The Marxist-Leninist Weekly

Pictured here in 1944 are Polish partisans, members of the Polish People's Army (Armia Ludowa), who bravely and with
great sacrifice fought together with the Soviet Army to liberate their country and defeat Nazi fascism in Europe.
(Polish Army Museum in Warsaw)

• Nazi Germany's Invasion of Poland
• World War II

Falsifications About Nazi Aims, Then and Now

September 1 marks the 74th anniversary of Nazi Germany's criminal invasion of Poland. Then and now the direct experience of the people who suffered this invasion and its consequences is falsified. The aim is to deprive the people today of any ability to mount an organized resistance to the crimes the Hitlerites of today are committing, just as was done by the Hitlerites and their appeasers at that time as well.

As the people of Poland and all of Europe and the world mark this anniversary, they are not unaware of the fact that the 70th anniversary of the victory of the anti-fascist forces over the Hitlerites, fascists and Japanese militarists in World War II is fast approaching and, once again, the world faces similar dangers all over again. The need to oppose the imperialist disinformation of today is as great as it was to oppose the Nazi disinformation of yesteryear. It is part of opposing the reactionary thesis that humanity has reached the end of history. This end of history outlook deprives the peoples of the world of the consciousness they need to open society's path to progress today.

This year's anniversary comes at a time when reactionary forces, including within the Harper government, are increasing their disinformation about communism so as to rehabilitate Nazi war criminals as patriots. Such efforts also come at a time when the ruling circles in Canada and elsewhere are stepping up their attacks on the workers and peoples fighting for their rights against the neoliberal anti-social offensive. Within this context, the talk of President Obama and others of launching cruise missiles against Syria under the pretext of high ideals is becoming more and more shrill and dangerous. It must not pass.

The lies spread about the Soviet Union, Stalin, Poland and World War II aim to ensure the people today do not mount a resistance movement to imperialism before it is too late. If left unopposed, the lies and current warmongering spread deep anxiety as a result of feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and humiliation because the ruling circles are getting away with terrible crimes that the people are left feeling powerless to prevent. These crimes include the U.S. and its allies and NATO forces committing invasions, proxy wars and mass killings in sovereign countries to bring about regime change and to consolidate their domination of vast regions of the world. They resort to torture, blatant violation of rights and drones flying over civilian areas and through commercial airspace to terrorize and spy on the people, firing their deadly rockets in targeted assassinations and mass killings. Their special ops and mercenaries use chemical weapons, other banned weapons and commit criminal acts indiscriminately, and then blame their enemies targeted for regime change for the crimes and chaos of which the big imperialist powers are responsible. The anarchy, violence and crimes become pretexts to justify invasions and yet more atrocities.

The peoples of the world fought similar crimes during World War II to make sure the Hitlerites would be contained once and for all. But the path to progress was blocked and the world entered a period of retreat of revolution with serious retrogression imposed as the U.S. and the big powers of old Europe engage in deadly competition to dominate all the world's resources, zones for the export of capital, sources of cheap labour and control over spheres of influence. Their success depends on their elimination of the striving of the peoples everywhere for empowerment, the struggle to achieve their own freedom, progress and prosperity. In countries like Estonia and Latvia, Nazism is being openly rehabilitated, with the tacit support of the rulers of other countries. In some European countries, communist symbols have been made illegal. In Canada, the Harper government officially promotes and has committed to finance a shady project to create a national monument commemorating the Nazis as "victims of totalitarian communism." The financial oligarchy and its governments are egging on the Nazi forces, putting them into positions of power and prompting them to commit crimes beyond the purview of law. The people cannot afford to let this problem go unresolved. A first step is to say No! and that No! Means No! Let us take a bold step together to defend the rights of all.

When Poland was invaded, its intelligentsia was slaughtered en masse and its working people placed in slave labour camps. After the war, the anti-communist campaign lied to the Polish people who had been rescued from the camps, telling them that their villages had been annihilated by the communists who had killed their old people and sent their bones to factories to make soap. On this basis, displaced persons were brought to Canada under false pretenses, many to the mines of northern Ontario to be used to attack the unions organized by the communists. Many of the original Canadian communist union organizers had themselves been interned during the war or deported en masse to their countries of origin as enemies of the state for their active struggle in defence of the rights of all and their support for the working class nation-building project in the Soviet Union.

