Onward Christian Soldiers 

[Part 7]

 

 

 

Note

This new version of Onward Christian Soldiers that I’ve compiled consists of the original contents published by Noontide Press in 1982 plus the “missing” text that, for reasons explained below, was in the Swedish version published in 1942.

I’ve also included some supplementary texts here giving the history of the missing parts of Day’s book. Also book reviews by Revilo Oliver and Amazon readers (see Part 1).

KATANA

 

 

Contents

 

 

Maps of Northern Europe & the Baltic States

THE REST OF DONALD DAY by Paul Knutson — 1984

EDITORIAL NOTE by Liberty Bell

The Resurrection of Donald Day — A review by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — January 1983

TWO KINDS OF COURAGE by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — October 1986

AMAZON REVIEWS

__________________

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Chapter

Introduction

Permit Me To Introduce Myself * (all new)

1 Why I did not go Home *………………………………. 1

2 The United States  *………………………………………. 7

3 Latvia  ………………………………………………………… 21

4 Meet the Bolsheviks  *………………………………….. 41

5 Alliance with the Bear  *……………………………….. 53

6 Poland  ……………………………………………………….. 63

7 Trips  ………………………………………………………….. 85

8 The Downfall of Democracy * ………………………. 93

9 Jews  …………………………………………………………… 101

10 Russia  *………………………………………………………. 115

11 Lithuania * ………………………………………………….. 131

12 Danzig  ……………………………………………………….. 145

13 Estonia  ……………………………………………………….. 151

14 Sweden  ………………………………………………………. 159

15 Norway  ………………………………………………………. 169

16 Finland  ………………………………………………………. 183

17 England  *……………………………………………………. 197

18 Europe  *…………………………………………………….. 201

19 Epilogue  *…………………………………………………… 204

Index of Names  ………………………………………………….. 205

* Contains new material (dark blue text) missing from original Noontide edition.

MAP

of Northern Europe 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

MAP

of Baltic States 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

 

 

 

LIBERTY BELL PUBLICATIONS

June 1984

THE REST OF

DONALD DAY

by

Paul Knutson

Donald Day, who had been for many years the foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in northern Europe, wrote a record of his observations, Onward, Christian Soldiers, in 1942. His English text was first published as a book in 1982. It was printed by William Morrison and appeared under the imprint of the Noontide Press of Torrance, California, As Professor Oliver pointed out in his review of that book in Liberty Bell for January, 1983, the text had been copied, with some omissions and minor changes, from an anonymously issued mimeographed transcription of a defective carbon copy of the author’s manuscript, which had been brought to the United States in someway, despite the vigilance of Franklin Roosevelt’s surreptitious thought-police.

That was not the first publication of Day’s book. A Swedish translation, Framat Krististridsman, was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm in 1944. (That paper cover, printed in red, green, and black, is reproduced in black-and-white on the following page.)

 

 

Copies of this book still survive in Sweden and are even found in some public libraries. There may still be a copy in the Library of Congress, where, however, it was catalogued and buried among the very numerous books of a different Donald Day, a very prolific writer who midwifed the autobiography of Will Rogers and produced book after book on such various subjects as American humorists, the folk-lore of the Southwest, the tourist-attractions of Texas, and probably anything for which he saw a market, including a mendacious screed entitled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Own Story. By a supreme irony, the Library concealed Framat Kristi stridsman in its catalogue by placing it between the other Day’s Evolution of Love and his propaganda piece for the unspeakably vile monster whose millions of victims included one of the last honest journalists.

The Swedish translation contains some long and important passages that do not appear in the book published in California and are not found in the mimeographed copy. By translating these back into English, I can restore Donald Day’s meaning, but, of course, I cannot hope to reproduce exactly the words and style of his original manuscript. I can also restore from the Swedish the deficiencies of the mimeographed transcript.

It seems impossible to determine now whether the parts of Day’s work that are preserved only in the Swedish were deleted by him to shorten his text when he sent a typewritten copy to the United States or were added by him before he turned his manuscript over to the Swedish translator at about the same time. At all events, the Swedish now alone provides us with some significant parts of bay‘s book and many Americans will want to have Day’s Work complete and entire.

For the convenience of the reader, I have, by arrangement with the publisher of Liberty Bell, included corrections of the printed English text where it departs, through negligence or misunderstanding, from the mimeographed text from which it was copied. I have passed over obvious typographical errors in the printed book, and omitted small and relatively unimportant corrections. For example, near the end of p. 44 of the printed book, the sentence should read, “All reported that the officials of the Cheka, later known as the GPU and NKVD, were Jews.”

Day did not use footnotes, so the reader will understand what all the footnotes [indicated by the symbol *] on the following pages are my own explanations of the text.

The supplements below are arranged in the order of pages of the printed book, as shown by the note in the small type that precedes each section, The three sources are discriminated typographically thus; Italics show what is copied from the printed text to give continuity.

Ordinary Roman type is used for what is in the mimeographed copy but was omitted from the printed version. This, of course, is precisely what Day wrote in English.

What I have translated back from the Swedish appears in this style of type. These passages, as I have said, convey Day’s meaning without necessarily restoring exactly the words he used in his English original, from which the Swedish version was made.

*****

 

 

Editorial Note

 

Liberty Bell

With the foregoing supplements, we have at last as accurate a text of Donald Day’s Onward, Christian Soldiers as we are likely to have, barring the remote possibility that the manuscript Day gave to his Swedish translator may yet be discovered.

The Swedish translation is pedestrian, as indeed is Day’s English style, but a comparison of the Swedish with the extant parts of the English assures me of the translator’s general competence. In one passage, which we have only in the Swedish, in which Day reports his refusal to become a well-paid and dignified member of our Diplomatic Service with a “little Morgenthau” as an “adviser” to tell him what to do, the translator was evidently confused by the irony of some English phrase such as “executive for a Jew” and reversed Day’s obvious meaning;, this was corrected in the foregoing text.

The mimeographed version is evidently a transcription from Day’s carbon copy, with only such errors as only the most expert typists can entirely avoid. There is, however, one very odd error in the mimeographed version corresponding to our printed page 4 above; it reads “the Great Rocky mountains of the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.” That is geographically absurd, of course, and the Swedish (stora Rijkiga Bergen) shows that Day wrote “Great Smoky mountains,” as we have, printed above. It is probably only a coincidence that the Swedish word for “Smoky” could have suggested, to a person who knew no Swedish, the error made by the typist in California who copied Day’s carbon copy.

When Day relies on his recollection of what he was told years before, his memory is sometimes faulty, and we have naturally made no changes in what he wrote. He makes an obvious error on our page 4, where he says that the Cherokees were driven from their lands and moved to Indian Territory “toward the end of the last century.” Actually, the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation by an American army took place in 1838. The Cherokees, by the way, were the most nearly civilized of all the Indian tribes in the territory that is now the United States and Canada, and it is true that their expulsion from the lands that had been guaranteed to them by treaty inflicted great hardships on them: they lost most of their property, including their negro slaves, and large numbers of them perished as they were quite brutally herded from the Appalachians almost half way across the continent to what is now the southern border of Arkansas.

