Seldom have historians asked themselves why Americans would want to stay out of foreign wars. In 1940 Americans knew that the last time the subject came up was during the 1916 election, when President Woodrow Wilson vowed to keep America out of World War I. He won the election and the following year persuaded Congress to enter what he claimed was “the war to end all wars” so he could “make the world safe for democracy.” Instead the peace treaty triggered the bitter nationalist reaction that generated political support for Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian movement. Clearly those who wanted America to enter foreign wars were utterly unable to anticipate the horrifying consequences. Thus in 1940-41 many Americans wanted nothing to do with the wars in Europe and Asia.

FDR figured that if he could provoke the Japanese to attack the United States, the American public would support a declaration of war against Japan. Since Japan was allied with Germany, a war with Japan would bring America into the war against Germany. FDR was anxious to help his beleaguered British friends, even though most Americans wanted to remain at peace.

Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy is a suspenseful detective story of that behind-the-scenes political scheming. The initial draft of the book was written by Percy L. Greaves, Jr., who served as chief of staff to the Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee, which investigated Pearl Harbor in 1945-46. Greaves combed through countless documents and interviewed all the major (and many minor) figures involved. He continued to investigate for many years afterward, finding key pieces of evidence overlooked by everyone else. After he died in 1984, his wife, longtime FEE staffer Bettina Bien Greaves, spent more than two decades turning the manuscript into a monumental scholarly achievement.

Pearl Harbor is among the most provocative mysteries in American history. In Greaves’s account FDR appears as the grand puppeteer manipulating events—even when this meant sacrificing American lives. While the Japanese bombing is almost universally described as an outrageous surprise attack, the book presents considerable evidence that it wasn’t much of a surprise to FDR. Although he probably didn’t know for sure where or when the Japanese would attack, he had many reasons to expect they would, and Pearl Harbor was a good bet to be the target.

As the book documents, in January 1940 the U.S. government began blocking exports to Japan, including strategic minerals, iron, steel scrap, and petroleum products like gasoline. Since the Japanese weren’t willing to abandon their ambitions for conquest in Asia, it should not have been surprising that they would attempt to retaliate against the United States. In fact, when questioned by his wife, Eleanor, about his economic policies toward Japan, Roosevelt admitted that they were driving the two countries toward conflict.

Moreover, in 1940 American cryptographers cracked the top Japanese diplomatic code—known as “Purple”—used to transmit messages. That enabled U.S. officials to learn a great deal about what the Japanese government was planning. Much of the intrigue and suspense in the book involves the interception and decoding of Japanese diplomatic messages. The research done by Percy Greaves demolishes the idea, long cultivated by FDR’s followers, that the attack on Pearl Harbor took the President and his military advisers completely by surprise.

What had FDR and his advisers known—and when? After reading the book it seems beyond question that the administration knew late on December 6 that a Japanese attack was imminent, with Pearl Harbor a likely target, and yet no one took immediate action to warn the endangered base. The two Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, were scapegoated to hide the administration’s incompetence and duplicity. After rigging a hasty “investigation” that declared Kimmel and Short derelict in their duty, the military engaged in a cover-up. Evidence was tampered with. Officers were pressured to have convenient “memory lapses” under questioning from counsel for Kimmel and Short. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall (famed for the postwar Marshall Plan) comes off looking especially bad in the book’s recounting of events.

The book has two important lessons for today. One is that using duplicity to enter foreign wars is likely to backfire with terrible consequences for the ordinary people of a nation. The other is that politicians will stop at almost nothing to make themselves appear great and heroic. I recommend this book highly.

Churchill, however, never waited idly for the world to construct his legend. From the 1890s onward, he strove to put himself in the places, especially the wars, where he would be best situated to advance his fame and realize his ambitions, and as he made his way through a series of adventures, he promptly wrote articles and books about each of them, thus shaping in large degree how others would view his actions. Moreover, he was an excellent writer; his articles and books sold very well, and in 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sharp wit and dazzling rhetoric enhanced his reputation.

In Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War,” Patrick J. Buchanan seeks to demolish the Churchill myth, along with several related ones, which he does with surprising success. I say “surprising,” not because the myth itself was ever unassailable—excellent historians, including Ralph Raico, long ago pounded Churchill’s feet of clay into dust—but because Buchanan is known primarily as an ideological polemicist. Yet in this book he presents respectably balanced and well-documented arguments for his theses. If he is not himself a professional historian, he has absorbed the works of scores of well-reputed historians, and he carefully assesses a number of counterarguments against his position. Although Buchanan presents no previously unreported facts, he offers abundant evidence expressed in clear, forceful prose. All in all, he makes a persuasive case.

