Austria was absorbed under the flimsiest of pretexts. For years the Nazis had stirred up trouble there. They even went so far as to assassinate the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfus in a 1934 putsch attempt. After that murder failed to achieve the desired results, Hitler bided his time while his goons continued to agitate. By 1938, he was ready to occupy his homeland. He insisted that his Austrian puppet, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, installed as chancellor after the forced resignation of his predecessor, send a telegram to the German government asking for help in quelling (Nazi-generated) unrest. This contrivance was Hitler’s justification to the rest of the world for the bloodless invasion that followed, never mind that he had threatened immediate attack if the Austrian leadership did not cooperate fully and hand over power. The world simply shrugged as Austria ceased to exist. Czechoslovakia was next.
“It is my unshakable will that Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map!” Hitler shouted during a meeting with Nazi leaders in May 1938. The führer absolutely meant what he said, but he would never be so blunt in public. Such naked aggression might provoke Britain and France to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid, and Germany at the time did not have the resources to fight them. An excuse was needed to invade, a feint to lull the Western European powers into complacency while he executed his designs. For this, Hitler fabricated intolerable abuses he claimed had been, and continued to be, inflicted on the German minority that lived in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
“A petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race,” Göring thundered at a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. “This pygmy race [the Czechs] is oppressing a cultured people [the Sudeten Germans] and behind it is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil.” No one ever accused the Nazis of subtlety. Even so, the world seemed determined to believe that Hitler’s interests in Czechoslovakia extended only to the welfare of the German populace living there, and that once satisfied on this issue, he would behave himself. Again, someone should have read Mein Kampf.
The last thing Hitler wanted was to be appeased on the “plight” of the Sudeten Germans. That would clear away the screen behind which he planned to crush Czechoslovakia. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain just didn’t get it. A man of peace, yet astonishingly naïve, Chamberlain actually believed Hitler’s concern for the German people in Czechoslovakia was real, and tried desperately to accommodate him. “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face,” the prime minister remarked after one meeting, “I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” It was a fatal misjudgment.
Chamberlain’s timid acquiescence to every one of the führer’s increasingly outrageous demands—which ultimately included the Sudetenland being handed over to Germany and Czechoslovakia’s complete withdrawal from the territory—infuriated Hitler. He was being robbed of the crisis he wanted to create, and thus a reason to destroy Czechoslovakia. Aides reported seeing the führer fling himself to the floor in a fit of fury and chew on the carpet. “The Germans are being treated liked niggers,” he screeched in frustration. “On October first [1938] I shall have Czechoslovakia where I want her. If France and England decide to strike, let them . . . I do not care a pfennig.”
The Czechoslovakian government was also understandably distressed by Chamberlain’s agreement to allow the dismemberment of its small country, among other concessions to keep Hitler happy. “If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you,” Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk told Britain’s leaders. “But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls!” Chamberlain sincerely believed he had achieved “peace in our time” by his appeasement of Hitler. His eventual successor, Winston Churchill, then a lone voice of dissent, knew otherwise. “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he declared before being shouted down in the House of Commons. Churchill was right. Hitler soon gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia, as he had always planned to do. And having seen firsthand how weak a stomach Britain and France had for fighting, he turned his greedy glare to Poland. World war was on the horizon.
As Czechoslovakia gasped its last breaths in the fall of 1938, the Nazis orchestrated what Goebbels called “spontaneous demonstrations” against Germany’s Jewish population. On the night of November 9-10, which would become known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, Jewish-owned shops and homes were destroyed, synagogues were burned, and thousands of Jews were arrested or murdered. This pogrom, the worst yet seen in Germany, was ordered in retaliation for the killing of a Nazi official by a Jewish refugee in Paris. The government issued specific instructions for how these “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be carried out. For example, synagogues were to be burned only when there was no danger to adjacent properties owned by gentiles. And, to compound the horror of the night, the government insisted Jews were to pay for all the damages to property that occurred. “German Jewry shall, as punishment for the abominable crimes, et cetera, have to make a contribution for one billion marks,” Göring announced. “That will work. The swine won’t commit another murder. Incidentally, I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
Although anti-Semitism was nothing new in Germany, Hitler made it government policy. He started with laws intended to exclude Jews from every facet of the community, and steadily escalated the persecution to genocide. His hate-filled lies about the Jews would be almost laughable had they not been responsible for such massive suffering. An excerpt from Mein Kampf:
The Jew offers the most powerful contrast to the Aryan. . . . Despite all their seemingly intellectual qualities the Jewish people are without true culture, and especially without a culture of their own. . . .
