesbank during the occupation of Belgium, [11] it flourished as never before from 1919 onwards. It’s London branch, the Banque Belge pour L’Etranger was the financial centre for all of the Societe Generale’s affairs outside occupied territories.

In the immediate post-war period it benefitted greatly from the influx of capital which followed the signing of the armistice. It created a series of new companies to accommodate the immense reconstruction in Belgium and extended and modernised the country’s infrastructure. Banque Belge pour L’Etranger opened new international branches in New York (1917), Paris, Manchester and Cologne (1919), Bucharest (1920) and Constantinople. (1924) [12] While the poor in Belgium remained needy and impoverished, its banks flourished. In wars, all wars, billions of dollars are made through profits accrued from the manufacture of warships, airplanes, weapons, and munitions. At war’s end, they reap a second dividend through reconstruction of cities, towns and villages shattered by the conflict. War is good business for banks; very good business. But these vested interests were not exclusively financial.

As has been said repeatedly, no event ‘just happens’ as if by mystical or divine intervention. Two important Americans who made their way to Paris were Supreme Court Judge, Mr Justice Brandeis, and his close associate, Felix Frankfurter. Brandeis openly ‘went abroad on Zionist missions’ and had three ‘busy and profitable days’ in Paris where he ‘lunched effectively’ with his new friend, Alfred Balfour and breakfasted with the American Peace Commissioners.’ [13] The only item on his agenda was Palestine. Indeed most of the leading Zionists went to Paris during the conference. Chaim Weizmann maintained his high-pressure tactic of interviews and meetings with the powerful and the influential, [14] the most important of which was held at the French foreign office at the Quay D’Orsay on February 27, 1919.

The British representation, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Milner, Maurice Hankey and William Ormsby-Gore, was, as we have detailed above, handsomely pro-Zionist. The American delegation that day was limited to Robert Lansing and former Ambassador White while the Zionist delegation was headed by Chaim Weizmann. [15] He presented a Statement of the Zionist Organisation with regard to Palestine, which supported a British Mandate. In other words, the land would come under British control, a development much sought after by the Zionists who felt confident of Britain’s sympathy. Weizmann claimed to speak in the name of a million Jews ‘who, staff in hand, waited for the signal to move’. [16] While the claim was clear and bold, it was not backed-up by any rush of eager immigrants once the mandate had been agreed.

A Franco-Jewish historian, Sylvain Levi, had been included in the French delegation. He was not a Zionist, and questioned the validity of the ingrained idea of a “country of their ancestors” and warned that the eastern European migrant Jews would include many who ‘would carry with them into Palestine, highly explosive passions conducive to very serious trouble in a country which might be likened to a concentration camp of Jewish refugees’. He stated that ‘nations could not be created at will … and that the realisation of a certain number of aspirations would not suffice to create a national identity …’ [17] Levi warned that it was dangerous to create a precedent whereby people who already possessed citizenship in one country would be called upon to govern and exercise other rights of citizenship in a new country. [18] This was not the Zionist party-line. Indeed it ran contrary to all their arguments in favour of a Jewish Homeland.

Weizmann was stunned, frozen in anger. Lansing stepped in to save the day. He asked for clarification about the correct meaning of a ‘Jewish national home.’ Weizmann prevaricated. The Zionists he said did not want to set up an autonomous Jewish government, merely set up, under a Mandate, an administration ‘not necessarily Jewish,’ to send 70-80,000 Jews per year into Palestine. That they would build up gradually a nationality that would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation, British.’ [19] This was a pivotal moment. Had Levi’s interpretation carried weight with the British and American delegates, who knows where history would have taken Palestine. What matters is that Levi was ignored; that Weizmann prevailed, thanks to a quick-witted American Secretary of State.

If the Zionist agenda later became self-evident and openly contentious, little attention has been paid to the J.P. Morgan/Warburg/Rockefeller/Wall Street assault on Versailles. What brought that legion of damned bankers to Paris? Their presence had the feel of an exclusive conference for sales executives, for in many ways that was their agenda. War was opportunity and so was its consequence. In America, the January 1919 Bankers Magazine reported a high level conference held in Atlantic City. Entitled, ‘A Reconstruction Congress’, it was spearheaded by Rockefeller Jnr., banker, William Cox Redfield (President Wilson’s Secretary of State for Commerce from 1913-1919) and James A. Farrell of the US Steel Corporation, part of the Morgan Empire. Rockefeller opened the Congress by stating: ‘Never was there such an opportunity as exists today for the industrial leader with clear vision … to establish a solid foundation for industrial prosperity’. [20] This prosperity was to be had on the back of reconstruction and reparation in Europe. The Reconstruction Congress stressed that ‘there seems no reason why enterprise should not move forward with confidence in the great work of reconstruction’. The market – place was the new world of post-war investment, reparations and reconstruction, but this new world order embraced its old world mentor as a partner.

In the same edition of Bankers Magazine, the US financial elites advocated the re-union of ‘the two great English-speaking countries of the world’ whose language, faith in democracy and concern for human liberty ‘derives from the same source.’ Put aside the grand lie of meaningful democracy and concern for humanity. These were the weasel-words behind which the Secret Elite had always protected themselves. One can almost hear Cecil Rhodes speaking. Magnanimously, the Americans accepted that Britain had spread civilisation; that differences between the English-speaking nations had become less marked and wider financial co-operation ‘will be welcome by the English bankers’. At which point the Bankers Magazine announced a new alliance: ‘The people of these two great English-speaking democracies have made their minds definitely to pull together hereafter – and no propaganda engendered either in hell or in Germany can change this purpose.’ [21]

And there it was. A statement from the heart of American banking that categorically announced the merger of Britain’s Secret Elite and the US Money power in a united design to ‘pull together hereafter’, for these were the people about whom the article was talking. Not ordinary people; powerful bankers and financiers. It was as if the birth of a new world order had been announced in their columns. It was to be a marriage of like purpose and all that remained to be ironed out were the pre-nuptial agreements. The Anglo-American establishment was to be in their joint control. What makes this all the more galling is the fact that in both Britain and America the ordinary man and woman was close to despair. High prices, low wages and industrial disputes became the order of the day. General strikes took place in Seattle and Winnipeg. [22] In Glasgow, troops from England had to be rushed into the fray carrying rifles with bayonets. Tanks were brought into the streets and union leaders beaten and thrown into prison. [23] The new Anglo-American establishment rose above such working-class protest. It always has.

1. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, p. 70.
2. J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 359.
3. The League of Nations came into being on 10 January 1920. It was the first international organisation which theoretically aimed to maintain world peace, prevent wars through collective security and disarmament. International disputes were to be solved through negotiation and arbitration. It failed because those who wielded real power ensured that it did not succeed..
4. Kathleen Burk, ‘Brand, Robert Henry, Baron Brand (1878–1963)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
5. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 168.
6. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000002-0043.pdf
7. http://www.usmidtermelections.com/midterm_summary.php?year=1918_1918&chart…
8. Mujahid Kamran, The International Bankers, World Wars 1, II and Beyond, p. 146.
9. Ibid., p. 63.
10. Minutes of the Federal Reserve Board, 20 January 1919, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/historical/nara/bog_minutes/19190120_Minutes.pdf
11. See Chapter 17.
12. Manfred Pohl, Handbook on the History of European Banks, pp 84-5.
13. Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life, p. 529.
14. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed The World. p. 429.
15. FRUS vol. IV, p. 159.
16. Ibid., p. 165.
17. Ibid., p. 167.
18. Ibid., p. 168.
19. Ibid., p. 169.
20. The Bankers Magazine Vol. 49, No 1, January 1919, p. 8.
21. Ibid., p. 7.
22. https://libcom.org/history/1919-winnipeg-general-strike.
23. Chanie Rosenberg, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr226/rosenberg.htm