In the seventies, when the former Soviet Union and the United States began collaborating and a period of so-called détente was ushered in, the Canadian people of Polish origin who were not part of the contingent of Nazi collaborators brought to Canada in the post-war period, started to realize that the rantings of the anti-communist campaign were untrue. However, by that time the leadership of their community was benefiting from the anti-communist post-war Liberal arrangements in Canada. The community as a whole remained without the ability to sum up the trauma of its experience during World War II. The Poles who survived the slave labour camps and came to Canada fell victim to those who imposed a curtain of silence on the direct experience of the Poles who fought alongside the Soviets against the brutal Nazi invasion. The silence extended to the experience of those liberated by the Soviets and who fought in the Polish uprisings, who know the crimes of the Polish renegade officers who collaborated with the Nazis and Zionists to betray the Jews and the Poles and all the peoples of Europe. Today, it is the official Nazi rendering of these events which is told and passed off as history to negate the direct experience of the Polish people and undermine their ability to fight today.

It is up to the younger generation to establish the truth of those historical events for purposes of opposing the falsification of history today, just as those who fought the Nazis in yesteryear opposed the falsification of history during that turbulent time. They opposed the falsification of history by writing their own history, the history of the anti-fascist war, the history of the victory of the peoples' striving for freedom, democracy and justice. A powerful determined force wrote that history and prevailed through courage and sacrifice. But history never stops marching forwards or backwards. Without continuing the battle against the forces of reaction, the people's history can be falsified and turned back against itself, as happened in the Soviet Union and Europe bringing reaction and even Nazis back to power. Let us learn from that history by making sure its falsification fails, by ensuring its aim to render the people powerless to stand up for their rights and the rights of all fails in the historical context of today.

Our Future Lies in the Fight for the Rights of All! Let us take the necessary measures to defeat the activities of the anti-people forces on all fronts. Let us start by saying No! to the falsification of history, which aims to render us passive today, just as it attempted to do when the invasion of Poland took place 74 years ago. Never Again! means to take a stand against imperialism and its war crimes now, to defeat the falsification of the crimes of the Nazi aggressors of yesterday, and to honour the heroism and resistance of the peoples and their communist leadership that won victory in the anti- fascist war.

Nazi Germany's Invasion of Poland

Executions of Poles by the Nazis' Einsatzgruppen in Leszno, October 1939, shortly after the invasion, part of an organized campaign of mass murder throughout the country. (Wikipedia)

Nazis round up Poles in Warsaw, to be sent for detention, deportation or execution. (Wikipedia)

At 4:15 am on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in a massive assault. Hitler's Wehrmacht of 1,850,000 troops, 3,200 tanks, 2,000 combat aircraft and 11 warships -- over two-thirds of Germany's entire combat force -- destroyed the Polish state and massacred the Polish people.[1]

Behind the Wehrmacht followed Himmler's SS Einsatzgruppen, killing squads specializing in mass murder.

Against Poland, the Nazis perpetrated one of the worst crimes history has ever known. Poland suffered the largest number of casualties per capita of any European country. A total of about six million people were killed. Direct extermination by mass murder, death camps and other means took some 1,750,000 Polish lives. In addition, the state forces of Nazi Germany exterminated 2,700,000 Polish Jews, 2,000,000 Polish children and youth, more than 50,000 Roma, some 12,000 people deemed mentally handicapped, and thousands of Polish prisoners of war, soldiers, and officers who were systematically shot. The German Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) shot some 40,000 Polish intellectuals, political personalities and other leaders within the first six weeks of the Nazi occupation. Prior to the invasion, beginning in May 1939, the Nazi OperationTannenberg, which was part of Hitler's Generalplan Ost (Masterplan East), had already identified and listed more than 61,000 Polish activists, intelligentsia, scholars, former officers and others, who were to be interned or shot, mainly by the SS. The murder of 5,000-6,000 Poles in Fordon, Bydgoszcz in October-November 1939 is just one example of the many executions the SS and the Wehrmacht carried out. Other examples include the murder of 4,143 Polish officers found buried in Katyn Forest for which the Nazis and their collaborators blamed the communists and continue to blame the communists so as to exonerate their massive crimes and confound who were the liberators and who were the criminals.

