Today I bring you Part II of the extraordinarily frank Benjamin Freedman speech, but I would like to preface it with a few "inside" highlights.
Some time ago Ernst Zundel told me about his encounter with Benjamin Freedman in New York City, where he did an extensive interview with Freedman at the home of a very wealthy lady on Park Avenue. Ernst remembers that Freedman was sharp as a whip, even though he was then already 77 years old. He was elegantly dressed, with exquisite Old World manners. He spoke passionately, had a wonderful vocabulary and a remarkable sense of humor. Ernst remembers this interview as a truly historic one because of what Freedman so very readily revealed.
When I asked Ernst how Freedman could have been so frank about his fellow tribe, Ernst said that he had converted to Christianity in his later years and took his new faith seriously. He felt an obligation to leave a record and tell it like it was.
Freedman told Ernst of how he had been privy to how America was manipulated into World War I. Freedman spent hours explaining to Ernst in what hotel rooms in Washington and New York the Zionist and US banking interests were negotiating, down to the stationary on which some of the proposals were written.
He recalled how President Woodrow Wilson was virtually blackmailed into doing the Zionist bidding because the Zionists had gotten hold of steamy love letters Wilson had written to a still married university professor's wife, which would have ruined Wilson, had they been published.
Freedman claimed that he had been one of the most trusted lieutenants of Henry Morgenthau Sr., the father of Henry Morgenthau who would later author the infernal "Morgenthau Plan" under President Roosevelt - a genocidal plan - put on paper! - which was meant to exterminate two-thirds of the German people through de-industrialization and starvation after World War II. (Both Ernst and I experienced the beginnings of this plan. We remember keenly how painfully we starved until the Marshall Plan brought relief to a devastated Europe . . . )
Freedman, then still a practicing Jew, lived unmolested for years in Adolf Hitler's Germany. He told Ernst about the Havarra or Transfer Agreement between Hitler and Palestine Zionists to get the Jews of Germany peacefully relocated, long before Edwin Black wrote "The Transfer Agreement" - and 35 years before Tom Segev wrote about it in "The Seventh Million."
Freedman said he was astonished by the restraint shown by Hitler's government in the face of repeated Zionist provocation; for instance, when Untermeyer called for a vicious, worldwide boycott against Hitler Germany, which had such devastating consequences for the German economy trying to recover from mass unemployment and the depression caused by the effects of Versailles.
As you read the second part of the Freedman speech below, please remember that this speech was made in the 1960s in the wake of the Hungarian uprising, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War tensions created by the building of the Berlin Wall. Remember also that in speeches sometimes summary "short-cuts" are made that are not as detailed and precise as scholarly papers would be.
Part II of the Freedman speech follows:
When Germany realized (after World War I) that the Jews were responsible for her defeat, they naturally resented it. But not a hair on the head of any Jew was harmed. Not a single hair. Professor Tansill, of Georgetown University, who had access to all the secret papers of the State Department, wrote in his book, and quoted from a State Department document written by Hugo Schoenfelt, a Jew whom Cordell Hull sent to Europe in 1933 to investigate the so-called camps of political prisoners, who wrote back that he found them in very fine condition. They were in excellent shape, with everybody treated well. And they were filled with Communists. (A) lot of them were Jews, because the Jews happened to comprise about 98 per cent of the Communists in Europe at that time. And there were some priests there, and ministers, and labor leaders, and Masons, and others who had international affiliations.
Some background is in order: In 1918-1919 the Communists took over Bavaria for a few days. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and a group of other Jews took over the government for three days. In fact, when the Kaiser ended the war he fled to Holland because he thought the Communists were going to take over Germany as they did Russia and that he was going to meet the same fate as the Czar. So he fled to Holland for safety, for security.
After the Communist threat in Germany was quashed, the Jews were still working, trying to get back into their former status, and the Germans fought them in every way they could without hurting a single hair on anyone's head. They fought them the same way that, in this country, the Prohibitionists fought anyone who was interested in liquor. They didn't fight one another with pistols. Well, that's the way they were fighting the Jews in Germany.
And at that time, mind you, there were 80 to 90 million Germans, and there were only 460,000 Jews. About one half of one per cent of the population of Germany were Jews. And yet they controlled all the press, and they controlled most of the economy because they had come in with cheap money when the mark was devalued and bought up practically everything.
The Jews tried to keep a lid on this fact. They didn't want the world to really understand that they had sold out Germany, and that the Germans resented that.
The Germans took appropriate action against the Jews. They, shall I say, discriminated against them wherever they could. They shunned them. The same way that we would shun the Chinese, or the Negroes, or the Catholics, or anyone in this country who had sold us out to an enemy and brought about our defeat.