War Without End 6: Fixing The Blame

Lloyd George knew all about the deteriorating situation in Germany from War Cabinet meetings he had chaired throughout February 1919. [1] Hoover’s outburst [2], even if it was true, was not news to the British prime minister, but dislodging the French from their obstinate position proved difficult. On 8 March, at a joint meeting of the Allied leaders, discussions were heading towards the accustomed stalemate when, with a theatrical flourish which suggested a stage-managed prearrangement, [3] a sealed message was delivered to the British prime minister from the afore-mentioned General Plumer. In fact the telegram had been sent at the prime minister’s request. [4] Lloyd George read it aloud; despair had plummeted to such depths in Germany that ‘people feel that an end by bullets is preferable to death by starvation … I request that a definite date be fixed for the arrival of the first supplies …’ [5] The French finance minister, Klotz, attempted to ignore the message, but Lloyd George turned on him with unrestrained venom, pouring contempt on his miserly attitude while women and children were starving. [6] The dam broke. The French conceded that Germany’s gold could be used for food, but relief was not instant. Some further headway was made on 14 March when an agreement was reached in Brussels allowing Germany to import 370,000 tons of food and 70,000 tons of fat per month. In April all blockade restrictions were removed on European neutrals, which was expected to facilitate an increased flow of food into Germany. [7] In theory that should have happened, but in practice, every nation affected by the blockade had endured great hardship and either consumed the produce themselves or offered them for export at exorbitant prices which Germany could no longer pay. [8]

But the cruelty did not end there. For the remainder of the Armistice period the bickering between the Americans, led by Hoover, and the Allied decision-makers, continued to thwart the lifting of the entire blockade on Germany. Even when it was perfectly clear that the Weimar government would sign the Versailles treaty, the die-hards refused to move. And though the Allies agreed to lift the remainder of the blockade on European neutrals on 25 June, they remained stubbornly obtuse until they had proof that the Germans had fully ratified the Versailles Treaty on 12 July 1919. [9] It was as miserable as it was petty.

The formal process of agreeing a peace treaty, predicated on the bitter Armistice, began in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles on 18 January 1919. From January to June, 1919, Paris was the capital of the world. [10] Complex discussions on how to punish the defeated nations involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities, but behind the scenes the true manipulators of power influenced the key decisions which determined a chain of events which go well beyond our time-scale.

History records the major outcomes from Versailles as the creation of the League of Nations; the five peace treaties with the defeated states, [11] the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as ‘mandates’, chiefly to Britain and France; reparations imposed on Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries. Critically, section 231 of the Versailles Treaty, stated that the first world War had been caused ‘by the aggression of Germany and her allies.’ [12] Blaming Germany and Austria was a political necessity; an absolute requirement for the Secret Elite and the establishment in Britain and America in particular. If the blame had not be squarely laid at the door of the Kaiser and his associates, the populous would have quickly turned on the politicians close to home who had lied so vehemently, had insisted that the war would save civilisation, had repeated the lie that the inhuman sacrifice was both worthy and necessary. Evidence had to be manufactured.

A Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of War was tasked with the official investigation on behalf of the victors and its conclusions were exactly as required by the allied governments. [13] Essentially its findings declared that war had been premeditated by the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and their allies, Turkey and Bulgaria, and was the result of actions deliberately committed to make war unavoidable. There is now a large body of evidence to the contrary, championed firstly by Harry Elmer Barnes, the renowned Professor of Historical Sociology at Smith College and teacher of history at Columbia University from 1918-29. The Commission of course, ignored the multitude of false claims and dates made by French President, Poincare, of complete misrepresentations made to the British parliament by foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey and the lies reported to Czar Nicholas by his equivalent counsellor, Sazonov. But why should you be surprised. Did you imagine that false news is a twenty-first century phenomenon?

Perhaps the most disgraceful falsification was made by the American duo who nominally headed the Commission, Secretary of State, Robert Lansing and U.S. Lawyer J.B. Scott. Secretary Lansing’s impartiality ought to have been absolute, but he and J.B. Scott stand accused of concocting a claim that the Austrians knew of Serbia’s ‘utter innocence’ of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914. They chose to focus on an early brief telegram to the Austrian foreign minister which was quickly corrected by its author, the Austrian investigator, Dr. von Wiesner as more evidence became available. As Professor Barnes put it, the brief passage from the Wiesner report ‘was torn from the context by James Brown Scott and Robert Lansing and gives the impression that Wiesner believed Serbia utterly innocent in 1914.’ [14] It was an atrocious lie. We know this now, but it was used to great effect to damn Germany and Austria, by the very people who ought to have been the guardians of truth and impartiality.

Some historians and commentators have simply accepted that Germany caused the war, and the proof was self-evident. The German government accepted Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Think hard. What else could Germany have done under the circumstances? Barnes famously described it in the following terms:

Germany occupied the situation of a prisoner at the bar, where the prosecuting attorney was given full leeway as to the time and presentation of evidence, while the defendant was denied counsel or the opportunity to produce either evidence or witnesses. Germany was confronted with the alternative of signing the confession at once or having her territory invaded and occupied, with every probability that such an admission would ultimately be extorted in any event. [15]

By the time they imposed Article 231, Germany was no longer in any position to resist. Her weapons and navy had been surrendered as per the Peace Treaty conditions. Do not forget that the blockade continued until the Germans signed the document which blamed them for causing the world war. Starve or sign a false testament. That was a the option Germany faced. It was a travesty of truth; a cancerous lie which would reap an awful vengeance within twenty years.

The ‘Big Four’ politicians who strutted this stage were the Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France; David Lloyd George, the British prime minister; the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and the prime minister of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They met together informally 145 times, fought for their own agendas and agreed all the major decisions which Germany had to accept in 1919. Paris became the corporate headquarters of international decision-makers, the wheelers and dealers who acted as judge and jury in a kangaroo court through which new countries were created and a new order established.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes, himself present at the Versailles Peace Conference, watched the malevolent manipulators with angry contempt. The blame-shapers who knew that both the neutral countries and the German people had been shamefully damaged, pointed damning accusations at the French, at Marshal Foch for his hard-line armistice conditions, at President Clemenceau for demanding unmanageable German reparations, at finance minister Klotz for his insistence that German gold reserves could not be used to buy food, at their delaying tactics, their constant referrals to dubious committees and their unwillingness to end the hunger. Keynes was not fooled. He moved in circles whose prime motivation was to crush Germany; crush the German economy; restore British predominance in trade and industry and promote the Rhodes/Milner ideals. Unaware of the depth of their complicity, he personally blamed the intransigence of the admiralty in Whitehall, sarcastically implying that since they had just perfected the blockade system which had taken four years to create, they did not want to dismantle it. [16] Keynes called the British admiralty representative, Admiral Browning, ‘an ignorant sea-dog … with no idea in his head but the extirpation and further humiliation of a despised and defeated enemy.’ [17]

Keynes had considerable sympathy for the Germans. His intimate friendship during the peace talks [18] with the German financial advisor, Carl Melchior, helped find solutions to the many obstacles which blocked food for Germany. Melchior had since 1900, been senior counsel to, and later a partner in, the Warburg Bank in Hamburg. He became Germany’s representative on the Reparations Committee as was described as the country’s financial director. [19] Carl Melchior was the only non-Parliamentary member of the main German Peace Delegation. His role in the Bank of International Settlements and his later chairmanship of the Financial Committee on the League of Nations is highly significant. [20] Keynes dined with Melchior and Paul Warburg, whom he described as ‘a German-American Jew, but one of the leading financiers of the United States, and formerly chief spirit of the Federal Reserve Board.’ [21] Given the bond between Melchior, the Warburgs and the Kuhn Loeb bank in New York, we need hardly ask why he was in Paris. Indeed, why were so many important bankers from the United States who were intimately linked to the Rothschilds and the Secret Elite, hovering like vultures above a stricken Europe?

