Chapters 1 & 2 of the book Facts Chapters 1 & 2 of the book Facts and Fascism by George Seldes In Fact, Inc., 1943 ó 7th edition, hard cover Part 1 The Big Money and Big Profits in Fascism CHAPTER IFASCISM ON THE HOME FRONT THE TIME will come when people will not believe it was possible to mobilize 10,800,000 Americans to fight Fascism and not tell them the truth about the enemy. And yet, this is exactly what happened in our country in the Global War. The Office of War Information published millions of words, thousands of pamphlets, posters and other material, most of it very valuable and all of it intended to inspire the people and raise the morale of the soldiers of production and the soldiers of the field; but it is also a fact that to the date of this writing the OWI did not publish a single pamphlet, poster, broadside or paper telling either the civilian population or the men and women in uniform what Fascism really is, what the forces are behind the political and military movements generally known as Fascism, who puts up the money, who make the tremendous profits which Fascism has paid its backers in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and other nations. Certainly when it comes to relating foreign Fascism with native American Fascism there is a conspiracy of silence in which the OWI, the American press, and all the forces of reaction in America are united. Outside of a few books, a few pamphlets, and a few articles in the very small independent weekly press which reaches only a few thousand readers, not one word on this subject has been printed, and not one word has been heard over any of the big commercial radio stations. Faraway Fascism has been attacked, exposed, and denounced by the same publications (the Saturday Evening Post for example) which for years ran articles lauding Mussolini and his notable backers in all lands; and the Hearst newspapers, which published from 1934 to Pearl Harbor dozens of signed propaganda articles by Dr. Goebbels, Goering and other Nazis, now call them names, but no publication which takes money from certain Big Business elements (all of which will be named here) will dare name the native or nearby Fascists. In many instances the publications themselves are part of our own Fascism. But we must not be fooled into believing that American Fascism consists of a few persons, some crackpots, some mentally perverted, a few criminals such as George W. Christians and Pelley, who are in jail at present, or the 33 indicted for sedition. These are the lunatic fringes of Fascism, they are also the small fry, the unimportant figureheads, just as Hitler was before the Big Money in Germany decided to set him up in business. The real Fascists of America are never named in the commercial press. It will not even hint at the fact that there are many powerful elements working against a greater democracy, against an America without discrimination based on race, color and creed, an America where never again will one third of the people be without sufficient food, clothing and shelter, where never again will there be 12,000,000 unemployed and many more millions working for semi-starvation wages while the DuPont, Ford, Hearst, Mellon and Rockefeller Empires move into the billions of dollars. I call these elements Fascist. You may not like names and labels but technically as well as journalistically and morally they are correct. You may substitute Tories, or Economic Royalists, or Vested Interests, or whatever you like for the flag-waving anti-American Americans whose efforts and objectives parallel those of the Liga Industriale which bought out Mussolini in 1920, and the Thyssen-Krupp-Voegeler-Flick Rhineland industry and banking system which subsidized Hitler when Naziism was about to collapse. Their main object was to end the civil liberties of the nation, destroy the labor unions, end the free press, and make more money at the expense of a slave nation. Both succeeded. And in America one similar organization has already made the following historical record: 1. Organized big business in a movement against labor. 2. Founded the Liberty League to fight civil liberties. 3. Subsidized anti-labor, Fascist and anti-Semitic organizations (Senator Black's Lobby Investigation). 4. Signed a pact with Nazi agents for political and economic (cartel) penetration of U. S. (Exposed in In Fact). 5. Founded a $1,000,000-a-year propaganda outfit to corrupt the press, radio, schools and churches. 6. Stopped the passage of food, drug and other laws aimed to safeguard the consumer, i.e., 132,000,000 Americans. 7. Conspired, with DuPont as leader, in September, 1942, to sabotage the war effort in order to maintain profits. 