Review of The American Axis by Max Wallace
A CONSPIRACY SO IMMENSE
Review by Joseph T Major of
THE AMERICAN AXIS:
Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich
by Max Wallace
(St. Martin’s Press; 2003; ISBN 0-312-29022-5; $27.95)
Curt Reiss was a journalist who spent his career exposing the many covert schemes of the Nazi-Teutonic Conspiacy, writing many books about the topic. In his best known work,Total Espionage (1941), he described the sinister Nazi ties of the America First Committee, and how its control officer, SS officer Walther Schellenberg, had sat on the dais at its great public meetings.
It is not recorded that Reiss made any comment whatsover when there turned out to be a real Walther Schellenberg, who by the way could not possibly have been the man he described. In the real Schellenberg’s memoirs, The Labyrinth (1956), he describes his proudest moment as head of the Nazi Secret Service, the Sicherheitensdienst (SD); having a device installed in his desk so that with the push of a button, he could have anyone on the other side of the desk cut down by hidden machine guns.
(And in response, Schellenberg endorsed wholesale a propaganda story spread by Reiss, the tale of "the little tailor of Scapa Flow".)
In short, even before the revelations in The Double-Cross System In the Second World War (1972) one might have suspected that the Nazi German intelligence services were short a liter or two. Hardly capable, that is, of providing covert support to overseas groups the way that the Soviets did (as described in The Secret World of American Communism by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Fridrikh I. Firsov (1996) and Operation SOLO by John Barron (1996)).
There were “professional anti-Fascists” like Reiss, as there were “professional anti-Communists”; people who saw their foe behind the activities of everybody and everything, in the latter case controlling the world in a Red tide that had washed over every place save a few bastions of freedom like South Africa, and a saving remnant such as themselves.
The demise of Nazi Germany left the professional anti-Fascists sort of vindicated, though their lurid tales of a conspiracy so immense and so black that its perpetrators deserved the maledictions of all honest men never quite seemed to be verified. As for their counterparts on the other side, well . . .
Indeed, the works of Derounian and his colleagues are touched on in Daniel Pipes’s Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (1997). Pipes comes to the topic from experience in Islamic lands, where in popular culture everything is the result of a conspiracy. One such indicator is the unexpected power of an insignificant figure, in a verdict divergent from that of all other observers. Thus, in the works of Charles Higham, Gero von Gävernitz was the man who carried the orders of the secret Nazi masters to their loyal servant, Allen Dulles. Ordinary history lists Gävernitz as a minor informer, and devotes more time to Dulles’s contacts with the German Widerstand through Hans-Bernd Gisevius. Another is the inversion of attitudes; opposition is support and support is opposition. For example, John Loftus’s dramatic claim that the United States has been an implacable enemy of Israel.
If such people seem hardly worth mentioning, to be in the aluminum-foil hat brigade, it should be mentioned that Wallace relies on them in this work, with most favorable commendations. Indeed, Loftus contributes a glowing back-cover blurb. So does Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose father comes in for praise (Pages 115, 248, and particularly 275). Makes you wonder about blurbs.
Wallace makes a number of startling claims in this work. However, he has an annoying habit of taking them back — and then going on to assume them. Even after terminating his antisemitic campaign in the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford kept a number of suspicious people with suspicious ties around him, such as for example his private secretary Ernst Liebold, former (or perhaps still) German spy. Charles Lindbergh also had a number of colleagues with sinister or unfortunate connections, most notorious of which being his partner in perfusion pumps, Alexis Carrell.
But then there are a lot of weaknesses in these arguments.
The favorable treatment the Ford production plant in Germany, the Ford Werke, received from the Reich Custodian of Enemy Property certainly seems suspicious. However, when Wallace scathes them for accepting slave laborers, since they could have mobilized women, he shows a certain failure of understanding regarding the Nazi attitude towards women, reflected by their refusal to mobilize female laborers.
He fails to distinguish among Germans, citing Ford’s work with Prince Louis-Ferdinand of Prussia for example as proof of a Nazi tie. Hitler’s disdain and outright hatred for the deposed royal families of Germany is constantly cited in, for example, Hitler’s Table Talk (2000). Or that a man who worked for Franz von Papen in 1917 was a Nazi agent. (Hint: look up “Marburg” and “Theodore Morde”. Franzchen may have thought wrongly he could control the Nazis but he got at cross purposes with them pretty quickly.)
What can we say? Lindbergh had a wide authoritarian streak, and having been abused by the public — loved to death, one might say — had little reason to be “democratic”. Some of his associates were not particularly desirable.
To erect this into a specter of a vast right-wing conspiracy, while something a fiction writer can assume as part of a plot, requires sounder bases if put forward as an accusation. The America First Committee contained such prominent right-wing reactionaries as Norman Thomas (the leader of the Socialist Party USA), and had some serious points of concern about the growth of government power as needed for a war. The problem is that the alternative proposed did not exist; standing completely aside from the conflicts in China and Europe might well leave us alone In the Presence of Mine Enemies, or facing a devastated world.
Similarly Henry Ford had a number of strange ideas, widely tolerated to the extent that great wealth makes them tolerable. He was an autocrat, as autocratic as being practically sole owner of a powerful company can be. Sometimes this was for well, as when he responded to the Depression by raising the famous Five Dollars A Day wage rate to $6. Sometimes this was for ill, as when he let his security chief and pet thug Harry Bennett terrorize the employees. Similarly, as noted, the Ford Werke seems to have got a better deal than most other US companies put in the hands of the receivers of enemy property, but it was still sequestered and used.
The testimony of Morris and Jack Childs, and the archives of the former Soviet Union, provide the hard proof of Soviet subsidy of the CPUSA. Would it be too hard for Williams to come up with something like that for Ford and the NSDAP?
Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Invervention in World War II by Wayne S. Cole (1974) could use some updates, but it is a more balanced view of the topic.