1. http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-9.pdf
2. See previous blog
3. C. Paul Vincent, Politics of Hunger, p. 122, note 121.
4. John Maynard Keynes, Dr. Melchior, Two Memoirs, p. 59.
5. Bane and Lutz, Blockade of Germany After the Armistice, p. 214.
6. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, Two Memoirs, pp. 60-61.
7. Eric W. Osborne, Britain’s Economic Blockade of Germany, 1914-1919, p.188.
8. Bane and Lutz, The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice, pp. 549-50.
9. Ibid., pp. 558-9.
10. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed The World, p. 1
11. These were:  the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919 with Germany; the Treaty of Saint-Germain, 10 September 1919 with Austria; the Treaty of Neuilly, 27 November 1919 with Bulgaria; the Treaty of Trianon, 4 June 1920 with Hungary; the Treaty of Sèvres, 10 August 1920, later revised by the Treaty of Lausanne, 24 July 1923 with Turkey.
12. http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa7.html
13. Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties Source: The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Jan. – Apr., 1920), pp. 95-154.
14. Current History, July 1928, p. 622. Article by Harry Elmer Barnes. 15. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War, pp. 34-35.
16. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, p. 24.
17. Ibid., p. 13.
18. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
19. A.N. Field, The Truth About the Slump, p.35.
20. Ibid., p. 57.
21. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, p. 70.

War Without End 5: Remorseless Misery

The acute misery which had been deliberately visited on Germany, Austria and Hungary was remorseless. British, French and Italian obstruction to all U.S. proposals which would have alleviated the crises in Berlin and Vienna appeared to be absolute. A breakthrough was apparently agreed on Christmas Eve, 1918, when the Americans thought that they had persuaded their Allies to relax the food blockade on the neutral and liberated countries. Furthermore the Inter-Allied Trade Council proposed to allow neutral countries to trade food to Germany in exchange for commodities which did not compete with Allied exports. On Christmas Day, Hoover announced to the world press that ‘it is our first move towards feeding Germany.’ He notified all of the nations involved and announced that the British blockade authorities had confirmed the decision. [1]  Unbeknown to him, or any of the American delegation in Europe, his breakthrough was blown apart by a consortium of Allied councils and executives which met in London some six days later on December 31. They reversed the original decision and re-imposed the full blockade. Hoover described it sarcastically as ‘a sudden joint meeting … to which no Americans were invited’. In fact they had not even been notified.

It was a stinging slap on the face for Hoover and another body-blow for the starving Germans. Not only had the London conspirators undermined his strategy, they had not even sufficient courage to tell him in person. Hoover’s first concern was the financial impact this would have. Money always was his first interest. The British were leading an economic revolt which would have caused an disastrous crash in the U.S. farming industries. The Grain Corporation alone had borrowed over $300,000,000 in the expectation of vast profits from sales to Europe. Hoover estimated that he had 700,000 tons of food en route to famine areas in Europe. Cold storage for perishable foodstuffs was already at bursting point.

At every opportunity Herbert Hoover used President Wilson to add covering letters to his dispatches, appeals and veiled threats to the allied food agencies. [2] The Americans were justifiably aggrieved. They had taken steps to increase agricultural production on a large scale, with guaranteed prices for their farmers in order to make vast post-war profits from all and sundry, including Germany. Such guarantees extended to the 1919 crop, which meant that the U.S. producers had to be protected from deliberate price-undercuts from the southern hemisphere. At one point over 1.2 billion pounds of fats and 100 million bushels of wheat were locked down in European storage. [3] Of even greater concern were perishable foods like dairy products and pork, and the tragic fact was that vast quantities of these foodstuffs were held up in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp while millions of Germans starved. [4]

Yet the British press were relentless in their denial of starvation in Germany. On 3 January 1919, a leading article in The Times dismissed the ‘German Hunger Bogy’ as spurious. What were people to think when the trusted Times reported, ‘You don’t see so many people with rolls of fat on them as you did five years ago, but you also see a healthier, harder and generally more fit population’. Such twisted, pathetic logic.

Even when, by mid-January 1919, it appeared that ‘the Big Four’ (Britain, France the United States and Italy) had agreed that Germany should be supplied with food and ‘if nothing else could be done’ pay in gold and export a limited amount of commodities,[5] the blockade remained in place. The Allied Blockade Committee refused to issue the necessary orders and the British navy stubbornly resisted any attempt by Hoover’s ships to enter German waters. The role of the admiralty in maintaining and enforcing the vicious throttling of a defeated Germany has been clearly understated. It wasn’t just that a watertight blockade was maintained; it was extended and remorselessly enforced. The admiralty ordered the cessation of all German fishing rights in the Baltic … an act of war, clothed in the name of the armistice. The German people were forbidden to even fish for their own food. The Berliner Tageblatt could not fathom why there were steamers from Scandinavia intended for Germany loaded with fish which perished in their holds ‘because the English had extended their hunger blockade’. [6] As we have shown time and again, had such a blockade been enforced in 1915 the war would have been over three years earlier.

Bitter voices were raised in the House of Commons demanding retribution at all costs. Commander Sir Edward Nicholl M.P., threw vastly inflated data into the equation, claiming that 23,737,080 tons of shipping had been sunk by German submarines, [7] and seventeen thousand men of the Mercantile Marine murdered ‘by order of Count Luxembourg’, with instructions to leave no trace behind! Nicholl claimed that the Merchant Seamen’s League had sworn that they would not trade with Germany or … sail with a German until reparation is made and compensation paid to those who have been left behind. [8] Exaggerations apart (Harold Temperley then a British official, estimated the total tonnage sunk at over 15,000,000 tons. Lloyd’s Register put the number at 13,233,672 tons), the hurt of war-loss reduced sensitivity towards the losers. While that is understandable, it is no reason to deny that the starving of Germany was deliberately maintained for ulterior motives.

The notion that the Armistice was signed and sealed in November 1918 is misleading. There were a number of armistice extensions because the process of prolonging the misery for Germany required an extensive period of implementation. The first armistice of 11 November was renewed on 13 December 1918, 16 January 1919 and on 16 February 1919, with Article 26 on the blockade of Germany still in force, it was renewed indefinitely. There was in fact no agreed peace, though the fighting had ended and Germany had surrendered her naval power.

While the blockade allowed the navy to distance itself from its consequences, the British army had to deal with the reality of hunger, starvation, poverty and misery on the streets of major German cities. The war office in London received reports from officers in Hamburg and Hanover [9] which described the physical deterioration of the population with alarming clarity. Shamefully, milk supplies around Hanover had dried up for children over six. [10] War continued to be waged against the innocent.