Ethnologists who have made intensive studies of the Indians of North America (e.g., Peter Farb) regard Sequoyah (Sequoia) as perhaps “the greatest intellect the Indians produced.” He was the son of a Cherokee woman by an unidentified white trader, and, growing up with the mother’s people, regarded himself as a Cherokee. He, however, was an exception to what Day says about half-breeds. Day may have been confused about the date of the expulsion because a few of the Cherokees succeeded in hiding from the perquisition in the wilds of the Great Smokies and were eventually given the small reservation they now occupy east of Bryson City in the toe of North Carolina. There was some agitation about them “near the end of the last century.”

The circumstances in which Day’s carbon copy was smuggled into the United States remain obscure. When the mimeographed transcription was made and first issued, it contained a prefatory page on which an anonymous writer said,

“It is my understanding that this book was published in; 1942, and then merely made an appearance at the book-sellers, when all copies were immediately withdrawn and destroyed without a single copy escaping the book-burners, I was also told that Mr. Day died shortly after this incident.”

The page was presumably withdrawn when its author learned that Day was still alive at that time and an exile in Helsinki, since the Jews who rule the United States would not permit him to return to his native land.

It is curious that the man who made the transcription, which did effectively preserve Day’s work for the future, and who was evidently a resident of California, had heard a somewhat less plausible version of the rumor that was current in Washington in 1943. (See the review by Professor Oliver in Liberty Bell, January 1983, p. 27). It is quite possible that the source of both rumors was an effort by the apparatus of the great War Criminal in the White House to prevent the publication of the Swedish translation, which, as Day tells us in the last item in our supplements, was delayed in the press for two years by a “paper shortage” and it is noteworthy that the paper for it was finally obtained in Finland, not Sweden,* Until the book was finally published in 1944, the enemies of mankind could have imagined that their pressures on Sweden had effectively prevented Day’s exposure of one phase of their activity from ever appearing in print.

[* Day’s book was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm, which, however, had to have the printing done by Mercators Tryckeri in Helsinki. Although copies of the Swedish book have been preserved, Day’s work would not now be generally known — and would be supposed lost by Americans who heard of it — if the anonymous gentleman in California had not issued his mimeographed transcription.]

_______________________

 

KATANA — The Liberty Bell article continues with a list of text to be added or amended to the Noontide edition. All these changes (indicated by the dark blue text) have been entered in this expanded version of Onward Christian Soldiers.

 

 

Word Totals for the Additional Text

Introduction – –

Permit Me To Introduce Myself – 5,738 (all new)

Chapter 1 – 23

Chapter 2 – 307

Chapter 3 – –

Chapter 4 – 653

Chapter 5 – 1,225

Chapter 6 – –

Chapter 7 – –

Chapter 8 – 408

Chapter 9 – –

Chapter 10 – 907

Chapter 11 – 6

Chapter 12 – –

Chapter 13 – –

Chapter 14 – –

Chapter 15 – –

Chapter 16 – –

Chapter 17 – 2,167

Chapter 18 – 1,179

Chapter 19 – 89

Total words in original = 85,311

Total additional words = 12,702

_______________

Total words in expanded version = 98,013

 

 

ONWARD

 

CHRISTIAN

 

SOLDIERS

 

 

1920-1942: Propaganda, Censorship

and One Man’s Struggle to Herald the Truth

Suppressed reports of a 20-year Chicago Tribune

correspondent in eastern Europe from 1921

Donald Day

With an introduction by Walter Trohan,

former chief of the Tribune’s Washington bureau

THE NOONTIDE PRESS

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

Poland

 

 

 

 

If anyone is to be blamed for the tragedy of Poland, it is the Poles themselves. Not one of Poland’s immediate neighbors had a good word to say for this miserable country. The Rumanians detested the Poles, the Czechs hated them, the Germans despised them, the Lithuanians feared them, the Latvians loathed them, the Russians abominated them and the Ukrainians and Ruthenians abhorred them. During their short existence as a modem nation the Poles were unable to make friends, but they did make plenty of enemies.

Poland was too ambitious. She was not satisfied with her frontiers which were fixed by the peace conference in Paris. She wanted additional territory. She took it through organizing putsches. She gathered behind her frontiers millions of Germans, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Russians and Lithuanians. She tried to assimilate them forcibly and failed. She also failed to provide a higher living standard for her inhabitants. She failed to provide an efficient government apparatus to manage the affairs of the country. The intrigues and treachery which fill so many chapters of Polish history also dominate the latest chapter. In the end she double-crossed herself and once again vanished from the map.

From 1921 till 1923 a journey from Riga to Warsaw was an adventure.

The train which brought you from Riga to the Polish frontier had to be abandoned at the border. Poland had changed her railroads to the European gauge, the Baltic States retaining the Russian broad gauge. During much of the year, but more in the winter months, squads of Polish soldiers equipped with machine guns rode on the trains from the Latvian frontier to Bialostok. The Vilna corridor contained many bandits and it was not until 1924 that order was completely established.

[Page 64]

Warsaw seethed with political intrigues. Poland wanted Danzig. She also claimed districts from Czechoslovakia and Latvia. She had hopes of assimilating Lithuania and acquiring Memel and Libau. Some political groups even looked forward to the day Poland would be able to seize east Prussia and colonize it with her fast breeding nationals. These hopes died away in later years, but they died hard. Poland had one opportunity and she seized it. When Germany reincorporated the Sudeten districts into the Reich from Czechoslovakia, Poland utilized this moment to annex Morova, Ostrova and other districts she had claimed from the Czechs.

When Poland became independent there were many Czechs employed as specialists and engineers in Polish factories and works. Within a few years they had all been expelled from the country. Conditions were made so unbearable for the Germans inhabiting the Polish corridor that a great migration developed. Almost 2,000,000 Germans left Poland and either settled in Germany or migrated overseas. This policy of terror, so typically Slav, continued until the German armies marched into Poland. It was also used against the Ukrainians, White Russians and Lithuanians. I knew the leaders of the persecuted groups and interviewed them many times over many years. I traveled extensively in Poland and had the opportunity to make first hand investigations. So when I say terror was used by the Poles I mean just that.

One of the great troublemakers in Poland was the Roman Catholic Church. This institution proselytizes for converts just as energetically as the Communist International. But it has somewhat older traditions. For centuries it had waged a struggle for survival against the Greek Orthodox Church in the east, the Autocephalic Church in the southeast and the pressure of the Lutheran Church from the north and west. Aggressive and pugnacious, its ambitions both rivaled and coincided with those of the Polish government. It wanted to destroy the Orthodox Church, the Autocephalic Church and Lutheran Church organizations and seize their properties and assimilate their believers. It wanted to turn Poland into a solid Roman Catholic country. It proposed, through monopolizing the Christian religion, to convert the minority nationalities into Poles.