Buchanan correctly views the two world wars as “two phases of a Thirty Years’ War.” He argues that both phases were unnecessary and that Great Britain “turned both European wars into world wars.”

For World War I, he maintains: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

For World War II, he maintains: “Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year war in which fifty million would perish.”

He argues that the decisive event in the run-up to World War II was not the infamous 1938 appeasement at Munich—because the Germans had good reason to reabsorb the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—but the 1939 guarantee, which was foolish of the British to make and foolish of the Poles to rely on. It was foolish because Britain had no means of defending Poland. When Hitler attacked in 1939, after Polish leaders refused to return Danzig to Germany, the British could only watch helplessly.

Buchanan begins his narrative at the end of the nineteenth century and ends it at the conclusion of World War II. Churchill occupies center stage in this extended drama because he “was the most bellicose champion of British entry into the European war of 1914 and the German-Polish war of 1939.” Along the way, Buchanan adduces evidence that Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria and nephew of King Edward VII, did not seek war with Great Britain (in 1910, he “marched in Edward’s funeral—in the uniform of a British field marshal”). Likewise, 30 years later, Hitler wished to avoid war with Great Britain, whose people and empire he admired: “His dream was of an alliance with the British Empire, not its ruin.”

The Lebensraum he sought lay to the east of Germany, not to the west. The Germans did not seek to “conquer the world,” despite frequent claims to that effect, and in any event, they lacked the means to achieve such a conquest.

No short review can depict the breadth, the depth, and the many fascinating details of Buchanan’s book. Read it and see for yourself. It may well challenge your most cherished beliefs about Winston Churchill and the world-shattering Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45.

For Mises, classical liberalism is the world view that liberates mankind from the ancien régime, with its systems of caste and class, favors and privileges, inequalities and injustices.² If groups of individuals wish to cling to their traditional identities and their longing for custom, tradition, and rituals, they are free to do so in the liberal society. But they are prevented, or at least greatly hindered, from imposing them on others, since the agency of government is limited to securing peaceful cooperation through a rule of law with equal treatment for all. Under limited government liberalism, the resentment, envy, and anger of some cannot be transformed into political malice and abuse toward others.

In the face of the ascending influence of socialist ideas, liberalism is the worldview and economic system, in Mises’s eyes, that can forestall the establishment of a terrible collectivist tyranny, which can only produce stagnation and poverty. Socialism is merely the old petty resentments and personal envy now cloaked in the rhetoric of a grandiose theory of economic and institutional exploitation and injustice. Worse, the triumph of socialism would introduce an economic system without a rational method for economic calculation. Thus socialism also would lead to waste, inefficiency, and a standard of living far below that of the market order it would replace.

All of these anti-liberal forces were set loose by World War I: socialism, nationalism, racism, and fascism. Together they cumulatively represented a counterrevolution against all that classical liberalism had advocated and succeeded in creating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were man’s return to the master and to chains. They heralded the end of the free man.

Behind the anti-Semitic aspect of collectivism’s counterrevolution, Mises believed, were envy and resentment against those who had succeeded socially and economically in the arena of free-market opportunity. While Mises did not discount the role of non-economic factors in generating anti-Jewish sentiments, especially in earlier ages, he was persuaded that the most important factor behind them in modern times was the frustration of those who had failed against competitors who happened to be Jewish or of Jewish ancestry.

Nazi race doctrine was unable to define and classify scientifically the incontestable characteristics of a “Jew” or an “Aryan.” Indeed, in the context of Europe’s long history of conquest and mixings of multitudes of ethnic and racial groups, there was no scientific meaning to a “pure” race in virtually any part of the continent. And after enumerating the many negative meanings that had been given to “Jewish” culture, attitudes, behavior, and influence on German society, Mises concluded that the only thing that could be found in common in them was that the critic did not like them. For example, the Jews were criticized for being either economic liberals in favor of rugged individualism or communists desiring the nationalization of the individual; for being either warmongers for profits or dangerous pacifists unwilling to fight for their country; for being either Zionist nationalists or rootless cosmopolitans with loyalty to no one; for being either crude materialists or utopian idealists; for being either advocates of democracy or agents of dictatorship. “Jew” was simply the covering term for whatever was disliked or considered undesirable in society.³

