THE HANDSTAND

july 2005

Lingering Shadows of World War II
By Zia Mian
Zia Mian is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, online at www.fpif.org, and a researcher at the Program on Science and Global Security of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, online at www.princeton.edu/~globsec. This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in Economic and Political Weekly

Many events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War were held this past May. Yet there has been little or no discussion of some of the most important and enduring legacies of that war, legacies that have cast long shadows ever since. Nationalism, industrial production, the bureaucratic state, and science and technology were harnessed to the cause of war in terrible new ways. It brought us the gas chambers, the systematic bombing of cities, and nuclear weapons. These three forms of modern violence are different in some significant ways, but they shared important features. Among these were centralized authority, extensive compartmentalization of responsibilities, tasks, and knowledge accompanied by strong organizational loyalty, along with scientific rationalization for the policy and technical ways of distancing perpetrators from victims.

Many moral barriers were breached, and not all were by the Nazis. In September 1939, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt denounced the bombing of cities and appealed to the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Poland to desist. Roosevelt wrote to them that “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities” had “sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.” He said:

“If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives. I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.”

While no American city was ever subject to such bombardment, when America entered the war it joined Britain in the bombing of German cities. Then it bombed Japanese cities. In a recent film The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains that the U.S. bombing campaign killed 50-90% of the people in 67 Japanese cities. This does not include the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The most profound moral threshold that was crossed in the Second World War was in the effort to build the first atomic bomb. Its use in the war, and the nuclear age that followed, showed just how far things had gone. Seven years after India and Pakistan tested their nuclear weapons (on May 11 and 13, and May 28 and 30, 1998), it is worth asking what barriers have been and are being crossed in the subcontinent.

Early Experiments

There is no doubt that the scientists who built the first atom bomb knew they were preparing a weapon of mass destruction. One particular incident sheds light on the scale of destruction these scientists may have been contemplating. In April 1943, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi proposed to Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the U.S. atomic bomb program, that a nuclear reactor might be used to produce radioactive isotopes not just for the bomb, but in large quantities to poison German food supplies. Oppenheimer found the idea “promising.” But, Oppenheimer wrote to Fermi, “We should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men.”

Other kinds of violence were unleashed too. As part of the Manhattan Project, scientists were working with unprecedented amounts and kinds of radioactive materials. They needed to know what levels of radiation exposure might be safe and what would be fatal for scientists and engineers on the project, if no one else. They started to create knowledge about radiation effects on health. They started by irradiating animals. But this was only the beginning. In the next thirty years, over 23,000 people in the United States were the subjects for 1,400 radiation experiments, in many cases without their informed consent. When details were released in December 1993, U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary was moved to exclaim that, “The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”

On July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic explosion burst over the New Mexico desert. The Trinity test was conducted at a place fatefully called Jornada del Muerto (the Journey of Death). Robert Oppenheimer watched the test and famously declared “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The physicist I. I. Rabi had a similar but less known reflection about what scientists, including himself, had wrought:

“At first I was thrilled. It was a vision. Then a few minutes afterwards, I had gooseflesh all over me when I realized what this meant for the future of humanity. Up until then, humanity was, after all, a limited factor in the evolution and process of nature. The vast oceans, lakes and rivers, the atmosphere were not very much affected by the existence of mankind. The new powers represented a threat not only to mankind but to all forms of life: the seas and the air. One could foresee that nothing was immune from the tremendous power of these new forces.”

On August 5, 1945, the United States used its atom bombs to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on August 9, the city of Nagasaki. Over 200,000 people died immediately or within weeks from injuries. More died in subsequent months and years; the exact toll is not known. In announcing the first use of the atom bomb, President Harry Truman warned on August 6: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city… If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Violence begets violence and fear. In August 1949 the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. There was a secret debate within the U.S. government about what should be the appropriate response to the Soviet atomic bomb test, in particular whether the United States should pursue the development of an even more powerful bomb, a hydrogen-bomb based on thermonuclear fusion (India claimed to test just such a bomb on May 11, 1998).

