Go to Part 1.

After the outbreak of war, Jews were instrumental in restructuring the American economy in order to finance the cost of fighting it — ushering in what has been called ‘the military-industrial complex” and the massive expansion of government power. One of the key features of the Jewish historical profile has been the involvement of Jews in systems of taxation. In keeping with this trend, during the early 1940s Jews were conspicuous in transforming the American economy to one based on mass taxation. The Treasury Department was of course headed by Henry Morgenthau, but what is less remarked upon is the fact that Morgenthau staffed his department very heavily with fellow Jews including Jacob Viner, Walter Salant, Herbert Stein and Milton Friedman. Ginsberg states that these Jews “fundamentally changed America’s tax system.”[1] It is not without irony that while Roosevelt was effectively pardoning high-ranking media Jews such as Joseph Schenk for large-scale income tax evasion, the Jews in his administration were championing the introduction of payroll withholding or “collection at the source” taxation for the common working man.

Although the Constitution’s Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, allowed the levying of an income tax, exemptions and thresholds meant that prior to the New Deal only 3 percent of Americans were subject to it. By 1940, Morgenthau’s Jewish team had added more than 5 million Americans to the income tax machine. The same team’s 1942 Revenue Act brought the number of Americans paying income tax to 40 million — a move Ginsberg describes as a “turning point in the history of American income taxation.” Since closely administering such a huge transition would be difficult, Jews employed much the same style of propaganda as their counterparts in the Soviet Union did to ensure popular compliance in the war effort — blanket efforts of persuasion and coercion.

In the area of persuasion, Jewish treasury officials “presented tax payment as a patriotic duty and launched an extensive propaganda campaign to convince Americans that paying taxes was a form of sacrifice required to win the war.”[2] Ginsberg adds that “Jewish films studios and radio networks, as well as Jewish composers and media personalities, played an active role.” At Mogenthau’s request his co-ethnic Irving Berlin wrote a song, “played incessantly on the radio,” titled “I Paid My Income Tax Today,” aimed at lower-income Americans who had never previously been asked to pay income taxes. Suspicious that this wouldn’t be enough, Morgenthau, along with Milton Friedman and Elisha Friedman, pushed for a permanent coercive system of payroll withholding. Ginsberg comments that:

The result of the gradual increase in tax rates mandated every year between 1940 and the end of the war, accompanied by payroll withholding, was conversion of the income tax from a minor tax levied on wealthy Americans into a major tax levied on all Americans — from a class tax to a mass tax…According to Elisha Friedman, one key, in addition to collection at the source, was gradualism. Raising taxes gradually, Friedman told the Congress, “got the people’s minds accustomed to things” and lessened the chance of tax resistance and political opposition.[3]

Gradualism has of course also been applied with devastating effect in European societies in relation to immigration and the slow erosion of rights and freedoms.

The sale of government bonds was another means of raising revenue for the war effort, and here too Jewish influence in the treasury and beyond was crucial. The two names most associated with popularizing war bond sales were Irving Berlin (who wrote the song ‘Any Bonds Today?’ at the behest of Morgenthau) and Bugs Bunny. Ginsberg writes that “Bugs, along with his animated friends Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig, was created by a Jewish producer, Leon Schlesinger, for the Jewish-owned Warner Brothers Studio. Bugs had been designed in the late 1930s to compete with the Judenfrei Disney Studio’s popular animated character Mickey Mouse. As opposed to the all-American Mickey, Bugs was quintessentially Jewish, sporting a thick Brooklyn accent, and was “sarcastic and disrespectful.”[4] After the studio was approached by Treasury, the studio produced a series of Bugs Bunny cartoons promoting war bonds at its own expense.

