Chronicler of the Neglected Truth,

The Fuhrer's Inspiration,

excerpted from the book

The American Axis

Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

by Max Wallace

St. Martin's Griffin, 2003, paper

p7
... the summer of 1919 when Ford made the first public sortie in a hate-filled but distinctively American campaign that was to dominate his attention for the next eight years. In July, he announced to the New York World that "International financiers are behind all war.. . they are what is called the international Jew: German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews... the Jew is a threat."

p8
Her letter reflects nothing more than the norm in American industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Workers were considered little better than beasts of burden; theirs was a grind of tedious and back-breaking labor from which any consideration for the employee's welfare was absent. The average worker toiled nine hours a day for a salary that barely approached subsistence levels. Profits were based on wages as low as a worker would take and pricing as high as the market would bear. Industrialists were regularly pilloried in the press as robber barons and caricatured in the nation's magazines as inhuman slave drivers.

... Ford convened a meeting of his board of directors on Tuesday, January 5, 1914, to announce the revolutionary policy that would alter permanently the worker-employer relationship. Henceforth, he announced to the stunned silence of his colleagues, the minimum wage for Ford workers would be more than doubled from $2.34 a day to $5.00, and the working day would be cut from nine to eight hours. An elaborate system of profit-sharing would be introduced. "Our workers are not sharing in our good fortune," declared Ford. "There are thousands out there in the shop who are not living as they should." The effect was electrifying, signaling nothing less than a new era in American industry. The next morning, every newspaper in the land announced the new policy with blaring headlines. "It is the most generous stroke of policy between a captain of industry and worker that the country has ever seen," wrote the Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record.' According to the New York Globe, Ford's new wage scheme had "all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of socialism." Overnight, Ford was hailed as a national hero.

p10
Henry Ford
"I don't like to read books. They muss up my mind."

p10
Nothing ... could diminish Ford's stature with the public or the press. Countless newspapers called on him to run for President. The letters of admiration poured in by the truckload. And as Ford predicted when he instituted the five-dollar day, his company enjoyed an immediate surge in production and skyrocketing profits, making him a billionaire and one of the world's richest men. His name became a verb (to "Fordize" meant to manufacture at a price so low that the common man can afford to buy it) and a noun ("Fordism" referred to mass production resulting in sustained economic growth).'6 Perhaps the best illustration of his newfound status was a nationwide poll in which Ford ranked as the third greatest man in history behind only Napoleon and Jesus Christ."

It is difficult, nearly a century later, to portray accurately the magnitude of Ford's fame and influence brought on by the five-dollar day. In his 1932 classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley attempts to reflect the time in his youth when Ford seemed an omnipresent force. In the novel, set far in the future, Huxley creates a utopian society where universal happiness has been achieved and people are conditioned to love their work. The entire society reveres the "Apostle of Mass Production," Henry Ford, who is worshipped like a God." Time is measured from when Ford first introduced the assembly line. Thus, the story is set in 632 A.F. (After Ford). Adherents cross themselves in the sign of the "T."

Small wonder, then, that when Ford first announced his philosophy toward the Jews to the New York World in 1919, it carried no inconsiderable impact. That same year, he quietly purchased a small weekly newspaper called the Dearborn Independent, opened an office in an engineering laboratory next to his tractor plant, and assembled a staff in preparation for a crusade that was about to leave a pronounced scar on the face of American society. For the first sixteen months of its operation, under the editorship of former Detroit News editor Edwin Pipp, the Independent was barely distinguishable from any other weekly newspaper. It supported Prohibition, prison reform and the Versailles Treaty, printed innocuous articles about local issues, and mentioned Jews not at all. But before long, Pipp later recalled, Ford began to bring up Jews "frequently, almost continuously," until his new obsession eventually found its way into the newspaper.'

On May 22, 1920, under a banner that announced the Independent as "The Ford International Weekly," a huge bold headline fired the opening salvo: THE INTERNATIONAL JEW: THE WORLD'S PROBLEM. For the next ninety-one weeks, each edition of the Dearborn Independent-promising its readers to serve as the "Chronicler of the Neglected Truth"-added further embellishments to the picture of a Jewish conspiracy so vast and far-reaching that the tentacles of the Jews supposedly touched every facet of American life. "In America alone," announced the paper, "most of big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in control of Jewish financiers and their agents. Jewish journalists are a large and powerful group here... Jews are the largest and most numerous landlords. They absolutely control the circulations of publications in this country."

