The Colonels Corner The Splendid Blond Beast Part 9

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Transcript

0:00 Good afternoon, Colonel. Hey, I had to go. They kicked me out. I had to come back in. As soon as I made you co-host, it kicked me out. That's crazy. I think it's you, not me. No, I'm just teasing. Oh, that's funny. Oh, my God. That is so funny. Well, I finally had to turn my Wi-Fi off. I told him what it was doing, and he's like, it's your Wi-Fi.

0:31 I reset the Wi-Fi. Oh, it's doing it again. Never mind. I thought I had it fixed. What's it doing? It says reconnecting. And generally, right after that, I will lose sound and microphone. But so far, I'm good. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and get started. If you guys wouldn't mind just reposting the space.

1:06 more people in here, but I want to get through the chapter and then we will open it up for discussions as our usual arrangement. So in the last chapter, we introduced Herbert Pell, P-E-L-L, and he's going to play a reoccurring theme for basically

1:33 a large section of the rest of the book. Very interesting fellow. And just as a reminder, he was a personal friend of FDR's that wanted to work in the aftermath of World War II for the State Department, and they didn't want to have anything to do with him because he had a completely different opinion of how the war crimes and trials

2:03 needed to be set up. So that's kind of where we're going today. Okay. It says that he was very impressive as far as a physical presence. He was six foot, five inches tall, weighed 250 pounds. He was very wealthy and very handsome. And he stood out.

2:27 anytime that he was in a meeting or in a crowd because of how well-spoken he was. The Pell family fortune can be traced back to the 17th century land grants that gave his ancestor, Sir John Pell, much of what today is the Bronx and Westchester counties in New York. Pell's mother was an heiress to the Lorillard

2:55 tobacco empire, and also a major investor in New York real estate and industry. For Herbert Pell, Rockefeller's and Morgan's was considered new rich. Pell had what some called a difficult personality. He was very obstinate. He was convinced of the rightness of his cause and basically didn't keep his mouth shut. He was a leader.

3:25 determined to shape events in accordance to what his vision of right and wrong was. He was, as it turned out, one of the handful of men in the U.S. government who were brave enough and bullheaded enough to risk their careers to bring Nazi criminals to justice at a time when such actions were unpopular and with most of the policy elite in Washington, D.C.

3:55 Pell was to sacrifice his diplomatic career rather than abandon his principle. He had from an early age shown a rebellious streak. He had dropped out of Harvard to pursue a life of travel and study. By the 1920s, Pell had lost whatever faith he may have had in the American business community. Quote, the destinies of the world.

4:20 were handed them on a plate in the 1920s. Their pig light rush to immediate profits knocked over the whole feast in nine years. These are the people with an ignorance equaled only by their imprudence who set themselves up as leaders of the country, unquote. I got to hand it to him. That pretty much describes them. He also called them totally selfish.

4:49 And Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said, but the aristocrat at least thought of his grandsons while the bourgeois thought only of himself. The Pell family estate at Hopewell Junction, New York, was just down the Hudson River from Roosevelt's home. And the two families had been friends and business associates for generations.

5:18 Franklin Roosevelt encountered Bertie Pell, as FDR called him, at Harvard, where Roosevelt had completed college in three years at about the same time Pell dropped out. Pell emerged as an important supporter of Roosevelt's progressive faction of the New York Democrat Party and served briefly as a congressman from the Manhattan Silk Stocking District.

5:44 In 1936, Roosevelt named Pell vice chairman of the DNC committee. After the victory, Roosevelt appointed Pell to sensitive ambassadorial posts in Portugal and later Hungary. FDR's conflicts with the Foreign Service dated back to the first days of his administration. The disputes often centered on what to do with the Nazi Germany, and sometimes Pell had been involved.

6:14 division of the State Department, which disagreed with FDR's politics. The State Department Eastern Specialists included William Bullitt, Loy Henderson, and George Kennan. They leaned towards the strategy of rapprochement with Hitler and turning their collective forces against the Soviets. In 1933, he sent

6:42 the first U.S. ambassador to Moscow since the 1917 revolution. He increasingly viewed the German-Japanese axis as the world's most dangerous imperial force. Pell agreed, strongly backing the president in his controversies with the Foreign Service. FDR went so far as to dissolve State Department's Division of Eastern European Affairs, believing that that group was disloyal to him and was undermining his efforts.

7:12 Pell had clashed with State Department's bureaucracy as well during the time that he was an ambassador to those very same areas. Pell and Green Hackworth failed to get along almost immediately. And again, for anybody joining us, Green Hackworth was the legal advisor to the State Department. The problem was partly out of style, but also jurisdiction.

7:41 As Pell saw things, he was working directly for the president, regardless of the administrative details of his appointment. As state's legal advisor, Hackworth may have had some sort of bureaucratic oversight of Pell's paperwork, but Pell did not believe that he worked for Hackworth. Hackworth was well-named, Pell remembered from his first encounter with the man. Quote, he was a little legal hack.

8:30 That's a dressing down. Hackworth saw things very differently.

8:35 It was he who was responsible for the oversight of the U.S. government's interpretation of international law, including war crimes. Pell may have been FDR's friend, but he knew little about international law or U.S. relations. For his part, Pell considered his lack of legal training to be a strength when it came to justice for the victims of the Nazis. A laughable proposition in Hackworth's book.

