The Unholy Alliance
Excerpts from Lionel West,Unholy Alliance: Collective Security in Western Europe 1934 to 1942 , (Sandhurst, 1977)*
…Following the collapse of the centre-left government of Edouard Daladier in November 1933, the French foreign ministry signed a memorandum of understanding with Foreign Secretary [Anthony] Eden, setting the stage for bilateral rapprochement with Germany.
The warming of relations with the German revanchist government would have fatal consequences for German democracy. The past year had been tumultuous in Germany. Following Hindenburg’s reluctant appointment of Hitler to the office of Chancellor, the fractious far right government had teetered on the edge of collapse. The German nationalist right was, in Eden’s own words following the secret Kiel Conference of January 1934, “a den of thieves.” The rosy idyll of the German volk absolutely unified by blood and soil was contradicted by the megalomania of its would-be leaders, each imagining itself to be the head.
In spite of the street violence of the past year, Germany was not, as later Nazi propaganda would put it, on the verge of its own Red May Revolution. The centre-left SPD would not countenance illegalism, whether in the form of strikes, factory occupations or street risings, to destabilize the nationalist putsch. Like in the Preußenschlag of July 1932, the SPD had submitted to the decorum of lawful authority even when its acts were illegal.
Without a unified left front, the directive form Moscow was for the KPD to go underground and prepare for a later uprising. These plans were being put into motion during the Reichstag Bombing Incident, where a group of conspirators within the Nazi Schutzstaffel paramilitary fabricated a bombing incident intended to assassinate Hindenburg during his planned 15 March 1933 address to the Reichstag.
Following the Reichstag Bombing Decrees, whatever was left of parliamentary and constitutional government was abolished. Opposition leaders, particularly the KPD and SPD, would be arrested and interned in concentration camps as the Nazi Party consolidated power. But the underground apparatus remained, and might have been emboldened to act had Britain and France been willing to muscle in on the still demilitarised Germany.
Instead, the memorandum of November 1933 and the Kiel Conference gave Hitler’s government not only carte blanche to rearm, but also a powerful tool to be wielded to consolidate power. Factions within the civil service and military that had opposed Hitler’s adventurism were cowed into silence.
[…]
The Kiel Conference, and the contents of the agreement made, would not be publicly acknowledged by His Majesty’s Government until 1962. This secrecy (and the complicity of communist security services in preserving the secret to mask the level of penetration into the apparatuses of government) has generated enduring myths about the Interwar period. These myths, while politically useful, prevent a robust understanding of the historic costs associated with appeasement strategies.
Three main areas are of interest in the Kiel Conference. The first, concerning the disarmament protocols of the Versailles Treaty, were explicit aims of the nationalist-right in Germany, and it can be argued given the economic climate and the political costs of rearmament, Germany would likely succeed in repudiating restrictions on force levels and remilitarized the Rhineland. Even absent a world-realigning event like the Red May Revolution, war with Germany is not guaranteed, nor are we concerned with such idle counterfactuals.
The second and third areas were terms of economic and military cooperation. Increased economic ties, both in terms of trade as well as technology exchange, were sought. These ambitions were stymied by the Nazi state’s preoccupation with autarky, but stabilising credit and currency exchange rates would both ensure that German firms continued to have access to raw materials on the world market, as well as contributed to the robust recovery period in 1934 to 1939.
The Baldwin government’s primary aim with German rapprochement was to stabilise central and eastern Europe against the increasingly aggressive posture being taken by the Soviets. The Polish General Strike of July 1933 and the formation of partisan red armies in Hungary and Yugoslavia had proven that the red wave would not be contained to America, and many figures within MI6 considered the Soviets ultimately responsible.
A rearmed Germany would prevent Soviet armies from spilling into Poland and the Balkans, or a Soviet fleet from breaking out of the Baltic Sea in the event of a new world war. This calculation greatly underestimated Germany’s ability to rearm.
[…]
The immediate knock-on effect on the warming relations with Germany was that a cadre of American exiles became a conduit for the flow of British capital into Germany, most notably Henry Ford. Ford proved particularly susceptible to the Nazi manichean worldview. Surrounding himself with Silver Legion exiles, Ford warmed up to the German business elite and the Nazi government, and secured significant investment to expand the Ford-Werke GmbH complex in Cologne.
Ford brought with him a cadre of talented engineers and mass production expertise, and cultivated ties both with the British far-right as well as military-industrial figures in the Nazi regime such as Fritz Todt and Albert Speer.
Excerpts from Erik Staropolski,Rat-Line: The Life and Times of American Anti-Communist Exiles , (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1988)*
White exiles considered too extreme even for the exile regime in Cuba invariably made their way to Nazi Germany. Several had been forced from Cuba for varying reasons, whilst others saw Hitler as a more effective savior for the old United States than MacArthur.
One-time presidential nominee and founder of the Silver Legion William Dudley Pelley was the most prominent of these, invited to Germany by Ford himself after his publications were closed in Cuba for inflammatory rhetoric.