Pivotal Role

Yet it was a fact, as Mises pointed out, and as mentioned in part one, that the Jews played a pivotal role in the cultural and economic development of Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Those who resented the passing of older and more traditional forms of social order or who were unable to adapt as easily to the rising currents of market competition saw the Jew as the cause of their “misfortune.” The Jews were central to industrialization, modern commerce, railway infrastructure, and raw-material and resource development, especially in Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary–even though at no time did the Jews represent more than 1 percent of the population of the German Empire, and scarcely 5 percent of the population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

For traditionalist Germans, the Jews represented “modernity” and secularization–especially in its free market manifestation. For the various non-German nationalities in eastern Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Jews represented “German” cultural and economic domination, especially since the German and Austrian Jews saw German “culture” as the most enlightened and progressive force, something into which a large majority of them wanted to assimilate.⁴

But the fact remained that in the market, individuals continued to patronize the suppliers who could provide better and/or less-expensive products and services. People demonstrated their preferences and voted with their money for those with whom they found it advantageous to do business. As Mises explained it:

Many decades of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda did not succeed in preventing German “Aryans” from buying in shops owned by Jews, from consulting Jewish doctors and lawyers, and from reading books by Jewish authors. They did not patronize the Jews unawares–“Aryan” competitors were careful to tell them again and again that these people were Jews. Whoever wanted to get rid of his Jewish competitors could not rely on an alleged hatred of Jews; he was under the necessity of asking for legal discrimination against them. Such discrimination is not the result of nationalism or of racism. It is basically–like nationalism–a result of interventionism and the policy of favoring the less efficient producer to the disadvantage of the consumer.⁵

And if the Jews were to be blamed for bringing anti-Semitism on themselves it would have to be for their most meritorious qualities:

But if the cause of anti-Semitism were really to be found in distinctive features of the Jews, these properties would have to be extraordinary virtues and merits which would qualify the Jews as the elite of mankind. If the Jews themselves are to blame for the fact that those whose ideal is perpetual war and bloodshed, who worship violence and are eager to destroy freedom, consider them the most dangerous opponents of their endeavors, it must be because the Jews are foremost among the champions of freedom, justice, and peaceful cooperation among nations. If the Jews incurred the Nazis’ hatred through their conduct, it is no doubt because what was great and noble in the German nation, all the immortal achievements of Germany’s past, were either accomplished by the Jews or congenial to the Jewish mind. As the parties seeking to destroy modern civilization and return to barbarism have put anti-Semitism at the top of their programs, this civilization is apparently a creation of the Jews. Nothing more flattering could be said of an individual or a group than that the deadly foes of civilization have well-founded reasons to persecute them.⁶

Contributions Exaggerated

Mises did not assert that civilization was the result of the Jews. He pointed out that the anti-Semites greatly exaggerated the contribution of the Jews to modern society and its accomplishments. What was distinct about the German and Austrian Jews was that they were small minorities in the greater society who could easily be targeted for economic discrimination through interventionism, with no ability to politically prevent more powerful special-interest groups from using the state at their expense. And “the Jews” were able to serve as a convenient hook on which could be hung all the excuses for individual disappointment and national humiliation, especially in the wake of defeat in World War I.⁷

What the Vienna of Mises’s time demonstrated, especially in the decades before the war, is that classical liberalism in practice means the protection of freedom in reality. The reawakening of Jewish life in Germany and Austria was made possible by the Enlightenment culture of reason, experience, and individualism in place of superstition, blind faith, and cultural collectivism. The spirit of individualism fostered a growing environment of self-education and self-improvement in the Jewish community. However, that spiritual individualism would have been stymied if it had not coincided with the new epoch of political and economic liberalism in which the individual could apply his liberated mind to the external world.