9:02 The legal advisor had some political appointees like Pell before, and he didn't like them. Hackworth turned 60 the year that FDR appointed Pell. He was by then a puffy, fussy man, a confirmed bachelor with monkish devotion to the law. By almost all accounts except Pell's, Hackworth was a highly confident lawyer. He had been a legal specialist at State for more than 20 years by this time.

9:31 He was considered a preeminent specialist in international law, the drafter of numerous treaties and international agreements. Hackworth had served simultaneously at the State Department post and also as a U.S. judge of a permanent court of arbitration at the Hague. The State Department had begun publishing Hackworth's legal opinions.

10:00 and papers in an eight-volume Digest of International Law in 1940. Hackworth sought to articulate his precept of international law. In 1943, just as controversy over the legal response to Nazi war crimes was coming into focus, State Department published his volume six on war and war crimes.

10:29 And of course, it says exactly what they want it to say. He basically embraced the legal status quo. And he basically believed that whatever happened in a country, no matter how atrocious it was, could not be treated as a war crime. That whoever was in charge of that country at the time that it was happening, if they said it was legal,

11:01 then there was nothing the international community could do about it. The impact of war on commercial relationships was one of his focuses. This included subjects like licensing companies under the Trading with the Enemies Act. And that, of course, was done in conjunction with John Foster Dulles'

11:30 opinions because that was his expertise and the complexities of determining whether a multinational corporation was a quote-unquote foreign company and subject to government seizures because obviously there was this huge big thing about subsidiaries for Ford and the Rockefellers and all of those people that during the interwar war.

11:57 interwar period had invested in companies that basically helped Germany rebuild. And so the legal interpretation of whether those subsidiaries could be considered trading with the enemy was utmost importance to the guy that's now sitting as the Secretary of State at the end of World War II. And he's the one that set them all up.

12:25 Sounds like a conflict of interest to me. The concepts of a crime against humanity or human rights violations were absent from Hackworth's text in six volumes, never mentioned. The international community might justly hold a government responsible for atrocities against its own people was basically a foreign concept to him. He saw heads of state as beyond the reach of any international law.

12:57 It is clear in hindsight that the Nazis' exterminations and murders was a key element of Hackworth's work on war crimes and basically had made it obsolete by the time it was published because it didn't address this. Herbert Pell had a different idea. He requested that Hackworth rival Sheldon Gulick, G-L-U-E-C-K, of...

13:27 London Assembly Project, be appointed as his chief assistant and legal advisor for the UN War Crimes Commission. Gulick was probably the most authoritative legal voice in the U.S., then arguing for tough measures against the Nazis. Hackworth rejected him immediately. Instead, he saddled Pell

13:56 with a guy by the name of Lawrence Pruess, P-R-E-U-S-S, who was a young university lecturer whose qualifications for the New Post included a confidential agreement with Hackworth to channel all derogatory information about Pell back to Hackworth. In other words, he was the spy that was going to be working for

14:26 Hackworth to tattletale on Pell. As Pell prepared to leave for Europe immediately following his appointment, at the last minute, the British government delayed his visa, not allowing him to leave. Wonder who arranged that. The agreement with the Soviets for joint action on war crimes had come unraveled because of

14:55 the massacres that had been announced in Poland. And both sides were still attempting to bring the allies back together. This delay stretched on for months, and Hackworth used the time to undermine and discredit FDR's nominee of Pell. More than a year had passed since Churchill and Roosevelt's 1942 agreement on War Crimes Commission, but the organization was still without a clear charter.

15:25 and had not met for the first time. Himmler had decreed in the fall of 1942 that all Jewish people in concentration camps within Germany's border were to be driven out, resulting in mass deportations to concentration camps at places like Auschwitz. The SS began gassing people and then moved it to other camps. This extermination killed tens...

15:55 if not hundreds of thousands of people during this time. The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered Warsaw Ghetto and killed thousands of people via street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jewish people to Auschwitz. In the north, they began deporting Dutch, gassing more than 34,000 people when they arrived.

16:26 The SS had arranged a special transport for 3,000 women and children from the Netherlands, all of them murdered. In June, Hindler formally ordered the liquidation of the ghettos in Poland and the Nazi-occupied regions of the Soviet Union. This went on and on, and Herbert Pell was still in the U.S. waiting for instructions to depart.

16:54 and the State Department continued to reject reports of genocide in Europe. Pell met with the Secretary of State Hall in August, but Hall seemed unable to change anything. Pell then protested directly to Roosevelt. An active war crime commission would help check at least some of these outrages, he said. Why can't we get Herbert Pell off to London? FDR wrote Hall a couple of days later.

17:23 Is there a reason for this delay? Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Pell, the British had decided to go ahead and have a meeting without him and without the Soviets. The Foreign Office cabled Washington twice in September, asking that the meetings necessary for actual formation of the commission begin at the end of the month. Both communiques ended up on Hackworth's desk, and he never told Pell.