The Polish people were greatly outnumbered but fought back bravely. The state leaders of Poland fled to Romania on September 17, but the Polish people's spirit of resistance remained strong. Many Poles fought courageously in the communist-led underground Resistance. Poles formed their own patriotic divisions and fought alongside the Red Army against the Nazis all the way to Berlin.

Nazis carry out expulsions in the Zamosc region of Poland, December 1942. (Wikipedia)

Despite the facts, the Hitlerites blame the Soviets for what happened to the Polish people, claiming that Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to let it happen, and Stalin invaded Poland. In fact, the Soviet Army entered the territory of Poland on September 17, only after the Polish state had collapsed, the Polish army had disintegrated, the government had ceased to function and its leaders had fled. The part of Poland the Soviet Union occupied was the territory of the Ukraine and Byelorussia that Poland had forcibly annexed from the Soviet Union during the Polish-Russian War of 1919-20. At that time, Poland was one of the 14 invading imperialist countries that attempted but failed to strangle the newborn Soviet Socialist Republic.[2] Only about eight per cent of the people in the Ukraine and Byelorussia were of Polish origin.

"As a result of the Soviet Union's timely entry into what had been territories of the Polish state, Hitler was forced to accept a line of demarcation between his troops and the Red Army, a long way west of the then Polish-Russian frontier."[3] The Red Army saved millions of people including Poles inhabiting the Ukraine and Byelorussia from a similar fate that Hitler was at that time wreaking upon the Polish people. Even the virulently anti-communist Winston Churchill publicly justified the Soviet march into eastern Poland.

Today, the modern-day Hitlerites, masquerading as democrats, continue to spread the vicious lies that "Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union secretly conspired to divide Poland between them." Those lies, meant to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany and discredit and split the anti-fascist front led by the communists, were first put forth by Hitler himself in a speech declaring war on the Soviet Union, when he referred to "secret protocols" to divide Poland. Then after their defeat, some Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremberg resurrected the"secret protocols" in a bid to escape punishment but the Presidium threw them out as a forgery. It was only when the U.S. took up the mantle of Hitlerism during the Cold War and became the modern day master of Goebbels' big lie technique that Hitler's concoction about "secret protocols" became a so-called historical fact.[4] This has now become official Canadian propaganda as well.

Collective punishment for opposing the Nazi occupation took the form of public hangings, mass executions and other crimes against the Polish people. (Wikipedia)

The real historical facts clarify why Hitler attacked Poland. In 1939 Poland was an imperialist country formed from the disaster of the First World War by Britain and France through the 1918 Versailles Treaty. "One of its ambitions was to add the rich agricultural regions of the Ukraine to Polish territory and extend Polish territory 'from sea to sea,' from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. [...] The Polish landlords and bourgeoisie dreamed of restoring the Polish empire of medieval times."[5] Financed and armed by the British and French monopolies who wanted to regain their lost profits and privileges seized by the workers and peasants' revolutionary forces,[6] the Polish rulers attacked the Soviet Union in 1918, occupying large parts of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania. During the following 18 years of semi-fascist Polish rule, the Polish landlords and industrialists viciously exploited the workers and peasants in those regions.

As inter-imperialist war clouds loomed over Europe, the Polish ruling circles refused to see the world as it presented itself, especially the German Nazi imperialists who made no secret of their desire to conquer Europe so as to conquer the world, and their racist contempt of the Polish people. The Polish elite considered Britain and France to be their allies and the Soviet Union their avowed enemy. The Anglo-American and French imperialists wanted to ensure their own leading roles in world domination. They followed a policy of appeasing Hitler and egging him eastward to attack the Soviet Union, rather than organizing collective security with the Soviet Union against the avowed eastward expansionism of Nazi Germany into industrial, oil bearing and rich agricultural regions, hoping that it would become bogged down in a protracted war rather than grow fat from robbing the Soviet Union of its wealth.