Jews were of course also dominant in the production of American wartime propaganda. The largest organization devoted to this enterprise was the Office of War Information (OWI). The OWI was heavily staffed with Jewish writers, the most important being Samuel Lubell. Lubell and the OWI authored a large number of pamphlets and guidelines that were disseminated to every organ of public communication with the aim of reinforcing hostility toward Germany. Guidelines were even issued to the movie industry, although, as Ginsberg remarks, “not unlike their Soviet counterparts, Hollywood’s large cadre of Jewish studio heads, producers, and directors needed little urging to join the war effort. … Most of the great propaganda films of this era were written, produced, or directed (or all three) by Hollywood’s Jewish filmmakers. Indeed, several of Frank Capra’s famous films were in fact written by Julius and Philip Epstein.”[5] The most famous wartime film, Casablanca, was funded by the Warner brothers, produced by Hal Wallis, directed by Michael Curtiz, and written by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch — all were members of Hollywood’s Jewish leadership cadre. The overall result of the activities of this network was that the American people “were the recipients of a steady diet of material emphasizing the need to support the war effort.”[6]

Aside from Jewish networking in the United States and the Soviet Union, Jews also presented formidable problems to National Socialism via their efforts in international intelligence operations. Code breaking and signals intelligence first emerged in significant fashion during World War I, and in 1919 the US army formed the Cipher Bureau, sometimes known as the ‘Black Chamber.’ It was disguised as a private civilian corporation and was heavily involved in decoding the diplomatic communications of other nations. However, in 1929 Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously declared that “Gentlemen to not read each other’s mail,” and withdrew funding for the Cipher Bureau, forcing it to close. The army, however, moved to establish the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) and placed it under the leadership of William Friedman, a Russian Jewish immigrant who specialized in code-breaking. The move away from the kind of gentlemanly conduct espoused by Stimson, to what would eventually morph into the National Security Agency under Friedman’s direction is at least as profound a social and political change as the income tax transformations undertaken by Jews at the treasury.

Indeed, many traditional soldiers scoffed at the wholesale adoption of what they saw as under-handed, Jewish tactics. In particular there was resistance from the navy to the idea of working with Friedman’s SIS. Ginsberg remarks that:

Normal interservice rivalries were exacerbated by the fact that the navy’s intelligence officers did not want to cooperate with an army unit that was headed by a Jew and that employed a number of Jews in its upper echelons. The U.S. Navy was thought by many to be even more anti-Semitic than the U.S. Army, and according to a British naval officer who visited the U.S. Navy’s cryptology unit, “The dislike of Jews prevalent in the U.S. Navy is a factor to be considered in the prevailing animosity between army and navy code-breaking operations as nearly all the leading Army cryptographers [William Friedman, Abraham Sinkov, Solomon Kullback, and Genevieve Feinstein] are Jews.[7]

As well as the code-breaking successes of Jews at the SIS, Jews were prominent in human intelligence. One of the most important Soviet spies was Leopold Trepper, a Jewish Communist who operated a spy ring known to the Germans as the ‘Red Orchestra.’ Posing as a Canadian industrialist, Trepper and fellow Jewish Communist Leo Grossvogel ran a Europe-wide import-export firm via several frontmen who were clueless that the firm was linked to Soviet military intelligence [GRU]. Once the initial set-up was carried out, the GRU sent further ‘orchestra’ members Anatoli Gurewitsch, Hermann Isbutsky, Isidor Springer, David Kamy, and Sophie Poznanska — all Jews. They were later joined by more Jewish Communists — Abraham Raichmann (from Belgium), and Hillel Katz (from Poland). After the fall of France in 1940, Trepper set up two companies in Paris, Simex and Simexco. After soliciting German contracts, the Red Orchestra was able to obtain passes to German commercial circles, enabling them to gather information on German preparations for an attack on the USSR. By far the most devastatingly effective asset of the Red Orchestra was, however, a German traitor — the anti-Nazi aristocrat Harro Schultze-Boysen, who provided the Jewish Communists with volumes of information from the aviation ministry that he worked in. The Germans would later claim that the Red Orchestra was responsible for the loss of as many as 200,000 German lives. The group was finally broken in 1942 when German direction-finding equipment was able to get a lock on the locations of Red Orchestra radio broadcasts. Its entire staff was located and arrested in a rapid series of raids.