He batters the national economies until ruined state enterprises are privatized and subject to his financial control.
In politics he refuses to give the state the means for its self-preservation, destroys the basis of any national self-determination and defense, wipes out the faith in leadership, denigrates the historic past, and pulls everything truly great into the gutter. . . .
In cultural affairs he pollutes art, literature, theater, befuddles national sentiment, subverts all concepts of beauty and grandeur, of nobleness and goodness, and reduces people to their lowest nature. . . .
Religion is made ridiculous, customs and morals are declared outdated, until the last props of national character in the battle for survival have collapsed.
The führer’s fierce anti-Semitism infected almost every element of German society through relentless propaganda. William Shirer, who lived in Germany during the Nazi era, wrote about the effect it had on him: “It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.”
Little children were a particular target of the terrible lies. “This new Reich will give its youth to no one,” Hitler declared, “but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” Teachers were required to instruct their students in Aryan superiority and the danger posed to the Reich by Jews. Even the smallest children were not immune. The government provided vicious storybooks to be read to wee Nazis at nacht-nacht time.
One of the most popular of these was a book produced by Julius Streicher called The Poisonous Mushroom. Save for the grotesque Jewish caricature on the front cover, it looked like any child’s storybook, with colorful illustrations and simple stories. The message, however, was pure hate. In one story, a mother and her son are walking in the woods looking for mushrooms. The mother explains to the boy that some mushrooms are good to eat, but that others are very bad.
“Look, Franz
,” the mother says, “human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?”
Franz tells his mother that he does understand. She then asks him if he knows who these bad people are, these poisonous mushrooms. “Of course I know, mother!” Franz says. “They are the Jews! Out teacher has often told us about them.”
Franz’s mother is very proud that her son understands. Then she tells him that he must help other children understand. “Our boys and girls must learn to know the Jew,” the mother warns. “They must learn that the Jew is the most dangerous poison mushroom in existence. Just as poisonous mushrooms spring up everywhere, so the Jew is found in every country in the world. Just as poisonous mushrooms lead to the most dreadful calamity, so the Jew is the cause of misery and distress, illness and death.”
Lest it be lost in the subtle and nuanced tale of The Poisonous Mushroom, the author helpfully explains the moral: “German youth must learn to recognize the Jewish Poison-mushroom. They must learn what a danger the Jew is for the German Volk and for the whole world. They must learn that the Jewish problem involves the destiny of us all.”
The Nazi response to the “Jewish problem” was, of course, another grotesque euphemism, the “Final Solution.” The systematic murder of six million Jews began in Germany and spread to each nation the Nazis conquered. Poland would be the setting for some of the worst atrocities.
Poland had long been on Hitler’s list of nations to be destroyed in his obsessive quest for Lebensraum (living space for the German people). But before he finally pounced in September 1939, the führer played the familiar role of friendly neighbor. In a pact with the Polish government, he agreed “to renounce all application of force in the relations with each other for the consolidation of European peace.” He even invited Poland to take a slice of Czechoslovakia as a gesture of goodwill. The Poles eagerly snatched up their piece of the ruined nation, oblivious to the fact that they were the next target.
Before Hitler could safely invade Poland, however, he had to placate the Soviet Union, Germany’s mortal enemy. Though he despised Soviet leader and fellow monster Joseph Stalin, and planned eventually to add Russia to the ever expanding Nazi empire, he had to keep his giant neighbor to the north neutral in the event Britain and France came to Poland’s rescue. That meant he had to lure Stalin away from any alliance with the Western powers, and assure him of his own peaceful intentions. This he managed to do with false promises and empty concessions, including the guarantee of a chunk of Poland once it was defeated and a free hand in the Balkan states. Stalin bit, and a nonaggression pact was signed. The path to Poland was now clear.