The committee that was set up to consider the possibility of a hydrogen bomb included Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and I. I. Rabi, among others. They concluded that the H-bomb could probably be built within five years, but advised against it. The committee argued that “it is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives … Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”

Debating the H-Bomb

While it was clear that the atom bomb was a tool for a policy of extermination, the committee was divided however on how to characterize the exterminist nature of an H-bomb. The majority of the committee members argued that, “its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians … Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” The minority view on the committee was that this statement did not go far enough. They argued, “It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

The advice of the committee was rejected. The political, military, and institutional pressures of the growing nuclear complex and the Cold War prevailed. On November 1, 1952, the United States tested the first H-bomb. The Mike test, at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, had an explosive yield of over ten megatons, many hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more explosive power than all the bombs dropped by U.S. and British armed forces during the Second World War.

Where the United States led, others followed. The nuclear stockpiles that were manufactured by the United States and Soviet Union, and the smaller nuclear weapon states, quickly surpassed the dangers posed by earlier measures of genocide. By 1960, only 15 years after the end of the Second World War, the United States had a nuclear war plan that would have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 360-525 million people. Robert McNamara, as then defense secretary, argued in 1962 that a “reasonable” goal for nuclear war against the Soviet Union could be the destruction of 25 per cent of its population (i.e. the death of 55 million people) and more than two-thirds of its industrial capacity.

Recent calculations have shown that McNamara’s criteria of killing 25 per cent of the Russian population would now require only 51 modern U.S. nuclear warheads. Estimates of current arsenals in 2005 suggest that the United States has about 5,300 operational nuclear warheads (and other 5,000 on reserve), while Russia has 7,200 warheads, China has about 400, France has 350, and Britain has 200 warheads. Israel is believed to have up to 200 nuclear weapons. It is estimated India and Pakistan have so far less than 100 warheads each.

There is little solace to be had in the relatively smaller arsenals of India and Pakistan, the newest nuclear weapon states. A nuclear war between Pakistan and India in which each used only five of their nuclear weapons (each of which typically has the same yield of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would likely kill about three million people and severely injure another one and a half million.

The Nuclear Future

It is clear now that for the United States and a handful of other like-minded states, nuclear weapons have a role to play in the 21st century. While some states pursue a nuclear weapons capability, U.S. nuclear weapons designers and military planners are pushing for new weapons designs and missions. There are arguments for new bunker-buster nuclear weapons, for more reliable nuclear weapons (that will last longer), and for nuclear weapons that will be customized in their effects.

Stephen Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and former associate laboratory director for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has argued that in the post-Cold War world, the United States needs new kinds of low-yield nuclear weapons because it faces “new threats,” and the continued U.S. “reliance on high-yield strategic (nuclear) weapons could lead to self-deterrence, a limitation of strategic options.” Paul Robinson, the former director of Sandia National Laboratory and chairman of the policy subcommittee of the strategic advisory group for the commanders-in-chief of the U.S. Strategic Command has proposed developing a special low-yield “To Whom It May Concern” nuclear arsenal, directed at third world countries. This is by no means the first time such suggestions have come from U.S. weapons laboratories. In 1970, Harold Agnew, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that “if people would prepare the right spectrum of tactical weapons, we might be able to knock off this sort of foolishness we now have in Vietnam and West Asia or any place else”.

The United States is renewing its embrace of a nuclear arsenal in the post-Cold War world, knowing that this more deeply embeds nuclear weapons in national and international structures of political and military thinking and action. The deep-seated reasons for this folly may lie in the bomb itself. The American novelist E. L. Doctorow observed that “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after years, compose our identity?”

A very important unanswered question is: Where are the original Polish documents today? Unless they were destroyed in the conflagration of the war, they presumably fell into either American or Soviet hands in 1945. In view of recent U.S. government policy on secret archival material, it is very unlikely that they would still be secret today if they had been acquired by the United States. My guess is that if they were not destroyed, they are now either in Moscow or at the East German Central State Archives in Potsdam.