The cultural level of much of the population was so low that this program had chances for success. In 1923 I visited Vilna to investigate the contention of the Lithuanians who claimed since this city was once upon a time their capital it should therefore belong to Lithuania. I went out in the market place and talked with the peasants. First I asked a number of them what was their nationality. Some replied “Catholic” others “Orthodox.”

[Page 65]

I questioned them again asking what was their religion. The same people replied, “Polish”, “Russian,” “Ruthenian.” Then I asked their names and after a search found a peasant with a Lithuanian name whom I asked if he were not a Lithuanian. He replied, “Yes, but I go to the Polish church.” Among the illiterate inhabitants, and there were many in Poland, religion and nationality meant the same thing. As a matter of fact I found Vilna’ s inhabitants in 1923 to consist of some 70% Jews, the remainder being Poles, Russians, Ruthenians and some 2% of Lithuanians.

After the third division of Poland in 1795 the Catholic church was the chief force in keeping alive the Polish national spirit. For the church this was a good business policy. It augmented its income and increased the scope of its activities adding a patriotic glamor to the prosaic priesthood.

Between the pressure applied by the Orthodox and Lutheran Churches and by the Russian, German and Austrian empires, Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism became synonymous. Today Roman Catholic priests of Polish origin are working just as hard in the United States to prevent the Poles from becoming Americanized as they worked to prevent the Poles from becoming assimilated into the former Russian, German and Austrian states.

Occasionally we see something which is indelibly impressed upon the memory and which, from time to time, flashes into our mind with the same clearness as though we had seen it only a few hours previously.

Walking across the Place of the Three Crosses at the entrance to Allejo Ujazdowski in Warsaw I happened to glance up at the doors of the imposing church there. A good looking, strongly built Polish peasant girl was coming out of the church. On her piquant face was an expression which told an entire story. She had done something very naughty, but very delightful. It was also sinful and had been more than embarrassing to confess. But now it had been done. She had been forgiven. She was leaving the church with relief and a free conscience. And now she was going to do it all over again.

Compared to that face and the story it told, Mona Lisa was just a cheap lithograph. And there was more to it than that. That face told the whole story of the tremendous temporal and spiritual power of the Roman Catholic church which claims divine right to pardon sinners and can sell for money visas to enter heaven.

[Page 66]

Poland was a religious country. From Good Friday until Easter Monday it was impossible to obtain food in either hotels or restaurants. If foreign visitors wished to eat they had to patronize a Jewish restaurant or cafe.

Easter was even more important as a holiday than Christmas. But religion alone, no matter how devoutly followed, does not make the moral or spiritual backbone of a nation.

Paul Super was an American who worked for many years to help Poland. He was director of the American Young Men’s Christian Association. This organization believes that if a boy is brought up properly and receives training to make him a good citizen, then his religious life will take care of itself. Super succeeded in forming a YMCA organization in Poland which remained independent of the Roman Catholic Church.

Super was an excellent organizer. He not only succeeded in collecting large funds in Poland but also obtained sizable donations from America.

After working 18 years among Polish boys, he told me the thing which horrified him most was “The Pole’s lack of respect for property.” To put it more plainly: that there were so many thieves in Poland.

In his campaigns in the United States to raise money to help Polish youth, Super mailed tens of thousands of appeals to American firms and individuals. One of these, which he presented to me, was a small mimeographed leaflet. It contained a fearful indictment of the Polish government. It runs as follows:

I know a city-which has a population of 600,000 — but — it has water-works and no sewer system. It’s Lodz, Poland. It is probably the largest cotton-mill center on the continent of Europe. 1064 smoke-stacks belching smoke. Most of these are cotton mill smoke stacks. Tens of thousands of Mill-hands. Each one a person. There is utterly inadequate provision for decent recreation, physical exercise, vocational education, wholesome boy life. Owing to general conditions this city is a splendid breeding place for: discontent, radical socialism, bolshevism, tuberculosis, social immorality, irreligion. Young men born there hardly have a fair chance at life’s real values: education, christian character, personal growth, health, a chosen vocation, citizenship, enjoyment of beauty, home life.

He continues to tell how the YMCA (that is himself) succeeded in organizing some of the unselfish citizens of Lodz in 1922, how they obtained promises and enrolled 1,200 members of whom 340 were attending classes, and how they founded a library with 3,376 books which were read by 1,096 persons each month. He urged Americans to help widen YMCA work in Poland. Through this and other appeals Super collected money to build a modem YMCA building with a swimming pool for Lodz.

He erected three such institutions in Poland, the other two being located in Warsaw and Krakow.

But the point I am driving at is this: this appeal was mailed to America in 1934. The conditions he portrays as existing in Lodz were also to be found in many other Polish cities and towns. After 14 years of national existence the Polish government had been unable to improve such conditions. Neither in Lodz, nor any other town.

[Page 67]

Pride has always been a dominating characteristic of the Poles. At the receptions and parties I attended I was invariably asked how I liked Poland and I very frankly stated that I did not like the country at all. This always shocked the questioner. When I explained the living standard of the inhabitants of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was far higher then in Poland, that the streets of Baltic cities were not overrun with beggars, that the Baltic peoples could afford to buy soap and liked to use it and kept themselves, their homes, their cities and streets spotlessly clean, the Poles were very much surprised.

They were proud of their culture. That culture was much more of the past than of the present. For instance: they made much of the Poles’ love for horses. I have traveled much but I have never seen so many blind and starved horses as I have seen on city streets and country roads in Poland.

In fact, there were so many that I questioned a number of veterinary surgeons. They told me the average Polish peasant is so lazy and cruel that he frequently blinds a nervous, high-strung horse rather than take the trouble of breaking it properly to harness.

At one of these receptions a titled Polish woman became impatient with me.

“Please remember Mr. Day, that Poland is a backward country. A century ago Poland was culturally 200 years behind France. Today we are still two hundred years behind France and very possibly we shall be still two hundred years behind France a hundred years hence.”

France was the ideal of the average Pole.

She continued:

“Let me tell you a true little story which will show you how backward we really are. It was told to me by our minister of health. Last year he issued an order directing the policemen throughout the country to make a monthly inspection of the village latrines. You see, usually a Polish village has only one latrine for the entire community and if it is a larger village sometimes there will be two. One policeman, making his usual inspection of the latrines in his district, discovered one to be clean and in good order. He complimented the Starastvo (village elder).

A month later to his amazement he discovered the latrine was still in the best of order. He asked the Starastvo to tell him how he managed to keep it so clean, so he could inform the other village leaders, thus relieving him of the necessity of imposing fines each month. ‘That is easy,’ said the Starastvo, ‘I keep it locked up.’”