For its part, Poland hoped that Hitler would somehow go East and attack the Soviet Union without seizing Poland first, and that from the spoils of war Poland could also capture Soviet territory. Poland refused to settle outstanding border questions thus keeping the Soviet defence line against the Nazis as far east as possible. The Polish state refused the Soviets permission to enter Poland to stop the impending Nazi advance and make it more difficult. Instead of taking all measures necessary to defend the people against the disasters of an obvious Nazi invasion, the Polish rulers, harbouring deep illusions about Hitler's intentions and blinded by anti-communism, preferred instead to engage in fanciful manoeuvres for advantages favouring their private interests.

In attacking Poland, Hitler was both taking up the Anglo-American policy of going East and implementing his own plan outlined in Mein Kampf, to increase Germany's "living space" (lebensraum) by taking over the Ukraine as part of his plan to enslave the entire world. Hitler made his barbaric intentions toward Poland very clear. Only ten days before the attack, Hitler in his Obersalzburg speech instructed his generals to "send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [lebensraum] which we need."[7] Tragically, in the end, Poland paid very dearly for its ruling class leaders' imperialist ambitions, anti-communism and rejection of Soviet assistance.

The Nazis had a longstanding plan to annihilate Warsaw as part of destroying and remaking the entirety of Poland. After the Nazis put down the Warsaw Uprising in the fall of 1944, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler said at an SS officers' conference on October 17, 1944, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." This photo from January 1945 shows that 85 per cent of the city was destroyed. This campaign of destruction was also meant to "teach a lesson" to the partisans of Warsaw who fought so valiantly to the end, so that their example would not be followed by others. (Wikipedia)

Today, the Harper government and reactionary Polish ruling circles continue to spread the same lies that the Nazis did, and try to throw mud on the wartime exploits of the Soviet Union so as to accuse the communists of crimes against humanity. On September 1, 2009, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called for "glory to all the soldiers who fought in World War Two against German Nazism and Bolshevik totalitarianism." Soon after the April 10, 2010 crash of a Polish airliner near Smolensk, in which Kaczynski and 95 others died, the Polish rulers and others around the world used the tragedy to resurrect the old lie that the Soviet Union and not the Nazis committed the wartime Katyn Forest Massacre. Such deliberate disinformation ignores the fact that it was the Nazis who killed six million Poles and that it was the Red Army together with an allied Polish Army that finally liberated Poland from the Nazi occupiers.

Monument to Polish partisans and German anti-fascist fighters in Berlin. The relief at right depicts a Soviet soldier,
a soldier of the Armia Ludowa (Polish People's Army) and a German anti-Fascist. (Wikipedia; Colin Smith)

1. Much of the German military equipment used in the invasion was built by U.S.-owned companies such as Ford, General Motors and Focke Wulfe (ITT).
2. An estimated seven million Russian men, women and children were killed during the 1918 invasion.
3. Hardial Bains, Causes and Lessons of the Second World War (Toronto: MELS Institute, 1990).
4. Poland had concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany in January 1934, the first state to form such an alliance with the Nazi administration.
5. Hardial Bains, Ibid.
6. These included oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, the Metro-Vickers arms trust, and the big banking houses such as Baring, Hambros and Credit Lyonnais. Soon-to-be U.S. President Herbert Hoover also had large investments in Czarist Russia.
7. E.L. Woodward & Rohan Riftlep (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy: 1919-1939, 3rd series (London: HMSO, 7:258- 260, 1954).

World War II

TML Weekly is posting below an extract from Chapter 22 of the book The Great Conspiracy by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, entitled "The Second World War."

***

On September 1, 1939, Nazi mechanized divisions invaded Poland at seven points. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Within two weeks, the Polish regime, which under the influence of the anti-Soviet "Colonels' clique" had allied itself with Nazism, refused Soviet aid and opposed collective security, fell to pieces, and the Nazis were mopping up the scattered remnants of their former ally.

On September 17, as the Nazi columns raced across Poland and the Polish Government fled in panic, the Red Army crossed the prewar Polish eastern border and occupied Byelorussia, the western Ukraine and Galicia before the Nazi Panzers could get there. Moving swiftly westward, the Red Army occupied all the territory which Poland had annexed from Soviet Russia in 1920.

"That the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace," declared Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast on October 1. "An Eastern Front has been created which Nazi Germany does not dare assail. When Herr von Ribbentrop was summoned to Moscow last week it was to learn the fact, and accept the fact, that the Nazi designs upon the Baltic states and upon the Ukraine must come to a dead stop."

