Historical Revisionism

"The Germans Arrive" - 1918 war propaganda painting by American artist George Bellows portrays imaginary atrocity committed by German troops in Belgium - where he had not been. (click to enlarge) The story is below.

By Carolyn Yeager

From acute hatred in 1914 to smoldering prejudice today, where did anti-Germanism start and why does it persist?

I cannot find any documentation of this phenomenon prior to the lead-up to World War I in the nineteenth century, and centered in the British Foreign Office. The image presented was of an exaggerated authoritarianism in both the German personality and culture.

Germans had always, up to then, been seen as a nation of “Poets and Thinkers” who were “disinclined to war,” acccording to Dr. Michael F. Conners in his book Dealing in Hate: The Development of Anti-German Propaganda. I have just now found Dr. Conners book online, as I am preparing to post this article, and will read what he has to say with interest ex post facto, as it were.

Or, even worse, the irreplaceable medieval manuscripts housed in the library there? Those uncivilized barbarians!

The message received by the public almost everywhere except in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires was one which placed the blame for all the horrors of war on the German side. And it remains the overwhelming belief enshrined in the official history of the First World War.

By Carolyn Yeager

THIS IS THE NARRATIVE YOU WILL COME ACROSS by a superficial Internet search on the popular search engines. I knew there was an alternate version of this narrative, but was surprised when I could not find any mention of one with a quick online search. There was not even a reference to it on the relevant Wikipedia pages. So I thought, again: The Internet is being denuded of all 'alternative' versions of history! This is getting to be nuts.

Ashkenazi Jew Henry Morgenthau Sr. (left) was part of Woodrow Wilson's administration in the important role of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time it was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary … and his son, Henry Jr., became Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary (1934-45). Both were Democrat Party administrations. Grandchildren of Henry Sr. include Robert M. Morgenthau, District Attorney of Manhattan for 35 years and 'Pulitzer-prize-winning' historian Barbara W. Tuchman. THE FATHERLAND raises an interesting question about Amb. Morgenthau in 1914. -cy

v 1 no 20   Dec. 23, 1914   Page 12

AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU IS “ACTIVE”

TWICE the United States has narrowly escaped being drawn into the European war. Once when a warning shot was fired across the bow of a launch of the Tennessee from a Turkish fort to impede its entry into mined waters, an act described by Capt. Decker as “not hostile,” though this qualifying statement was suppressed in Washington for several days for mysterious reasons; and again when our [US] ambassador to Turkey, Mr. Henry Morgenthau, informed the Porte that he would demand his passports* unless the British colony in Constantinople was allowed to leave the city.

It's hard to find any images that show the level of viciousness against Germans stirred up by the British once they had declared war. I don't believe there are any images extant of the concentration camps in England into which they threw any German or German-named civilian  man they got their hands on, including Americans. These camps are reported to have been of the lowest quality, where some Germans who tried to complain about the inedible quality of the food were shot! Nothing like this ever occurred in Germany. 

By Carolyn Yeager

THIS IS A MUST-READ FOLLOW UP OF THE PREVIOUS POSTED REPORT asking whether American citizens are entitled to protection by the U.S. State Department. The answer unfortunately is “not always” and there will probably be more personal accounts like these two as I continue to read The Fatherland issues. I am publishing this  2nd “installment” next, but in order to do so I had to forego another important and truly heart-rending article that I was going to post next. I urge everyone to read it for themselves in the Dec. 2, 1914 issue, page 6, titled ENGLISH BARBARISM by Hans F. Kammeyer. It's incredible and extremely sad. But even though it hurts, it's what we need to know. This kind of thing has been covered up for too long. We're still protecting the guilty from these two major wars and we are the worse off for it. Time to free the long-suffering Germans.

During WWI, the British press never stopped lampooning German Kaiser Wilhelm II, portraying him as a deluded, power-hungry narcissist who started a war he could not win. In this Punch cartoon, he is penning lie after lie when in reality it was the English who were doing the lying about ground won or lost. The "Made in Germany" title was an attempt to mock the German goods that were competing (successfully) with the English manufacturing trade.