The Polish lady did not display the slightest trace of shame when she told me this anecdote. A few minutes later when she asked me what I thought of Polish women, I decided it was my turn to shock her. I said I found them “Beautiful, but dirty.”

[Page 68]

The Poles were so used to hearing compliments from strangers that they enjoyed asking questions. The government also discouraged travel abroad and it required political pull and, for many, a prohibitive sum to obtain a passport. Despite my outspoken criticism I did have many friends in Poland, but very few were in government circles.

In 1926 I visited Warsaw late in January and remained several weeks. I found delegations from the Guarantee Trust Company and Dillon, Reed & Company, both of New York, who were negotiating a forty million dollar loan.

I cabled to The Tribune a series of articles about Poland’s financial situation. I reported the country was bankrupt. The Polish banks could not meet their commitments abroad. The Polish budget was so far out of balance that it could hardly be called a budget. The thirteen parties represented in the Polish Parliament made efficient and honest government impossible. All the ministries stank with corruption and bribery.

Poland’s financial and political future looked black.

These stories were published. The loan negotiations collapsed. The Polish foreign office ordered the secretary of the Polish Legation in Washington, Mr. Ostrowski, to visit Chicago, call on Colonel McCormick, publisher of The Tribune, and inform him that I was a drunkard and a liar and not a word of the report was true.

Colonel McCormick heard the complaint and suggested that since the accuracy of a Tribune correspondent had been questioned he would be glad to send another Tribune correspondent to Warsaw to check up on my reports. Mr. Ostrowski agreed and John Clayton, our correspondent in Berlin, visited Warsaw in March. Mr. Clayton’s reports were even more pessimistic than my own for the situation had deteriorated even more during the ensuing weeks. Needless to say Poland did not get her forty million dollar loan. It was some five weeks later that Marshall Pilsudski came to the rescue, staged a putsch, ousted the corrupt government and debased parliament and formed a dictatorship.

I liked and admired Pilsudski. He was a great patriot and a great vulgarian. Some time later, when another parliament had been elected, he addressed it. One evening I was in the offices of the Gazeta Polska, the government newspaper, when a copy of one of Pilsudski’s famous address arrived. There were several typists waiting to transcribe it to stencils for the mimeograph. The editor divided the speech among them and, taking me by the arm, said: “Now we must leave the room.” He explained that the Marshal used such terrifying language in his addresses that no gentleman could remain in the same room with a woman while she was copying the speech. He mourned the fact the Pilsudski was so vulgar and used such primitive language and said even the Marshal’s closest collaborators could not understand why he did it.

[Page 69]

But the reason was quite plain. Pilsudski used the same language the peasant addressed to his cow when it kicked over a pail of milk. He thought it more important the peasant should understand his views about Parliament than to couch his thoughts in parlor Polish. The Marshal was hard-boiled. Study the shape of his head. It was as square as the head of President Reichsmarshal von Hindenburg. His character matched his head. The honest, uncompromising square-headed Pilsudski told the round-headed Poles what had to be done. They did it.

While Pilsudski lived and dictated Poland made some progress. Charles Dewey, A Chicago banker, came to Warsaw and put Poland’s finances in order. He was Poland’s financial dictator and for several years the Polish state had to control and limit its expenditures according to his orders. Poland did get a twenty-five million dollar loan but she could not do with this money as she liked. She was treated like a bankrupt for she had to dispose of it according to Dewey’s orders and most of it was converted into gold to give the Polish zloty some sort of support. Dewey pulled the state out of financial bankruptcy. The threatened political bankruptcy which had been staved off by Pilsudski’s putsch did not materialize until after the leader’s death.

Pilsudski did everything he could to give Poland an honest, efficient government. A number of corrupt party leaders and government leaders and government officials were jailed. They were imprisoned in a concentration camp at Bereza Kartushk. It was not a pleasant place. The regime was hard and horrible stories were told about it in Warsaw. But it did put fear into the heart of the Poles. Government corruption decreased slightly. Efficiency remained a stranger.

Poland’s greatest handicap in starting her national existence in modem Europe was that she had no middle class. Both the nobility and the church seemed to think Poland could be run on feudal lines. There was a small educated class, most of whom held government positions. There were but few Poles following the professions and even less were engaged in business. The Jews functioned as Poland’s middle class. With their typical tenacity and nepotism the Jews attempted to monopolize these occupations. The hatred between the Poles and Jews intensified. In 1937, Polish universities introduced the numerous clauses in many faculties to help Polish students. In all the universities small wars broke out between the Polish and Jewish students. The favorite weapons were stink bombs and razor blades embedded in canes. There were many casualties.

[Page 70]

Anti-Semitism was not a phenomenon limited to Germany alone. It was one of the historical developments following the world war which destroyed the national barriers set up against the Jews in past centuries. The world war enabled the Jews to flood into Europe to prey upon Christian communities.

The Jews also attempted to monopolize journalism in Poland. They almost succeeded. During the years from 1921 till 1933 I Visited Poland three times each year. In that period almost the entire German press was represented by Jews. I can recall only one German journalist stationed in Warsaw and he represented the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The Jewish journalists representing the German press and those employed in the Jewish and Polish press in Poland did much to promote dissension and mistrust between Poland and Germany. They had no love for either Germany or Poland, and their chief aim was to promote the interests of the Jewish minority in both countries. The association of foreign journalists in Warsaw was composed almost entirely of Jews. I refused to join this organization and when I was invited to become a member I said that Gilbert Redfern, correspondent of The London Times and The Daily Telegraph, and myself were organizing a Christian foreign correspondent’s association. But we never succeeded. There was a perpetual shortage of Christian correspondents.

The Danzig elections in 1933 were exciting. The decadent German political parties were fighting a losing battle against the growing strength of the National Socialist Party in Danzig. A number of Warsaw correspondents arrived in the Free City to cover the election. When I had finished dictating my dispatch to London one evening, our London Bureau told me The Daily Herald had carried a banner headline over a story about the Jews crowding the trains fleeing Danzig. The following morning I investigated the story. I first went to the Polizei president who informed me that according to his police reports no Jewish residents had left the Free City. I next called on the rabbis of the old and new synagogues who said the Jews were neither panic stricken nor excited. They suggested to their congregations that during the election period Jews had better avoid gathering in restaurants and cafes and should spend their evenings at home in order to avoid possible incidents. I then visited the chief of the railroad station, which was under Polish administration. This Polish official informed me the number of Jewish travelers in recent days had been normal and there was no evidence of a Jewish exodus from Danzig.

[Page 71]

Thus having discovered that The Daily Herald sensation was a lie from beginning to end, I visited Jerzy Szapiro (Jew) who for many years represented The New York Times and The London Daily Herald in Warsaw and had come to Danzig to cover the elections. I asked him why he had sent a completely false report to his newspaper. Szapiro was astonished.

“Why don’t you know that when I get a story on the front page of The Herald they pay me ten guineas for it?” he asked. “And tomorrow when I send them a contradiction or a denial of it then they will pay me another guinea. That is the way to make money.”