It is particularly important to keep in mind that these secret reports were written by top level Polish ambassadors, that is, by men who though not at all friendly to Germany nonetheless understood the realities of European Politics far better than those who made policy in the United States.

For example, the Polish ambassadors realized that behind all their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and expressions of love for the United States, the Jews who agitated for war against Germany were actually doing nothing other than ruthlessly furthering their own purely sectarian interests. Many centuries of experience in living closely with the Jews had made the Poles far more aware than most nationalities of the special character of this people.

Two Key Diplomats

Two American diplomats who played especially crucial roles in the European crisis of 1938-1939 are mentioned often in the Polish documents. The first of these was William C. Bullitt. Although his official position was U.S. Ambassador to France, he was in reality much more than that. He was Roosevelt's "super envoy" and personal deputy in Europe.

Like Roosevelt, Bullitt "rose from the rich." He was born into an important Philadelphia banking family, one of the city's wealthiest. His mother's grandfather, Jonathan Horwitz, was a German Jew who had come to the United States from Berlin.[12] In 1919 Bullitt was an assistant to President Wilson at the Versailles peace conference. That same year, Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George sent him to Russia to meet with Lenin and determine if the new Bolshevik government deserved recognition by the Allies. Bullitt met with Lenin and other top Soviet leaders and upon his return urged recognition of the new regime. But he had a falling-out with Wilson and left diplomatic service. In 1923 he married Louise Bryant Reed, the widow of American Communist leader John Reed. In Europe Bullitt collaborated with Sigmund Freud on a psychoanalytical biography of Wilson. When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he brought Bullitt back into diplomatic life.[13]

In November 1933, Roosevelt sent Bullitt to Moscow as the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. His initial enthusiasm for the Soviet system gave way to a deep distrust of Stalin and Communism. In 1936 the President transferred him to Paris. He served there as Roosevelt's key European diplomat until 1940 when Churchill's assumption of leadership in Britain and the defeat of France made his special role superfluous.

In the Spring of 1938, all U.S. envoys in Europe were subordinated to Bullitt by an internal directive of the State Department.[14] As the European situation worsened in 1939, Roosevelt often spoke with his man in Paris by telephone, sometimes daily, frequently giving him precisely detailed and ultra-confidential instructions on how to conduct America's foreign policy. Not even Secretary of State Cordell Hull was privy to many of the letters and communications between Bullitt and Roosevelt.

In France, the New York Times noted, Bullitt "was acclaimed there as 'the Champagne Ambassador' on account of the lavishness of his parties, but he was far more than the envoy to Paris: He was President Roosevelt's intimate adviser on European affairs, with telephone access to the President at any hour."[15]

Bullitt and Roosevelt were fond of each other and saw eye to eye on foreign policy issues. Both were aristocrats and thorough internationalists who shared definite views on how to remake the world and a conviction that they were destined to bring about that grand reorganization.

"Between these teammates," the Saturday Evening Post reported in March 1939,

there is a close, hearty friendship and a strong temperamental affinity. The President is known to rely upon Bullitt's judgment so heavily that the ambassador's mailed and cabled reports from abroad are supplemented several times a week by a chat by transatlantic telephone. In addition, Bullitt returns to the United States several times each year to take part in White House councils, to the displeasure of the State Department, which considers him a prima donna.

In the whole roster of the State Department the President could not have found an adviser who would have been so responsive to his own champagne personality as Bullitt. Both men, born patricians, have the same basic enthusiasm for remolding society ...[16]

In Europe, Bullitt spoke with the voice and the authority of President Roosevelt himself.