IN THE NOVEMBER 18, 1914 ISSUE OF THE FATHERLAND, two articles struck me as especially powerful proofs that the popular feelings about this at-that-time-3-month-old war were being driven by British propaganda and the cooperation of the Press in most countries save Germany and Austria-Hungary. These two articles, copied below, speak against the narrative already being set in stone via the newspapers that it was the German “barbarians” who were out to take over and dominate Europe through undemocratic force. In truth, we know it was England that elected long before to utilise war as the means to weaken any European nation that successfully competed with it. It is Great Britain that was not above using illegal means to assure its dominance, including ignoring and abusing the rights of American citizens. -Carolyn

Why is the establishment press always pro-England, anti-Germany?  By Carolyn Yeager

MOST HAVE LEARNED BY NOW that the descriptions of atrocities carried out by German soldiers on Belgian and French civilians in the opening weeks of the Great European War were not true, were in fact British lies happily repeated by the press. But they were believed at the time, and these fictional atrocities were of the most gruesome kind—chopping off the hands of children, raping and bayoneting women, burning down churches and other buildings after locking civilians inside. The American newspapers carried these stories and a great many people believed them. It wasn't until after the war was over that Britain began to admit, under pressure of evidence to the contrary compiled by the German Foreign Office, that they were propaganda lies designed to gain the sympathy, and arouse the indignation, of the public—and most especially the Americans. However, there was never an official apology or correction.

Such lies were obviously designed to create hatred and fear of the German Army and even the entire German nation. The English justify such tactics in the name of saving England and the world from great evil. The major newspapers were owned and managed by people who were pro-Britain and whomever Britain was allied with. The German-American editors of The Fatherland were wise to this and devoted some space in most issues to explaining and exposing it to their readers. Sometimes it was the readers who wrote to instruct the magazine about the “unbelievable” and so very “un-German” behavior attributed to the military of a country and people they admired or were kin to.

Very first issue of The Fatherland weekly dated August 10, 1914 appeared immediately after war "broke out" on July 28th following the assasination of the Austrian Crown Prince exactly one month earlier.

By Carolyn Yeager

SINCE GEORGE SYLVESTER VIERECK CAME TO MY ATTENTION, I haven't been able to get enough of him. Being especially intrigued by his publication THE FATHERLAND, you can imagine my delight upon finding a website with every issue available for reading. Credit for this goes to Pensylvania's Villanova University and the 'digital library' project of its Falvey Memorial Library. Pennsylvania has thankfully not forgotten to recognize its large ethnic German population—the 2000 US Census reports it at over 3 million, the highest total number of any U.S. state outside of California. [The highest in percent of population is North Dakota. My home state of Illinois is way down in 17th place, yet because of greater overall population still numbered almost 2.5 million Germans in the 2000 census, higher than Wisconsin's 2.2 million, though Wisconsin stands in 2nd place on the list.]

By Carolyn Yeager

WHEN MINNESOTA SENATOR ERNEST LUNDEEN WAS KILLED IN A PLANE CRASH over Virginia on August 31, 1940, the Republican governor was able, according to the rules, to appoint a fellow Republican to fill the senator's seat. Though Lundeen had begun his political career as a Republican, he had run for office as a Farmer-Labor "Democrat" since 1933.

Governor Harold Stassen (left) had been the keynote speaker at the 1940 Republican National Convention in June that nominated Wendell Willkie as it's presidential candidate. Stassen threw his support to Willkie and even became his official floor manager. The circumstances of the 1940 Republican convention were unusual, from beginning to end.

Willkie was a New York lawyer, corporate executive, Democrat activist and 'interventionist' who only switched to the Republican party in late 1939! He had not run in any primaries but positioned himself as an acceptable choice for a deadlocked convention. Front runners for the nomination, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, Michigan Sen Arthur Vandenberg, and New York District Attorney Tom Dewey, were all non-interventionist, as was Senator Lundeen of Stassen's state of Minnesota. The east-coast Republicans tended to be the internationalists who wanted to take sides in the European conflicts, and that's who Stassen seemed to be representing.

MY FRIEND WOUTER SENT ME THE ARTICLE BELOW ABOUT ERNEST LUNDEEN, an American “isolationist” politician from Minnesota who had a fair-minded and truth-seeking attitude toward the German-Polish conflict and the war of September 1939. Through Lundeen, I've learned about a couple others who are also of particular interest to me. Lundeen served in the US House of Representatives from 1917 to 1919, when he was one of 50 Congressmen to vote against the U.S. declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917. For this reason he was not renominated by his Republican party. After switching to the Democratic Farmer-Labor party, he was elected again from 1933 to 1937 in the Roosevelt landslide. He then went on to become Minnesota Senator from 1937 until his untimely death in a plane crash on August 31, 1940.

Lundeen's father, C.H. Lundeen was an early pioneer in South Dakota, where Ernest was born and raised. The Lundeens in the USA come from Norway and Austria, according to ancestry sites. Ernest Lundeen is what I would call a true American patriot.