But it was the ideology of interventionism and socialism put into practice in the period between the two world wars that enabled the prejudices of the envious and the resentful to be applied against their more successful competitors. Mises explained the methods by which the power of the interventionist state could be turned against a minority group such as the Jews:

If, for instance, members of the minority are alone engaged in a specific branch of business, the government can ruin them by means of customs provisions. In other words, they can raise the price of raw materials and machinery. In these countries [in post-World War I Central and Eastern Europe], every measure of government interference–taxes, tariffs, freight rates, labor policy, monopoly and price control, foreign exchange regulations–were used against minorities. If you wish to build a house or use the services of an architect from the minority group, then you find yourself beset by difficulties raised by the departments of building, of health, of fire. You will wait longer to receive your telephone, gas, electric, and water connections from the municipal authorities. The department of sanitation will discover some irregularities in your building. If members of your minority group are injured or even killed for political reasons, the police are slow in finding the culprit. Against such obstacles all provisions of minority protection are useless. Think of the assessment of taxes. In those countries, Chief Justice Marshall’s dictum “The power to tax is the power to destroy” was practiced against the minorities. Or think of the power that [occupational] licensing gives to a government.⁸

In the two decades following World War I the governments of Central and Eastern Europe, especially in countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, used these types of interventionist policies to prohibit and restrict economic opportunities for the Jewish populations. This was often accompanied with brutal acts of violence against the lives and property of Jews.⁹

It was precisely through such interventionist policies that the Jews were excluded from German social and economic life in the years following the triumph of Hitler’s National Socialist movement in 1933. During the first five years of the Nazi regime, restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions were imposed on the German Jewish community that completely reversed the previous hundred years of economic and social liberalization. Step by step Jews were legally banned from the professions, academia, the arts and sciences, and commerce, industry, and trade. This was matched by savage physical attacks on Jews throughout the country, in which thousands where killed, beaten, or arrested and imprisoned in the new system of concentration camps.¹⁰

What had taken five years to accomplish in Nazi Germany itself was achieved within weeks and months in Austria following its annexation to the Third Reich in March of 1938. The following, admittedly lengthy, passages from Bruce Pauley’s book on the history of Austrian anti-Semitism gives a chilling sense of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Vienna in the days and months after the Anschluss.

The night of 11–12 March 1938 marked the dramatic end of a thousand years of Austro-Jewish history. On Friday, 11 March, all the Jewish newspapers of Vienna published their usual weekly editions. By the next day their offices and those of other Jewish organizations had been seized by Nazis. Within a matter of days, or at most a few months, nearly all Austrian Jews had lost their means of livelihood and in many cases their homes as well. . . .

Gangs of Nazis invaded Jewish department stores, humble Jewish shops in the Leopoldstadt, the homes of Jewish bankers, as well as the apartments of middle-class Jews, and stole money, art treasures, furs, jewelry, and even furniture. Some Jews were robbed of their money on the street. All automobiles owned by Jews were confiscated immediately. Jews who complained to the police about the thefts were lucky if they escaped arrest or physical violence. . . .

SA men stood at the entrances of Jewish shops; Christians who entered the stores were arrested and forced to wear signs saying they were “Christian pigs.” . . . Within a few hours or at most a few days all Jewish actors, musicians and journalists lost their jobs. By mid-June 1938, just three months after the Anschluss, Jews had already been more thoroughly purged from public life in Austria than in the five years following Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. Tens of thousands of Jewish employees had lost their jobs. Only rarely were they given any warning or severance pay. Among those dismissed were all state and municipal employees (what few there were), including 183 public schools teachers, and employees of banks, insurance companies, theaters, and concert halls. Meanwhile, private Jewish businesses large and small were either confiscated outright or their owners were paid only a small fraction of the property’s true value. Jews were also excluded from most areas of public entertainment and to some extent even public transportation by the early summer of 1938; similar rules were not imposed on German Jews until November. Austrian Jews were also subjected to all kinds of personal insults and indignities that were not the result of official Nazi legislation. If a gentile streetcar passenger did not like the looks of a Jewish fellow passenger in the summer of 1938, he could have the trolley stopped and the Jew thrown off. The number of coffeehouses and restaurants that would not serve Jews grew from day to day. All of the public baths and swimming pools were closed to the Jews. Park benches all over the city had the words “Juden verboten” stenciled on them. Jews were not admitted to theater performances, concerts, or the opera. Numerous cinemas had notices saying that Jewish patronage was not wanted. Sometimes Jews were ejected from a motion picture theater in the middle of a performance if gentiles complained about them. SA men at times even stood at the last tramway stop in the suburb of Neuwaldegg in order to prevent Jews from strolling in the nearby Vienna Woods. . . .

