If Wilhelm had reasons for wanting the blame shifted, the same could hardly be said of General Ludendorff, widely trusted in Germany and seen as one of its finest and most intelligent generals. Yet when Ludendorff—who had emerged from a lost war with his reputation enhanced—was shown the Protocols, he too leaped upon the exculpatory opportunity. “Several publications have recently appeared which throw more light on the position of the Jewish people,” he wrote. When these documents had been studied properly, he predicted, “One suspects that, in many instances, we shall arrive at another version of world history.”8
Among young Germans, the text had a receptive audience. To them it was doubly believable because it fitted with what other people were saying and what they were already inclined to think. The year 1919 had also seen the publication of Friedrich Wichtl’s book The World War, World Freemasonry, World Revolution, which similarly advanced the notion that Jews and Freemasons had brought about the disastrous conflict. This book, a nineteen-year-old boy wrote in his diary, explained “all and tells us against whom we must fight.”9 The young man was Heinrich Himmler.
But even in the countries that had—officially, at least—won the war, the Protocols were not dismissed. Serious newspapers cogitated on the meaning of the revelations. In France, L’Opinion analyzed the content of the book as it would any other serious publication. In Italy, the Milan newspaper Perseverenza and the Roman Vita Italiana did the same.
What seems most surprising now, however, was what happened in Britain. In 1920, the first English edition of the Protocols was published, a private commission from Eyre and Spottiswoode, who bore the distinction (and the imprint) of being His Majesty’s Printers. The British version was called The Jewish Peril and was soon being reviewed in some of Britain’s most prestigious journals. On May 8, The Times, newspaper of the Establishment, published an editorial, quite possibly the work of its celebrated editor Mr. Henry Wickham Steed. This leading article was titled “A Disturbing Pamphlet: A Call for Inquiry.” Its tone was urgent. “What are these Protocols?” it asked. “Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition?”
Then The Times asked, and seemed to answer, the key question. “Are they a forgery? If so whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in parts fulfilled, in parts far gone in the way of fulfillment?” Then the peroration. “Have we,” The Times demanded, “been struggling these tragic years to blow up and extirpate the secret organization of German world dominion only to find beneath it another, more dangerous because more secret? Have we, by straining every fiber of our national body, escaped a ‘Pax Germanica’ only to fall into a ‘Pax Judaeica’?”
A week later, it was the turn of the Spectator magazine. The edition of May 15 contained a long and respectful review of The Jewish Peril, accompanied by an editorial. The Protocols were described as being “of very great ability . . . brilliant in moral perversity and intellectual depravity . . . One of the most remarkable productions of their kind.”10 Both the Spectator and The Times were rapidly inundated by letters from horrified Jewish readers, an occurrence that for those who read the Protocols and believed them merely acted as corroboration.
Worse was to come. The Tory Morning Post commenced a series of twenty-three long leading articles backing the Protocols, and bound them together in another pamphlet, which was sold under the title of The Cause of World Unrest. Here was revealed how “a formidable sect” had brought about the First World War by manipulating the Germans, with the ultimate objective being “the destruction of Christianity and all religion except the Jewish.” The Morning Post was doubtless influenced in this by its employee and former correspondent in Russia, Victor Marsden.11
In the autumn, the Spectator praised the Morning Post for its stance. “The evidence that the paper brings to support its plea of conspiracy is clearly of enough substance and enough importance to justify its action,” argued the magazine. “We most sincerely wish that some body of the nature of a Royal Commission could be appointed to inquire into the whole subject.”12 One wonders now what such a royal commission would have been called, but the Spectator was in no doubt as to what ought to happen if such a body were to find the case against the Jews proved. In that situation, it demanded, “We must drag the conspirators into the open, tear off their ugly masks and show the world how ridiculous as well as how evil and dangerous are such pests of society.” Blackwood’s Magazine, unwilling to wait, advocated that Jews be excluded from public office and influence.