17:53 that they were proceeding with the meetings. A new problem had arisen as Hackworth saw things. Popular anger against Nazi atrocities was pushing the Allies into a more sweeping grant of authority to this War Crimes Commission. He did not want that to happen. They were contemplating the narrowly worded declaration of the previous October. Hackworth's vision of the commission,

18:24 was the narrowly defined version. It would conduct a study, hold a few meetings, prepare a report, and go home, not hold anybody accountable. Even though the UN War Crimes Commission had not yet met, the scope of plans for its operation gradually grew as Nazi crimes continued unabated. The British Foreign Office had, from the beginning, used this committee as a shield

18:54 to ward off criticisms of its failure to do anything, especially open up Palestine to Jewish immigration, or to take any other measures to slow down the atrocities. The public protests became desperate and more pressing in both Britain and the United States. Hackworth's apprehensions about the organization increased as fast as the group's authority on paper began to expand.

19:25 The plans now outlined by the British was quite different than what they had agreed upon. And sending Pell into this expanded variation of this commission was frightening to Hackworth. Its potential impact on foreign affairs had increased well beyond the original.

19:50 Hackworth played for time. He quietly arranged for the U.S. ambassador in London, John Wynette, W-I-N-A-N-T, to attend the first War Crimes Commission instead of Pell, who they're still leaving in the United States. There were only two conditions. Our representative Pell is not to become the chairman under any circumstances, Hackworth said.

20:18 and Pell was not to be informed of the gallering until it was all over. The first War Crimes Commission meeting took place in October 20, 1943, and consisted of formal introductions of representatives from the various countries and discussions of arrangements for future meetings. Ambassador Winant represented the U.S. There was no voice from the Soviet Union. Herbert Pell remained in New York, unaware that it was even taking place.

20:48 The central purpose of the group, the UN War Crimes Commission agreed, was to investigate and record the evidence of the war crimes, identifying individuals responsible for those crimes whenever possible. The commission was then to report to the government's concern the cases that needed to have, that apparently had enough evidence for prosecutions. They were then to serve these documented cases.

21:17 to an international grand jury for war crimes trials. That's Hackworth's worst nightmare. Pell soon learned of the meeting and descended on Washington in a fury. Hackworth was out of the office that day, but Pell cornered a junior assistant and gave him an earful. He furiously dressed down the young man and said,

21:43 He now knew of the earlier telegrams from London. He demanded to know when he would be given permission to leave and when he would be formally briefed by the department on his mission. He, meaning Pell, stated that in the absence of instructions, he would, should the occasion arrive, act on his own initiative and would be given a very strong hand and that he would take the initiative.

22:11 Pell dismissed the legalistic approach to war crimes that he had been given as the official statement of the State Department. Instead, he linked his role on the commission to the broader issue of war and the unresolved question of what was to be done with Germany following the defeat of Hitler. Pell warned that German business cartels had been instrumental in Hitler's rise to power and the execution of the war.

22:40 and unless the seemingly monolith was dismantled, it would provoke yet another war. For Pell, a sweeping program of war crimes prosecution of Germany's economic elite was not simply a matter of justice. It was necessary to stop it from happening again. Quote, I believe that the business of my committee will be to take its part in the great effort to prevent a third war.

23:09 rather than merely to act as an instrument of vengeance for past wrongs, unquote. He wrote that in a statement to Secretary of State Hall in November 1943. The first thing is to make it clear to every last German in the world that war is not profitable. Unless prompt and severe justice is done, they will go back to their old ideas.

23:36 Five years after the end of this war, Germany, unless tremendously restrained, will be relatively far stronger than it is today. Every other country in Europe has been bled white and will take anywhere from 30 to 50 years to recover. It is almost impossible to believe that Germany will be reduced to anything like that extent.

24:03 want the War Guilt Commission to go as far as it can and to be as tough as possible, unquote. That's still in that same letter to the Secretary of State. Pell's dispute with Hackworth was more than just a clash of personalities. Pell called into question a decade of his writings and defied his status as the principal American arbiter of everything international law. Worse,

24:34 Pell's analysis had a certain compelling logic to it, that Pell's disrespect could come from a man whom Hackworth regarded as an overbearing political appointee and a diplomat ignorant person proved to be reason enough for Hackworth to seek to engineer the unruly ambassador's dismissal, regardless of what the president wanted. The U.S. War Crimes Commissioner returned to his temporary roost at

25:03 a club in New York, waiting for his passage to London. In those days, traveling under assumed names was a popular thing. He finally arrived in London in mid-December 1943, some 14 months after he was announced to be the person on the committee.

25:28 As news of Nazi genocide accumulated in the West, the press and the Jewish community and immigrant governments in London slowly pushed Britain and the U.S. government towards an aggressive war crimes commission capable of doing something about the atrocities. The U.N. commission was the only inter-allied group that had specific responsibility for collecting evidence.

25:53 Sophisticated observers knew that the commission was also the only logical place to resolve the unsettled legal opinions on international law. There was hope in many quarters that a strong active war crimes commission could become an anchor for psychological warfare campaigns aimed at saving at least as many people as they could for the remainder of the war. Let's see.

26:27 At the same time, though many other Germans and officials in the Axis satellite states were less committed to genocide, indeed, some had had second thoughts after hearing some of the dispatches of what was going on inside of Germany. U.S. intelligence reported as early as the spring of 1943. This is evidently inspired by the announced

26:54 determination of the UN to punish people guilty of war crimes. Apparently, these German officers were responding to Allied radio broadcasts saying that they were all going to be held accountable. So it was actually having the exact opposite effect on some people than what Hackworth was worried about.