Other important spy rings were the Red Three, operated from Switzerland by the Hungarian Jew Alexander Rado, and one operated by the Polish Jew Rachel Dubendorfer that successfully obtained advance knowledge of German plans to attack Stalingrad and the oil fields in the Caucasus. Since the acquired material was Hitler’s entire directive, it proved “invaluable to the Soviets.” Enabling the Soviet forces to counter the Germans and ultimately defeat them at Stalingrad, Jewish human intelligence yet again cost the German forces tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Soviets were of course aware of the threat of similar German operations. The Soviet Union’s lead counterintelligence agency was SMERSH, an acronym for Smert Shpionam, or ‘Death to Spies.’ Jews were hugely over-represented in SMERSH, and Ginsberg remarks that “Jews played an important role within SMERSH throughout the war.”[8] Led by Jews such as Iakov Serebrianski, Isidor Makliarskii, and Vilyam Fisher, the tight ethnic cohesion of Soviet intelligence circles meant that infiltration by non-Jewish agents of any nationality was especially difficult. “During the course of the war, SMERSH alone killed or captured nearly 40,000 of the 44,000 agents the Germans acknowledge having sent into the USSR.” This is a remarkable level of success.

British and American spy agencies were also heavily Jewish. Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which would be instrumental in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, employed more than 1,000 Jewish spies, the most famous of whom were the female spies Vera Atkins (born Vera Rosenberg) and French Jew Denise Bloch (later executed at Ravensbruck concentration camp). The director of the SOE was the Jewish banker Sir Charles Hambro, while its chief cryptographer was the Jew Leo Marks. The American equivalent of the SOE was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an early incarnation of the CIA. As well as boasting a large number of Jewish spies, Ginsberg writes that one group of ‘analysts’ within the OSS “consisted of a number of refugee Jewish intellectuals associated with the so-called Frankfurt School of neo-marxist social theorists. These included such luminaries as Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer.”[9] These Frankfurt School intellectuals were tasked with assessing the prospects for propaganda and psychological warfare as weapons against the German people.

Ginsberg’s final chapter deals with Jewish armed partisan activity. I found this particularly interesting because, much like the latter sections of David Cesarani’s Final Solution, accounts of such activity provide a (previously omitted) brutal logic to increasingly harsh treatment by the German military of Jewish populations within its reach. The first point worth emphasizing is that Jewish populations were deadly to German military aspirations. For example, while more than 25 percent of French Jews were involved in resistance efforts, only one percent of the non-Jewish population was engaged in similar activity.[10] The anthem of the French resistance was written by the Jewish novelist Joseph Kessel, while the most popular anti-German novel in French during the period, La Silence de la mer, was written by the Hungarian Jewish immigrant Jean Bruller. Two of the most important resistance fighters in France were Jean-Pierre Levy (who headed the nucleus of de Gaulle’s ‘secret army’) and Leo Goldenberg who operated the main Paris resistance movement.

In Belgium “the most militant resistants were Jews,” and the country’s heavily Jewish resistance network (RR) was responsible for multiple acts of sabotage as well as the targeted assassination of Jews co-operating with Germans. Resistance in Greece was orchestrated by the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). Ginsberg writes that “a significant percentage of the officers and leaders of ELAS were Jews” who adopted Greek names.[11] Greek Jewish partisans were responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 German soldiers and forced the deployment of an entire combat division in order to counter ongoing sabotage efforts. Similarly, in Yugoslavia, “several thousand Jews fought in the partisan movement.”[12]

By far the most destructive partisan activity took place in the Soviet Union where “very often these early partisan groups were led by Jewish Communists.”[13] Partisan activity was relentless and devastating from the earlier days of the invasion of the Soviet Union, eventually prompting Hitler to issue a memorandum to the armed forces demanding the spread of “a kind of terror that would make the population lose all interest in subordination.” However, there was often a disconnect between local populations and the partisans operating in their midst. Indeed, because many partisans were Jews (and therefore outsiders dedicated to the regime) many villagers would often readily supply Germans with information on partisan movements. Despite being a relatively small percentage of the population of the Soviet Union, Jews constituted the third largest nationality group among Soviet partisans, and occupied many of the most influential roles. Because of this, anti-Semitic actions by partisans became subject to extreme punishment and one prominent Ukrainian partisan leader was executed for killing five Jews.[14]

According to Soviet sources, partisans killed 500,000 Germans in Byelorussia, and 460,000 in Ukraine, along with 5,000 locomotives, 50,000 railway cars, and 15,000 German automobiles. While historians debate the accuracy and extent of these figures, it is clear that partisan activity was hugely detrimental to the German war effort. Because of their extremely long supply lines and often ad hoc logistical planning, partisan activity emerged like an ever-recurring pestilence or plague, and was often heaviest in and around Jewish areas. This activity, rather than irrational prejudice, provided the Germans with the logic for the mass relocation and concentration of Jewish populations in ghettos during wartime, and prompted harsher measures as a means of deterrent to future attacks. While Ginsberg’s exploration of Jewish partisan activity is succinct and useful, it is ultimately inferior to Cesarani’s treatment of the same topic both in terms of factual information and analysis. For this reason and others, this was in my opinion the weakest of the four major chapters in How the Jews Defeated Hitler.