I told Szapiro that I did not consider that kind of reporting as journalism and that he was a dirty liar and a disgrace to the profession. He was not insulted. Today he is working in London. Many of the Jewish journalists in Warsaw succeeded in escaping from the country when the war began.

Over in Berlin in 1935, when feeling was running high against the Jews, the correspondent of The London Daily Express, Pemberton, one evening sent a story to his newspaper relating how each morning autotrucks were sent to the different Jewish cemeteries, to collect the bodies of the Jews who had been murdered and tossed over the fence during the night. This sensation story was also published on the front page. A week later Pemberton was ordered to appear at the press department of the foreign office. He was shown a copy of the newspaper containing the story and asked if he had really sent such a dispatch. He admitted he had.

“We have waited a week to see if you take the trouble to either visit these cemeteries or telephone them to check up your information,” the official said. “You made no effort to do so. Your story is a lie from beginning to end. We can no longer consider you as a reliable journalist. You have 24 hours to leave Germany.”

This story was given to Pemberton by a crippled Warsaw Jew named Gurdusz whom Pemberton employed as secretary. Gurdusz was also expelled from Germany and he returned to Warsaw. There he found The Daily Express was represented by another Jew named Mike Nowinski. It was only a few weeks later that Nowinski was discharged and Gurdusz was appointed Warsaw correspondent for The Daily Express. I asked Gurdusz how he managed to get Nowinski’s job.

“That was easy,” he boasted.

“I obtained proof that Nowinski was the owner of two whorehouses in Warsaw and forwarded this information to The Express asking them if they wanted to keep a pimp as their correspondent.”

Gurdusz excelled all the Warsaw correspondents in being the most unscrupulous liar that ever represented a foreign newspaper in that city of yellow journalism and faked news. Paralyzed from the hips down, he was confined to a wheelchair. He had two other Jews who collected information for him.

[Page 72]

When Foreign Minister Eden visited Warsaw en route to Moscow in 1938 he stopped overnight in Hotel Europeski. John Steele, veteran chief of The Chicago Tribune London Bureau, accompanied him together with many British and American newspapermen. Eden had a meeting with Foreign Minister Beck and the newspapermen received a few scraps of information which we cabled. One of Gurdusz’s boys approached me in the lobby pleading for news. I told what we had obtained and he left. Two days later I met Gurdusz who proudly said he had scooped all the correspondents with his interview with Eden. I asked for details. It seems his assistant returned and told him he had succeeded in speaking with Eden while the foreign minister was in his room changing his pants for the formal dinner which Minister Beck was staging in his honor. Eden told him he was not at all satisfied with the conference he had with Beck and was more than displeased with the Polish policy towards Russia.

Gurdusz had telephoned this fabrication to London and had received the compliments of The Express.

Even in pre-war days it would have been difficult to find a newspaper either in Europe or in America as dirty and depraved as The Daily Express, whose chief editor, by the way, was for many years a Jew.

Although many newspapers are just as perfidious in their treatment of foreign and other news and prefer sensational lies to the approximate truth, still one would have to search long and thoroughly to discover a newspaper as detestable as The Express.

Gurdusz’s father was a wealthy Warsaw leather merchant. His home was the headquarters of a small group of Jewish journalists who specialized not only in swindling their newspapers with fake stories, but carried this even further by faking their expense accounts. This clique fabricated stories of events alleged to be taking place in Moscow. One of the most brilliant frauds conceived in the Gurdusz home was an eyewitness description of the execution of Zinovier, Kamenev and Stecklov, three commissars liquidated by Stalin in one of his early purges of the communist party. Gurdusz described how these Reds faced a firing squad and, as only one handkerchief was available to bind their eyes, they met death singly. The execution and their last moments were portrayed with sadistic detail.

The source of this and other wonderful reports was supposed to be certain foreign legations in Moscow. Gurdusz frequently telephoned the British, French and other foreign representations in the Soviet capital. When some minor clerk answered the call, he would inquire about the weather or the request of some imaginary person for a visa and request the assistance of the consulate. The telephone call, was merely the excuse to obtain a receipt from the Warsaw telephone office that the call had been made. For a small bribe the girls in the exchange would provide six more duplicate bills. These would be included by the Jewish correspondents in their expense accounts to their newspapers. Thus each telephone call to Moscow, or to any other foreign centers where a story developed, was paid by six or more newspapers. The spectacle of these six pseudo journalists making up their expense accounts at the end of each month would hardly have pleased the editors.

[Page 73]

At one time Mike Nowinski, the brothel proprietor, represented The Chicago Tribune in Warsaw. I did not delegate him as correspondent there. He obtained this appointment from our Berlin correspondent. After trying to collaborate with Mike for some time, I discharged him. If there was something he would not do for money I have yet to discover it. One of his sources of income was to make the acquaintance of girl entertainers employed in Warsaw night clubs and cafes and introduce them to foreigners. The girls gave part of their earnings to Mike.

Mike knew more scandal than any other person in Warsaw. He loved to intrigue, and the more trouble he caused the more enjoyment he got out of life. I discovered his news reports to be just as unreliable as those of his colleague Gurdusz. He also dabbled in espionage for several legations as a sideline. He was a born agent-provocateur.

Mike was also a sadist. He kept small crocodiles as pets and fed them live fish and frogs. He wasted hours watching for the crocodiles to get up an appetite and eat their prey. Mike also attended every execution in Warsaw over a period of many years and enjoyed them immensely. It was a source of regret to him that his stories describing the hangings were never published. Mike tried to make his stories gruesome, but he wrote in Yiddish-English which made them funny. A Polish execution was an unpleasant ceremony, especially for the victim. Instead of a decent sized rope they used a cord and the doomed man was placed on a chair beneath the gallows. When the chair was removed, the drop was not enough to break his neck so he would strangle with ghastly contortions. Mike’s attempts to describe these executions seriously were so funny, they deserved to be published as humor.

Ostracized by decent people, shunned and feared by the indecent, Nowinski eventually obtained an American visa. He married the daughter of a Boston rabbi, a real estate speculator, who paid handsomely to have his daughter taken off his hands.

Today Nowinski has arrived at the Mecca of the Jews, Washington. He has obtained a government post under the Roosevelt administration.

What could be more natural. He is working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the American state police force. The American consul who gave Nowinski a visa to enter the United States committed a crime against the American people. I protested about this to our Embassy in Warsaw.

[Page 74]

The only good thing I can report in Nowinski’s favor is that, according to my knowledge, this ultra-contemptible man never sold cocaine.

I do not like to insult Joel Zang by including him in the same chapter with Szapiro, Gurdusz and Nowinski, for Zang was one of the more capable and accurate of the Jewish correspondents. But his technique of handling news is worth mentioning. Zang represented The Central News Agency, The Jewish Chronicle, The Sunday Times, The Referee, The News Chronicle: all of London, and The Manchester Guardian. When Zang had an interesting story he would first send a short item to the news agency which forwarded it to all the newspapers. Zang’s many editors would read it, recall they had a correspondent in Warsaw, and either cable or telephone him for more details which he, of course, was ready to provide.

