Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West

by Michael A. Ledeen

Overview

From Accomplice to Evil: "The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes—from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis—who swear to destroy us and others like us, and we are repeating the errors of the recent past. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly."

Acknowledging the existence and actions of evil enemies means accepting that we are at war, and then designing and con duct - ing a strategy to win. Accomplice to Evil takes a com pre hensive look at the errors we have made in the past when dealing with a mounting enemy force, why we've refused to acknowledge the implications of a rising evil, and how we can defeat the forces that threaten us today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429986700
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	231 KB

About the Author

MICHAEL A. LEDEEN, a noted political analyst, is a Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is the author of The Iranian Time Bomb, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, and Tocqueville on American Character, and he is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

Michael A. Ledeen, a noted political analyst, is a Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is the author of The Iranian Time Bomb, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, and Tocqueville on American Character, and he is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Accomplice to Evil

Iran and the War Against the West

---

By Michael A. Ledeen

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2009 Michael A. Ledeen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8670-0

---

CHAPTER 1

SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

[State Department officials] have not only failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe but in their official capacity have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.

— January 1944 memorandum by U.S. Treasury Department officials entitled "On the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews."

THE HOLOCAUST

The refusal to see evil, and the deliberate denial of its existence, are very common, whether among policy makers, intellectuals, or reporters. The most famous case is the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the consequent mass murder of the European Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and other "inferior peoples." Despite the enormous literature on the Holocaust, it is still difficult to understand the determined resistance in Western capitals and leading newspapers (including The New York Times) to believe what was happening, let alone try to do something to save the victims.

Hitler's intentions could hardly have been clearer. His racist doctrine was spelled out in Mein Kampf, he reiterated it in all his major speeches both before and after his seizure of power, and he acted on it in many ways, moving the Jews out of entire sectors of German life, forcing them to wear special clothes, and then moving them out of German cities.

Very few leaders were willing to see it for what it was, even though it was obvious enough, from the very first. Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when the Nazis unleashed a wave of physical violence against German Jews and their enterprises, was well reported and well understood. From that moment, it should have been impossible for anyone to close his eyes to the fact that Hitler fully intended to annihilate the Jews of Germany, and eventually everywhere else that he could reach. The New York Times, which had a very mixed record on reporting the events of the Holocaust, described it on the front page in language that could not be misunderstood:

A wave of destruction, looting and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist Revolution swept over ... Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices ...

Nonetheless, great debates raged over the meaning of the word "elimination." Yes, it was said, Hitler promised to eliminate the Jews, but that didn't mean he intended to kill them. Some chose to interpret that as a simple desire to get them out of Germany, and there were several plans to relocate Jews to Africa, as well as the long-standing "homeland" in Palestine created by the Balfour Declaration.

So there was plenty of wiggle room for Western leaders, and for the most part they wiggled until the sight of the Nazi gallows concentrated their minds on the real threat. Until then, they preferred to deny what was clearly in front of their eyes and noses.

As Robert Conquest says,

The true criticism of Neville Chamberlain is that he could not really imagine a man like Hitler or a party like the Nazis. ... The notion that people who raised the alarm about Hitler in the 1930s were being immoderate and unreasonable was found in the Times and at All Souls, in all the blinkered and complacent crannies of the Establishment. The concept of a quite different set of motivations, based on a different political psychology, was absent.

But once Nazi armies started to march, it was obvious that he wanted the elimination of the Jews from every area under German control. Everywhere the Nazis went, the Jews were rounded up and shipped out. Even then, the facts were frequently denied.

By the second half of 1942, it was pretty clear that "elimination" meant physical destruction. As Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman note, a German railway officer commented that "Auschwitz surely must have become one of the biggest cities in Europe: so many people entered it, and no one ever left!" And in fact, the year before, a brave German industrialist named Eduard Schulte had learned about the Führer's orders to commence the Holocaust. In July 1942, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, had gone there to watch 449 Dutch Jews gassed. Schulte got the information and carried it to Switzerland, where he gave it to Jewish leaders, the most effective of whom was Gerhardt Riegner, of the minuscule World Jewish Congress (WJC). Riegner in turn passed it on to British and American consular officers in Geneva, asking that it be given both to high officials in Washington and to the WJC head, Rabbi Steven Wise.

Schulte was a proven source. He had previously passed on accurate information about German diplomatic and military operations, demonstrating both his reliability and his access to high levels of the Nazi regime. But the Americans didn't want to hear about it. By the time the information reached the State Department, it was already wrapped in dismissive language.

The American diplomats were annoyed at being asked to deliver a private message, even though some of them understood that, given the sensitivity of the information, it made sense to use coded cables rather than the public telegraph office. But they would have nothing to do with it. The European Bureau at Foggy Bottom called the report a "war rumor inspired by fear [another memo referred to "Jewish fears"] and what is commonly understood to be the actually miserable condition of those refugees...."