Ginsberg’s brief concluding chapter strikes the reader as a strange and ill-fitting addition intended to ‘beef up’ the book and make the slender manuscript a little longer. Titled ‘From Tragedy to Farce,’ Ginsberg moves onto a personal, neocon-style screed against “liberal anti-Zionism.” Ginsberg attacks the House Un-American Activities Committee and the contemporary American and European Left as anti-Semitic, as well as discussing ‘Black anti-Semitism,’ and ‘self-hating Jews.’ It’s really rather remarkable that after a volume that essentially discusses the importance of Jewish influence, and apparently rejects the notion of Jewish victimhood, Ginsberg should lift his final chapter right out of the ADL playbook. I believe that this is the result of Ginsberg’s own inner nature on these matters reasserting itself (as indicated by his own publication history), as well as being designed to appease mainstream Jewish elements and appeal to fashionable discussion points within that demographic.

Ginsberg’s How the Jews Defeated Hitler is nonetheless a fact-filled, concise, and efficient guide to the extent of Jewish power and influence before and during World War II. The fact that it places Jews in a belligerent role, both in terms of armed conflict and in more abstract forms of warfare, is a welcome and very much novel contribution to mainstream historiography on the experiences and actions of Jews during that period. Ginsberg’s writing style is quite bland, but the facts being relayed, and the splitting of each chapter into multiple sections, mean that this is not a volume that will bore readers. The production quality of the paperback is also quite good.

As always when I read a volume of history, I question at its conclusion whether there are any valuable lessons to be derived from the material and arguments presented. In this instance I was moved to reflect on a chapter from Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents, in which MacDonald puts forward a very strong argument that National Socialism was a group evolutionary strategy that in many ways mirrored Judaism. Taking this to be an accurate assessment, which I do, Ginsberg’s volume prompted me to conclude that National Socialism had failed to mirror one crucial element of the modern Jewish evolutionary strategy — its international nature. Germany ultimately had no answer for the vast exercise of Jewish international power during the era, and it was this expression of power and influence that, in the final act, was how the Jews defeated Hitler.

Those in the contemporary movement for White advocacy, the Alt Right, White Nationalism, or however they choose to self-describe, would do well to heed this lesson when discussing how to challenge modern manifestations of Jewish influence. Very often I see expressions of common contempt for Jews that run the risk of under-estimating their formidable strength. I always try to keep in mind that much wiser men than me have wrestled with this issue. The daunting task facing us is to rise to a challenge that many before us have failed. One of the key reasons for the failure of our predecessors was the rooting of their efforts in the nationalism of the nation state. This movement can and must evolve, and adopt a system of ‘international White nationalism.’ Today, the nation state has been reduced to an expression of civic globalism. Citizenship is paperwork and nothing more. Borders are weak, and will continue to disintegrate. Our strength can come only from cross-border cooperation.

I’ll end with the same thoughts that occurred to me at the conclusion of my 2015 article on the German dispossession under Merkel:

In this, the hour of our dispossession, there is no such thing as German nationalism, English nationalism, French nationalism, or Swedish nationalism. Your fight is mine, and my fight is yours. If any White nation falls, we all fall. To paraphrase John Donne: No White nation is an island, entire of itself; every White man is a part of the race, a piece of the continent. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any European nation’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in their kind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

[1] Ginsberg, p.56.

[2] Ginsberg, p.58.

[3] Ginsberg, p.59.

[4] Ginsberg, p.61.

[5] Ginsberg, p.63.

[6] Ginsberg, p.65.

[7] Ginsberg, p.72.

[8] Ginsberg, p.87.

[9] Ginsberg, p.96.

[10] Ginsberg, p.101.

[11] Ginsberg, p.110.

[12] Ginsberg, p.111.

[13] Ginsberg, p.113.

[14] Ginsberg, p.117.