Pipp resigned in protest over the paper's new editorial direction and was replaced by former Detroit News reporter William J. Cameron, who would serve Ford well over the ensuing two decades.

No American institution, according to the Independent, was immune from the grasp of Jewish control. "Whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews," it declared. "If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words: too much Jew." Jazz music was "Jewish moron music." The Federal Reserve was designed by "Jew bankers" to put the nation's money under the control of a "Jewish cabal."

Each week readers were treated to what Ford's paper called "a lesson" in the insidious tricks Jews used to control the country. These included "the gentle art of changing Jewish names" to disguise their ethnicity. Once disguised as Gentiles, the reasoning went, the Jews' goal was to eradicate Christian virtues.

To Henry Ford, who had famously claimed history is "bunk," the Independent was the forum for a history tailored to his own worldview. He dispatched a team of detectives to dig up the evidence that Jews were behind all that was evil in the country. For example, the paper claimed, America was not discovered by Christopher Columbus but by a Jewish interpreter named Luis de Torres-for the purpose of finding and exploiting tobacco, a substance Ford linked to "degeneracy." Benedict Arnold was merely a Jewish pawn who betrayed his country at the behest of Jewish moneylenders. The underlying theme of the series was clear. Jews were attempting to take control of the United States-not by force, but by stealth. In Ford's paranoid conception, the menace was ubiquitous. "If there is one quality that attracts Jews, it is power," the paper announced. "Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequiously."

p13
The influx of European immigrants at the turn of the century ... brought foreign accents, different cultural mores, and strange fashion styles. And something more insidious-a small body of anti-Semitic literature unfamiliar on America's shores but which had been widely distributed in Europe for some time, especially in countries with large Jewish populations. Among these was an obscure document known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Throughout Russia, France, Poland, and England, this document was being circulated as proof that the Jews were plotting to take over the world. The Protocols are usually divided into twenty-six separate chapters, each of which comprises a purported Jewish lecture on how to subvert western civilization. "With steadfast purpose," they claim to reveal, "the Jews are creating wars and revolutions.. . to destroy the white Gentile race, that the Jews may seize the power during the resulting chaos and rule with their claimed superior intelligence over the remaining races of the world, as kings over slaves."

p13
In 1920 ... a former czarist agent named Boris Brasol arranged for an English translation of the Protocols to be sent to the offices of the Dearborn Independent. Here was the evidence Ford was looking for to support his suspicion that the Jews were engaged in a sinister conspiracy. Each week a different article attacking the Jews was backed up by one of the twenty-six Protocols, skillfully edited to incorporate a contemporary theme.

p18
In April 1915, eight months after the First World War broke out in Europe, Ford had suddenly emerged as a pacifist. In his first public pronouncement on any international issue, he told the New York Times Magazine that "Two classes benefit by war-the militarists and the moneylenders... the cause of militarism is never patriotism, it is usually commercialism .... The warmongers urging military preparedness ) in America are Wall Street bankers .... I am opposed to war in every sense of the word."

p43
In February 1921, at a time when Hitler was still only a little-known fanatic, the first German-language edition of The International Jew was published in Berlin under the title Der International Jude. The authors name on the jacket was Henry Ford, though the book, like its American counterpart, was merely a compendium of articles that had appeared in the Dearborn Independent.

The book was an immediate success. Germany's humiliating defeat and a postwar recession had sapped the nation's morale. The people were eager to hear Ford's prescription out of the morass. But there was another reason for the book's warm reception. It spoke directly to some of the country's greatest concerns. 18 Much of Der International Jude was devoted to exposing a conspiracy to undermine the German nation. Bolshevik Jews, the book claimed, were responsible for the German defeat in the First World War and the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty:

Jewish influence in German affairs came strongly to the front during the 1914-1918 war. It came with all the directness and attack of a flying wedge, as if previously prepared... The principal Jewish influences which brought down German order may be named under three heads: (a) the spirit of Bolshevism which masqueraded under the name of German socialism; (b) Jewish ownership and control of the Press; (c) Jewish control of the food supply and the industrial machinery of the country. There was a fourth, "higher up," but these worked upon the German people directly. It will be recalled that the German collapse in that war was directly due to food starvation and material shortages, and to industrial unrest. As early as the second year of the war, German Jews were preaching that German defeat was necessary to the rise of the proletariat.