The Protocols crossed the Atlantic. In October 1919, they were published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger but with the Jewish references omitted. Soon afterward, an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor linked the Protocols to world events and argued, “It could be a tremendous mistake to conclude that the Jewish peril . . . does not exist . . . That a secret political organization exists, working unremittingly . . . is, to the man who can read the signs of the times, a thing unquestionable.” On June 19, 1920, the Chicago Tribune carried an article headlined “Trotsky Leads Jew-Radicals to World Rule. Bolshevism Only a Tool for His Scheme.” There was, the author claimed, a world revolutionary movement, part of which aimed “for the establishment of a new racial domination of the world. So far as the British, French and our own department’s inquiry have been able to trace, the moving spirits in this second scheme are Jewish radicals.”
Ford and the Protocols
The man who more than any other popularized the Protocols in America—and, as a result, abroad—was the industrialist Henry Ford. The Flivver King was the Bill Gates of his day. He had taken a modern product that few could afford and many wanted—the motor car—and turned it from a luxury into an everyday household item. He had liberated millions of Americans in that vast land from dependence on irregular public transport or horse-drawn conveyances. He had grown his business from a small workshop into one of the largest and most truly industrial in the whole of America.
However, the successful capitalist also had a social conscience and a political and social philosophy. Ford was one of those enlightened bosses who believed that screwing as much work for as little pay as possible out of your workforce was counterproductive. It was better to hire good folks and keep them happy, and to that end the Ford Company’s Sociological Department employed fifty people to vet new employees. Those who were sober and didn’t take in boarders (considered inimical to family life) were eligible for substantial bonuses. One irony of Ford’s political philosophy was that despite its emphasis on traditional American values, his industrial techniques—and the machine that they produced—were altering America forever.
Ford hated war, describing it as “murder, desolation and destruction.” From 1915, when America’s involvement in the First World War began to be discussed, Ford argued vehemently against it. Parasites and absentee owners, he told a press conference that summer, wanted to get involved in an unnecessary venture. “New York wants war,” he claimed, referring presumably to Wall Street. “The United States doesn’t.”13 In the autumn of 1915, a woman antiwar activist met Ford at his Highland Park factory in Michigan. During the course of their meeting, Ford paused, slapped his breast pocket, and exclaimed, “I know who caused the war—the German-Jewish bankers! I have the evidence here! Facts!” It was a statement that he repeated at least once more during the discussion.14
America never found out exactly what Ford’s facts were, and despite his campaigning the country did go to war in 1917, following the sinking by a German U-boat of the passenger liner Lusitania. By the time the U.S. doughboys were on their way home from Europe, there were new enemies for the celebrated industrialist to fight. There was, above all, Bolshevism, the negation of everything Ford believed in.
Ford, though a diffident man, did not believe in the quiet use of financial muscle. One lesson that he took from his antiwar campaign was that he could not rely upon the existing press to get his message over. Indeed, he was locked in a multimillion-dol
lar libel suit with one of the most powerful, the Chicago Tribune. Ford had also won the Michigan primary for the Republican presidential nomination in 1916 without ever agreeing to stand. It seemed to him that if he reached the people directly then he was likely to achieve political success. He was ever the innovator, and the solution seemed clear to him: he would become his own press, start his own newspaper. So in January 1919, the Dearborn Independent (Dearborn was the location of the first Ford plant) was launched, featuring, among the usual things, “Mr. Ford’s Own Page.” Promoted by Ford dealers throughout America, the Dearborn Independent soon had a print run of 300,000.
Initially, the newspaper manifested interest in the concerns of its readers, whom it took to be the hardworking folks of America and their families. But it wasn’t long before “Mr. Ford’s Own Page” was fulminating against the specter of Bolshevism and its threat to the American way of life. In April 1919, the paper printed an article about Russian Bolshevism, commissioned from a Russian exile, Boris Brasol, who had made an acquaintance of Henry Ford’s personal secretary, Ernest Liebold.15 Four weeks later, Liebold had his own article published, pointing out the “deep and sinister” role played in creating the conditions for the First World War by “financial interests.” Like a Ford car, the components were being assembled by different people. Soon they would be put together, and the thing would begin to move.