Even with his landslide election victory behind him, Lloyd George took no action to intervene until five months of misery had reduced the immune system of the German people to desperately low levels. Economic despair brought about political unrest, riots, protests and the rise of a new threat, Bolshevism. [11] Hunger and malnutrition were indeed breeding revolt. The risks to European stability merited a change of policy. The warnings sent to the war office began to underline a growing concern about the worth of the blockade. A report from fourteen ranking army officers, mainly captains with legal, business or financial backgrounds, detailed their conclusions on the critical state of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, Magdeburg and Cassel. They stated that a disaster was imminent and ‘the policy of starvation (note the terminology … the policy of starvation) was not only senseless but harmful to ourselves…. and it would be folly to suppose that the ensuing disaster would be confined to Germany.’ [12]  Never mind the emaciated children, the fear of hunger, the sick and the dying … starvation had become a threat to stability across Europe. It was spreading disease and a new threat called Bolshevism had begun to seep out of a dysfunctional Russia. They had no notion that Bolshevism was being funded by the great international banks in Wall Street.

The War Cabinet was issued with a memorandum on these findings in February 1919 [13] by the recently appointed secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill. [14] The picture it painted was stark. Unemployment in Germany was rising at alarming rates, the cost of living had grown to dangerous levels and industry could not find a foothold because it was starved of raw materials. Malnutrition caused physical and mental inertia, with disease adding to the misery of the people. The concluding message could not have been clearer, ‘Revictualling Germany is really urgent because either famine or Bolshevism, or both will ensue before the next harvest.’ [15]

Though Britain had been struggling to import sufficient food for its population earlier in the year, by late 1918 Hoover’s fleet provided a steady inflow from America to Britain. Yet the onward distribution remained completely blocked. The War Cabinet meeting of 12 February 1919 noted that British ports were stocked ‘to their utmost capacity’, storage facilities taxed to their limit and meat supplies so strong that the civilian ration should be increased’. [16] Although consideration was given to British exports to neutral countries, the government was advised that the blockade be maintained. There was to be no swift relaxation…until, well, Herbert Hoover, the super-hero of his own legend, burst the bubble. Safe in the knowledge that he could not be contradicted, Herbert Hoover later awarded himself the pivotal role in ending the food blockade. The following story was penned by Hoover in his autobiographic American Epic 2 written in 1959.

On the evening of 7 March 1919, Herbert Hoover was summoned into Lloyd George’s presence in Paris where he found a distraught General Plumer, Commander of the British Army of Occupation in Germany. Plumer insisted that the rank and file of his men could no longer cope with the sight ‘of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments’. He claimed that his soldiers were actually depriving themselves to feed these children and wanted to go home, adding that the country ‘was going Bolshevist.’ When asked by Lloyd George why he had not sent food to Germany, Hoover, in his own words, exploded in anger and detailed the obstructions put in his way. He ranted about ‘the three hundred million pounds of perishables, which would spoil in a few weeks, in continental ports or Belgium. He pointed to the vicious and senseless admiralty policy which prevented the Germans fishing in the Baltic, and the inhumane tactic of starving women and children after Germany had surrendered. Hoover apparently closed this rant with the warning that ‘the Allies would be reduced to nothing better with which to make peace with Germany than the Germans had had with Communist Russia.’ [17] Truth or romanticised self-indulgence? Who can say?

1. Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 303-4.
2. FRUS vol 2. Papers Relating etc pp. 695-7.
3. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol 1. pp. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 333.
5. Ibid., p. 339.
6. Berliner Tageblatt, 13 December 1918, p. 2.
7. House of Commons Debate 02 April 1919 vol 114 cc1304-49.
8. Ibid., cc1311.
9. Reports by British Officers on the Economic Conditions Prevailing in Germany, December 1918-March 1919 , Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. ( Period 12 January-12 February 1919, in CAB/ 24/ 76)
10. Ibid., pp. 57-8.
11. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol. 1, pp. 340-1.
12. Reports by British Officers, Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. p. 84.
13. CAB/ 24/76/22
14. Winston Churchill was returned to high office on 9 January 1919 as Secretary of State for War.
15. CAB/ 24/76/22.
16. War Cabinet 531, p. 2. War Cabinet Minutes 12 February 1919. CAB /23/ 9/18.
17. Herbert Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 337-8.

War Without End 2: The Deadly Armistice

It is often forgotten that Germany’s signature to the truce in 1918 was conditional. On 12 October the Kaiser’s government confirmed that it wished to enter into more detailed discussions on an armistice on the understanding that it was predicated upon a joint agreement on the practical details of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. [1] Unfortunately, the Allies had no intention of acceding to any assumptions about Wilson’s proposals as the basis for an Armistice, no matter what he said. But reality provided a worst-case scenario which the German government had never suspected. No-one realised that the construction of the final demands would be left to allied military advisors who were ordered to ensure there was no possibility of Germany’s resumption of hostilities. Indeed, the Allied commanders were ordered to resume hostilities immediately if Germany failed to concede any of their outrageous demands.

Britain and France had spurned numerous German approaches to hold peace negotiations from as early as 1915, but the Kaiser’s government believed that Woodrow Wilson was a man of honour. They knew that Europe was bankrupt; dependent on the United States for food supplies and financial support to stave off starvation and collapse. Negotiations in a crisis of mutual survival required cool heads and experienced decision-makers. They trusted the President of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson was influenced by his Secret Elite minders in America and completely out of his depth in the political potholes of a ruined continent. Sir Arthur Willert, the British diplomat, likened President Wilson’s arrival on the Parisian stage weeks after the Armistice to ‘a debutante entranced by the prospect of her first ball’. [2] A bitterly devastated Europe offered no shelter for the starry-eyed. If he was hardly a match for cultured statesmen like Clemenceau or Balfour, Wilson was positively an innocent abroad when faced with David Lloyd George. The British economist, John Maynard Keynes, labeled Wilson a ‘slow-minded incompetent’ [3] and wondered whether the terms of the Armistice to which he gave his approval were the product of deception or hypocrisy. [4] Either matched the Secret Elite’s intention to crush Germany.

Unbeknown to the German delegates, the British, French and Italian governments had agreed on specific armistice conditions which had not been previously outlined. The Fourteen Points were little more than live bait set to catch out the unsuspecting Germans. The Kaiser like the proverbial salmon tried to leap over the allied impasse and seek the sanctuary of a calmer pool. It proved a false hope. Perhaps the most important question in all that followed is why the Germans tholed the Allied rejection of Wilson’s so-called ‘terms’, though having been landed on a friendless shore, they had little option.

Lloyd George continued the blockade of Germany, and France was intent on imposing swingeing reparations upon the ‘beaten’ foe. [5] A major potential stumbling block to peace might have been Wilson’s insistence on the abdication of the Kaiser during the pre-Armistice discussions in October, but the German Emperor stood down under protest. [6] As the German delegation ‘for the conclusion of the armistice and to begin peace negotiations’ left Berlin, [7] they anticipated that tough decisions lay ahead, but nothing had prepared them for the shock of hearing the outrageous conditions read aloud to them in the presence of of the French commander, Marshal Foch.

The terms of the armistice required the Germans to evacuate the Western Front within two weeks.  That was no surprise, but Allied forces were to occupy large portions of Germany on the left bank of the Rhine within a month and a neutral zone established on the right bank. These parts of Germany were to be controlled by an American and Allied army of occupation. All German-occupied territories were to be abandoned and the treaties already negotiated with Russia and Romania, officially annulled. Under the terms of the armistice the Germans had to hand over 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns and 1,700 aircraft. Its entire submarine fleet was to be confiscated and battleships and cruisers interned at Scapa Flow in Scotland. [8]

Take a moment to contemplate how much at variance these terms were from the ‘just peace’ which Lord Kitchener would have championed. Three or four days before his death, Kitchener had stated that ‘one country’s territory should not be taken away and given to another… if you take Alsace and Lorraine away from Germany and give them to France, there will be a war of revenge.’ He would also have left Germany with her colonies as a ‘safety valve’. [9] But Kitchener had been murdered. His wisdom and good counsel, silenced.