Schulte's information sat in the European Bureau. Roosevelt didn't see it.

Nonetheless, FDR must have known about the Nazi program to destroy the Jews. Churchill understood it from the outset, and a year before Schulte's first-hand account reached Switzerland, British intelligence had intercepted German SS transmissions about the "mass murder of Jews in every captured town and village" as the war unfolded. In August, Churchill was confident enough to say on the radio that "whole districts are being exterminated" in conquered Russian areas. It was "a crime without a name."

Churchill continued to talk about Nazi crimes, despite the Americans' reluctance to push the issue or take any action on behalf of the victims. At about the same time Schulte learned about the gassing of the Dutch Jews in Auschwitz, Churchill had sent a message to a big Jewish meeting in Madison Square Garden in New York, in which he said that the Nazis had killed more than one million Jews, and that "Hitler apparently will not be satisfied until the cities of Europe in which Jews live are turned into giant cemeteries." Those words were published on page four of the leading newspaper in Switzerland, the Neue Zuricher Zeitung. And if Churchill knew it, Roosevelt must have known it, too.

Over the course of the next several months, Rabbi Wise and other American Jewish leaders tried desperately to convince Washington policy makers that the information was accurate, and that something should be done. The diplomats resisted, arguing that "if the State Department confirmed the news it would 'come under pressure to do something.'" And they were not at all inclined to recommend any action that might, they said (and would continue to say), undermine the war effort.

At the beginning of the second week in December 1942, there was a meeting with the president, at which Wise finally presented Schulte's information. No doubt Wise believed he was bringing real news to the White House, since he could not imagine that FDR — a personal friend — would remain silent if he knew the facts. In the event, Roosevelt was not surprised in the least. We knew it, he said. The problem was what, if anything, could be done about it?

In other words, Roosevelt was not going to go public about the destruction of the European Jews. When he was publicly asked about it, as at a press conference on August 21, 1942, he danced around the matter. "We want news — from any source that is reliable — of the continuation of atrocities," he said. As if he didn't have it already. Indeed, he didn't need Schulte's report, or Churchill's intercepts. All he had to do was read The New York Times on December 4, four days before the meeting with Wise and the other Jewish leaders. The headline on the front page was explicit: "Two-thirds of Jews in Poland Held Slain." The Times reported that a million and a quarter Polish Jews were still alive, of an original population of three and a half million. But Roosevelt was still looking for reliable sources, and his diplomats were still pretending either that we did not know about it all, or that such information as we had was insufficiently documented.

Later in the month, the Americans had to be pressured by the Brits and eleven others (including eight governments-in-exile and de Gaulle's French National Committee) to sign on to a public statement that clearly described and condemned what they called "this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" of "hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children." The Americans reluctantly signed it, after losing editorial battles that would have made the statement less damning (the State Department wanted to modify "crimes" by putting "alleged" in front of it, for example). The final declaration was explicit and detailed: "None of those taken away are ever heard of again. ... The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions." The thirteen nations promised that those guilty of such crimes would be tracked down and brought to justice.

Nor were American Jewish leaders particularly energetic in pressuring the Roosevelt administration to act on behalf of their dying brethren in Europe. A colleague of Wise's wrote angrily in December 1942, "... what are you going to do about it? ... Why do you expose our memories to be spat upon by future generations because we acquiesced in the crime of inaction in such a time and did not try everything, I say everything in the world?"

But Wise's organization was tiny, and although he was predictably thwarted, in fact he was one of the more active advocates of action. The most effective public campaign came in 1943 from journalist Ben Hecht and supporters in the entertainment business, and it succeeded in the face of vigorous opposition from the government and from major Jewish organizations.

Hecht wrote a pageant, meant to be staged in theaters, called "We Will Never Die," that dramatized the contributions of Jews to Western civilization, and their current plight at the hands of the Nazis. It was spectacular in every sense, from a cast of hundreds to the oversized set, featuring two tablets of the Ten Commandments reaching forty feet in height. The closing scene consisted of fifty rabbis, refugees from Europe, chanting the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

Official Jewish opposition was based on numerous factors, ranging from a quite legitimate fear of provoking open anti- Semitism in America to long-standing divisions (both political and religious) within the Jewish community. The Roosevelt administration opposed it because they were opposed to increased numbers of Jewish refugees (a view shared by the Brits, who were opposed to letting large numbers of Jews into Palestine for fear of antagonizing the Arabs), and because it challenged the president's policy of "rescue through victory," which effectively postponed any positive action until the war was won.

Hecht and his coproducer, Peter Bergson, finally got support from Hollywood and Broadway stars, from Kurt Weill (who wrote the music), Moss Hart (who directed it), and an array of famous actors from Paul Muni, Sylvia Sidney, and Ralph Bellamy to Burgess Meredith and Luther Adler. It was staged first in Madison Square Garden in early March, then across the country from Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago to the Hollywood Bowl, where ten thousand people attended in mid-July.