After 2 July Jews were not allowed to enter certain public gardens and parks, and none at all after September 1939. At the end of September 1938 both Jewish physicians and Jewish lawyers lost their right to serve gentile clients. Only about fifty Jewish lawyers were able to make a living even briefly under these circumstances. After 5 October Jews were not permitted to enter sports stadiums as spectators. Shortly after the November Pogrom the Jews were not even allowed to appear in public during certain times of the day. After January 1939 they could not use sleeping or dining cars on railroad trains. . . .

The confiscation of Jewish homes and other kinds of wealth by Austrian Nazis both before and after Kristallnacht probably had less to do with Nazi ideology than it did with economic self-aggrandizement–that is, pure old-fashioned greed.

. . . Already by December 1938, 44,000 Jewish apartments had been Aryanized out of a total of about 70,000 [in Vienna]. . . . Jews were sometimes notified by a piece of paper on their front door that they had only a few days or even hours to move out of their apartments. . . . Likewise, the confiscation of Jewish jobs was also an answer to Viennese unemployment, which had been endemic during the entire interwar period, and especially in the 1930s.¹¹

Illusory Gains

In the spring of 1940, shortly before Mises left Geneva to come to the United States, he pointed out that Austria had had a thousand outstanding entrepreneurs before the Anschluss in 1938. Of these at least two-thirds had been Jews. Now, two years later, all of these Jews either had been tortured and murdered, or sent off to concentration camps, or expelled from the country. The supposed gains to the remaining Austrian population through confiscation and expulsion of their Jewish neighbors were all illusionary, Mises insisted, based on the crudest of Marxian fallacies:

The so-called Aryanization of firms was based on the Marxist idea that capital (machinery and raw material) and the labor input of workers were the only vital ingredients of an enterprise, whereas the entrepreneur was an “exploiter.” An enterprise without entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, however, is nothing more than a pile of rubbish and iron. Today the Aryanized firms, one and all, contribute nothing to exports. They are either working for the military or they have been liquidated. Commercial ties abroad, built up by more than one hundred years of unrelenting effort, have been broken. The core of skilled workers have been dispersed and displaced from its traditional skills.¹²

Thus the ideology of envy and the interventionist policies of discrimination under German National Socialism brought to a disastrous close the liberal epoch of freedom for the Jews in Austria. In 1938, Austria’s Jewish population had numbered around 250,000. By May 1939 only 121,000 were still in Austria, with most of the rest having emigrated. Those who were not able to leave ended up in the inferno of the Holocaust.¹³ According to one estimate, fewer than 300 survived the war in hiding in Austria.

Among those who left before or immediately after Germany’s annexation of Austria were many members of the Austrian school of economics or Mises’s private seminar circle (both Jews and non-Jews): Martha Steffy Browne, Gottfried Haberler, Friedrich A. Hayek, Felix Kaufmann, Fritz Machlup, Ilse Mintz, Oscar Morgenstern, Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, Alfred Schutz, Erich Voegelin, to name just a few. Mises had departed in the autumn of 1934 for a teaching position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva when it was clear that the collectivist darkness was starting to fall over the center of Europe. He made a new life for himself after 1940 in the United States, as did many of his Austrian colleagues and friends, where the spirit of freedom was not yet in the same shadow of tyranny as in their native country. America, for them, was still a land where Austrian Jews such as Mises could breathe the air of liberty.

For many Austrians, and especially Austrian Jews, there long remained a nostalgia for the old Vienna before World War I. It represented peace, freedom, security, and certainty with its liberal values and apparent tolerant atmosphere in which a vast diversity of peoples lived and worked, and culturally gained from each other. As the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig expressed it, “It was sweet to live here, in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation, and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.”¹⁴

Yet this appearance was deceiving. Beneath the surface, anti-liberal currents were at work that brought this idyllic epoch to an end. In too many people’s hearts and minds, collectivist attitudes and sentiments dominated their conduct and desires. Ludwig von Mises explained the problem and danger in the years immediately after World War I. The mentality of people had lagged behind the political and economic changes in nineteenth-century society. Institutions had been transformed more rapidly than the everyday psychology of men. And a counterrevolution against freedom had emerged. It was characterized by the migrations of a growing multitude of people from the countryside to the cities, from traditional society to urban life, Mises argued:

Immigrants soon find their place in urban life, they soon adopt, externally, town manners and opinions, but for a long time they remain foreign to civic thought. One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume. It must be earned–earned with the effort of thought. . . . The growth of the towns and of the town life was too rapid. It was more extensive than intensive. The new inhabitants of the towns had become citizens superficially, but not in ways of thought. . . . More menacing than barbarians storming the walls from without are the seeming citizens within–those who are citizens in gesture, but not in thought.¹⁵

Classical liberalism requires not only a political and economic philosophy. Its survivability is also dependent on an attitude and a philosophy of life: the accepting of self-responsibility for both successes and failures; a respect for others as individuals; a realization that peace of mind comes only from within, and that purpose and meaning cannot be bought at others’ expense; and an understanding that one’s own freedom, and that of others, should not be traded away for a few pieces of silver and a false sense of security through political paternalism.

