Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5 -Guardian.co.uk

Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5′s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.”

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare’s papers.

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” said Martland.

“I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses.”

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.

“There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy,” said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time to fight against the allies.

Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.

Martland said: “Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain.”

by Robert Higgs

September 1, 1939—exactly seventy years ago today [time of original publication]—is customarily considered the day when World War II began, owing to the German invasion of Poland. Of course, some belligerents, most notably the Japanese and the Chinese, had already been at war for years, and others did not join the fray until later. The United States actually began to participate in the war almost immediately, but its participation remained for the most part covert until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

I was born in the midst of this terrible event, and all my life, whenever anyone referred to “the war,” I have assumed, as most Americans have, that the reference was to World War II. It was the largest and the most horrible of all wars, although, sad to say, it no more proved to be “the war to end war” than its predecessor (1914-18) had been. In many ways the two world wars are best understood as two phases of a single conflict, although the matter is much more complicated than that formulation might suggest.

No one knows with much confidence how many people died as a result of the war. Estimates range widely, from a low of about 50 million to a high of nearly 80 million. Perhaps two-thirds of the dead were civilians. Countless others were wounded or harmed in various ways, as by malnutrition. Millions were spiritually scarred for life. The war was very productive of nightmares that, for some individuals, recurred for decades. After all that had taken place between 1939 and 1945, it was difficult to believe that the human beings of the mid-twentieth century, many of whom had regarded themselves as civilized, were any better than their savage ancestors of ten thousand years ago.

Yet, oddly enough, World War II has developed a reputation in this country as “the Good War”—an unfortunate turn of phrase, if ever there was one. The war is taken to have been good primarily because (1) the Allied side is believed to have represented the morally virtuous side, in opposition to the manifestly evil Axis side; (2) it got the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression; and (3) it left the world a better place, mainly because of Nazi Germany’s defeat.

For me, these ideas fall under the rubric of myth. I am not saying that no good came of the war, because obviously some did. As much as anyone, I believe that the destruction of the Nazi regime in Germany was a splendid thing for the human race. But every good end must be weighed against the means by which it was achieved, and in this perspective the war’s positive achievements take on a sickly pallor.

In this war, the belligerents plumbed new depths of depravity: operation of mass-destruction death camps, torture of every conceivable kind, terror bombing and other attacks systematically aimed at civilian populations, crowned by the gratuitous atomic bombing of two large, defenseless cities. I am aware that some people still defend some of these heinous actions, but in my mind nothing the war achieved can justify them. Indeed, I seriously doubt that anything can justify them. Yet such wanton, barbaric cruelties were deeply woven into the fabric of the war’s conduct from its earliest days. One is scarcely engaging in moral equivalence if one concludes that neither side represented “the good guys.” There was plenty of evil to go around.

I have been combatting for decades the widely believed notion that the war got the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. For readers who still labor under this misconception, I recommend the first five chapters of a book called Depression, War, and Cold War.

Finally, the idea that the war left the world a better place seems to me unacceptable as a flat, unqualified statement. Yes, the defeat of Hitler’s regime was an excellent outcome—may such utter beastliness never dare to show its face again. But over large parts of the territory where Hitler’s troops had reigned supreme in the early 1940s, Stalin’s troops reigned supreme from 1945 to 1989. It is difficult to count Stalin as anything less than first-rate in the category of monstrous tyrants. Yet, if the war had a clear political winner, it was he. Moreover, he and the evil Soviet regime that carried on after his death wreaked massive human and material destruction over a wide swath. Similarly in the East, the defeat of Imperial Japan counts as a positive accomplishment. But that defeat removed a bulwark against Communism’s expansion and ultimate victory in China, and like the eastern Europeans held under Stalin’s sway, the Chinese were to pay a terrible price—the major political consequence of Japan’s defeat on the mainland of Asia.

World War II is an immense subject. Thousands of books have been written about it from almost every conceivable angle, and thousands more books will probably be written in years to come. The complexities being so great, nearly everything one might say about it cries out for qualification and clarification. Nevertheless, I am willing to assert that in important regards the prevailing American view of the war rests on a foundation of myths. The entire enterprise of understanding the war needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

by Robert Higgs (Aug. 23)

When American students learn about World War II, they are usually taught that it began on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. They do not get much instruction about the Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (after the foreign ministers of the two countries), signed early on August 24, 1939, but dated August 23.  By this agreement, each side promised to remain neutral in the event that the other were attacked by a third party.

A key feature of the agreeement, however, was the secret protocols that accompanied it, by which the USSR and Germany divided eastern and central Europe into “spheres of influence” and provided that each side might occupy its sphere should “territorial and political rearrangements” be made in these areas.  In other words, they agreed on a plan for carving up the entire area between the USSR and Germany as their borders existed at that time.

Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland, the Russians invaded from the other side and quickly occupied the Polish territories identified as the Soviet sphere of influence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Afterward, the two sides cooperated economically and militarily in subduing the Poles and in supplying one another with various raw materials and manufactured goods, including military arms and equipment, as well as plans for weapons.

The pact, which came as a great surprise to almost everyone, created a potentially huge embarrassment for the many Soviet sympathizers in the West, including those in the United States, who had worked tirelessly for years to move public opinion against the fascists in general and Germany in particular. But, like the mindless marionettes they were, they missed not a beat, switching virtually overnight to praise for Stalin’s efforts to promote world peace and opposing war against Hitler.