Journalists like Zang were such rare exceptions among the Jews that they stood out from the crowd. But even though there is an occasional dependable Jewish newspaperman, still from my wide experience in America and Europe I sincerely believe Jews should be barred from working for newspapers owned or read by Christians. Jewish publications of all kinds should contain a prominently placed statement that they are Jewish. This would automatically brand them as being completely unreliable and people would read them at their own risk, or would know what to expect.

What I have written about the clique in Warsaw could be greatly elaborated. It could also be written about the Jewish journalists in pre-Nazi Germany, in pre-war France, in pre-anschluss Austria, in preoccupied Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Latvia, and in present day Switzerland, Sweden, England and the United States. Today the press of England is saturated with Jews and Jewish propaganda while that of the United States is rapidly becoming so. The great majority of the American newspapers not yet owned or controlled by Jews are so afraid of them they fear to publish news disapproved by them.

In the two decades I have been forwarding news from Europe to America I have always called a Jew a Jew. Other American correspondents call Jews, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, as the case may be. But I was able to make such reports only because my newspaper had the courage to publish them and defended me when I was attacked by the Jews and their organizations in America. If it had not been for the loyal support given me by Colonel McCormick, the publisher of The Tribune, my career as correspondent might have ended many years ago. Fortunately for myself I received my newspaper training as a reporter on The Chicago City News Bureau.

[Page 75]

There inaccuracy meant discharge. It was this training which has enabled me to survive for so many years as a correspondent in Europe. My reports have been frequently challenged but I was always able to support my news with additional factual evidence when needed.

In 1933, when President Roosevelt appointed William Bullitt as ambassador to Moscow, I received a letter from Colonel McCormick instructing me to use his efforts to procure for me a Soviet visa. I met Bullitt at the home of John Cudahy, our ambassador to Warsaw. He promised to take up the matter with the Soviet foreign office and to communicate with me either through Mr. Cudahy or our minister in Riga, Mr. Lane.

Some months passed and I received another letter from Colonel McCormick, asking if I had heard from Bullitt. When he heard Bullitt had ignored his request he instructed me to send a story about Bullitt’s activities as ambassador in Moscow. I complied. A few weeks later, when I was again visiting Warsaw, another laconic note arrived from the Colonel:

“I hear Bullitt is making a fool of himself in Moscow. Make a report.”

The Colonel occasionally seemed to delight in giving his correspondents assignments which were almost impossible to carry out. But I had luck on my side.

The next morning I was drawing some money from the Bank Americanski. Standing in front of me at the teller’s window was a messenger of the American embassy who presented a check to be cashed. I knew the bank clerk and reached in and took the check. It was for two thousand dollars drawn upon Bullitt’s personal account in the Philadelphia General Trust Company and made out to our ambassador John Cudahy and endorsed by him. I memorized the number of the check and questioned the messenger. He told how Bullitt quite often sent such checks out from Moscow, how he cashed them at the bank for dollars and with this money bought Soviet roubles and chervonetz from Jewish valuts mechlers in the ghetto.

Sometimes the American diplomatic pouch to Moscow contained several kilograms worth of Soviet roubles.

Here was evidence for the kind of a story that Colonel McCormick had asked for. I recalled that when Bullitt first went to Moscow he had strictly ordered all members of the embassy staff not to purchase roubles on the Warsaw black exchange, promising them that he would obtain a special rouble rate from the Soviet state bank in Moscow. He confirmed this in his conversation with me when Cudahy was present.

I knew that in Moscow Bullitt had gone immediately to the State bank and borrowed some hundreds of thousands of roubles which he had divided among the embassy staff to cover personal expenses. Later he again appeared at the bank and asked for another loan, at the same time requesting a special rate for the American embassy. The Bolshevik bankers were not obliging, saying they could not give him a special rate.

[Page 76]

Bullitt asked how he was going to pay for the roubles he had already borrowed. He was told the bank would be glad to have his check for dollars at the official rate of exchange which was then one rouble thirteen kopeds for one dollar. Bullitt was horrified and refused to pay. All right, the banker told him, you know where you can get roubles.

The Soviet government knew everything about the illegal trade in roubles on the Warsaw black exchange. As a matter of fact it exported these roubles and placed them on sale through the Soviet trade delegation in Warsaw. As it was strictly forbidden for private persons to bring Soviet currency into Russia, the Soviet government did not need to worry about depreciating the value of their currency. This tricky manipulation whereby the Soviet government sold its own currency abroad for the bargain price of 50 roubles for one dollar was partly to keep the diplomats in Moscow bovinely contented and partly to demoralize them and make them friends of the Bolsheviks.

This cheap money made life in Moscow more attractive. The diplomats, most of whom pride themselves on their knowledge of art and antiques, haunted the second hand shops operated by the GPU buying the belongings of the murdered and liquidated Russian aristocracy and bourgeois for prices which enabled them to obtain a handsome profit on their “investments” abroad.

Rather than pay his loan from the state bank in dollars Bullitt sent out to Warsaw and bought several kilograms of Soviet roubles. In settling his debt to the bank Bullitt was obliged to buy so many roubles that the price on the black exchange rose to thirty roubles for the dollar. This made the diplomatic colony in Moscow, the majority of whom received their pay from their government in dollars, very dissatisfied. But the kind hearted Soviet government soon made matters right by increasing their rouble exports and everyone was happy until I saw Mr. Bullitt’s check.

That morning I visited Mr. Cudahy at the embassy and told him of my discovery. I also mentioned Colonel McCormick’s instructions and said I was going to send a story about the American ambassador to Moscow becoming a rouble smuggler. Cudahy was horrified and urged me to desist. I told him I would protect him and would not mention that Bullitt’s check had been made out in his name, but I pointed out that in doing this Bullitt was taking an unfair advantage through involving the ambassador in Poland in his smuggling operations and suggested that he instruct Bullitt to make out his checks hereafter to bearer.

However the story did not have the news value I had supposed. Colonel McCormick was not in Chicago and the story, although it appeared in The Tribune and many of our syndicate papers including The Washington Post passed unnoticed by the public although it did kick up a considerable row in the state department.

[Page 77]

A fortnight later Mike Nowinski, whom I had discharged as our correspondent in Warsaw, obtained the story from The Tribune and one afternoon it appeared under big headlines on the first page of all the Warsaw newspapers. Nowinski had obligingly supplied the newspapers with the misinformation that the United States government intended to conduct an investigation in Warsaw and since I would be unable to prove the truth of my story I was going to be recalled to America. I sent a letter to these newspapers informing them there would be no investigation as I had complete proof that the American ambassador to Moscow, Mr. Bullitt, was a valuta smuggler, that the American government knew I was in possession of this evidence and would therefore do nothing in this matter.