The second most important American diplomat in Europe was Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt's Ambassador at the Court of St. James. Like Bullitt he was a wealthy banker. But this Boston Catholic of Irish ancestry was otherwise a very different sort of man. Roosevelt sent Kennedy, an important Democratic party figure and father of a future President, to Britain for purely political reasons. Roosevelt disliked and distrusted Kennedy, and this sentiment grew as Kennedy opposed the President's war policies more and more vehemently. Moreover, Kennedy despised his counterpart in Paris. In a letter to his wife, he wrote: "I talk to Bullitt occasionally. He is more rattlebrained than ever. His judgment is pathetic and I am afraid of his influence on F.D.R. because they think alike on many things."[17]

The Documents

Here now are extensive excerpts from the Polish documents themselves. They are given in chronological order. They are remarkably lucid for diplomatic reports and speak eloquently for themselves.

* * * * *

On 9 February 1938, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, reported to the Foreign Minister in Warsaw on the Jewish role in making American foreign policy:

The pressure of the Jews on President Roosevelt and on the State Department is becoming ever more powerful ...

... The Jews are right now the leaders in creating a war psychosis which would plunge the entire world into war and bring about general catastrophe. This mood is becoming more and more apparent.

in their definition of democratic states, the Jews have also created real chaos: they have mixed together the idea of democracy and communism and have above all raised the banner of burning hatred against Nazism.

This hatred has become a frenzy. It is propagated everywhere and by every means: in theaters, in the cinema, and in the press. The Germans are portrayed as a nation living under the arrogance of Hitler which wants to conquer the whole world and drown all of humanity in an ocean of blood.

In conversations with Jewish press representatives I have repeatedly come up against the inexorable and convinced view that war is inevitable. This international Jewry exploits every means of propaganda to oppose any tendency towards any kind of consolidation and understanding between nations. In this way, the conviction is growing steadily but surely in public opinion here that the Germans and their satellites, in the form of fascism, are enemies who must be subdued by the 'democratic world.'

On 21 November 1938, Ambassador Potocki sent a report to Warsaw which discussed in some detail a conversation between himself and Bullitt, who happened to be back in Washington:

The day before yesterday I had a long conversation with Ambassador Bullitt, who is here on vacation. He began by remarking that friendly relations existed between himself and [Polish] Ambassador Lukasiewicz in Paris, whose company he greatly enjoyed.

Since Bullitt regularly informs President Roosevelt about the international situation in Europe, and particularly about Russia, great attention is given to his reports by President Roosevelt and the State Department. Bullitt speaks energetically and interestingly. Nonetheless, his reaction to events in Europe resembles the view of a journalist more than that of a politician ...

About Germany and Chancellor Hitler he spoke with great vehemence and strong hatred. He said that only force, and ultimately a war would put an end to the insane future German expansionism.

To my question asking how he visualized this coming war, he replied that above all the United States, France and England must rearm tremendously in order to be in a position to oppose German power.

Only then, when the moment is ripe, declared Bullitt further, will one be ready for the final decision. I asked him in what way a conflict could arise, since Germany would probably not attack England and France first. I simply could not see the connecting point in this whole combination.

Bullitt replied that the democratic countries absolutely needed another two years until they were fully armed. In the meantime, Germany would probably have advanced with its expansion in an easterly direction. It would be the wish of the democratic countries that armed conflict would break out there, in the East between the German Reich and Russia. As the Soviet Union's potential strength is not yet known, it might happen that Germany would have moved too far away from its base, and would be condemned to wage a long and weakening war. Only then would the democratic countries attack Germany, Bullitt declared, and force her to capitulate.

In reply to my question whether the United States would take part in such a war, he said, 'Undoubtedly yes, but only after Great Britain and France had let loose first!' Feeling in the United States was no intense against Nazism and Hitlerism, that a psychosis already prevails today among Americans similar to that before America's declaration of war against Germany in 1917.

Bullitt did not give the impression of being very well informed about the situation in Eastern Europe, and he conversed in a rather superficial way.