It took a year or so for the various themes—the Americanization of immigrants (120,000 Jews arrived in the United States in 1920), the greed of the great bankers (with special mention of the Rothschilds), and the threat of alien Bolshevism—to coalesce. When they did, the impact was huge. On May 22, 1920, and for ninety-one successive weeks after that, the Dearborn Independent devoted itself to campaigning on what it called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”
The starting point of this sustained campaign was a folksy “just askin’ ” stance. The observable fact was, as the paper put it, “a sparse Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a population of 110 million—attaining in fifty years a degree of control that would be impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race.”16 How, the Dearborn Independent wanted to know, had such a remarkable state of affairs come about? What special and specific qualities did the Jewish people have? What did such minority power mean for the majority of Gentiles? Week by week, the paper went through various aspects of life and politics, naming the chosen people wherever it found them and becoming a veritable Jew’s Jew in America. Sometimes the tone was plaintive. In an article about the music business, for example, the author lamented that once upon a time, “composers like Victor Hebery and Gustav Kerker” had been popular, “but now the Irving Berlins have forced themselves into places hewn out and established by Gentiles who had a regard for art.” A regard that Mr. Berlin, we may deduce, did not have. Sometimes the tone was cross, as when noting that Jewish control of the movie industry had made it impossible to show a film called The Life of the Saviour because it “might offend the Hebrews.”
We don’t know exactly when Boris Brasol told Liebold that he had a copy of the Nilus version of the Protocols. We do know that around the end of May 1920, a stenographer in Washington, D.C., made a copy of the Brasol text of the Protocols on behalf of the Ford Motor Company, and had it sent to Liebold.17 Then, on June 26, the Independent began to publish the Protocols as part of its series “The International Jew.” The serialization began with a complaint about the fuss that the publication was likely to cause. “The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question,” the editor wrote, “is the supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter.” It was an early complaint about what today might be described as political correctness. In August, the Independent claimed to show exactly the “connection between the written program of the documents and the actual program as it can be traced in real life.”
When the series was finished, it was collected together by Ford’s publishing house and sold in four volumes as The International Jew. Subsidized by Ford to the tune of $5 million, the books cost twenty-five cents per volume and sold half a million copies in the United States alone. But if Ford was a selling point in America, he was revered abroad. That such an endorsement of the Protocols should be made by someone so successful, so modern, and (presumably) so wise, added significant credibility to a document which had previously seemed rather outlandish. It is hardly surprising that versions of the Protocols published right up to today often quote the words of Henry Ford when interviewed by the New York World in February 1921: “They fit with what is going on,” said Ford. “They are sixteen years old and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.”
Enter Sir John
But even as Ford spoke, the Protocols were unraveling. Ten months earlier, in an article in the Berlin monthly journal Im Deutschen Reich, a German academic, Dr. J. Stanjek, had revealed that a secret meeting of Jewish elders, very much like the one supposed to be the source of the Protocols, had been described in a book published some time before. In fact, said Dr. Stanjek, it had been published more than thirty years before the First Zionist Congress had even met in Basel. And this earlier book was not a work of history or fact, but of fiction. A novel.
The book in question appeared in German in 1868, and had been supposedly authored by a certain Sir John Retcliffe. But Retcliffe was actually the nom de plume of a German journalist Hermann Goedsche. Goedsche had been convicted of political forgery back in 1848, when he had used fabricated letters to try to discredit the leader of the Prussian liberals Benedikt Waldeck. Sacked from his job in the post office, he had become a journalist on a right-wing Berlin newspaper, and supplemented his income by writing lurid novels under a romantic pseudonym. And it was in one of these, Biarritz, that a remarkable gathering takes place in a central European graveyard.