The story which appeared in the Warsaw press was telegraphed to other countries and mentioned in radio news broadcasts. Count Potocki, head of the Anglo-American department of the Polish foreign office, visited Ambassador Cudahy expressing his regrets that I was to go unpunished. He said if a Polish newspaperman had ever written such an expose of a Polish ambassador he would receive at least five years imprisonment. He further told Mr. Cudahy that in the future I was to be considered persona non grata by the Polish foreign office.

When Mr. Cudahy told me of this interview I asked his permission to mention it when I next met Count Potocki. He granted it. I called upon Potocki at the foreign office and explained I had received instructions from Colonel McCormick to report about Ambassador Bullitt’s activities in Moscow. I said this had nothing whatever to do with the Polish government but if they wished to take up this matter they could do so with The Tribune. Mentioning there was considerable difference (at that time) between American and Polish correspondents and since I could prove my charges against Bullitt I said no action would be taken against me by either my government or the Polish government. As for his statement that I was persona non grata I had felt I had been that ever since 1926 when I frustrated Poland’s attempts to obtain a forty million dollar loan in the United States. In conclusion, I suggested to Count Potocki it might be advisable for him to mind his own business in the future and leave me out of his discussions. Our language became rather heated and I am afraid I punctuated some of my remarks with profanity for I considered Potocki’s action entirely uncalled for.

The Bullitt affair ended with the Ambassador being recalled from Moscow. A short time later Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to France. The Tribune, commenting upon the President’s action in promoting Bullitt to this post published an editorial entitled “Kicked Upstairs.”

[Page 78]

During the summer of 1934 I had an even more interesting encounter with the Polish foreign office. Stefan Klecgkowski was a reporter on the Kurjer Warszawski. When Filipowicz was Polish minister in Washington, Klecgkowski went there for propaganda work. When he arrived, the legation informed him it had no funds to pay his salary. He was left stranded with neither money nor friends in a strange country. Steve became editor of a Polish newspaper in New York which opposed the Pilsudski regime and worked there a few years before returning to Warsaw. His connection with an anti-Pilsudski paper proved a curse. The press department of the foreign office intrigued against him. When I employed him as translator the foreign office requested me to discharge him. They were unable to provide me with any evidence against him so I refused.

Steve was a friend of General Ladislaw Sikorski and introduced me to him. The General proved a valuable source of news. Some officers in the government camp came to him with gossip and information as to what was proceeding in government circles. They hoped the general would remember them when he once again was in power.

Sikorski was a gentleman and a fine officer. He reminded me very much of another officer friend, General Johann Laidoner, commander-in-chief of the Estonian army. Because he was an opponent of Marshal Pilsudski, Sikorski was placed on the shelf. He was kept on the active list, but was not given any post or duties. He lived in a small villa with a garden surrounded by a high fence on the road leading down from the Belveders, the residence of Marshal Pilsudski, to the Villanov castle. I visited him occasionally and he came to visit me. The General wrote many interesting articles which appeared in the Kurjer Warszawski. I forwarded some of these articles and interviews I had with the General to The Tribune, as a matter of news, but I did not agree with his point of view. I contended that Poland’s only hope for a safe national future lay in cooperation with Germany. Like too many Poles, the General pinned his faith on France. The great majority of educated Poles worshipped France.

They knew French history as well as their own. They believed a strong France and a strong Poland could keep Germany in check: The General was also in close touch with Polish Roman Catholic circles. He told me how despite restrictions imposed on his movements by the government he had managed to slip across the Czechoslovak frontier for a conference with Ignace Paderewski, the pianist and self made exile who had abandoned Poland and never returned after Pilsudski forced his abdication as president. Another party at this meeting was Vincent Witos, the bearded leader of the peasant’s party whose great influence with the peasants made him feared by the Pilsudski group. Witos was also an exile.

[Page 79]

Little came of these attempts of Sikorski to regain a position in Polish political life, except an attack upon his life.

One morning the General telephoned and asked if I could come to his villa immediately. I jumped in my car and in fifteen minutes the General was showing me the body of a dead man in his garden. He said some men had attempted to break into his house that night to kill him but his guards had shot one on the street in front of his house and the other in the garden. The Police had already removed the body of the man in the street. Sikorski had not mentioned the body in the garden as he wished to show it to me first.

The General said he knew the names of the men who plotted this attempted assassination. He anticipated another attempt which might be more successful and he wished to give me this information in order that I might write a story if his fears came true.

I told the General we might be able to prevent another attack if he would help me. He agreed and I suggested he write me a note stating how he had telephoned me asking me to visit his villa where he showed me the body of one of two assassins killed by his guards that night, that he knew about this plot against his life and had given me the names of the plotters authorizing me to publish these names if any future attempt was made.

The General wrote this note and signed it. I told him I would immediately send it by courier to the Bureau of The Tribune with instructions to mail it to the Chicago office. I said I would send a cabled story that evening to The Tribune describing this attempt to murder him and ask my editor to publish the story on the first page. I knew all the Polish newspapers in America would immediately republish the story, that it would be branded as a falsehood by the Polish government who would attempt to expel me from the country. I explained I would use this note to intimidate the ministry of foreign affairs to prevent this expulsion. In 1934 I was living in Warsaw.

The situation developed as anticipated. The Tribune did publish this story on the first page and the next afternoon I was called to the press department of the foreign office. The press chief smiled maliciously for we were not on friendly terms. He asked if I knew why he had phoned. I said I expected him to inform me that I had to leave Poland. He said this was correct and I must do so immediately. I replied I had no intention of obeying this order and told him to inform Col. Beck the foreign minister, that General Sikorski had given me the before mentioned note which was already in Berlin and if the Polish authorities dared to arrest me and expel me across the frontier I would publish the entire story and the names of those involved in the assassination plot. The press chief turned pale and quickly left the room. Returning in a few minutes he asked me to please forget the entire matter, it had all been a regrettable mistake.

[Page 80]

General Sikorski was not further molested by his enemies. Shortly afterwards he received long-awaited permission to make a visit to France where he had many powerful and influential friends. I might mention here that Sikorski and Beck were bitter enemies and the General had told me if he ever obtained power in Poland he most certainly would not have a murderer in his cabinet. It was common knowledge in Poland that Colonel Beck had been involved in the mysterious disappearance of General Zagurski, military commander of the Vilna district, who had quarreled with Pilsudski. At that time Beck was Pilsudski’s chief aide-de-camp.

Shortly after this event Beck decided to become foreign minister. Pilsudski refused to appoint him offhand but told him to take a post in the foreign office. So Beck became the pupil of August Zaleski who was Poland’s permanent foreign minister from May 1926, until Beck took over in November 1932.