27:14 Equally important, strong public action by the Wartime Commission during the war would almost certainly arouse further demands from citizens of the Allied countries for substantial action against Nazi crimes. R. Borden Rehm's fear of such a reaction, it will be recalled, had led him to attempt to suppress all news of the war front. Presidential Advisor Adolf

27:43 Burrell and some members of the OSS became convinced the Allied psychological warfare stressing just ensure punishment for war crimes would slow the pace of their crimes in Germany, Hungary, Romania, and other Axis states. But Green Hackworth used legal technicalities to spike the OSS efforts of using that propaganda twice.

28:09 The British War Cabinet again confronted the question of whether to go ahead with tough campaigns aimed at deterring Nazi atrocities in the fall of 1943. When British forces discovered a new mass grave on the Greek island of Kos, German forces had arrested and massacred 100 Italian military officers whom they feared might defect to the Allies. William Churchill seized the news.

28:40 At the next meeting of the British War Department and proposed the Big Three issue a declaration of the upcoming Allied Conference in Moscow, pledging to pursue Nazi war criminals to the end of the earth. By late 1943, the fact that the Germans had embarked on a campaign of mass murder and prosecution had became crystal clear. The Russian-Polish

29:08 had already numbered in the millions, yet Churchill focused on these 100 Italian officers. Why is that? Well, part of the reason can be traced to the war situation. The Allies had invaded Italy about one month before. They had taken Naples, but much of the country was still under German hands. The massacre in Greece offered an opportunity to demonstrate to the Nazis the treachery

29:38 against the Italians, their one-time friends. Churchill's firm response to the atrocity also sent a message to the Allies that might be willing to treat former Axis soldiers with some leniency if they too abandon Germany. Churchill was sensitive to the Moscow's view of the war crime issue, and he was eager to demonstrate a hard line for that reason as well.

30:05 Quote, I attach great importance to the principles and the criminals will be taken back to be judged in the countries or even districts where their crimes have been committed. Unquote. Here again, revelations of Nazis atrocities became an instrument of political warfare against Germany and Hitler was an effective user of that political warfare.

30:35 Churchill was an acute judge of German political culture. A threat from the Western allies that suspected Nazi criminals would be sent back for judgment to those countries where their crimes had been committed, which for many suspects meant to the Soviet Union. That would have petrified, so he was using it as a tool to get Germans to defect. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden remained unconvinced.

31:05 He said, I am far from happy about all of this war crime business. He wrote to his staff, I must, I am most anxious not to get into the position of breathing fire and slaughter until war criminals and promising punishment and a year or two hence having to find pretexts for doing nothing, which of course is what they really want to do is nothing.

31:33 The central question for each of the allies at the upcoming 1943 conference in Moscow was how the struggle with Germany was likely to affect European allies once the conflict was over. The answer to that turned to a surprisingly large extent on the symbolic and practical questions of what was to be done with Nazi war criminals. In the Soviet capital during October and early November,

32:01 The three allied foreign ministers reached new agreements on the terms of U.S.-British and Soviet alliance against Germany and on joint allied policy for post-war Europe. The foreign ministers announced their joint resolution in Moscow's declaration on war crimes on November 1st. Each major element of the Moscow covenants attempted to establish proof.

32:31 that the Allies would not betray one another during the war. These included new commitments to jointly prosecute senior Nazi criminals, to inform one another of any Axis peace-fillers, and to handle jointly any armistice discussions with the smaller Axis states, such as Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The U.S. and Britain renewed this commitment to openly

33:01 to open a second front in Western Europe, and all three powers formally agreed to demand unconditional surrender of Germany. The treatment of Nazi war criminals again became a very important topic. The Moscow Declaration began by agreeing to require the complete disarmament of Germany, then express commitments to dissolve the Nazi party in all forms, to return Nazis to face judgment,

33:31 in the countries where they were accused of committing crimes, to create a three-power advisory commission in London, to make further recommendations on joint policy for post-war Germany, and to reach a joint decision among the three Allied concerning the disposition of Nazi leaders. Two points are worth underlining. First, the Western Allies' agreement that any armistice would include provisions

34:01 to ship Nazi criminals back to the site of their crimes. If it was respected, amounted to a renewed guarantee that there would be no armistice with Germany without Soviet participation. Second, there was no direct mention that the murder of Jewish stateless people and other Axis civilians was in any sense a crime, because the legal advisors at the State Department and Foreign Office in Britain believed it was not.

34:30 Jews as such were not mentioned even in the list of atrocity victims in the declaration. A curious blunder occurred on the way to making the Moscow declaration public. Owing to that was termed, quote, an unfortunate mistake in ciphering or translation.

34:58 British Foreign Office staff in Moscow referred to the wholesale shooting of Polish officers in the declaration's list of victims of Nazi atrocities rather than to the Italian officers, as had been agreed by the three foreign ministers. The Polish version was released to the press in London and in Washington, while Moscow published the correct Italian version.

35:28 So this is purposeful sabotage. At the Goebbels' ministry in Berlin, the propagandists noticed the difference between the two translations and exploited the blunder to call the massacre of Polish officers back to the central focus in the middle of all of this. The Soviets demanded and eventually won a formal correction from the British and the Americans, much to the dismay of the British exile government.