To the victors go the spoils; it has always been so, but the Germany army had not been defeated and her leaders came willingly to the peace table on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s apparent good faith. The Secret Elite, who had caused the war, were determined to humiliate Germany; strip her bare. Within the 35 articles which comprised the armistice, one in particular drew gasps of astonishment from the German delegation. Article 26 originally stated that: ‘The existing blockade conditions set up by the Allied and Associated Powers are to remain unchanged. German merchant ships found at sea remaining liable to capture.’ [10]

At the first meeting on 8 November, the German representatives, including Matthias Erzberger, State Secretary and President of the German delegation, were stunned. [11] None had anticipated such a monstrous condition. U-Boats were returning to their bases, and the Allied fleets reigned supreme on the high seas, yet the naval blockade was to continue. The initial sham blockade had played an important role in enabling the Secret Elite’s war to continue beyond 1915 by supplying Germany. The absolute blockade imposed over the last year of the war had effectively led to Germany’s ultimate defeat. To continue that policy following the armistice was akin to deliberate genocide.

Matters were made worse through the imposition of Article 7 which demanded that Germany surrender 5,000 railway locomotives and 150,000 wagons in good working order. [12] Consider the dual impact of these ‘conditions’ for peace. Taken together they would destroy Germany’s capacity to relieve starvation in a country teetering on the edge of revolution and anarchy. How could they feed a shattered and dislocated population with hundreds of thousands of disillusioned soldiers returning from the Western Front, if they were denied food imports and had no means of transporting what little home-grown food they could still produce at home? Malnutrition had already reared the ugly spectre of disintegration in public health. It was inhumane.

The German delegates initially refused to sign the death sentence on their own people. Erzberger sent an urgent telegram to his superiors, but the reply from the new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, authorised its acceptance.26 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, aware as he was of the hopeless military situation, added his weight to Germany’s formal approval.

Still Matthias Erzberger protested. He asked Chancellor Ebert to seek an intervention from President Wilson to avoid the inevitable widespread famine. When the delegates reassembled in the early hours of 11 November, Erzberger continued his protest based on the argument that since the blockade had been an essential act of war, its continuation was in fact as much part of the fighting as any action on the front line. An end to the blockade would be an act of good faith by the Allies and an incentive to work together for a meaningful peace. Erzberger’s dogged determination appeared to bear fruit when an addendum to article [13] was included in the final armistice agreement. It read: ‘The Allies and the United States contemplate the provisioning of Germany during the armistice as shall be found necessary’. [14] In Lloyd George’s memoirs, the British prime minister altered the wording of the last-minute modification to read: ‘The Allies will endeavour to assist, as far as possible with supplies of food.’ [15] As a sound-bite it was kinder than the word ‘contemplate,’ but in reality it changed nothing. That was the word on which a nation’s future hung. The Allies would only contemplate supplying Germany with the bare necessities for survival. The German delegation had been given a mere four days to accept the Allied conditions for an armistice that bore no relation to the Fourteen Points. They had been royally duped.

Exhausted both physically and emotionally, Erzberger sincerely believed that the rewritten article was a serious promise.[16] Even after he was obliged to sign the armistice at 5 am on 11 November, the German State Secretary specifically warned that article 26 would result in famine and anarchy. He was right. It proved a death sentence, not just for the starving and the vulnerable. Erzberger became a target of hate in Germany.

On 26 August 1921 he was murdered in the Black Forest by two former marine officers, members of a secret right wing radical group. [17] Though we would not portray him as a martyr, Matthias Erzberger hardly deserved the disparaging comments from The Times in London which scorned his ‘pretentious conflicts with Marshal Foch … his tergiversations (change of heart) … culminating in his advice to sign the Peace Treaty.’ [18] The Northcliffe press dismissed him as ‘an opportunist’ who had initially supported the war before committing himself to surrender ‘when he saw Germany was powerless’. [19] His warnings on the consequences of famine and starvation were not mentioned.

But what followed is still rarely mentioned. At a conference in Brussels in November 2014, [20] under the banner of a ‘historic dialogue’, the German ambassador to Belgium clearly did not understand our question about the continuation of the blockade after the Armistice had been signed. Professor Gerd Krumeich (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf) had a quiet word in his ear, but added nothing to the enquiry. Worse still was the admission from Professor Laurence Van Ypersele (UCL) the Chairperson, that the history of the First World War was not included in the curriculum in Belgian schools. How better might you sweep away the inconvenience of historical fact other than sweeping it metaphorically under the classroom carpet? Truth to tell, the immediate consequences for the German people in 1918 were disastrous.

1. J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 27.
2. Arthur Willert, The Road to Safety: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, p. 166.
3. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace pp. 20-1.
4. Ibid., p. 29.
5. http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/armistice.htm
6. Ex-Kaiser William II, My Memoirs: 1878-1918, pp. 280–84.
7. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs Vol. 2, Appendix, pp 2044-2050.
8. Ibid., p. 2045.
9. Randolph S Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, p. 210.
10. National Archives, ADM 1/88542/290.
11. C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 67.
12. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 50.
13. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 1983-4.
14. Herbert Hoover, An American Epic 2, p. 319.
15. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 1985.
16. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 70.
17. http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?what=thmanu&manu_id=1561&tag=26&monat=8&year=2016&dayisset=1&lang=en  The murderers fled abroad after the assassination but returned after the National Socialists granted an amnesty for all crimes committed ‘in the fight for national uprising’.
18. The Times, 27 August, 1921, p. 7.
19. The Times, 29 August, 1921, p. 9.
20. The Brussels meeting in November 2014 was entitled «Expériences et représentations de la pénurie alimentaire durant la Guerre 14-18. Allemagne-Belgique, 6 November 2014»

First World War Hidden History Blogs – an update

We appreciate the number of blog readers and followers who have continued to support our drive to demonstrate clearly how the  First World War was justified, prolonged and deliberately aimed at the destruction of Germany and her allies. Over the past nine months we have been focussed on completing the second book spanning the years 1914-1919. It will be entitled, Prolonging The Agony and published by Trineday in the United States in the autumn/fall. As soon as the production work is completed we intend to post directions from the blog to the publishers so that you can get hold of a copy should you want to read the entire narrative and have it as an historical record. The revelations contained within its covers unmasks many of the myths of ‘The Great War for Civilisation’. It is a history that the establishment does not want to acknowledge, yet year on year, has been forced to concede, as the evidence of their collusion and lies grows ever more obvious.