8. Sabotage the U. S. defense plan in 1940 by refusing to convert the auto plants and by a sit-down of capital against plant expansion; sabotage the oil, aluminum and rubber expansion programs. (If any of these facts are not known to you it is because 99% of our press, in the pay of the same elements, suppressed the Tolan, Truman, Bone Committee reports, Thurman Arnold's reports, the TNEC Monopoly reports and other Government documents.) 9. Delayed the winning of the war through the acts of $-a-year men looking out for present profits and future monopoly rather than the quick defeat of Fascism. (Documented in the labor press for two years; and again at the 1942 C.I.O. Convention.) Naturally enough the President of the United States and other high officials cannot name the men, organizations, pressure lobbyists, and national associations which have made this and similar records; they can only refer to "noisy traitors," Quislings, defeatists, the "Cliveden Set" or to the Tories and Economic Royalists. And you may be certain that our press will never name the defeatists because the same elements which made the above 9-point record are the main advertisers and biggest subsidizers of the newspapers and magazines. In the many instances even the general charges by the President himself have been suppressed. In Germany, in Italy until the seizure of government by the Fascists, the majority of newspapers were brave enough to be anti-Fascist, whereas in America strangely enough a large part of the press (Hearst, Scripps-Howard, McCormick-Patterson) has for years been pro-Fascist and almost all big papers live on the money of the biggest Tory and reactionary corporations and reflect their viewpoint now. On the anti-Fascist side, unfortunately, there is not one publication which can boast of more than one or two hundred thousand circulation, whereas the reactionary press has its New York News with 2,000,000 daily, its Saturday Evening Post with 3,000,000 weekly and its Reader's Digest with 9,000,000 monthly, which means up to 50,000,000 readers. It is a shameful and tragic situation that in America, with 132,000,000 persons of whom 50,000,000 read anti-labor and anti-liberal propaganda in Reader's Digest, only a few hundred thousand buy and read intelligent, honest, unbribed, uncorrupted publications, issued in the public interest. CHAPTER II PROFITS IN FASCISM: GERMANY IT SEEMS to this writer that the most important thing in the world today next to destroying Fascism on the field of battle, is to fight Fascism which has not yet taken up the gun. This other Fascism will become more activeóand drape itself in the national flag everywhereówhen military Fascism has been defeated. So far as America is concerned, its first notable Fascist leader, Huey Long, a very smart demagogue, once said, "Sure we'll have Fascism here, but it will come as an anti-Fascism movement." To know what Fascism really is and why we must fight it and destroy it here in America, we must first of all know what it is we are fighting, what the Fascist regimes really are and do, who puts up the money and backs Fascism in every country (including the United States at this very moment), and who owns the nations under such regimes, and why the natives of all Fascist countries must be driven into harder work, less money, reduced standard of living, poverty and desperation so that the men and corporations who found, subsidize and own Fascism can grow unbelievably rich. This is what has happened in Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries; it is true to a great extent in Spain, Finland, Hungary, Rumania, the Polish so-called Republic, and although not one standard newspaper or magazine has ever breathed a word about it, the same Fascist movementóthe march of the men of wealth and power, not the crackpot doings of the two or three dozen who have been indicted for seditionóis taking place in America. These matters are all related, both as systems of government and as business enterprises. It is the purpose of Part I of this book to show who really owns the Fascist International, who profits from it, and just how far the United States has gone along the Fascist line. The true story of Hitler-Germany is the real clue to the situation everywhere. In 1923, after his monkeyshines in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler received his first big money from Fritz Thyssen. January 30, 1933, Hitler came into power after a deal with Hindenburg and the big Prussian landlords (Junkers). Since then, and in all of vast occupied Europe, Hitler has been paying off the men who invested in Fascism as a purely money-making enterprise. A personal dispute put Thyssen out, but his brother and the thousand biggest industrialists and bankers of Germany have as a result of financing Hitler become millionaires; the