Unlike the private approaches to the Roosevelt administration, the dramatic nationwide campaign actually had a considerable effect. Eleanor Roosevelt attended the show in Washington, and devoted one of her regular newspaper columns to it, openly sympathizing with the plight of the Jews. Such writing, and the coverage of the per for mances, brought the facts of the unfolding Holocaust to millions of American newspaper readers, for many of whom it was news.

Hecht and Bergson got lucky on timing: In the midst of the grand tour, British and American diplomats met in Bermuda to work out a common policy on the rapidly expanding population of Jewish refugees. After twelve days of deep thinking and animated debate, the delegates announced failure. The State Department wasn't prepared to open our doors to more refugees, and the men from Whitehall wouldn't listen to any scheme that would increase the Jewish population of Palestine.

By contrast, Bergson and Hecht argued that there were many steps the American government could take right away to save Jews from Hitler, steps that would not interfere with the war effort. For example, empty supply ships returning from Europe could be used to bring refugees who could be held in temporary detention camps. Or pressure could be put on countries such as Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, which were not yet occupied by the Nazis, to let their Jews emigrate. Later, the Bergson group would call for additional steps, such as bombing Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. This was too much, even for the quiescent American Jewish community, which denounced the Bermuda charade (the Jewish Frontier said the diplomats behaved "in the spirit of undertakers") and pushed for congressional action.

In early autumn, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a call for a new agency to rescue Jewish refugees, and hearings in the House of Representatives yielded a State Department official who drastically overstated the number that had already entered the country, thus adding impetus to the campaign.

It soon became obvious that the bill would pass both houses, and FDR judged it politically advantageous to take the action by himself, without waiting for the vote. He was no doubt encouraged to take the step after the damning Treasury Department report on the State Department's deliberate efforts to spike information about the European catastrophe. Roosevelt accordingly created the War Refugee Board in January 1944, which probably saved more than two hundred thousand lives and gave badly needed support to the heroic efforts of Raoul Wallenberg in Sweden.

Even so, it was a feeble reed in the terrible storm. On March 2, 1944, The New York Times ran a story from London on page four, reporting on the latest developments in Parliament. The British had created their own committee on refugees, and appropriated fifty thousand pounds to fund its efforts. But the real news came a bit further down:

... S. S. Silverman, Labor member, read a report from the Jewish National Committee operating somewhere in Poland, saying:

"Last month we still reckoned the number of Jews in the whole territory of Poland as from 250,000 to 300,000. In a few weeks no more than 50,000 of us will remain. In our last moment before death, the remnants of Polish Jewry appeal for help to the whole world. May this, perhaps our last voice from the abyss, reach the ears of the whole world."

This was not worth a headline, let alone placement on the front page. By then, the Times was telling its reporters in Europe, "Our readers are tired of horror stories. Cable only those of death tolls unusually large or deaths themselves unusually gruesome." Any reporter worth his inkwell could have sent dozens of such cables, but the editors didn't really mean it. When Raymond Arthur Davies, a Times reporter in Eastern Europe, tried to do it, they wrote back: "Jewish atrocity stories are not acceptable news material."

The State Department's experts could hardly have done better.

The practice of covering up Nazi atrocities was not limited to the State Department, or even to the annihilation of non-Americans. General Eisenhower ordered the documentation of the horrors of the Third Reich, but other American military officers imposed strict censorship on American soldiers who survived Nazi concentration camps. They were ordered to sign an affidavit denying they had ever had such experiences.

[Anthony Acevedo] was one of 350 U.S. soldiers held at ... a satellite camp of the Nazis' notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The soldiers, working 12-hour days, were used by the German army to dig tunnels and hide equipment in the final weeks of the war. Less than half of the soldiers survived their captivity and a subsequent death march ...

Soldiers like Acevedo were warned that they could not write or speak about their suffering. The affidavit they signed flatly stated "you must give no account of your experience in books, newspapers, periodicals, or in broadcasts or in lectures." The army claimed this was necessary "to protect escape and evasion techniques and the names of personnel who helped POW escapees," but the explanation isn't convincing. The vast majority of the survivors of Buchenwald didn't escape. They were liberated by the 6 Armored Division of Patton's Third Army. There was certainly no need to protect the names of the American liberators.

The same vow of silence was imposed on the survivors of the Bataan Death March and subsequent imprisonment, slave labor, torture, and execution that killed off nine of every ten Americans captured by the Japanese.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Accomplice to Evil by Michael A. Ledeen. Copyright © 2009 Michael A. Ledeen. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
1 SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL,
2 NONE SO BLIND AS THEY WHO WILL NOT SEE,
3 TO SEE EVIL,
4 DEFEATING EVIL,
CONCLUSION: IRAN AND THE WAR AGAINST THE WEST,
NOTES,
INDEX,