Military Intelligence and the Jewish Threat

During the first half of the twentieth century, and even into later decades, the highest ranks of United States military leadership and, particularly, Military Intelligence, widely subscribed to beliefs concerning an organised Jewish threat to American society and Western civilisation.

For decades, the US Military Intelligence apparatus constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security structure, functioning as the equivalent of a combined Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), responsible for both international and domestic security.

Widespread Beliefs of the Military Elite

The top ranks of the US military and Intelligence community heavily subscribed to notions that powerful Jewish elements posed a deadly threat to American society.

Historian Joseph W. Bendersky concerning the widespread belief in an internal and external threat posed by organised Jewry among high-ranking officers within the United States military, particularly within Military Intelligence, during the first half of the twentieth century.

Bendersky’s work, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, a volume of over 500 pages including some 1,350 footnotes and drawing upon thousands of declassified Intelligence files and personal correspondence, makes an extremely compelling case that the top ranks of the US military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Beliefs of the Military Elite

For decades, Military Intelligence professionals viewed organised Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilisation in general.

• Global Subversion:  US military leaders widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organised Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilisation.
• Communist Movements:  There was an overwhelming belief in these military circles that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organising similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacythroughout America and the rest of the Western world.
• Motivation:  While some of these Communist leaders were seen as idealists, many of the Jewish participants were viewed as cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power.
• Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt the authenticity of the The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule. The determined Military Intelligence officer in charge of the vital Venona Project actually remained a lifelong believer in the importance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as late as the 1970s.

Political Consequences:  These widespread beliefs had significant political consequences. One of the former military officers most fearful of Jewish immigrant subversion played a crucial role in orchestrating passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, whose central unstated goal was eliminating any further influx of Eastern European Jews.

Top Generals and Outspoken Views

These sentiments were shared and aggressively promoted by highly respected commanders, such as Deputy Chief of Staff General George Van Horn Moseley, a personal mentor to Dwight D Eisenhower and George C. Marshall.

• War for Hegemony:  After his retirement in 1938, Moseley embarked on a nationwide speaking tour. In an early 1939 speech, he declared that The war now being proposed is for the purpose of establishing Jewish hegemony throughout the world, asserting that only Jews would profit from the war and claiming that leading Wall Street Jews had financed the Russian Revolution.
• Praise for German Policy:  In Congressional testimony before the outbreak of World War II, Moseley declared that the murder squads of Jewish Communists had killed millions of Christians, but that fortunately, the character of the German people was aroused against these traitors within their midst. He urged national leaders to benefit from the German example in addressing America’s domestic Jewish problem, claiming that The Germans should not be blamed for settling the problem of the Jew within their borders for all time.

Military Consensus:  Although Moseley earned a reprimand, he received private letters of support from other top generals. Both Eisenhower and Marshall continued to privately regard him with great admiration and remained in friendly correspondence for many years, strongly suggesting that his harsh appraisal of Jews was hardly a deep secret within his personal circle. Moseley’s extreme statements differed little from the depictions of Jews expressed by General George Patton immediately after World War II, and even maintained by some retired generals well into the 1970s.

Historical Revisionism and Bendersky’s Ideological Bias

While Bendersky’s archival research is described as exhaustive and accurate, he exhibits serious error in his interpretation of the officers' fears and American intellectual history.

• Dismissal of Fears:  Bendersky demonstrates that top military professionals were extremely concerned about the subversive activities of Jewish Communists, yet he seems to casually dismiss those fears as nonsensical, almost delusional.
• The Reality of Venona:  This dismissal contradicts the undeniable reality confirmed by the declassified Venona Decrypts that a large and overwhelmingly Jewish network of Stalinist agents was situated near the top of the Roosevelt Administration. Bendersky’s failure to mention the term Venona or Jewish spies like the Rosenbergs nor Harry Dexter White in his index, while ridiculing the military officers who made such claims at the time, raises severe doubts about his credibility as an objective historian.
  • The Venona documents prove the massive extent of Soviet espionage activities in America. Furthermore, the fact that former Vice President Henry Wallace stated that a Wallace Administration would have installed Stalinist henchmen like Harry Dexter White as Secretary of the Treasury means that America’s national government of the early 1940s came within a hair’s breadth—or rather a heart-beat—of falling under Communist control.
  • The Venona Project was nearly shut down by a directive from the Roosevelt White House in 1944, arranged by Soviet agents, and survived only because the determined Military Intelligence officer in charge risked a court-martial by directly disobeying that explicit Presidential order.

Statistical Distortion:  Bendersky treats reports of the overwhelmingly Jewish leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks and the similar ethnic skew of America’s Communist Party as bigotry and paranoia. He dismissed the link between Jews and Communism in Germany by noting that less than half of the Communist Party leadership was Jewish, failing to acknowledge that Jews were obviously over-represented among Communist leaders by as much as 5,000%. This type of dishonesty and innumeracy is claimed to be regularly encountered among Jewish Holocaust experts.

The Iron Curtain and Holocaust Revisionism

Bendersky’s work is further critiqued for its ideological avoidance of the Holocaust narrative, which is his own area of study and a central pillar of the West’s current ideological framework.

• Silence on Extermination:  Across the one hundred pages Bendersky dedicates to the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath, there is not a single directly-relevant quote from the military officers referring to the massive slaughter of Jews that constitutes what we commonly call the Holocaust, nor to the existence of death camps or gas chambers. The military officers quoted, even in private remarks from the late 1970s, seemed strangely unaware that Jewish former camp inmates had just barely escaped an organised mass extermination campaign.
• Beaty’s Denial and Endorsement:  This silence aligns with the views of Military Intelligence Colonel John Beaty, who, having reviewed all incoming intelligence during World War II, dismissed the supposed Holocaust as a ridiculous wartime concoction by dishonest Jewish and Communist propagandists that had no basis in reality. Beaty’s book, The Iron Curtain Over America, containing explicit Holocaust denial, was fully endorsed and promoted by many of our leading World War II generals.
• Ideological Conflict:  It is suspected that Bendersky discovered that such Holocaust denial was remarkably common in the private papers of many of his Military Intelligence officers and top generals, who had possessed the best knowledge of the reality of World War II. Bendersky may have entirely skirted the topic to avoid challenging his own ideological framework.

The sources conclude that Bendersky’s volume, despite being produced by a Holocaust historian, seems to utterly demolish our conventional narrative of Jewish political activism between the world wars and, when carefully considered, constitutes a dagger aimed with deadly accuracy straight at the heart of our conventional Holocaust narrative.