Men’s unwillingness or inability to adopt this wider and deeper sense of a true citizenship of liberty brought all the ruin of the last 100 years, including the barbaric extermination of the Jews of Europe and the destruction of an entire continent in World War II. After analyzing the collectivist roots of Nazism and the anti-Jewish attitudes of both Germans and many others at that time, Mises concluded: “Mankind has paid a high price indeed for anti-Semitism.”¹⁶

Notes

1. Mises’s monumental work on Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), originally published in 1922, is not merely a logical argument against the possibility of socialist central planning–which of course is a centerpiece of the book. It is also a sweeping and majestic analysis of the social, cultural, and political potential of a free and classical liberal community, and the poverty and destructive tendencies of all forms of collectivism. His 1927 volume, Liberalism (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985) presents an integrated and coherent exposition of the truly humane world that a liberal society can bring mankind. All these themes on the nature of the free society were brought together in his masterful treatise, Human Action (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996). On Mises as social and political philosopher, see Richard M. Ebeling, “Planning for Freedom: Ludwig von Mises as Political Economist and Policy Analyst” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Competition or Compulsion? The Market Economy versus the New Social Engineering (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2001), pp. 1–85.
2. See Ludwig von Mises, “The Clash of Group Interests” [1945] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Money, Method and the Market Process: Essays by Ludwig von Mises (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Press, 1990), pp. 202–14; and Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 112–22.
3. Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 171–77.
4. Many of these assimilated Jews were embarrassed and ashamed of their “eastern cousins” who continued to follow more traditional Jewish cultural and religious forms. Their physical appearance and religious practices seemed a reminder of what they had chosen to escape from. And the arrival of these more orthodox Jews in Berlin and Vienna in the years both before and after the first World War was viewed with great unease. Indeed, the assimilated Jews were fearful that their country orthodox cousins would make them look “bad” in the eyes of their non-Jewish neighbors. They would be tarred with the negative impressions these orthodox Jews would (and did often) create in the minds of non-Jewish Germans and Austrians. See Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: Eastern European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), pp. 195–205; and Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), pp. 231–57.
5. Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 184.
6. Ibid., pp. 184–85.
7. Indeed, though Mises does not draw attention to this point, what most German and Austrian Jews shared with their non-Jewish countrymen was an enthusiasm for German imperialism on the eve of World War I, and they served in the German army in a proportion far in excess of their percentage in the general population. They also shared the same resentments and feelings of humiliation with the defeat of the German and Austrian armies at the end of the war, especially in the wake of the peace terms imposed by the Allied powers in 1919. See Elon, The Pity of It All, pp. 297–354; Howard M. Sachar, Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 205–82; and Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The perversity, as Mises does point out, is that many of the non-Jews in Germany tried to maintain their mental equilibrium in the face of German’s defeat by looking for a scapegoat for the humiliation of 1919 and found it in a Jewish “stab in the back.” See Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 187: “It was salvation for the self-esteem of all these disheartened souls when some generals and nationalist leaders found a justification and an excuse: it had been the work of the Jews. Germany was victorious by land and sea and air, but the Jews had stabbed the victorious forces in the back. Whoever ventured to refute this legend was himself denounced as a Jew or a bribed servant of the Jews. No rational argument could shake the legend. . . . It must be realized that German nationalism managed to survive the defeat in the First World War only by means of the legend of the stab in the back.” Mises later developed the theme of envy and resentment as the foundation for anti-capitalist attitudes; see Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).
8. Ludwig von Mises, “Postwar Reconstruction” [1941] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 3: The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 13.
9. On how such interventionist policies were used against the Jews in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the period between the two World Wars, see Sachar, Dreamland, and Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1983); see also P. G. J. Pulzer, “The Development of Political Antisemitism in Austria” in Josef Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria: Essays on Their Life, History and Destruction (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), pp. 429–43.
10. For detailed accounts of the growing political and interventionist discrimination and prohibition on the social, civil and economic liberties of the Jews in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 43–105; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam Books), pp. 48–69; J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, 1933–1945, Vol. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), pp. 521–67; Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 113–158; Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989); Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper/Collins, 1997); Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 82–102; also, Stephen Roberts, The House that Hitler Built (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), pp. 258–67; and Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publications Society of America, 1938), pp. 392–421; on anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s, see, Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2001), pp. 43–81. And on the response of the Jews in Germany to mounting interventionist discrimination and violence in the 1930s, see John V. P. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
11. Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 275, 280–84, 288–90.
12. Ludwig von Mises, “A Draft of Guidelines for the Reconstruction of Austria” [1940] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 3: The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction, pp. 135–36.
13. For an account of how it was the rise of immigration barriers across Europe and North America in the post-World War I period that closed the door and determined the fate of many German and Austrian Jews who therefore had no route of escape from the Nazis, see Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust, pp. 103–32; also Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967); and David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). On the general development and effects of immigration restrictions, see, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).14. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [1943] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 13.
15. Mises, Socialism, p. 38.
16. Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 192.