After a while, the Jews of the world called a meeting in Amsterdam. Jews from every country in the world attended this meeting in July 1933. And they said to Germany: "You fire Hitler, and you put every Jew back into his former position, whether he was a Communist or no matter what he was. You can't treat us that way. And we, the Jews of the world, are serving an ultimatum upon you."
You can imagine what the Germans told them. So what did the Jews do?
In 1933, when Germany refused to surrender to the world conference of Jews in Amsterdam, the conference broke up, and Mr. Samuel Untermeyer, who was the head of the American delegation and the president of the whole conference, came to the United States and went from the steamer to the studios of the Columbia Broadcasting System and made a radio broadcast throughout the United States in which he in effect said, "The Jews of the world now declare a Holy War against Germany. We are now engaged in a sacred conflict against the Germans. And we are going to starve them into surrender. We are going to use a world-wide boycott against them. That will destroy them because they are dependent upon their export business."
And it is a fact that two thirds of Germany's food supply had to be imported, and it could only be imported with the proceeds of what they exported. So if Germany could not export, two thirds of Germany's population would have to starve. There was just not enough food for more than one third of the population.
Now in this declaration, which I have here, and which was printed in the New York Times on August 7, 1933, Mr. Samuel Untermeyer boldly stated that "this economic boycott is our means of self-defense. President Roosevelt has advocated its use in the National Recovery Administration," which some of you may remember, where everybody was to be boycotted unless he followed the rules laid down by the New Deal, and which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of that time.
Nevertheless, the Jews of the world declared a boycott against Germany, and it was so effective that you couldn't find one thing in any store anywhere in the world with the words "made in Germany" on it. In fact, an executive of the Woolworth Company told me that they had to dump millions of dollars worth of crockery and dishes into the river; that their stores were boycotted if anyone came in and found a dish marked "made in Germany," they were picketed with signs saying "Hitler," "murderer," and so forth, something like these sit-ins that are taking place in the South.
At a store belonging to the R. H. Macy chain, which was controlled by a family called Strauss who also happen to be Jews, a woman found stockings there which came from Chemnitz, marked "made in Germany." Well, they were cotton stockings and they may have been there 20 years, since I've been observing women's legs for many years and it's been a long time since I've seen any cotton stockings on them. I saw Macy's boycotted, with hundreds of people walking around with signs saying "murderers," "Hitlerites," and so forth.
Now up to that time, not one hair on the head of any Jew had been hurt in Germany. There was no suffering, there was no starvation, there was no murder, there was nothing.
Naturally, the Germans said, "Who are these people to declare a boycott against us and throw all our people out of work, and make our industries come to a standstill? Who are they to do that to us?" They naturally resented it. Certainly they painted swastikas on stores owned by Jews. Why should a German go in and give his money to a storekeeper who was part of a boycott that was going to starve Germany into surrendering to the Jews of the world, who were going to dictate who their premier or chancellor was to be? Well, it was ridiculous.
The boycott continued for some time, but it wasn't until 1938, when a young Jew from Poland walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot a German official, that the Germans really started to get rough with the Jews in Germany. And you found them then breaking windows and having street fights and so forth.
Now I don't like to use the word "anti-Semitism" because it's meaningless, but it means something to you still, so I'll have to use it. The only reason that there was any feeling in Germany against Jews was that they were responsible for World War I and for this world-wide boycott. Ultimately they were also responsible for World War II, because after this thing got out of hand, it was absolutely necessary for the Jews and Germany to lock horns in a war to see which one was going to survive.
In the meanwhile, I had lived in Germany, and I knew that the Germans had decided that Europe is going to be Christian or Communist: there is no in between. And the Germans decided they were going to keep it Christian if possible. And they started to re-arm.
In November 1933 the United States recognized the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was becoming very powerful, and Germany realized that "Our turn was going to come soon, unless we are strong." The same as we in this country are saying today, "Our turn is going to come soon, unless we are strong." Our government is spending 83 or 84 billion dollars for defense. Defense against whom? Defense against 40,000 little Jews in Moscow that took over Russia, and then, in their devious ways, took over control of many other countries of the world!
For this country now to be on the verge of a Third World War, from which we cannot emerge a victor, is something that staggers my imagination. (...)
(Tomorrow: Conclusion of the Freedman speech)
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Thought for the Day - a summary of our times and Western civilization's attitude in the face of ever-mounting provocation:
There is a tale of a warlord - I think Japanese - entering a Buddhist temple and, as his men sack and pillage in time-honoured manner, he threatens the priest.
The priest is calm, and not afraid.
"I am the man who can kill you!" shouts the warlord.
"And I," says the priest, "am the man who can let you."