The advance of the Red Army to the west was the first of a series of moves by the Soviet Union counterbalancing the spread of Nazism and designed to strengthen Soviet defenses in preparation for the inevitable showdown with the Third Reich....

During the last week in September and the first days in October, the Soviet Government signed mutual assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These agreements specified that Red Army garrisons and Soviet airports and naval bases were to be established in the Baltic States.

There began immediately a wholesale deportation of the Nazi Fifth Column in the Baltic area. Within a few days 50,000 Germans had been deported from Lithuania, 53,000 from Latvia and 12,000 from Estonia. Overnight, the Baltic Fifth Columns so laboriously built up by Alfred Rosenberg suffered a devastating blow, and the German High Command lost some of its most strategic bases for the contemplated attack on the Soviet Union.

But to the north, Finland remained as a potential military ally of the Third Reich.

The most intimate working relationship existed between the German and the Finnish High Commands. The Finnish military leader, Baron Karl Gustav von Mannerheim, was in close and constant communication with the German High Command. There were frequent joint staff talks, and German officers periodically supervised Finnish army maneuvers. The Finnish Chief of Staff, General Karl Oesch, had received his military training in Germany, as had his chief aide, General Hugo Ostermann, who served in the German Army during the First World War. In 1939, the Government of the Third Reich conferred upon General Oesch one of its highest military decorations ....

Political relations between Finland and Nazi Germany were also close. The Socialist Premier Risto Ryti regarded Hitler as a "genius"; Per Svinhufrud, the wealthy Germanophile who had been awarded the German Iron Cross, was the most powerful behind-the-scenes figure in Finnish politics.

With the aid of German officers and engineers, Finland had been converted into a powerful fortress to serve as a base for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Twenty-three military airports had been constructed on Finnish soil, capable of accommodating ten times as many airplanes as there were in the Finnish Air Force. Nazi technicians had supervised the construction of the Mannerheim Line, a series of intricate, splendidly equipped fortifications running several miles deep along the Soviet border and having heavy guns at one point only twenty-one miles from Leningrad. Unlike the Maginot Line, the Mannerheim Line had been designed not only for defensive purposes but also for garrisoning a major offensive force. As the Mannerheim Line neared completion in the summer of 1939, Hitler's Chief of Staff, General Halder, arrived from Germany and gave the massive fortifications a final inspection ....

During the first week of October, 1939, while still negotiating its new treaties with the Baltic States, the Soviet Government proposed a mutual assistance pact with Finland. Moscow offered to cede several thousand square miles of Soviet territory on central Karelia in exchange for some strategic Finnish islands near Leningrad, a portion of the Karelian Isthmus and a thirty-year lease on the port of Hango for the construction of a Soviet naval base. The Soviet leaders regarded these latter territories as essential to the defense of the Red naval base at Kronstadt and the city of Leningrad.

The Mannerheim line (front line December 1939) is shown by the purple dotted line, with Finland to the north. The red bars
show Finnish fortifications. The Soviet-Finnish border of 1918-1939 is shown by the green dotted line. (www.northfort.ru)

The negotiations between the Soviet Union and Finland dragged on into the middle of November without results. In order to reach some agreement, the Soviet Government made a number of compromises. "Stalin tried to teach me the wisdom of Finnish as well as Soviet interest in compromise," declared the Finnish negotiator, Juho Passikivi, upon his return to Helsinki. But the pro-Nazi clique dominating the Finnish Government refused to make any concessions and broke off the negotiations.

By the end of November, the Soviet Union and Finland were at war. "The Finnish nation," declared the Finnish Government, "is fighting for independence, liberty and honor.... As the outpost of Western civilization, our nation has the right to expect help from other civilized nations."

The anti-Soviet elements in England and France believed that the long-awaited holy war was at hand. The strangely inactive war in the west against Nazi Germany was the "wrong war." The real war lay to the east. In England, France and the United States, an intense anti-Soviet campaign began under the slogan of "Aid to Finland."