Ambassador Potocki's report from Washington of 9 January 1939 dealt in large part with President Roosevelt's annual address to Congress:

President Roosevelt acts on the assumption that the dictatorial governments, above all Germany and Japan, only understand a policy of force. Therefore he has decided to react to any future blows by matching them. This has been demonstrated by the most recent measures of the United States.

The American public is subject to an ever more alarmifig propaganda which is under Jewish influence and continuously conjures up the specter of the danger of war. Because of this the Americans have strongly altered their views on foreign policy problems, in comparison with last year.

Of all the documents in this collection, the most revealing is probably the secret report by Ambassador Potocki of 12 January 1939 which dealt with the domestic situation in the United States. This report is given here in full:

The feeling now prevailing in the United States is marked by a growing hatred of Fascism and, above all, of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with Nazism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100 percent radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible-above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited-this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.

Right now most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and Nazism as the greatest evil and greatest danger threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who don't spare any words to incite the public here with every kind of slander. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.

It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely excluded. If mentioned at all, it is only in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way as if Soviet Russia were working with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathy of the American public is completely on the side of Red Spain.

Besides this propaganda, a war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is unavoidable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America must also take an active part in order to defend the slogans of freedom and democracy in the world.

President Roosevelt was the first to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose: First, he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from domestic political problems, especially the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors about danger threatening Europe, he wanted to get the American people to accept an enormous armament program which exceeds the defense requirements of the United States.

Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is steadily growing worse. The unemployed today already number twelve million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far there have only been the usual strikes and local unrest. But how long this kind of government aid can be kept up cannot be predicted. The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.

As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever political player and an expert of the American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand, to conjure up a war menace hanging over the world because of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by babbling about an attack of the totalitarian states against the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He portrayed it as a capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As people say here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.

The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German Nazism is further kindled by the brutal policy against the Jews in Germany and by the 6migr6 problem. In this action, various Jewish intellectuals participated: for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau; and others who are personal friends of President Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-makers. These groups of people who occupy the highest positions in the American government and want to pose as representatives of 'true Americanism' and 'defenders of democracy' are, in the last analysis, connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.

For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to portray the President of the United States as the 'idealist' champion on human rights was a very clever move. In this manner they have created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a masterly manner. Roosevelt has been given the foundation for activating American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous military stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving very consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is very convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism, which is constantly growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending religion and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.

On 16 January 1939, Polish Ambassador Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry on another lengthy conversation he had with Roosevelt's personal envoy, William Bullitt:

The day before yesterday, I had a longer discussion with Ambassador Bullitt in the Embassy where he called on me. Bullitt leaves on the 21st of this month for Paris, from where he has been absent for almost three months. He is sailing with a whole 'trunk' full of instructions, conversations, and directives from President Roosevelt, the State Department and Senators who belong to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In talking with Bullitt I had the impression that he had received from President Roosevelt a very precise definition of the attitude taken by the United States towards the present European crisis. He will present this material at the Quai d'Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry] and will make use of it in discussions with European statesmen. The contents of these directives, as Bullitt explained them to me in the course of a conversation lasting half an hour, were:

1. The vitalizing of foreign policy under the leadership of President Roosevelt, who severely and unambiguously condemns totalitarian countries.

2. United States preparations for war on sea, land and air will be carried out at an accelerated pace and will consume the colossal sum of 1.25 billion dollars.

3. It is the decided opinion of the President that France and Britain must put an end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not get into any discussions aiming at any kind of territorial changes.

4. They have the moral assurance that the United States will abandon the policy of isolation and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth of money and raw materials at their disposal.

The Polish Ambassador to Paris, Juliusz (Jules) Lukasiewicz, sent a top secret report to the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw at the beginning of February 1939 which outlined U.S. policy towards Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:

A week ago, the Ambassador of the United States, William Bullitt returned to Paris after a three months' leave in America. Meanwhile, I have had two conversations with him which enable me to inform you of his views regarding the European situation and to give a survey of Washington's policy.