35:58 Despite the correction, however, the incident was again another representation that the British and the Americans were working while they were supposedly working with the Soviets as an ally. They were actually working against them. The Western allies gutted Churchill's plan to reduce Nazi violence through aggressive psychological warfare less than two months after the

36:29 pronouncement in Moscow. During early November 1943, US psychological warfare specialists began a major campaign to use Moscow declaration statements about trials for Nazi criminals as a centerpiece for messages aimed at German and other people living under Nazi rule.

36:49 But on November 23rd, U.S. Army Air Force headquarters in Algiers aborted a planned war crimes trial of Germans accused of a second Italian massacre, then issued directives to shut down all publicity concerning the investigations of Nazi war crimes and any plan to try war criminals.

37:12 The Army Air Force feared that if the U.S. tried German criminals during the war or even threatened to put them on trial, the Nazis would retaliate with war crimes of American flyers who had been shot down in bombing runs, which is exactly the argument Hackworth used. Green Hackworth's office at the State Department, which had required

37:36 months to respond to any initiative involving Nazi war crimes when it suited him, immediately endorsed the Army Air Force policy within hours of it hitting print. Hackworth worked through the weekend to put together a memo that supported this stance because it was his stance. This is what it said. The State Department agrees most emphatically.

38:02 with the Air Force headquarters decision against publicity in connection with the capture, collection of evidence, and trial of war criminals. This was in a cable that he sent to Algiers. Any temporary propaganda advantage that might be gained from such publicity would completely overbalance by the danger of reprisals against American prisoners of war.

38:28 From that point until the end of the war, the claim that any action against Nazi crimes might risk American prisoners came back to this document and the position of the Army Air Force. The conflict within the Allied camp over failure to respond to Nazi atrocities was at last coming to a head. Shortly after the Air Force incident,

38:55 A half dozen senior administrative officials responsible for various aspects of the refugee issue met in the office of the Secretary of Treasury, who happened to be Henry Morgenthau Jr., the son of World War I U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, who had protested the Armenian genocide.

39:19 The subject of the meeting was eliminating obstacles to the rescue of refugees from Europe. Members of Morgenthau's staff were at the moment tracing State Department policy concerns in Europe over the last four years. The title of their report told the story, Report to the Secretary on the Acquiesce of this Government in the Murder of Jews. That was the name of his report.

39:47 Secretary Morgenthau, a close political ally of Herbert Pell in the war crimes debates, squinted down through his glasses at Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. The two officials had frequently locked horns over what to do about Nazi Germany and both knew that this confrontation could not be put off any longer.

40:13 Long insisted he was doing everything possible to rescue refugees and that rumors questioning his commitment were untrue. Morgenthau, in his diary, noted, quote, I looked him right in the eye. Well, Breck, as long as you raise the question, we might as well be a little frank.

40:38 The impression is all around that you particularly are anti-Semitic, unquote. Morgenthau knew that a handful of Long's aide at State had for years systematically denied U.S. visas to any Jewish person seeking one. They also suppressed intelligence about what Hitler was doing to undermine the efforts of any documented Nazi atrocities.

41:05 Recently, he had learned that Long's group at State had sabotaged the deal that could have purchased survival for 70,000 Romanian Jewish for a mere 170,000 in Romanian currency. Long choked and denied Borgenthal's charge. Let's see. He was a...

41:31 man whose indiscreet praise of Mussolini and Italian fascism during the 1930s had once made headlines, talking about Breckenridge. He was not about to permit himself to be pinned down on the wrong side of this issue. He attempted to blame an assistant for the paperwork delays that had buried the Romanian plan. But Morgenthau continued, the position of Long's group, it seemed to him,

42:01 was identical to that of the British Foreign Office. At bottom of both institutions had resigned themselves that what the Secretary had recently called diplomatic double talk, cold and correct, and adding up to a sentence of death for everyone involved. Okay, that's it for today. Can I ask you a question? Sure. When do you think Russia,

42:37 Really had the aha moment when they realized this was all pin the tail on the donkey and they were the donkey. They suspected that very early on. And there's a lot of indication that there were several opportunities that created itself because they had moles everywhere. They knew that the British and the.

43:05 was plotting behind their back. There's a lot of indication of that, a lot of examples of that. And later on, they find several of the moles were eventually outed and they went back to being in the OSS. So they knew. And that's why.

43:30 In many cases, you see them pressing the issue and making them commit in public to supporting that. And then each and every time the UK and the US renege on the agreement that they made that happened repeatedly. Absolutely. Okay. And that's what, you know, it's like you see glimpses of them. I don't want to put it. It was obvious for so long, but they still came and helped.

44:03 They still. Well, we had a war. It's the the, you know, friend of my whatever that saying is. They had. Oh, yeah. The Nazi. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Yeah. They they using actually, though, what they thought was going to happen was the US when it got involved in the war. They actually thought that the.

44:34 Western Front was going to be done a lot sooner. And when you start reading these people's papers and their biographies, you find out very quickly that the long road around through North Africa into Italy allowed for a lot more Russians to be killed. And we read earlier in this book, they very much thought.