Prime Minister Chamberlain, who only a short time before had asserted his country lacked adequate arms for fighting the Nazis, quickly arranged to send to Finland 144 British airplanes, 114 heavy guns, 185,000 shells, 50,000 grenades, 15,700 aerial bombs, 100,000 greatcoats and 48 ambulances. At a time when the French Army was in desperate need of every piece of military equipment to hold the inevitable Nazi offensive, the French Government turned over to the Finnish Army 179 airplanes, 472 guns, 795,000 shells, 5100 machine guns and 200,000 hand grenades.

While the lull continued on the Western Front, the British High Command, still dominated by anti-Soviet militarists like General Ironside, drew up plans for sending 100,000 troops across Scandinavia into Finland, and the French High Command made preparations for a simultaneous attack on the Caucasus, under the leadership of General Weygand, who openly stated that French bombers in the Near East were ready to strike at the Baku oil fields.

Day after day the British, French and American newspapers headlined sweeping Finnish victories and catastrophic Soviet defeats. But after three months of fighting in extraordinarily difficult terrain and under incredibly severe weather conditions, with the temperature frequently falling to sixty and seventy degrees below zero, the Red Army had smashed the "impregnable" Mannerheim Line and routed the Finnish Army.[3]

Hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union ended on March 13, 1940. According to the peace terms, Finland ceded to Russia the Karelian Isthmus, the western and northern shores of Lake Lagoda, a number of strategic islands in the Gulf of Finland essential to the defense of Leningrad. The Soviet Government restored to Finland the port of Petsamo, which had been occupied by the Red Army, and took a thirty-year lease on the Hango peninsula for an annual rental of 8,000,000 Finnish marks.

The Soviet Union, having smashed the Finnish Army and having every opportunity of occupying the whole of Finland, did not do so and did not demand any indemnities for its expenditures in the war as any other Power would have done, but confined its desires to a minimum ... We pursued no other objects in the peace treaty than that of safeguarding Murmansk and the Murmansk railroad ....

On the day that Finnish-Soviet hostilities ceased, General Mannerheim declared in a proclamation to the Finnish Army that "the sacred mission of the army is to be an outpost of Western civilization in the east." Shortly afterwards, the Finnish Government began to construct new fortifications along the revised frontier. Nazi technicians came from Germany to supervise the work. Large armament orders were placed with Sweden and Germany. German troops began arriving in considerable numbers in Finland. The Finnish and the German commands set LP joint headquarters and held joint army maneuvers. Scores of Nazi agents swelled the staffs of the German Embassy at Helsinki and the eleven consulates around the country....

The Nazi warship Admiral Hipper lands troops in
Norway in 1940. (Wikipedia)

The lull in the west came to a sudden end in the spring of 1940. On April 9 German troops invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark was occupied in a single day without resistance. By the end of the month the Nazis had crushed organized Norwegian resistance, and the British troops, which had come to aid the Norwegians, were abandoning their few precarious footholds. A puppet Nazi regime was set up in Oslo under Major Vidkun Quisling.

On May 10, Chamberlain tendered his resignation as Prime Minister, having brought his country to possibly the most desperate situation in its long history. That same day, as the King asked Winston Churchill to form a new cabinet, the German Army invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. By May 21, the Germans had smashed their way through crumbling opposition, reached the Channel and cut off the Allies in Flanders.

Panic swept through France. Everywhere, the Fifth Column was at work. French troops were deserted by their officers. Whole divisions found themselves without military supplies. Paul Reymud told the Senate that French Army chiefs had committed "unbelievable errors." He denounced "traitors, defeatists and cowards." Dozens of top-ranking French officers were suddenly arrested. But the arrests came too late. The Fifth Column was already in control of France.

The former French Minister of Aviation, Pierre Cot, later wrote in Triumph o f Treason:

... the Fascists had their own way in the country at large and in the Army. The anti-Communist agitation was a smoke screen behind which was being prepared the great political conspiracy that was to paralyze France and facilitate Hitler's work .... The most efficient instruments of the Fifth Column .... were Weygand, Pétain and Laval. At the Council of Ministers which was held at Cangé, near Tours, on June 12, 1940, General Weygand urged the government to end the war. His principal argument was that a Communist revolution had broken out in Paris. He stated that Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the Communist Party, was already installed in the Presidential Palace. Georges Mandel, Minister of the Interior, immediately telephoned to the Prefect of Police in Paris, who denied Weygand's statements; there was no disturbance in the city, the population was quiet .... As soon as they had seized power amid the confusion of the collapse, Pétain and Weygand, with the help of Laval and Darlan, hastened to suppress all political liberties, gag the people, and set up a Fascist regime.