Over the next two years we intend to examine the period from late 1916-1919 in a series of blogs which will be unrepentantly contentious. As the First World War was deliberately prolonged, so the opportunities for racketeers and armaments suppliers, millionaire bankers and financiers and political opportunists, expanded exponentially and the Secret Elite, whom we have regularly  exposed, began to extend into the trans-Atlantic, Anglo-American establishment, first documented by Professor Carroll Quigley. [1]

In July 1917, the great war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, [2] wrote a letter to his regimental masters in his capacity as a Second Lieutenant of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. It was read aloud in the House of Commons on 30 July by his friend and Member of Parliament for Northampton,  Lees-Smith, and might well have resulted in a court martial and Sassoon’s execution. It read:

‘Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.
3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
July, 1917.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.’ [3]

Ponder the key words here. Sassoon wrote his outcry in wilful defiance of military authority because he believed as a fighting soldier, that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who could have ended it. He no longer considered it a war of defence and liberation but of aggression and conquest. Had the reasons for war been clearly set at the start, the end would already have been attainable by negotiation (the peace that Britain and France refused to entertain). He could no longer be involved with prolonging these sufferings at the Front for objectives which he described as evil and unjust. He castigated the politicians for their lies for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. He blamed deception and callous complacency with which those at home accepted the agonies which continued in the trenches. This is the very vocabulary which we have used repeatedly to try to come to grips with the horrendous fact that young men across Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and, by 1917, America were being sacrificed. Sassoon’s very words; being sacrificed. Slaughtered, abandoned, surrendered to a faceless evil. It was  young men across the world who were betrayed … for the aims of a Secret Elite who sought to control a one world power for themselves. These words sit at the core of our thesis that the First World War was deliberately prolonged.  What Sassoon could not point out were the names of the elite cabal involved in this monstrous charade.

Our future blogs will prove beyond argument that this evil was deliberately prolonged just as Sassoon stated. When The Times reported that the letter had been read aloud in Parliament [4] the ruling powers had already taken steps to nullify his brave outburst. For Siegfried Sassoon was a very brave soldier who had won the Military Cross for his actions on the Western Front and had received several commendations for his leadership and decisiveness. This was not a man who could be thrown into prison or executed as a traitor. No. The official conclusion, which the War Office had prepared in advance, was that Sassoon was not responsible for his actions because he was suffering from a nervous breakdown. They decided that there ‘must be something wrong with an extremely gallant officer’ and had him sent to a special hospital for shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. It was by far the easiest solution for Lloyd George’s government to avoid of the wrong kind of publicity. [5]

Between 1917 and 1919 momentous changes were brought about because of the prolonged war which impacted severely on the future direction of a fast-changing world. These events did not ‘just’ happen. Each on its own has grown into further and future power struggles, with consequent misery and disaster.

In 1917 two immensely significant events helped destroy the old world order. In Russia, the once-mighty Czar and his royal family were forced to abdicate before being summarily shot by the rising force of bolshevism. What ensued involved hidden forces from the American banking dynasties, the money-power, which bled Russia of her wealth before abandoning her to the misery of Lenin’s secret police. We will demonstrate how Lord Alfred Milner and his Secret Elite colleagues were intimately involved in the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.

A second momentous event was not awarded  its proper significance at the time. In 1917, the British government sent a letter to Walter Rothschild and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain intimating that it sympathised with, and approved, the idea of a future Jewish homeland in Palestine. Though a range of conditions and understandings concerning the rights of the native arabs were also inferred, the Balfour Declaration, as the letter became known, was to have far-reaching consequences. It was not as it has been politely portrayed by sympathetic historians. As events became manipulated by the nascent Zionists, this action also prolonged the war, and, unknown to the general public, had deep rooted links in America.

By 1918, as the relentless stalemate appeared to have no foreseeable end, Germany was driven to seek an armistice. But the war was not over. Far from it. Had the Germans not been completely deceived by the lofty pronouncements from President Wilson and his mythical Fourteen Points, they would never have surrendered. Yet, because historians and politicians have distorted the true facts, we have long believed that the First World War ended in 1918. It did not. From 1918-1919 war against Germany and her allies continued to be waged through the cruel strangulation of a total food blockade to deliberately crush the German people. Her women and children, her starving troops returning from the front line, and her old and disabled became the victims of a merciless allied revenge. Starvation became the weapon of attrition until the crippling and false Treaty of Versailles was signed in mid-1919; until the Anglo-American establishment was satisfied that Germany had been crushed.

If these statements of intent cause you a deep intake of breath, bear with us. All of these great issues deserve close analysis. We start with the convenience of America’s entry to the fray after an election which championed the President who had previously kept the United States out of the war, Woodrow Wilson. Let the story unfold.

[1] The Anglo-American Establishment written by Professor Carroll Quigley is the seminal work on the elite cabal in England which developed after 1919 into a much more powerful trans-Atlantic power-group.
[2] For a brief but informative piece on Sassoon’s life and works see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/sassoon_siegfried.shtml
[3] The letter can be read in full at; siegfried-sassoon.firstworldwarrelics.co.uk/html/protest.html
[4] The Times, 31 July 1917, p. 6.
[5] Ibid., p. 8.

GUEST BLOG: Professor Hans Fenske (4) A Peace To End All Peace

The armistice of 11 November 1918, made it impossible for the German Reich to restart the battle and was tantamount to an unconditional surrender. In terms of international law it was questionable, since it contained conditions of a political nature – the annulment of the Eastern peace treaties – and because it permitted the continuation of the British blockade until peace was finally concluded. Since a blockade constituted a combat operation, it should have been suspended as soon as the armistice began. In addition, the Allies continued their stance of refusing peace talks with the enemies even after 11 November. They negotiated the peace treaty only among themselves. The main features were defined during a British-French-Italian pre-conference that took place in London in December 1918. They also decided to put Emperor Wilhelm II. on trial. President Wilson was unhappy with the result of the pre-conference and told his delegation that he demanded a just peace. He threatened that if Lloyd George and Clemenceau were not to ease up on their demands, he would depart and conclude a separate peace with Germany. However, he did not follow through with this threat because he feared for the League of Nations that he endorsed.

During the peace conference formally opened in Paris on 18 January 1919 consultations on all important issues were conducted within the close circle made up of the leading politicians from the US, Great Britain, France, Italy, and initially, also Japan. There were numerous commissions, but due to a lack of time, the politicians were not able to thoroughly deliberate upon their submissions. Due to Clemenceau’s hard line, talks were temporarily very controversial. Lloyd George realised that Clemenceau strove to attain excessive goals. In a comprehensive memorandum issued in late March, he urged that the conditions imposed on Germany be more moderate so that the peace treaty should not be a reason for embitterment.

Clemenceau rejected this memorandum outright and successfully insisted on his hard-line approach. When the German delegation arrived in Versailles on 29 April, the treaty was not yet concluded. So they were detained in hotels for the time being. On the morning of 7 May, only a few hours before the hand-over, it was finally ready in printed form; up to that moment, no-one had been able to read and evaluate it in its entirety. The German delegation considered it unacceptable and developed several counter-propositions by the end of May, but nearly all of them were rejected. The German government then recommended that the National Assembly in Weimar accept the treaty which it did on 22 June, with the exception of articles 227 – 231. These were concerned about bringing the German Emperor to trial and convicting war criminals. Article 231 made Germany and its allies liable for all the loss and damage they had caused by foisting this war upon Europe. The victorious powers did not accept this. Instead they gave an ultimatum to sign the treaty and the National Assembly complied. The formal signing took place on 28 June in the Hall or Mirrors of Versailles Castle, where King Wilhelm I of Prussia had accepted the German Emperorship on 18 January 1871.

For the two German delegates, this act was demeaning. The young British diplomat Harold Nicolson found it abominable. On the day of the second vote in the National Assembly, on 23 June, Quartermaster General Groener said in the Supreme Army Command, that not to accept it would result in bringing on a war of total annihilation by France against Germany. In that case, the Allies would have restarted their advance – so Weimar knew from American sources – and separated Southern Germany from the North, given separate peace treaties to the southern states and also detached the Rhineland from Germany. Clemenceau wanted to form an independent state on the left banks of the Rhine which was to constitute an economic and military system together with Belgium, Luxemburg and France.