Further potential for embarrassment arose in June 1941, when, notwithstanding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Disdaining embarrassment, the Roosevelt administration immediately embraced the mass murderers in Moscow and maintained them in a tight embrace for the balance of the war. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

by John Hooper, Guardian.co.uk

Germany’s most notorious postwar neo-Nazi party was led by an intelligence agent working for the British, according to both published and unpublished German sources.

The alleged agent – the late Adolf von Thadden – came closer than anyone to giving the far-right real influence over postwar German politics.

Under his leadership, the National Democratic party (NPD) made a string of impressive showings in regional elections in the late 60s, and there were widespread fears that it would gain representation in the federal parliament.

Yet, according to a report earlier this year in the Cologne daily, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the man dubbed “the New Führer” was working for British intelligence throughout the four years he led the NPD, from 1967 to 1971.

However, a former senior officer in German intelligence told the Guardian this week that he had been informed of a much longer-standing link between Von Thadden and British intelligence. His recollection raises the question of whether the German far-right-winger was under the sway of M16 when he and others founded the NPD in 1964.

Dr Hans Josef Horchem, who was the head of the Hamburg office of the Verfassungsschutz – the West German security service – from 1969 to 1981, said he received regular visits from British intelligence liaison officers.

“We held general discussions on security. At one of these – I think it was towards the end of the 70s- they said, ‘Adolf von Thadden was in contact with us’, and that that was in the 1950s”. Mr Horchem did not know whether the links between the German and British intelligence had continued into the 60s and 70s.

According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, whose report passed virtually unnoticed when it was published, the neo-Nazi leader met his British contact at a hotel in Hamburg.

Germany’s government is currently trying to ban the NPD on the basis that its policies violate the constitution.

But the government’s case is in danger of collapse after the disclosure that some senior NPD members were agents of the Verfassungsschutz. This has sparked debate about the extent to which counter-intelligence officers were sustaining the far right in their efforts to monitor it. Similar issues arise in Von Thadden’s case.

The question also arises of whether MI6 was seeking help from the neo-Nazi movement when far-left militancy was sweeping Europe after the uprising of May 1968 in Paris.

Von Thadden left the NPD in 1975, and died at the age of 75 in 1996.

His younger sister, Barbara Fox von Thadden, said she had had no reason to suspect her brother worked for British intelligence. But she added that they had very different political views and steered away from political discussion.

They had an English grandmother, and Ms Fox von Thadden said her brother “did like coming to Britain, and did like Britain very much”.

The article dispassionately indicates the commitment of to Zionism which overlapped the other political activities of the founders of the Soviet Union.  -D.W.

by Mark Weber, Institute for Historical Review

Ilya Ehrenburg, the leading Soviet propagandist of the Second World War, was a contradictory figure. A recent article in the weekly Canadian Jewish News sheds new light on the life of this “man of a thousand masks.” [1]

Ehrenburg was born in 1891 in Kiev to a non-religious Jewish family. In 1908 he fled Tsarist Russia because of his revolutionary activities. Although he returned to visit after the Bolshevik revolution, he continued to live abroad, including many years in Paris, and did not settle in the Soviet Union until 1941. A prolific writer, Ehrenburg was the author of almost 30 books. The central figure of one novel, The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz, is a pathetic “luftmensch,” a recurring character in Jewish literature who seems to live “from the air” without visible means of support.

As a Jew and a dedicated Communist, Ehrenburg was a relentless enemy of German National Socialism. During the Second World War, he was a leading member of the Soviet-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. (At fund-raising rallies in the United States for the Soviet war effort, two leading members of the Committee displayed bars of soap allegedly manufactured by the Germans from the corpses of murdered Jews.)

Ehrenburg is perhaps most infamous for his viciously anti-German wartime propaganda. In the words of the Canadian Jewish News: “As the leading Soviet journalist during World War II, Ehrenburg’s writings against the German invaders were circulated among millions of Soviet soldiers.” His articles appeared regularly in Pravda, Izvestia, the Soviet military daily Krasnaya Zvezda(“Red Star”), and in numerous leaflets distributed to troops at the front.

In one leaflet headlined “Kill,” Ehrenburg incited Soviet soldiers to treat Germans as sub-human. The final paragraph concludes: [2]

“The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day … If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German — that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German — that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German — that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill.”

Ehrenburg’s incendiary writings certainly contributed in no small measure to the orgy of murder and rape by Soviet soldiers against German civilians.

Until his death in 1967, “his support for the Soviet state, and for Stalin, never wavered,” theCanadian Jewish News notes. His loyalty and service were acknowledged in 1952 when he received the Stalin Prize. In keeping with official Soviet policy, he publicly criticized Israel and Zionism.

The Canadian Jewish News further writes:

“ … The recent disclosure that Ehrenburg arranged to transfer his private archives to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem library and archive, while still alive, comes as a stunning revelation. The reason this information has come to light only now is that Ehrenburg agreed to transfer his archive on condition that the transfer, and his will, remain secret for 20 years after his death. On Dec. 11 [1987], with the 20-year period expired, Israel’s daily Maariv related Ehrenburg’s story…”

The collection includes material about the important wartime Jewish partisan movement. Among the documents in the collection is one concerning a pogrom in Malalchovka, a village near Moscow, which took place in 1959.

This new revelation about one of the most influential figures of the Stalinist regime shows that, whatever he may have said for public consumption, Ehrenburg never privately disavowed Zionism or forgot his ancestry.

Notes