44:58 that the Nazis and the Soviets could fight a war of attrition, and they really didn't care. I mean, Truman even said that when he was a senator, that they should back whichever side, and even suggested switching sides based on whoever was winning, so that as many of them could be killed as possible, because he didn't like either one. He said that out loud. Crazy, isn't it? It is.

45:30 Evil six, evil one. Yeah. Very interesting. I guess in the government's defense, though, you know, if, like, they do have a fiduciary duty to try and mitigate, you know, the U.S. Army's exposure to the war, right? Like, if there's a way to have Russia kind of take on a little bit more of the war and U.S. soldiers to take on a little bit less, you know, there's a fiduciary duty argument there.

46:03 that they have a responsibility of their people to minimize our exposure to the battles in terms of overall winning. I don't disagree with that statement, but we know that that government and the people involved in that government, which was also involved in the Korean and Vietnam and everything, they have no qualms of sacrificing American military on a field of...

46:32 foreign countries when it benefits them. So while I agree that there are merits to that approach, it also was not, and they say that, that was not the overriding thought process in doing it. It was literally to prolong the war and allow the Nazis and the communists to kill each other.

47:04 But I like your approach, Illini. Ron, did you have something you wanted to say? In a minute, yes. I'm sorry. Just interesting. This book is very interesting, even though there's a lot of it that I disagree with. I think it is very interesting. I find it curious why they...

47:35 I mean, was this guy good or was this guy bad? Why did they want to keep him out of the loop? Are you talking about Powell? Yeah. Because he believed in holding the Nazis responsible for murdering people or for war crimes accountable. And no one in the State Department had that position. Gotcha. All right.

48:04 Yeah, they didn't want him anywhere near the negotiating table or responsible for representing the United States. And because he was a personal friend of FDR's, they had a problem on their hands because and without sabotaging him, they weren't going to keep him from being involved in this process. And he didn't he didn't have the right groupthink.

48:29 Gotcha. I'm tracking on that. Okay. And that makes perfect sense. You know, when you look at paperclip, and I'm not trying to go off on a tangent. I'm not trying to take a rabbit hole. But when you look at paperclip, what the United States got out of Germany was they got, for the most part, they got the mines. What the Russians got was the equipment.

48:57 The Russians had to reverse engineer stuff, whereas we had the minds that could make it from scratch, which I think is one of the reasons why we saw such a significantly faster increase in technology, at least militarily. Now, that's not to say that the Russians couldn't produce good military hardware, but they were just...

49:27 They're still far behind us. Well, I'm going to push back a little bit. Who went to space first? Not us. Well, no, that's true. Their entire space program was ahead of ours. I can't argue that. So, yeah. I honestly don't think that the Russians...

49:57 It's just an interesting dynamic between them and the distribution of the scientists around the world, because no one ever actually talks about where all of the other countries were that they were scattered to. It wasn't. I mean, we ended up sending them all over. There were some in Japan, you know, supposedly our mortal enemy. They went to Egypt. They went all over.

50:26 um very very interesting um that you know it's it's actually it's interesting to say that um there's uh i i know i know you're familiar with the um um with the youtube channel uh eyes wide open and i was actually uh uh trading tweets with him today and he put a book up that was uh it talked about um oh shit what was it um it was about uh uh

50:56 uh, Japan and how they, um, uh, let me find it here because it's, uh, it's, it's actually, it's actually a big deal. Uh, uh, it was, um, damn it. I can't find it, but it was a, uh, um, it was a book about how it was a book about how we were like, essentially all the things that were going on in, in, uh,

51:27 Germany were also happening in Japan. They just let these people go because they needed them for future uses of either making military technology or whatnot. So it just parallels what you're talking about in this book with Germany. Well, we've talked about that a lot, actually. When we did the Asian theater on our Around the World tour,

51:56 The lack of accountability because they had a similar tribunal to Nuremberg and it was conducted exactly the same way. They threw a token few people that amounted to nothing and they left all of the actual war criminals alone because.

52:21 The actual war criminals that Kodona and that Yaka Sudo or whatever his name was, was used as part of the World Anti-Communist League for setting up the quote unquote anti-communist effort of stay behind networks throughout Asia. They used the Asian theater.

52:49 After World War Two was set up. Excuse me. Exactly. They had their own version of Gladio over there. And it was just like NATO under in Europe. I found the name of the book. It was called An Occupation Without Troops by Glenn Davis.

53:13 And I'm trying to I'm trying to find it. It's impossible to find. But it's but talking talking about the exact same thing. But anyway, yeah, it's it's fascinating when you see all of the connections to what those two people were doing and then their roles, because they basically ran the mafia in Japan afterwards.

53:38 And they were in bed with Chiang Kai-shek and the whole drug things. They were in bed with Reverend Moon and the Moonies over in Korea. It's crazy. Yeah, absolutely. OK. Anybody else? No. OK. Hopefully everybody got to see, if you have not seen it, the video that we did.

54:07 um, at 11 with the ghost of beast Patrick Henry and war hamster. And I, I would highly recommend sometime this weekend. Y'all watch it. Um, it is an amazing, um, show.

54:21 We talk about Ukraine, we talk about Russia, we talked about Pakistan and India, and then we talked about Israel and Iran, which looped us right back around to the Israelis' participation in Ukraine. So it was an excellent kind of world, around the world tour of all of what we have began.