For a gullible German public desperate to find a scapegoat for its catastrophic defeat, these words pointed the way. We weren't defeated, it told them, we were betrayed and, although the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had previously found its way to Germany via White Russian émigrés, it remained an obscure document there until the German edition of The

International Jew gave the forgery legitimacy. In 1921, western leaders were still debating the establishment of the League of Nations, the international organization U.S. President Woodrow Wilson envisioned to prevent another world war. But entry into the League was conditional upon accepting the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and its founding was deeply unpopular in many German circles. Ford's book, meanwhile, was warning of the consequences of forming such a body, directing its readers to the Fifth Protocol, which purported to reveal a cabal of Jews vowing, "We will so wear out and exhaust the Gentiles by all this that they will be compelled to offer us an international authority, which by its position will enable us to absorb without disturbance all the governmental forces of the world and thus form a super-government." Thus, even a proposed instrument of international peace was suspiciously perceived as a Jewish tool designed to undermine Germany.

In 1923, American Jewish community activist Samuel Untermeyer described the impact of The International Jew after he returned from a trip around the world. Translations of the book, he wrote, were to be found in the most remote corners of the earth:

Wherever there was a Ford car, there was a Ford agency not far away, and wherever there was a Ford agency, these vile libelous books in the language of the country were to be found. They, coupled with the magic name of Ford, have done more than could be undone in a century to sow, spread and ripen the poisonous seeds of anti-Semitism and race hatred. These articles are so fantastic and so naive in their incredible fantasy that they read like the work of a lunatic, and but for the authority of the Ford name, they would have never seen the light of day and would have been quite harmless if they had. With that name, they spread like wildfire and became the Bible of every anti-Semite."

p46
... on March 8 [1922], the [Chicago] tribune ran expansive interview Hitler had granted to its foreign correspondent Raymond Fendrick. That week, American and German newspapers had been discussing Ford's potential White House candidacy at length, and Hitler seemed overjoyed at the prospect:

I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian Fascisti platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany."

p47
The contradictory claims about whether Ford's money financed the l early rise of the National Socialists have for more than half a century stymied historians probing one of the enduring mysteries of the Nazi era: Who provided Hitler's early funding?

Certainly, when Hitler assumed control of the Party in the summer of 1921, funding was sparse. According to an early member:

The Nazi organization itself lived from day to day financially, with no treasury to draw on for lecture hall rentals, printing costs, or the other thousand-and-one expenses which threatened to swamp us. The only funds we could count on were membership dues, which were small, merely a drop in the bucket. Collections at mass meetings were sometimes large, but not to be relied on... We never had money enough. Instead of receiving salaries for the work we did, most of us had to give to the Party in order to carry on. 31

That fall, the National Socialists abruptly canceled a rally that was scheduled to take place at Munich's Krone Circus, citing a "lack of funds. 1132 The Party still could not afford to hire a treasurer. Its purchase of a newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, a year earlier had left it deep in debt. But by the summer of 1923, German newspaper references abound, reporting the National Socialists "flush with cash." The sudden largesse would seem to coincide with the period of the allegation by Vice President Auer-reported in the New York Times article-that one of Ford's agents had been successfully solicited for financial aid by Dietrich Eckart.

p49
In their 1964 study of Ford's overseas operation, American Business Abroad, Mira Wilkins and Frank Hill insist that no evidence exists in company records proving Ford financed Hitler." What they don't say is that those records are far from complete. According to archivists at the Ford Motor Company, a significant amount of archival material from the company's early days-particularly material pertaining to Fords antiSemitism-has been "discarded. 113' This, of course, places severe obstacles in the way of getting at the truth behind these events.

p52
... whether Ford actually financed Hitler, there can be no doubt about his ideological say over the Fuhrer-in-waiting. [1924]

p56
Perhaps the most important influence Ford exerted over Hitler is his "exposé" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in chapter six of The International Jew, "An Introduction to the Jewish Protocols." Although Hitler may have encountered the Protocols before, they are never mentioned in the list of the earliest anti-Semitic literature he read before 1920, as cited by his contemporaries.

p57

Hitler and many of his fellow Nazis, including propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and the Party's ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, would cite the work [Protocols] repeatedly over the years as the Party's blueprint. Most historians concur that the Russian forgery played a major part in shaping Hitler's genocidal intentions. In her 1968 book, The Holocaust, historian Nora Levin argues that "Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews." In his own 1967 study, Norman Cohn describes them as a "Warrant for Genocide." If Ford's book was indeed the catalyst for Hitler's acceptance of the Protocols, the implications are staggering.

The American Axis

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