The scene is the Jewish cemetery in Prague, the oldest in Europe, during the Feast of Tabernacles. It is night and all is silent. Then the tower clock of the town hall strikes eleven. A key clicks in the lock of the cemetery gates. A rustling of long coats is heard; a white, shadowy figure appears, and then twelve more. These thirteen are the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel plus the exiles, and they are greeted by someone who is addressed as “Son of the accursed.” It is evident they are up to no good.
One by one, they report on what they’ve been doing for the last hundred years and their current thinking. Levi has got gold; Reuben has been setting up stock exchanges; Simeon has been getting his hands on all the best agricultural land, Judah on the factories. Manasseh from Budapest meanwhile is capturing the press, Benjamin the professions; Asher (from London) wants free marriage between Jews and Christians, and has been enjoying “the forbidden pleasure with the women of our enemies.” Naphtali wants to seize government bureaucracies; Dan is after monopolies on bread, butter, liquor, and wool. Zebulon argues for siding with liberals to foment revolution, while Issachar is interested in discrediting the military classes in the eyes of the people and Aaron sees the advantages in undermining the Church. The board meeting of Evil Jews Inc. over, they depart with the words “Let us renew our oath, sons of the golden calf, and go out to all the lands of the earth!”
After Biarritz’s forgotten publication, the chapter titled “In the Jewish Cemetery at Prague” underwent some curious metamorphoses. In 1872, it turned up as a pamphlet in Russia, with a foreword arguing that, though the meeting was fiction, it nevertheless revealed a truth. In 1881, it was published in France in the magazine Le Contemporain. This time, however, it was called the “Rabbi’s Speech,” and consolidated all the various wicked claims into one address, whose speaker talked of “Our sole aim—world domination, as was promised to our father Abraham.” By now it had mutated from fiction to fact, a speech supposedly delivered at a real gathering around the tomb of the “Grand Master Caleb.” Furthermore, it was held to have been recounted by an observer—that most irreproachable of characters, an English diplomat by the
name of Sir John Readclif!18
In 1891, in Odessa on the Russian Black Sea, the “Rabbi’s Speech” was published in a local newspaper but was said to have been given at a secret Sanhedrin eight years earlier—there had been a congress of Reform Judaism that year, held in Leipzig. It was reprinted again in France in 1896, in a book by François Bournand, Les Juifs et Nos Contemporains, and now the sinister speechifier was named as Chief Rabbi John Readclif. And so it went, with the rabbi subsequently becoming Rabbi Eichorn or Reichhorn, and sometimes speaking to a congress of Jews in Lemberg in Austria in 1912. In October 1920, La Vieille France published a Russian document recognizing the similarity between the Reichhorn speech and the Protocols but seeing this as evidence of the authenticity of both, the one backing up the other. In any case, hadn’t the speech been vouched for by that valiant English diplomat Sir John Readcliffe, “who paid with his life for the divulgation”?19 So fiction had become fact, and a German forger and author of pfennig dreadfuls had gradually turned into a power-hungry rabbi and a martyred English nobleman.
Enter Machiavelli
Dr. J. Stanjek’s hypothesis of a fictional source for the Protocols wasn’t enough, however, to discredit them. Even if there was a structural and philosophical similarity with the “Rabbi’s Speech,” this could have been coincidental. Just because Goedsche had imagined a ghastly get-together in which the world was subverted, that didn’t mean that no such gatherings had ever happened. And the Protocols were, after all, a record, word for word, of what was said at a very particular time and place: Basel 1897. It took another journalist to unearth another strange similarity before people began to sit up and listen.
When the Times editorial worrying about a “Pax Judaeica” was written in May 1920, the newspaper’s correspondent in Constantinople, Philip Graves, had worked for the paper for well over a decade. Sometime probably in the summer of 1921, he was approached by a Russian exile whom he calls “Mr. X”—“a landowner with English connections. Orthodox by religion, by political opinion, a Constitutional Monarchist.”
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 4