The international situation is regarded by official circles as extremely serious and in constant danger of armed conflict. Those in authority are of the opinion that if war should break out between Britain and France on the one hand, and Germany and Italy on the other, and should Britain and France be defeated, the Germans would endanger the real interests of the United States on the American continent. For this reason, one can foresee right from the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally some time after the outbreak of the war. As Ambassador Bullitt expressed it: 'Should war break out we shall certainly not take part in it at the beginning, but we shall finish it.'

On 7 March 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent a remarkably lucid and perceptive report on Roosevelt's foreign policy to his government in Warsaw. This document was first made public when leading German newspapers published it in German translation, along with a facsimile reproduction of the first page of the Polish original, in their editions of 28 October 1940. The main National Socialist party newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, published the Ambassador's report with this observation:

The document itself needs no commentary. We do not know, and it does not concern us, whether the internal American situation as reported by the Polish diplomat is correct in every detail. That must be decided by the American people alone. But in the interest of historical truth it is important for us to show that the warmongering activities of American diplomacy, especially in Europe, are once again revealed and proven by this document. It still remains a secret just who, and for what motives, have driven American diplomacy to this course. In any case, the results have been disastrous for both Europe and America. Europe was plunged into war and America has brought upon itself the hostility of great nations which normally have no differences with the American people and, indeed, have not been in conflict but have lived for generations as friends and want to remain so.

This report was not one of the Polish documents which was released in March 1940 and published as part of the "German White Book No. 3" (or the German White Paper). However, it was published in 1943 as part of the collection entitled "Roosevelt's Way Into War." As far as I can determine, this English translation is the first that has ever appeared. Ambassador Potocki's secret report of 7 March 1939 is here given in full:

The foreign policy of the United States right now concerns not only the government, but the entire American public as well. The most important elements are the public statements of President Roosevelt. In almost every public speech he refers more or less explicitly to the necessity of activating foreign policy against the chaos of views and ideologies in Europe. These statements are picked up by the press and then cleverly filtered into the minds of average Americans in such a way as to strengthen their already formed opinions. The same theme is constantly repeated, namely, the danger of war in Europe and saving the democracies from inundation by enemy fascism. In all of these public statements there is normally only a single theme, that is, the danger from Nazism and Nazi Germany to world peace.

As a result of these speeches, the public is called upon to support rearmament and the spending of enormous sums for the navy and the air force. The unmistakable idea behind this is that in case of an armed conflict the United States cannot stay out but must take an active part in the maneuvers. As a result of the effective speeches of President Roosevelt, which are supported by the press, the American public is today being conscientiously manipulated to hate everything that smacks of totalitarianism and fascism. But it is interesting that the USSR is not included in all this. The American public considers Russia more in the camp of the democratic states. This was also the case during the Spanish civil war when the so-called Loyalists were regarded as defenders of the democratic idea.

The State Department operates without attracting a great deal of attention, although it is known that Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull and President Roosevelt swear allegiance to the same ideas. However, Hull shows more reserve than Roosevelt, and he loves to make a distinction between Nazism and Chancellor Hitler on the one hand, and the German people on the other. He considers this form of dictatorial government a temporary "necessary evil." In contrast, the State Department is unbelievably interested in the USSR and its internal situation and openly worries itself over its weaknesses and decline. The main reason for United States interest in the Russians is the situation in the Far East. The current government would be glad to see the Red Army emerge as the victor in a conflict with Japan. That's why the sympathies of the government are clearly on the side of China, which recently received considerable financial aid amounting to 25 million dollars.