I always liked and admired Zaleski. I interviewed him frequently while he was foreign minister and visited him in the Bank Mandlowy when he temporarily retired from politics and became a banker. He did his best to further Poland’s policy of intimate collaboration with France, but France continually snubbed Poland. In 1934, when Pilsudski sent France an ultimatum to join Poland in making an immediate war upon Germany or he would come to an agreement with Berlin, France refused and Pilsudski ordered Beck to sign the ten year pact of non-aggression and friendship with Germany.

Pilsudski’s choice of Beck as foreign minister was not a fortunate one.

Beck proved an adroit diplomat but he did not have the faculty of making friends and had no personal following except his close satellites to whom he gave posts in his ministry. When Pilsudski died in 1935 his last instructions to President Moscicki, Finance Minister Kwiatkowski and Josef Beck, the three men who divided his authority after his death, was to maintain friendly relations at all costs with Germany. Of these three men Beck was the strongest character. Moscicki was Poland’s greatest scientist and engineer and he tried to give his country an efficient government. Kwiatkowski in former days the President’s chief collaborator in his scientific work, tried to give it an honest government. Beck was entrusted with the task of continuing the foreign policy, the chief aim of which was rapprochement with Germany. All three men failed at their tasks. The Poles didn’t want an efficient government.

[Page 81]

Let me relate an experience which might help to prove this point. In 1936 I motored from Riga to Danzig and after forwarding some stories of the Danzig-Gydnia rivalry I went to Musz Lake in the corridor to meet a friend, Donald LeLara of Warsaw, to go fishing. Donald fished de luxe.

He carried a four cylinder outboard motor in his Hispano Suiza car and had bought boats on a number of Poland’s lakes to fish for pike. We stopped at the home of a farmer and I discovered a small stream flowing out of the lake into Germany which contained trout. I took a farmhand and wandered down this stream fly fishing. We met three boys with a net who had caught some trout, but as they had muddied the stream further fly fishing was impossible. I asked the farmhand why someone didn’t care for this little river and rent it to the Warsaw fishing club or some private person. He said no one could prevent the boys from fishing with nets and nightlines. When I asked if there were no one to maintain order he said:

“When the corridor belonged to Germany there was only one policeman for the entire district and there was order. Now the same area has five policemen and there is no order, but we like it much better now,”

This attitude was typical for the Poles.

Colonel Beck proved no match for Sir Howard William Kennard, the British ambassador, and Leon Noel, the French ambassador. These diplomats found willing accomplices among the Poles to sabotage the policy of friendship with Germany. To destroy Beck’s influence, which the name of Pilsudski maintained, this clique managed to appoint General RydzSmigly as Marshal of Poland. This new Marshal swung the weight of army influence away from Beck, who was eventually jockeyed into the position where he had to pay a visit to London. When he returned the British and French agents had a well paid clique to welcome him. A demonstration was staged outside the foreign office. Beck had to appear on the balcony. He acknowledged the applause of the mob and stepped back into his office to fall in a faint. Pilsudski’s policy of peace with Germany had been stabbed in the back by the Poles, and the Ambassadors Kennard and Noel directed the knife.

There is an old Chinese proverb that you can flatter a man into jumping from a house. The ambassadors did their part in flattering Poland into thinking she was a great power and that she had the support of France and England, especially England, against Germany. So Poland jumped and we know what happened to her.

When the corridor crisis, which had smouldered for many years, broke into flame the ambassadors repeatedly assured Poland that she would receive immediate, effective and material assistance should Germany attack. These promises were confirmed by the London press. If anyone wishes to know the extent to which England was involved in supporting Poland resistance to German demands they only need to read the editorials published during the latter days of August 1939, by The London Times, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Herald, etc.

[Page 82]

It is possible these promises were given in all seriousness. England’s brilliant plan was to rush her fleet into the Baltic Sea and occupy Libau as a base. The Polish divisions stationed in the Vilna corridor were to sweep through Lithuania and aid in the capture of Libau. The Poles had approached the Lithuanian government, asking permission for their troops to pass through the country. Lithuania said she would fight first. Latvia was also asked to surrender Libau to Poland if Germany attacked. The Letts also refused.

Fulfillment of England’s plan depended upon the Soviet government joining with England and France in an alliance directed against Germany.

A British-French delegation had been in Moscow since spring, trying to reach agreement with the communists. But the Soviet government had already concluded an economic agreement and was negotiating a political agreement with Germany. I knew about the economic but only suspected the political agreement. Today we know what followed. The Poles, dizzy with promises and other illusions, decided to resist Germany. They were betrayed by England and France after these two powers had been double-crossed by Moscow. The deluded incompetent Polish government had disappeared. Marshal Rydz-Smigly, the tool of the ambassadors of treachery Kennard and Noel, escaped to Rumania and thence to Turkey where he also disappeared. Beck is in an asylum in Rumania. Moscicki is reported living in seclusion in Switzerland. Kwiatkowski has disappeared.

And today in London, Pilsildski’s old enemies, led by General Sikorski are heading a shadow Polish government.

Although I like both Sikorski and Zaleski and have appreciated the friendship of these men and other Poles, I must state frankly my opinion, formed while watching and studying developments in Poland over twenty two years, that the project to restore the Polish state anything like her former boundaries is a crime against humanity.

If at some future date another Polish state should appear, steps should be taken to exclude the Catholic Church from having any voice whatever in its affairs. Catholicism in Poland was also synonymous with corruption.

The Catholic Church was the author of many shameful deeds in Poland.

One of the crimes in which it was heavily involved was the dynamiting of a number of Uniate churches in Galicia to force their congregations to attend services in Roman Catholic churches. The activities of the Catholics, both priests and laymen, in Poland, are the strongest argument one could possibly find for the separation of the church and the state and the denial to a church of monopoly of religion and education. The Catholic church in Poland, like the government apparatus, contained so much corruption that it too must bear a sizable portion of the blame for Poland’s debacle.

[Page 83]

Before any new Poland can appear on the map of Europe a Polish middle class has to be educated. The Poles must also learn a different conception of patriotism and honor than that taught by their church and learn to recognize and respect the rights and property of their immediate and more distant neighbors. If all of Poland’s neighbors, the Germans, Russians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Rumanians, Slovaks, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians were emphatically unanimous in their hatred of the Poles then there must be plenty of good reasons for this attitude. It is not enough to have a glorified expurgated history as an excuse for national existence. A nation must have the ability to improve the living standard of its people. After 22 years of national existence Poland’s standard of living was the lowest in Europe. That is why she collapsed like a house of cards when an enemy crossed her frontier.

 

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NOTES

 

* Images (maps, photos, etc.) have also been added that were not part of the original Noontide edition.

 

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Knowledge is Power in Our Struggle for Racial Survival

 

(Information that should be shared with as many of our people as possible — do your part to counter Jewish control of the mainstream media — pass it on and spread the word) … Val Koinen at KOINEN’S CORNER

 

 

Version History

Version 1: Published Mar 17, 2015