The Treaty of Versailles was very tough. Germany lost nearly one seventh of its territory and one tenth of its population. Half the iron ore and one quarter of the coal production as well as one seventh of agricultural production were taken from her. German colonies and all foreign possessions of the Reich were lost. Most of the commercial fleet had to be handed over and long-term economic discrimination accepted. The army and navy had to decrease their size quite considerably. The Rhineland was de-militarised, split in three zones and occupied by Allied forces for five to fifteen years. The Saarland was put under the mandate of the League of Nations. The coal mines went to France and Gdansk with its surrounding area was turned into a Free City of Poland with special rights. The independence of Austria, whose National Assembly had voted to accept the connection to the German Reich, was to be guaranteed in perpetuity. The amount of reparations was to be determined at a later time. That the sum to be compiled would be very high, and paying it would take several decades, was beyond doubt. In the line of European peace treaties concluded since the 17th century, the Treaty of Versailles was nearly unique in that there was no negotiation with the conquered party. Only one peace treaty was comparable: the one Napoleon imposed upon Prussia in Tilsit in 1807.

Before the signing of the treaty, President Wilson said that if he were a German, he would not sign it. His foreign minister Lansing considered the conditions imposed on Germany as unutterably hard and abasing, many of them impossible to comply with. His adviser, Mandell House wrote in his diary on 29 June that the treaty was bad and should never have been concluded; its execution would bring no end of difficulties over Europe. And Delcassé, who had done a great deal for the onset of war and who in 1914 wanted to shatter Bismarck’s achievements, voted against the treaty’s ratification in the French chamber. He told a journalist that one could not urge a nation of 60 million people to pay a toll to another for 44 years. This would be nearly like forcing this nation to start a new war. As a matter of fact, regulating the issue of reparations had fatal consequences indeed. In early 1921, the total amount claimed from Germany was determined to be 226 billion gold Marks, a few months later, after Germany had protested, this was reduced to 132 billion. France used a small arrear in the delivering of commodities that Germany had to come up with to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s most important industrial district. In doing so, France hoped to be able to sever the Rhineland from Germany and to be able to moreover loosen the cohesion of the Reich.

The occupation of the Ruhr constituted a clear breach of the Treaty of Versailles. In Germany, it caused strong national emotions, but it also caused Great Britain to step out of the restraint it so far had shown towards France and get it to the negotiation table. Thus came about the Dawes plan in 1924, which set up an interim regulation regarding the reparations, a guarantee of the German-French border in 1925, and the admission of Germany into the League of Nations in 1926. The final fixing of the reparation burden was brought about by the Hague Conference in January 1930, whose main content had become known as early as mid- 1929.

According to this co-called Young Plan, the Reich would have to pay a total of 116 billion Marks over 58 years, i.e. until 1988. The first annual rate amounted to 1.8 billion Marks, which constituted 26% of the national budget of the Reich in 1928, a very high amount. A petition initiated by the German National People’s Party, by “Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten” [literally: “steel helmet, alliance of front-line soldiers”] and by the National Socialists, made a referendum possible. This was not successful, but the NSDAP unremittingly continued its fight against what it called the “tribute madness”, receiving very widespread positive reactions. At the Reichstag election in May 1928, it had only been a splinter party getting a mere 2.6% of valid votes, but during the new elections in September 1930 it received 18.3% of the votes; it thus increased its result seven times. The party leadership attributed this acceptance by 6.5 million voters to a very large part to their decisive stance against the Young Plan. With this successful election, the Party had laid a solid base for its further growth. That the party leader, Hitler, would finally be empowered to claim the position of Reich Chancellor for himself was also connected to the Treaty of Versailles.

In order to be able to have access to the national socialist storm troops in case of potential violent actions by Poland against the Eastern parts of Germany, which could not be excluded, and thus to be able to strengthen the all too weak Reichswehr, Reich President Hindenburg wanted to shift further to the right, and had Papen promise the NSDAP his agreement on new general elections in return for tolerating the new government he had just appointed. These elections in late July of 1932 brought in 37.4% of the votes for the NSDAP. Within only a few months, this resulted in the situation which saw Hitler become Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, being able to build up his dictatorship thereafter. Six years later, the issue of Gdansk and the so called Polish corridor which, according to the Treaty of Versailles, separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, constituted the starting point of the German-Polish conflict which led up to the Second World War. Thus came true what Lloyd George had feared back in March 1919, namely that accommodating Poland too much would sooner or later result in another war in Eastern Europe.

As mentioned in the introductory passage, Swiss citizen Ernst Sauerbeck accused the Entente in 1919 of having unleashed the war without need, of without need having prolonged it, and of again without need having ended it by means of a calamitous peace. This judgement proved to be correct. If, at the turn of the year 1917/18, the Allied forces had agreed on the German peace offer, or if they had accepted, like the German Reich, the mediation offer by Wilson, the war would surely have been ended by a treaty that both sides would have been able to live with. And if in 1919 the statesmen of the two Anglo-Saxon powers had prevented that a Clemenceau peace was imposed upon Germany, Europe would also have been spared much harm.

GUEST BLOG: Professor Hans Fenske (1) The Allied Refusal of Peace Talks 1914–1919

This is the first of four guest blogs from Hans Fenske, Professor of Contemporary History at Freiburg University from 1977-2001 and author of Der Anfang vom Ende des alten Europa. (The Beginning of the End of Old Europe; The Allied Refusal of Peace Talks, 1914-1919.)

A War Germany did not want.

When handing over the peace treaty to the German delegation on 7 May 1919, French Prime Minister Clemenceau stated very brusquely that the most horrible war had been foisted on the Allies, and that now the time of reckoning had come. There would be no spoken negotiations; only remarks concerning the treaty in its entirety would be accepted if submitted in writing within two weeks. In his answer, German Foreign Minister Brockdorff-Rantzau rejected the accusation of exclusive responsibility and demanded that an impartial commission investigate the amount of guilt of all parties concerned.

The victorious Allied powers were not prepared to concede forming an impartial commission to look at the facts, but there were a number of neutral scholars who in their academic work reached a view appropriate to the facts. As early as 1914, the renowned American Professor of Law, John William Burgess declared – after having studied the Blue Books presented by the warring parties – that the Entente held a far greater share of responsibility for the war than Germany and the Danube Monarchy. The Swiss scholar Ernst Sauerbeck confirmed this view in 1919. According to his findings, the Entente had unleashed the war without need and turned it into what it became – the tomb of entire nations. He also accused the victorious powers of having, by means of the Versailles peace treaty, allowed the 1914-1918 war to grow into the direst doom that has possibly ever threatened the world; that is the War that began in 1939.

In addition, experts from Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, who in 1927 presented their expertise in a volume published by a Norwegian committee investigating the issue of war guilt, assessed the share of guilt of the Central Powers as low. According to Hermann Aall, the committee’s secretary, Russia had provoked the war, and Great Britain played a decisive role in its outbreak. Axel Drolsum of the University of Oslo stated that Germany in 1914 had been the only nation to have tried everything it could to keep the peace, but that it failed due to the will of the other powers to make war.

Moreover, please let reference be made to one voice from a victorious country. In 1924, the French journalist and former diplomat Alcide Ebray recommended a thorough revision of the Treaty of Versailles. He claimed that the Czarist Regime held the decisive share of war guilt, while Germany acted in favour of a conciliatory position in Vienna and St. Petersburg in 1914.