I. G. Farbenindustrie and other cartel organizations have become billionaires. Big money entrenched itself completely after the departure of Fritz Thyssen, with his rather quaint ideas of placing limits on corruption in business, with his repugnance to the murder of Jews as a national policy, and other rather old-fashioned ethical concepts of monopoly and exploitation which he inherited from his father and which did not encompass robbery and bloodshed as means of commercial aggression. The cartels moved forward with the troops. There were, of course, exposÈs of Hitler as a tool of Germany's Big Money, written before he became dictator, but inasmuch as publication occurred in small non-commercial weeklies which few people read, or in the radical press, which is always accused of misrepresentation (by the commercial press which is always lying) the fact remains that few people knew what really was going on. This conspiracy of silence became even more intense when the big American and other banking houses floated their great loans for Hitleróand other fascist dictators in many lands. As early as 1931 Gerhard Hirschfeld published in a Catholic literary weekly a tiny part of the evidence that Hitler was the political arm of the biggest branch of German capitalism. Recalling that Hitler vowed that the Krupps, the Thyssens and the Kirdorffs, the Mannesmans, the Borsigs and the Siemens (who are the Garys, Schwabs and Mellons of Germany)ówould be stripped of wealth and power, Hirschfeld pointed out that "it is from the ranks of heavy industry, however, that Hitler is drawing much of the money which is making German Fascism something to be reckoned with. Hitler received considerable support from the heavy industries of Bavaria where he started the Fascist movement. The Borsig works and the Eisenheuttenleute (Association of iron forgers and founders) are important pillars of the Fascist structure. . . . From the machine industry of Wuerttemberg and from many other branches of the iron and steel industries, marks flow into the bulging coffers. In addition, money comes from abroad. Swiss friends sent him 330,000 francs just before last year's elections. Baron von Bissing, the university professor, collected many thousands of florins in the Netherlands . . . German-American friends expressed their sympathy in dollar bills . . . even directors of the French-controlled Skoda-Works (of Czechoslovakia), famous in the manufacture of armaments, may be found among Hitler's supporters." It requires neither integrity nor courage today to say that Hitler was made the Fuehrer of Germany by the biggest industrialists of his country. (It does require integrity and courage even today to relate the German men and forces to those in America, to point out the equivalents, and that is why no commercial newspaper or magazine has ever done so.) But as early as Summer, 1933, in the Week-End Review, a light which shows up Fascism as nothing but a military-political-economic movement to grab all the money and resources of the world was already focused on Germany by the man who wrote under the name of "Ernst Henri." He denies, first of all, the myth that Naziism is a "rebellion of the middle classes." The middle classes, it is true, were most united and outspoken for Hitler, they did in fact send in their contributions, but when "these sons of butchers and publicans, of post office officials and insurance agents, of doctors and lawyers" imagined they were fighting for their own interests, when "they swarmed out of the Storm Troops barracks and struck down defenseless workers, Jews, Socialists and Communists" they would not have been able to do it, had they not been mobilized by other sources. "Hitler, the idol of this mass, and himself only a petty bourgeoisóa petty bourgeois posing as a Napoleanóin reality followed the dictates of a higher power." The secret, continues Henri, "must be sought in the hidden history of Germany's industrial oligarchy, in the post-war politics of coal and steel. . . . Not Hitler, but Thyssen, the great magnate of the Ruhr, is the prime mover of German Fascism." Thyssen's main undertaking was the German Steel Trust, the equivalent of U. S. Steel. Vereinigte Stahlwerke Aktien Gesellschaft, incidentally, was heavily financed by American banking housesóEpiscopalian, Catholic and Jewishóthroughout the pre-Hitler and Hitler regimes. The Steel Trust was the basis of Germany economy, and when it found itself in a desperate situation, during the Bruening regime which preceded Hitler, the foundations of Germany were threatened. It was then that the state came to trust's aid by buying nearly half the shares of Gelsenkirchener Bergwerke, holding company, nominally worth 125,000,000 marks, at a fantastic