The crisis Hitler concocted to justify the invasion of Poland to the world, and to his own people, was one of the lamest of all his lies. An attack on a German radio station near the Polish border was staged, carried out by SS men disguised in Polish uniforms. Condemned prisoners, also dressed in Polish uniforms, were drugged and then shot to make them appear to be casualties of the fake raid. A German who spoke Polish broadcast a speech from the “captured” radio station and announced it was time for Poland to rise up against Germany. Hitler, for his part, appeared unconcerned about the transparency of the provocation he had arranged. “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting this war,” he had stated several weeks earlier, “never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”
Thus, with the invasion of Poland, began World War II. Hitler knew a clash with the Western European powers was inevitable. In fact, he was itching for it. “Everyone must hold the view that we have been determined to fight the Western powers right from the start,” he said. Germany needed this life or death struggle. “A long period of peace would not do us any good,” he declared. The Third Reich had to be tempered by an epic clash of arms, just as Bismarck’s Second Reich had been. Nevertheless, he continued to make bogus pronouncements of his benign intentions, and even called for a conference of European nations (those that he had not yet conquered) to promote peace. “It is impossible,” he stated in a speech, “that such a conference, which is to determine the fate of this continent for many years to come, could carry on its deliberations while cannon are thundering or mobilized armies are bringing pressure to bear upon it. If, however, these problems must be solved sooner or later, then it would be more sensible to tackle the solution before millions of men are first uselessly sent to death and billions of riches destroyed.” These shamelessly contrived sentiments were uttered just before Hitler sent his war machine to crush, in short order, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Then, after the Battle of Britain, it was Russia’s turn.
“It is war,” said Russia’s stunned foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, upon hearing what amounted to yet another of Hitler’s fabricated excuses for invasion. “Do you believe that we deserved that?” Historians have long debated whether or not the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union really took the wily and suspicious Stalin by surprise. Some have argued that he knew all along that the pact between Germany and Russia offered him no protection, and that he was buying time to build up defenses when he signed it. Others maintain that Stalin, though crafty, nevertheless was caught off guard, and that the USSR was nearly destroyed as a result.
Stalin certainly seemed smug and complacent as much of Europe fell to the Nazis. He dismissed Britain’s repeated warnings of Hitler’s intentions, and even mocked them in an official statement just a week before the invasion of Russia began. They were, he declared, an “obvious absurdity . . . a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany.” If the Soviet dictator really was blind to the führer’s intentions, he missed a number of obvious clues that should have at least nudged his suspicions. For starters, of course, there was Mein Kampf. “When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states,” Hitler had written fifteen years earlier. “Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here. . . . This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia also will be the end of Russia as a state.”
As it turned out, Russia spelled the end for Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. And when it came to grasping the futility of the Nazi offense there, the führer only fooled himself. “The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous,” lamented one of Hitler’s generals in his diary. “Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called ‘leadership’ a most peculiar character.”
With Soviet forces closing in on his Berlin bunker, Hitler dictated one last lie before he blew out his brains. He called it his “Political Testament,” and asserted for the sake of posterity that he never wanted a world war, nor was he responsible for the suffering of tens of millions that his policies caused. Others bore the blame. And it’s not hard to imagine who they were. “Centuries will go by,” he declared, “but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its helpers.”
6
Elena’s Padded Résumé
She billed herself as a brilliant scientist—Romania’s own Marie Curie—but Elena Ceausescu was really just a poorly educated peasant who gathered enough power to fabricate for herself an impressive list of scholarly credentials. It was one of the perks of being the wife and cohort of Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Elena managed to obtain her doctorate in chemistry despite some fairly significant educational gaps,
like high school. Her thesis was on “the Stereospecific Polymerization of Isoprene on the Stabilization of Synthetic Rubbers and Copolymerization,” though some snickered (privately, of course, for fear of arrest) that she couldn’t even pronounce the title. No matter. Upon this wobbly academic foundation, Elena added a long list of other titles and honors to her résumé, like president of the National Council for Science and Technology and chairman of the Section for Chemistry in Romania’s Supreme Council for Economic and Soviet Development. “Being an ignorant, uneducated, primitive kind of woman, she really thought that if she had some titles after her name, it would change her image,” one Romanian official told author Edward Behr.
The accumulation of titles corresponded with Elena Ceausescu’s ever increasing political power, which culminated in her position as her husband’s second-in-command, a sort of vice despot whom no one dared defy. She slapped her name on reams of scientific books and papers she couldn’t possibly have written, let alone understood, and demanded honorary degrees when she made official trips abroad. Sometimes she was obliged, like at the University of Tehran, but not always. On a state visit to the United States in 1978, Elena wanted a degree from a university in Washington, D.C., but was told President Carter couldn’t guarantee that. Instead, she was offered an honorary membership in the Illinois State Academy of Science. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of Romania’s espionage service, Elena wasn’t pleased. “Come off it!” she reportedly snorted. “You can’t sell me the idea that Mr. Peanut can give me an Illiwhatsis diploma but not any from Washington. I will not go to Illiwhatever-it-is. I will not!”
A Treasury of Deception Page 9