54:47 calling these post-World War II countries that are set up to create a strategy of tension and friction points, it kind of encapsulates that entire concept in less than two hours. It was an amazing show. I really enjoyed it. Oh, if only you would have just said something about that last night. It's teasing. I'm not feeding them.

55:13 I know you're not. I know you're not. I was, that was a joke. Yeah, that was a joke. Yeah, I know. Um, people over on rumble said it was absolutely amazing and that you should do it more often. Um, they really enjoyed it. Oh, cool. I didn't get to hear it yet, but it is, it is a good show. It is definitely a good show. And I love doing shows with those two, um, two amazing people. So, um, anyway,

55:42 Appreciate everyone being here today. And let's see, I don't have anything scheduled this weekend. So for now, we will be back on Monday at four o'clock for our next chapter. And the next chapter is the present ruling class of Germany. And that goes into...

56:07 And it gives you an overview of what was going on in Germany and what needed to be protected because it connected back to the United States. And that dictated a lot of what our policy was going to be and the sabotaging of the the war crimes process. So anyway.

56:36 Thanks for being here, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the rest of your Friday. Take care.

Entities here

United States30 Green Hackworth25 Herbert Pell25 West Germany25 U.S. State Department22 Soviet Union21 United Kingdom16 Holocaust12 Nazi Party9 World War II9 United Nations War Crimes Commission9 London9 Eastern Soviet Union8 Franklin D. Roosevelt8 Winston Churchill7 Henry Morgenthau Jr.6 Moscow Declaration6 U.S. Air Force5 Breckinridge Long5 Adolf Hitler3 Greece3 Japan3 Romania3 Hungary3 Netherlands2 Italy2 Poland2 Heinrich Himmler2 Anthony Eden2 Auschwitz2 Cordell Hull2 John Winn2 Sheldon Glueck2 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising2 Pell family2 Katyn massacre2 Algiers2 Sumner Welles2 George F. Kennan1 Lloyd Henderson1

Claims made here

Herbert Pell member_of Pell family documented ▶ 2:27

“anytime that he was in a meeting or in a crowd because of how well-spoken he was. The Pell family fortune can be traced back to the 17th century land grants that gave his ancestor, Sir John Pell, much…”

Herbert Pell member_of United States documented ▶ 3:25

“determined to shape events in accordance to what his vision of right and wrong was. He was, as it turned out, one of the handful of men in the U.S. government who were brave enough and bullheaded enou…”

Herbert Pell member_of Polish National Democratic Committee documented ▶ 5:44

“In 1936, Roosevelt named Pell vice chairman of the DNC committee. After the victory, Roosevelt appointed Pell to sensitive ambassadorial posts in Portugal and later Hungary. FDR's conflicts with the F…”

Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Herbert Pell documented ▶ 5:44

Franklin D. Roosevelt member_of United States documented ▶ 5:44

Green Hackworth member_of U.S. State Department documented ▶ 7:12

“Pell had clashed with State Department's bureaucracy as well during the time that he was an ambassador to those very same areas. Pell and Green Hackworth failed to get along almost immediately. And ag…”

Green Hackworth member_of Digest of International Law documented ▶ 9:31

“He was considered a preeminent specialist in international law, the drafter of numerous treaties and international agreements. Hackworth had served simultaneously at the State Department post and also…”

Green Hackworth member_of The Hague documented ▶ 9:31

Herbert Pell member_of United Nations War Crimes Commission documented ▶ 13:27

“London Assembly Project, be appointed as his chief assistant and legal advisor for the UN War Crimes Commission. Gulick was probably the most authoritative legal voice in the U.S., then arguing for to…”

Green Hackworth recruited Lawrence Preuss documented ▶ 13:56

“with a guy by the name of Lawrence Pruess, P-R-E-U-S-S, who was a young university lecturer whose qualifications for the New Post included a confidential agreement with Hackworth to channel all deroga…”

Lawrence Preuss spied_on Herbert Pell documented ▶ 13:56

Heinrich Himmler ordered_assassination_of Holocaust documented ▶ 15:25

“and had not met for the first time. Himmler had decreed in the fall of 1942 that all Jewish people in concentration camps within Germany's border were to be driven out, resulting in mass deportations …”

Green Hackworth covered_up United Nations War Crimes Commission documented ▶ 17:23

“Is there a reason for this delay? Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Pell, the British had decided to go ahead and have a meeting without him and without the Soviets. The Foreign Office cabled Washington twice…”

Green Hackworth recruited John Winn documented ▶ 19:50

“Hackworth played for time. He quietly arranged for the U.S. ambassador in London, John Wynette, W-I-N-A-N-T, to attend the first War Crimes Commission instead of Pell, who they're still leaving in the…”

John Winn member_of United Nations War Crimes Commission documented ▶ 20:18

“and Pell was not to be informed of the gallering until it was all over. The first War Crimes Commission meeting took place in October 20, 1943, and consisted of formal introductions of representatives…”

Winston Churchill member_of British War Cabinet documented ▶ 28:09

“The British War Cabinet again confronted the question of whether to go ahead with tough campaigns aimed at deterring Nazi atrocities in the fall of 1943. When British forces discovered a new mass grav…”