Eager attention is given to all information from the diplomatic posts as well as to the special emissaries of the President who serve as Ambassadors of the United States. The President frequently calls his representatives from abroad to Washington for personal exchanges of views and to give them special information and instructions. The arrival of the envoys and ambassadors is always shrouded in secrecy and very little surfaces in the press about the results of their visits. The State Department also takes care to avoid giving out any kind of information about the course of these interviews. The practical way in which the President makes foreign policy is most effective. He gives personal instructions to his representatives abroad, most of whom are his personal friends. In this way the United States is led down a dangerous path in world politics with the explicit intention of abandoning the comfortable policy of isolation. The President regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own personal ambition. He listens carefully and happily to his echo in the other capitals of the world. In domestic as well as in foreign policy, the Congress of the United States is the only object that stands in the way of the President and his government in carrying out his decisions quickly and ambitiously. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Constitution of the United States gave the highest prerogatives to the American parliament which may criticize or reject the law of the White House.

The foreign policy of President Roosevelt has recently been the subject of intense discussion in the lower house and in the Senate, and this has caused excitement. The so-called Isolationists, of whom there are many in both houses, have come out strongly against the President. The representatives and senators were especially upset over the remarks by the President, which were published in the press, in which he said that the borders of the United States lie on the Rhine. But President Roosevelt is a superb political player and understands completely the power of the American parliament. He has his own people there, and he knows how to withdraw from an uncomfortable situation at the right moment.

Very intelligently and cleverly he ties together the question of foreign policy with the issues of American rearmament. He particularly stresses the necessity of spending enormous sums in order to maintain a defensive peace. He says specifically that the United States is not arming in order to intervene or to go to the aid of England or France in case of war, but rather because of the need to show strength and military preparedness in case of an armed conflict in Europe. In his view this conflict is becoming ever more acute and is completely unavoidable.

Since the issue is presented this way, the houses of Congress have no cause to object. To the contrary, the houses accepted an armament program of more than one billion dollars. (The normal budget is 550 million, the emergency 552 million dollars.) However, under the cloak of a rearmament policy, President Roosevelt continues to push forward his foreign policy, which unofficially shows the world that in case of war the United States will come out on the side of the democratic states with all military and financial power.

In conclusion it can be said that the technical and moral preparation of the American people for participation in a war-if one should break out in Europe-is preceding rapidly. It appears that the United States will come to the aid of France and Great Britain with all its resources right from the beginning. However, I know the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the opinion that the possibility that America will enter war as in 1917 is not great. That's because the majority of states in the mid-West and West, where the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at all costs. They remember the declaration of the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of unpaid billions which the European states still owe America.

Juliusz Lukasiewicz, Poland's Ambassador to France, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 about further conversations with U.S. envoy Bullitt in Paris. Lukasiewicz discussed Roosevelt's efforts to get both Poland and Britain to adopt a totally uncompromising policy towards Germany, even in the face of strong sentiment for peace. The report concludes with these words:

... I consider it my duty to inform you of all the aforesaid because I believe that collaboration with Ambassador Bullitt in such difficult and complicated times may prove useful to us. In any case it is absolutely certain that he agrees entirely with our point of view and is prepared for the most extensive friendly collaboration possible.

In order to strengthen the efforts of the American Ambassador in London [Joseph Kennedy], I called the attention of Ambassador Bullitt to the fact that it is not impossible that the British may treat the efforts of the United States with well-concealed contempt. He answered that I am probably right, but that nevertheless the United States has at its disposal the means to really bring pressure on England. He would be giving serious consideration to mobilizing these means.

The Polish Ambassador in London, Count Edward Raczynski, reported to Warsaw on 29 March 1939 on the continuing European crisis and on a conversation he had with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, his American counterpart. Kennedy's remarks to Raczynski confirmed Bullitt's reputation in diplomatic circles as an indiscreet big mouth:

I asked Mr. Kennedy point blank about the conference which he is supposed to have had recently with [British Prime Minister] Mr. Chamberlain concerning Poland. Kennedy was surprised and declared categorically that a conversation of such special significance never took place. At the same time, and thereby contradicting his own assertion to a certain extent, Kennedy expressed displeasure and surprise that his colleagues in Paris and Warsaw [William Bullitt and Anthony Biddle] 'who are not, as himself, in a position to get a clear picture of conditions in England' should talk so openly about this conversation.