price, estimated at double the market. Immediately thereafter the political parties of the nation began fighting for control of this weapon. The Bruening regime, Catholic, favored the Otto Wolff-Deutsche Bank group which was affiliated with powerful Catholic groups. The Thyssen-Flick-Voegeler group was opposed, although Thyssen himself was a Catholic. Otto Wolff is a leading Catholic, but one of his partners, Ottmar Strauss, is a Jewish liberal. Another affiliate of Wolff's was General Schleicher. The rivalry in Germany was something like that between the Morgan and Rockefeller interests in America, except that the Wolff group was known as liberal and the Thyssen group included Flick and Voegeler, political heirs of Hugo Stinnes who had been, Henri says, "perhaps the first National Socialist in Germany." Stinnes, Hugenberg, Thyssen and other multi-millionaire owners of Germany had never hidden their participation in political movements nor their subsidization of all reactionary anti-labor political parties. These men put their money into the parties of the right wing and were powerful enough at all times to prevent the Social-Democratic Party, which took over the nation (with the aid of the victorious Allies) in 1918 from doing anything radical to aid the majority of the peopleóeven if the Social-Democrats had sincerely attempted to do so. The historic facts speak for themselves. Germany under Ebert and all the liberal coalitions which preceded the reactionary regimes, which naturally culminated in the advent of big business Fascism, never did more than make gestures towards the working class and permitted joblessness and poverty to increase while the Stinneses and Hugenbergs and Thyssens grew in wealth and power. Thyssen became interested in Hitler in the year of the Beer Hall Putsch, when Hitler was regarded as a revolver-firing clown who would end up in an insane asylum rather than the chancellor's chair. But Thyssen saw possibilities. In 1927 Thyssen took his partner in the Steel Trust, Voegeler, to Rome, they interviewed Mussolini, and when they returned it was noticeable that the Nazi Party suddenly grew rich and began its march to power. In 1927 Thyssen joined the Nazi Party officially and began that cooperation with Hitler which led to the latter's overthrow of the Republic in 1933. "Hitler," writes Henri, "never took an important step without first consulting Thyssen and his friends. Thyssen systematically financed all the election funds of the National Socialist Party. It was he who, by a majority decision and against the most pointed opposition on the part of Otto Wolff and Kloeckner, persuaded the two political centers of German Ruhr capital, the Bergbauverein Essen and the Nordwestgruppe der Eisen-und Stahlindustrie, to agree that every coal and steel concern had, by way of a particular obligatory tax, to deliver a certain sum into the election cash of the National Socialists. In order to raise this money, the price of coal was raised in Germany. "For the presidential elections of 1932 alone, Thyssen provided the Nazis within a few days with more than 3,000,000 marks. Without this help the fantastic measures resorted to by Hitler in the years 1930-1933 would never have been possible. Without Thyssen's money Hitler would never have achieved such a success, and the party would probably have broken up at the time of the Papen elections at the end of 1932, when it lost 2,000,000 votes and the Strasser group announced its secession. In January, 1933, Schleicher was on the point of hitting the Hitler movement on the head and putting it under his own command. But, just as before Thyssen had raised Hitler by his financial machinery, so now he rescued him by his political machinery. "To bring off this coup Thyssen employed two of his political friends and agents: Hugenberg (who is one of the directors of the Thyssen Steel Trust group) and Von Papen. In the middle of January a secret meeting between Hitler and Papen was held at Cologne in the house of Baron von Schroeder, partner of the banking House of J. H. Stein, which is closely related with Flick and Thyssen. Although, thanks to an indiscretion, the news of this meeting got into the papers, a few days later, the conspiracy against Schleicher was ready. The allied group, Thyssen-Hitler-Von Papen-Hugenberg, which was backed by the entire German reactionary force, succeeded in drawing to its side the son of President von Hindenburg, Major Oskar von Hindenburg, who had so far stood by his old regimental friend, Schleicher. In this way the sudden fall of Schleicher and the sensational nomination of Hitler came about. Thyssen had won, and Hitler set the scene for his St. Bartholomew's day. "What's followed w… truncated (26,386 more characters in archive)