With every hour, confusion mounted and the debacle grew, as the French soldiers fought on desperately, hopelessly, and the world watched the betrayal of a nation on a scale never witnessed before ....

From May 29 through June 4, the British Army evacuated its troops from Dunkirk, heroically rescuing 335,000 men.

On June 14, Paris fell, and Pétain, Weygand, Laval and the Trotskyite Doriot became the Nazi puppet rulers of France.

On June 22, an armistice between Germany and France was signed in the Compiègne Forest in the very same railroad car in which Marshal Foch had dictated the terms of surrender to the defeated Germans twenty-two years before.

As France crumbled, the Red Army again moved swiftly to strengthen the defenses of the Soviet Union.

In the middle of June, forestalling an imminent Nazi Putsch in the Baltic States, Soviet armored divisions occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On June 27, the Red Army moved into Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which Rumania had snatched from the Russians after the Revolution.

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany now faced one another on their future battle lines.

Toward the end of July, the Nazis launched mass air raids over London and other English cities, pouring down tons of explosives upon the civilian population. The raids, which increased in ferocity throughout the next month, were intended to terrify and paralyze the whole nation, and swiftly bring an already gravely weakened England to her knees.

But with Churchill as Prime Minister profound changes were taking place within Great Britain. The confusion and division which had resulted from Chamberlain's leadership had given way to determination and growing national unity. Across the narrow Channel the British people saw the workings of the Fifth Column. Churchill's Government acted swiftly and with resolution. Scotland Yard and British Intelligence swooped down on Nazi agents, British Fascists and leaders of secret Fifth Column intrigues. In a sudden raid on the London headquarters of the British Union of Fascists, the authorities seized important documents and arrested many Fifth Columnists. The leader of the British Fascist Party, Sir Oswald Mosley, was arrested in his own apartment. Sensational arrests followed. John Beckett, a former Member of Parliament and founder of the anti-Soviet and pro-Nazi People's Party; Captain A. H. Ramsay, Tory Member of Parliament for Peebles; Edward Dudley Elan, an official in the Ministry of Health, his wife Mrs. Dacre Fox, and other prominent Pro-Nazis and Fascists were arrested. A Treachery Bill was passed, providing the death penalty for traitors.

Showing that it had learned well the lesson of France and of the Moscow Trials, the British Government in July 1940 announced the arrest of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, former Director of Naval intelligence. Domvile, a friend of Alfred Rosenberg and of the late General Max Hoffmann, had been involved in most of the anti-Soviet conspiracies since 1918. At the time of his arrest, Domvile was the head of a secret pro-Nazi society in England called The Link which was organized with the aid of Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the Gestapo ....

Assured against treachery from within, the British people faced the ordeal of the Nazi air blitz without flinching, and defended themselves. On the single day of September 17, 1940, the RAF downed no less than 185 German planes over England.

Meeting such fierce and unexpected resistance, and mindful of the Red Army on his eastern borders, Hitler paused at the Channel. He did not invade the British Isles ....

The year was 1941. An air of tense expectancy hung over the whole of Europe as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the two greatest military powers in the world, prepared to lock in battle.

On April 6, after a popular revolt had overthrown Regent Prince Paul's Yugoslavian regime and Nazi agents were forced to flee the country, the Soviet Government signed a non-aggression pact with the new Yugoslavian Government. That same day, Nazi Germany declared war on Yugoslavia and invaded it.

At four o'clock on the morning of June 22, 1941, without any declaration of war, Hitler's tanks, air force, mobile artillery, motorized units and infantry were hurled across the borders of the Soviet Union on a stupendous front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Later that morning Goebbels broadcast Hitler's war proclamation. It read in part:

German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as regards extent, compares with the greatest the world has hitherto seen. United with their Finnish comrades, the fighters of the victory of Narvik are standing in the Northern Arctic. German divisions commanded by the conqueror of Norway, in co-operation with the heroes of Finnish freedom, under their marshal, are protecting Finnish soil. Formations of the German eastern front extend from East Prussia to the Carpathians. German and Rumanian soldiers are united under Chief of State Antonescu from the banks of the Pruth along the lower reaches of the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of Europe and thereby the salvation of all.