Mr. Kennedy-who made me understand that his views were based on a series of conversations with the most important authorities here-declared that he was convinced that should Poland decide in favor of armed resistance against Germany, especially with regard to Danzig, it would draw England in its wake.

This concludes the excerpts from the Polish reports.

* * * * * An important confirmation of the crucial role of Roosevelt and the Jews in pushing Britain into war comes from the diary of James V. Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. In his entry for 27 December 1945, he wrote:Played golf today with [former Ambassador] Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and [British Prime Minister] Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain's position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy's view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for [William] Bullitt's urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn't fight; Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversations with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939, the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain's backside.[29]  

When Ambassador Potocki was back in Warsaw on leave from his post in Washington, he spoke with Count Jan Szembek, the Polish Foreign Ministry Under-Secretary, about the growing danger of war. In his diary entry of 6 July 1939, Szembek recorded Potocki's astonishment at the calm mood in Poland. In comparison with the war psychosis that had gripped the West, Poland seemed like a rest home.

"In the West," the Ambassador told Szembek, "there are all kinds of elements openly pushing for war: the Jews, the super-capitalists, the arms dealers. Today they are all ready for a great business, because they have found a place which can be set on fire: Danzig; and a nation that is ready to fight: Poland. They want to do business on our backs. They are indifferent to the destruction of our country. Indeed, since everything will have to be rebuilt later on, they can profit from that as well."[30]

On 24 August 1939, just a week before the outbreak of hostilities, Chamberlain's closest advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, went to Ambassador Kennedy with an urgent appeal from the British Prime Minister for President Roosevelt. Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself in March to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned in despair to Roosevelt as a last hope for peace. He wanted the American President to "put pressure on the Poles" to change course at this late hour and open negotiations with Germany. By telephone Kennedy told the State Department that the British "felt that they could not, given their obligations, do anything of this sort but that we could." Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to possibly save the peace of Europe, Roosevelt rejected Chamberlain's desperate plea out of hand. At that, Kennedy reported, the Prime Minister lost all hope. "The futility of it all," Chamberlain had told Kennedy, "is the thing that is frightful. After all, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe."[31]

Roosevelt liked to present himself to the American people and the world as a man of peace. To a considerable degree, that is still his image today. But Roosevelt cynically rejected genuine opportunities to act for peace when they were presented.

In 1938 he refused even to answer requests by French Foreign Minister Bonnet on 8 and 12 September to consider arbitrating the Czech-German dispute.[32] And a year later, after the outbreak of war, a melancholy Ambassador Kennedy beseeched Roosevelt to act boldly for peace. "It seems to me that this situation may crystallize to a point where the President can be the savior of the world," Kennedy cabled on 11 September from London. "The British government as such certainly cannot accept any agreement with Hitler, but there may be a point when the President himself may work out plans for world peace. Now this opportunity may never arise, but as a fairly practical fellow all my life, I believe that it is entirely conceivable that the President can get himself in a spot where he can save the world ..."

But Roosevelt rejected out of hand this chance to save the peace of Europe. To a close political crony, he called Kennedy's plea "the silliest message to me that I have ever received." He complained to Henry Morgenthau that his London Ambassador was nothing but a pain in the neck: "Joe has been an appeaser and will always be an appeaser ... If Germany and Italy made a good peace offer tomorrow, Joe would start working on the King and his friend the Queen and from there on down to get everybody to accept it."[33]

Infuriated at Kennedy's stubborn efforts to restore peace in Europe or at least limit the conflict that had broken out, Roosevelt instructed his Ambassador with a "personal" and "strictly confidential" telegram on 11 September 1939 that any American peace effort was totally out of the question. The Roosevelt government, it declared, "sees no opportunity nor occasion for any peace move to be initiated by the President of the United States. The people [sic] of the United States would not support any move for peace initiated by this Government that would consolidate or make possible a survival of a regime of force and aggression."[34]