In Serbia, the radical party had been the decisive power since the bloody officers’ putsch back in 1903, during which the Royal couple had been murdered. This party pursued a decidedly anti-Austrian foreign policy which demanded that all Serbs be united within one state. The problem here was the fact that there were about as many Serbs living outside the country as within, particularly in the two provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Although they nominally still belonged to the Ottoman Empire, they had been under Austrian-Hungarian administration since the Congress of Vienna in 1878. When the Habsburg Empire annexed them in 1908 following an arrangement with Russia, there was a severe international crisis. When this was settled in March 1909, Serbia had to sign a treaty pledging to again maintain good neighbourly relations with the Danube Monarchy. But this did nothing to change Belgrade’s keen antagonism towards Vienna. First, however, Serbian activities were directed towards the South. The war against the Ottoman Empire started by Italy in 1911 to conquer Libya triggered Serbian talks with Bulgaria about whether to join arms against the Turks. After entering into an alliance, the two states started the campaign in the autumn of 1912. Together with Montenegro and Greece, they took away from the Ottoman Empire nearly its entire possessions on the Balkan during the First Balkan War.

This took place with the full assent of Russia, which wanted to get the Bosporus and the Dardanelles under its control and which therefore had a strong interest in effecting changes on the Balkans. Serbia enlarged its territory considerably towards the south. In November 1912, shortly after the beginning of the war, the French ambassador in Belgrade reported to Paris that Serbia was set on bringing down Austria at the first possible occasion. King Peter asked the Russian ambassador whether to enact the downfall the Habsburg Empire now, or whether to still wait. The Russian ambassador relayed this question to St. Petersburg, from where in February 1913 came the answer that Russia was not yet ready for a war against Austria-Hungary. Serbia should content itself with the present increase in territory for now, so that it could later, once the time was ripe, lance the Austrian-Hungarian abscess. Later, more statements of this kind were issued from St. Petersburg: Serbia would find its promised land in Austria-Hungary and should prepare itself for the inevitable battle.

When, in the summer of 1913, Serbia – together with Greece and Romania – turned against Bulgaria in a struggle over the recently conquered land, Russia backed Serbia; it clearly was a satellite of Russia.

At the beginning of 1914, the leadership in St. Petersburg saw Russia far better prepared for a war than the previous year. During a council of war, a decision was taken to use the upcoming war for occupying Constantinople and the Straits. The Russian military gazette expressly declared the Czarist Regime’s readiness for war, and in late March, the head of the military academy declared in front of officers that a war with the Triple Alliance was inevitable and would probably break out in the summer. The Belgian ambassador in St. Petersburg reported to Brussels at the beginning of June that it was to be expected that Russia would soon put its war tools to use. At the same time, Foreign Minister Sazonov exerted pressure in London to quickly conclude the marine convention about which negotiations had been going on for some time. Soon after, he travelled to Romania together with the Czar. There, he asked the Prime Minister how Romania would react should Russia see itself compelled by the events to start hostile actions.

St. Petersburg was well aware that in the case of a big European conflict, Russia would be firmly backed by France and Great Britain. A Russian-French alliance had been in effect since 1894. The British-French understanding about Egypt and Morocco of 1904 was amended from 1905 by firm military agreements made by the General Staffs, about which the Belgian military was kept informed. During his visit to England in September 1912, Sazonov was assured by the British Foreign Minister Grey that in the case of a German-French war, Great Britain would support France by sea and by land, and try to deliver as destructive a blow as possible to German predominance. For Grey, Germany’s strong economic growth presented a grave threat; its weakening was thus a definite necessity for him.

When the Serbian secret society “Unification or Death” planned the murder of Austrian heir apparent Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the head of the Serbian intelligence service, Dragutin Dimitrijević, leader of the putsch of 1903, asked the Russian military attaché, whether this plan was convenient. St. Petersburg sent its consent, although they should have been aware that the Danube monarchy would have no choice but to react harshly to the murder of their heir to the throne. Apparently, Russian leadership thought the moment had arrived to lance the Austrian-Hungarian abscess.

In mid-June, German Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg asked the German ambassador in London to talk with Grey about securing European peace. If another crisis was to erupt in the Balkans, Russia might react more decisively  than before due to its comprehensive rearmament. Whether this would result in a European clash would depend entirely on Great Britain and Germany. If both states were to act as guarantors of peace, then war might be prevented. If not, any arbitrary marginal difference might light the war torch between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Grey’s response to the ambassador was placatory, but of course he did not tell him the truth.

After the Sarajevo murder on 28 June, Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold and General Chief of Staff Hötzendorf argued for an immediate strike against Serbia. The Hungarian Prime Minister prevented this. They agreed to demand of Serbia absolute clarification about the crime, but to hand over the respective note only after the end of the impending French state visit to Russia. They were sure about German allegiance to Austria in case of complications; a high-level public servant had been given this assurance when visiting Berlin on 5 and 6 July. The relevant German decision makers agreed that Russia would not intervene, so that the conflict could remain localised. That was a crass misjudgement.

During their stay in St. Petersburg on 20 through 23 July, the French guests, President Poincaré and Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Viviani, repeated the assurance of absolute French solidarity in a war against Germany, often given before. Sazonov and Viviani agreed on 23 July that everything must be done to counter the Austrian demand as well as any request which might be construed as a meddling with Serbian independence. The Austrian note to Serbia called for an unequivocal condemnation of propaganda directed against the Danube Monarchy, and lodged claims as to how this should occur. It also asked for the participation of Austrian delegates in suppressing any subversive efforts directed against the Habsburg Empire, as well as in investigating the murder. An answer was expected within 48 hours, i.e. by the evening of 25 July.

At first, the Serbian council of ministers showed a strong penchant to accommodate this request, and maybe it might have been even more pronounced, had Vienna made reference in its note to the fact that after the murder of Serbian ruler Duke Michael Obrenović in 1868, a Serbian prosecutor had conducted examinations in the Danube Monarchy. A call back to St. Petersburg was answered with the admonition to remain firm, which caused a change in opinion. Thus Serbia mobilised its forces on the afternoon of 25 July and handed over a rather conciliatory answer three hours later. Only the Austrian involvement in suppressing the subversive efforts and in investigating the murder was denied. At once, the Danube monarchy cancelled its diplomatic relations with Serbia. On the same day, Berchthold had it stated in St. Petersburg that should a battle with Serbia be foisted on Austria, this would not be about territorial gain but about defence, and that Serbian sovereignty would not be touched.

Czar Nicholas II had informally started mobilisation directly after the departure of his French guests on 24 July; the respective measures did not go unnoticed by German observers. The British navy was made ready for war on 26 July, and France called back all vacationers to their respective units. Formal Russian mobilisation against Austria-Hungary was ordered on 29 July, complete one day later. The German Empire tried to mediate until the last minute. On 28 July, the day of the Austrian declaration of war against Serbia, Emperor Wilhelm II. advised Vienna to stop in Belgrade, and even on 31 July, he urgently asked the Czar to avert the doom now facing the entire civilised world. Peace in Europe might still be kept if Russia stopped military actions threatening Germany and Austria-Hungary. Since Nicholas II. did not cancel the mobilisation order, the German Empire informed Russia on the evening of 1 August that it regarded the state of war to have occurred. On 3 August, it also declared war on France, after efforts to receive a declaration of neutrality from France had remained unsuccessful.

This was intended as a pre-emptive measure. France could not be left to choose the moment for attack; after all, German plans for a war on two fronts envisaged first turning west. The breach of Belgian neutrality by Germany, which at that point was only nominal, gave Grey the welcome opportunity to lead Great Britain into war on 4 August. Up to that point, public opinion had predominantly been in favour of steering clear of the strife on the Continent. During the crisis, Grey had been very insincere about his intentions towards German diplomats, misleading most of his cabinet colleagues, the House of Commons and the general public.