Winston Churchill proposed Moscow Declaration documented ▶ 28:40

“At the next meeting of the British War Department and proposed the Big Three issue a declaration of the upcoming Allied Conference in Moscow, pledging to pursue Nazi war criminals to the end of the ea…”

United States funded Moscow Declaration documented ▶ 33:01

“to open a second front in Western Europe, and all three powers formally agreed to demand unconditional surrender of Germany. The treatment of Nazi war criminals again became a very important topic. Th…”

United Kingdom funded Moscow Declaration documented ▶ 33:01

Soviet Union funded Moscow Declaration documented ▶ 33:01

U.S. State Department covered_up Katyn massacre host_asserted ▶ 34:58

“British Foreign Office staff in Moscow referred to the wholesale shooting of Polish officers in the declaration's list of victims of Nazi atrocities rather than to the Italian officers, as had been ag…”

Soviet Union ordered_assassination_of Katyn massacre host_asserted ▶ 35:28

“So this is purposeful sabotage. At the Goebbels' ministry in Berlin, the propagandists noticed the difference between the two translations and exploited the blunder to call the massacre of Polish offi…”

Joseph Goebbels exposed Katyn massacre host_asserted ▶ 35:28

United States covered_up Nazi Party host_asserted ▶ 36:49

“But on November 23rd, U.S. Army Air Force headquarters in Algiers aborted a planned war crimes trial of Germans accused of a second Italian massacre, then issued directives to shut down all publicity …”

Green Hackworth supported U.S. Air Force host_asserted ▶ 37:36

“months to respond to any initiative involving Nazi war crimes when it suited him, immediately endorsed the Army Air Force policy within hours of it hitting print. Hackworth worked through the weekend …”

Henry Morgenthau Jr. exposed Breckinridge Long host_asserted ▶ 40:38

“The impression is all around that you particularly are anti-Semitic, unquote. Morgenthau knew that a handful of Long's aide at State had for years systematically denied U.S. visas to any Jewish person…”

Breckinridge Long covered_up Nazi Party host_asserted ▶ 40:38

Breckinridge Long sabotaged Romania host_asserted ▶ 41:05

“Recently, he had learned that Long's group at State had sabotaged the deal that could have purchased survival for 70,000 Romanian Jewish for a mere 170,000 in Romanian currency. Long choked and denied…”

Breckinridge Long supported Benito Mussolini host_asserted ▶ 41:31

“man whose indiscreet praise of Mussolini and Italian fascism during the 1930s had once made headlines, talking about Breckenridge. He was not about to permit himself to be pinned down on the wrong sid…”

Soviet Union spied_on United Kingdom host_asserted ▶ 42:37

“Really had the aha moment when they realized this was all pin the tail on the donkey and they were the donkey. They suspected that very early on. And there's a lot of indication that there were severa…”

Soviet Union spied_on United States host_asserted ▶ 42:37

United Kingdom targeted_for_regime_change Soviet Union host_asserted ▶ 43:05

“was plotting behind their back. There's a lot of indication of that, a lot of examples of that. And later on, they find several of the moles were eventually outed and they went back to being in the OS…”

United States targeted_for_regime_change Soviet Union host_asserted ▶ 43:05

Harry S. Truman supported Soviet Union host_asserted ▶ 44:58

“that the Nazis and the Soviets could fight a war of attrition, and they really didn't care. I mean, Truman even said that when he was a senator, that they should back whichever side, and even suggeste…”

Harry S. Truman supported Nazi Party host_asserted ▶ 44:58

Sumner Welles supported Nazi Party host_asserted ▶ 47:35

“I mean, was this guy good or was this guy bad? Why did they want to keep him out of the loop? Are you talking about Powell? Yeah. Because he believed in holding the Nazis responsible for murdering peo…”

United States removed_from_power Sumner Welles host_asserted ▶ 48:04

“Yeah, they didn't want him anywhere near the negotiating table or responsible for representing the United States. And because he was a personal friend of FDR's, they had a problem on their hands becau…”

United States recruited Nazi Party host_asserted ▶ 48:29

“Gotcha. I'm tracking on that. Okay. And that makes perfect sense. You know, when you look at paperclip, and I'm not trying to go off on a tangent. I'm not trying to take a rabbit hole. But when you lo…”

Yasuo Okamura member_of World Anti-Communist League host_asserted ▶ 52:21

“The actual war criminals that Kodona and that Yaka Sudo or whatever his name was, was used as part of the World Anti-Communist League for setting up the quote unquote anti-communist effort of stay beh…”

Korechika Anami member_of World Anti-Communist League host_asserted ▶ 52:21

World Anti-Communist League front_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 52:49

“After World War Two was set up. Excuse me. Exactly. They had their own version of Gladio over there. And it was just like NATO under in Europe. I found the name of the book. It was called An Occupatio…”

Yasuo Okamura supported Sun Myung Moon host_asserted ▶ 53:38

“And they were in bed with Chiang Kai-shek and the whole drug things. They were in bed with Reverend Moon and the Moonies over in Korea. It's crazy. Yeah, absolutely. OK. Anybody else? No. OK. Hopefull…”

Korechika Anami supported Sun Myung Moon host_asserted ▶ 53:38

Korechika Anami supported Chiang Kai-shek host_asserted ▶ 53:38

Yasuo Okamura supported Chiang Kai-shek host_asserted ▶ 53:38