Italy, Rumania, Hungary and Finland joined the Nazi war on Soviet Russia. Special Fascist contingents were raised in France and Spain. The united armies of a counterrevolutionary Europe had launched a Holy War against the Soviets. The Plan of General Max Hoffmann was being tested in action ....

On November 11, 1941, the American Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, said in a speech at Washington:

Twenty-three years ago today, Woodrow Wilson addressed the Congress of the United States in order to inform the representatives of the American people of the terms of the Armistice which signalized the victorious conclusion of the First World War .... Less than five years later, shrouded in the cerements of apparent defeat, his shattered body was placed in the grave beside which we are now gathered ....

The heart-searching question which every American citizen must ask himself on this day of commemoration is whether the world in which we have to live would have come to this desperate pass had the United States been willing in those years which followed 1919 to play its full part in striving to bring about a new world order based on justice and on "a steadfast concert for peace." ... A cycle in human events is about to come to an end .... The American people ... have entered the Valley of Decision.

On December 7, 1941, without warning, Japanese bombing planes and battleships attacked the United States of America. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declared war on the United States ....

The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has paralleled the course of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and Africa. Today, it has become far more than a parallel. It is collaboration so well calculated that all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one gigantic battlefield.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchukuo -- without warning. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia -- without warning.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia -- without warning. Later in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland -- without warning. In 1940, Hitler invaded Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg -- without warning.

And now Japan has attacked Malaya and Thailand -- and the United States -- without warning.

The masks were off. The secret war of the Axis Anti-Comintern against Soviet Russia had merged with the world war against all free peoples.

In 1936 the Government of Japan openly associated itself with Germany by entering the anti-Comintern Pact. This pact, as we all know, was nominally directed against the Soviet Union; but its real purpose was to form a league of fascism against the free world, particularly against Great Britain, France and the United States.

The Second World War had entered its final decisive phase as a global conflict between the forces of international Fascism and the united armies of progressive mankind.

Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, a strategy meeting held by the Allied powers. The main outcome of the conference was the agreement to open a second front against Nazi Germany. (U.S. Army)

3. In June 1940 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in New York City reported: "The American press told less truth and retailed more fancy lies about the Finnish war than about any recent conflict."

4. At 10:30 P.M. on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, a German Messerschmitt plane plummeted earthward over Lanarkshire, Scotland, and buried its nose in a field near Dungavel Castle, property of the young Duke of Hamilton. A former employee on the Duke's estate saw the flare of the fallen plane and then the slow, white plume of a descending parachute. Armed with a pitchfork he ran out to find a man lying on the ground with a broken ankle. The man was Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler's Deputy.

"Take me to the Duke of Hamilton," said Hess, speaking in English."l have come to save humanity!"

Hess hoped through Hamilton and his friends to gain British Tory backing for the Nazi attack on Soviet Russia.

Sir Patrick Dollan, Lord Provost of Glasgow, Scotland, said on June 11, 1941: "Hess came here ... in the belief that he could remain in Scotland two days, discuss his peace proposals with a certain group and be given a supply of petrol and maps to enable him to return to Germany and tell them the results of his conversation."

Referring to the Hess Mission in his speech of November 6, 1941, Stalin declared: "The Germans knew that their policy of playing upon the contradictions between the classes in separate states, and the contradictions between these states and the Soviet Union, had already produced results in France, the rulers of which had allowed themselves to be intimidated by the spectre of revolution, had refused to resist, and terror-stricken had placed native land under the heel of Hitler. The German-fascist strategists thought the same thing would occur with Great Britain and the United States of America. The notorious Hess was sent to Britain by the German fascists for this very purpose, in order to persuade the British politicians to join the general campaign against the U.S.S.R. But the Germans gravely miscalculated. Rudolph Hess became a prisoner of the British Government."

(The Great Conspiracy, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn,Chapter 22: The Second World War, 1946)