Pelley’s lackluster record commanding paramilitary troops in the Civil War had not endeared him with the professional military clique surrounding MacArthur. Pelley might have continued to influence the councils of government had he not exercised the poor judgment of openly criticizing MacArthur’s command decisions in the war, and accusing him of weakness for not cajoling the British Empire to support a return expedition to mainland.
Inflammatory accusations that some in MacArthur’s cabinet, notably Joseph P. Kennedy, had Judaic ancestry or sympathies, ultimately sealed his fate. On 15 July 1934, Pelley was arrested by the Secret Service on MacArthur’s direct orders. After a rough interrogation to determine if he was a Red mole and agent provocateur, Pelley was dismissed from all his responsibilities.
Ford-Werke GmbH’s Cuban contacts offered Pelley a management position in Cologne not long after. Pelley gained access to Ford’s network of contacts in Germany, and with the official support of the Nazi government spent the mid-30s recruiting technical talent and militants from among the expatriate populations in Canada, Cuba and the UK.
His role in assisting German rearmament gained Pelly the personal attention of Hermann Göring, Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan and effectively Hitler’s second-in-command. Along with fellow expatriate Virgil Effinger, Pelley lobbied the Nazi leadership to form an American auxiliary within the Schutzstaffel.
While Göring was dismissive of the “angry young boys” Pelley sought to turn into soldiers of the Reich, he recognized their political utility in cultivating a positive image of Germany as an allie to anti-communists everywhere. On 1 May 1937, With Hitler’s blessing, Pelley was granted the rank of in the Standartenführer in the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS Dispositional Troops), the precursor to the Waffen-SS.
With the command of the motorized infantry Regiment Silberne Legion , Pelley became the first in the long line of foreign nationals to command troops of the Waffen-SS under the smokescreen of the anti-communist crusade. While Pelley’s never led to the unit in wartime, his creation would be better known as the infamous 5th SS Panzer DIvision “Silberne Legion”.
The Unfortunate Son - Joe Kennedy, Jr. (By@Asami)
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was a young man who had lost it all in the Revolution. Born to the affluent Kennedy family of Hyannisport, Massachusetts–from a young age he was groomed for political success by his father, with a gambling eye set towards eventually coming to the highest office in the land: President of the United States. When the Old Republic collapsed, and with it, the Kennedy family’s affluence and power, Joseph Sr. followed General Douglas MacArthur into exile, settling his family in the upscale expatriate community in Havana, quickly securing himself a position as MacArthur’s advisor, gaining an important ability to whisper into the dictator’s ear.
Joe soon found that life in exile did not sit well with him. Just prior to the Revolution, Joe Kennedy had become increasingly engrossed in the literature and publications of Benito Mussolini, Julius Evola, and Adolf Hitler. As the revolution neared and the Red Guards began to swarm New England, Joe became increasingly cynical and hostile to what he saw as weakness and ‘sympathy for Jewish Bolshevism’ in the American government and resistance against the Reds.
Ultimately, his time in Cuba was brief. Immediately conflicting with the local authorities and his father, making stump speeches claiming that the American people needed to retake their birthright from the Jewish saboteurs who seized control of the mainland. He was briefly detained by the NSF in November 1934, before being released without charge. Deciding that MacArthur and his father were no better than the Bolsheviks that had supplanted them on the Mainland, Joe set a course for a new life.
His decision to go to Germany to “fight the Bolsheviks” was not just informed by the quick sedentation of the National Salvation Front , but also of the publicism of his brother’s treason to the Old Republic.
For the Kennedy family, they had initially presumed that the young John had been killed by the Reds, or lost to the revolution in some manner or another– he was a martyr often upheld in White publications as a “promising young white man cut down by the Negro hordes”, or “an All-American boy shot dead by the filthy Reds”; but in early 1934, the nascent UASR began to propagandize some of the turncoat bourgeois sons who had joined arms with their downtrodden comrades and become servants of the people, to further demoralize remaining White holdouts and resistance cells.
The image of the dashing John Kennedy (now Sean Cinneide) wearing a Workers’ and Farmers’ Revolutionary Army uniform, posing with his comrades outside West Point on the cover of the March 1935 issue of Libertine , was a final straw that cast the die for Joe– he would go off to Germany to fight the fire of Bolshevism as best as he could, damn the consequences.
Upon his arrival in Hamburg in March 1935, he was immediately picked up on the metaphorical radar by the local Nazi government, who quickly made arrangements. Joe was whisked away to Berlin to meet with the Führer; the young American fascist was enraptured and enthralled by the silver-tongued devil, and quickly pledged his loyalty to the German Reich to fight against Bolshevism both in America, and in Russia.
In the first public speech made in Germany, Joe openly pronounced his contempt for the American government both in DeLeon-Debs and Havana. That Douglas MacArthur was incapable of liberating the American people from the yoke of the Jews and Bolsheviks, and that only Hitler’s Germany could truly take up the mantle of the people. The young Kennedy was permitted to enlist in the SS, and served as an officer for one of the first American volunteer divisions, which would grow as White emigres trickled their way to Cuba and Europe to fight communism.
And with that– Joseph Kennedy, the all-American son whose destiny included the Presidency and political celebrity, became a cog in the machine of genocide that was the SS.
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