by Albert L. Weeks

Rowman & Littlefield • 2002 • 201 pages • $60 hardcover; 24.95 paperback

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

For most of the period since the end of  World War II the general interpretation about the role of the Soviet Union in the events leading up to the beginning of the war in 1939 ran something like the following:

In the 1930s Great Britain and France had failed to show decisiveness in standing up to the growing threat from Hitler’s Germany. Stalin, in the Soviet Union, had a clearer understanding of this threat and showed greater resolve to resist fascism’s increasing power. He ended the Soviet Union’s aggressive propaganda against the West, and attempted to form a “popular front” with other anti-fascist nations and groups in Europe on the basis of “collective security.”

Britain’s and France’s appeasement policies, which allowed Hitler to occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and early 1939, made Stalin realize that to save the Soviet Union from having to possibly face Nazi aggression alone without support from the Western powers, he had to “buy time” to build up Soviet military defenses. Thus, he chose to enter into a nonaggression pact with Hitler in August of 1939. He agreed in a secret protocol of that pact to divide up Poland with Nazi Germany in the event of war breaking out, so as to widen the buffer zone separating Nazi military power from the Soviet heartland. Stalin’s fears were proven right when Hitler broke the pact in June of 1941 and invaded the USSR.

It may have been unsavory and unfortunate for the Poles, who had their nation carved up by the two totalitarian giants in September 1939; or for the Finns, who were invaded by the Red Army and lost border territory to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1939-1940; or for the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were annexed by Stalin in June 1940; or for the residents of the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovia, which were also occupied by Stalin’s forces in June 1940. But these lands provided “breathing space” for the Soviet Union to peacefully prepare for the inevitable war and do its part, after it was invaded, to destroy the Nazi threat to humanity.

This interpretation has been increasingly challenged over the last two decades. Ernst Topitsch’s Stalin’s War (1987), Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker (1990), and Heinz Magenheimer’s Hitler’s War (1998), for example, all argue that Stalin’s purpose was not to protect the Soviet Union from an early attack. Instead, Stalin’s strategy was to intentionally create the conditions for a war to more easily break out between Nazi Germany and the Western powers. Such a war would weaken the “capitalist nations” and produce the conditions for communist revolution throughout Europe at the point of Soviet bayonets and tanks.

These authors also have argued that Stalin was planning an aggressive war against Nazi Germany, with the only problem being that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union before Stalin could break the nonaggression pact and invade Germany. Magenheimer even reproduced maps from the Soviet archives showing the planned directions of attack into the German heartland by Soviet military units. The differences of opinion among these writers have been about the date for Stalin’s aggressive war on Germany. Was it to have been in the summer of 1941 or the spring of 1942?

The latest work on this theme is Albert Weeks’s Stalin’s Other War. Weeks has drawn on the latest findings in the formerly secret Soviet archives to carefully explain and contrast these two historical interpretations of Stalin’s policies between 1939 and 1941. But it is clear that he is impressed by the documentation that substantiates the case for seeing Stalin as an active and aggressive force for bringing about the start of the Second World War.

Lenin believed that World War I served as the catalyst for weakening the “capitalist nations.” Out of their war with each other came the opportunity for socialist revolution and the overthrow of the property-owning “exploiters.” The proof of this, according to Lenin, was shown by the success of his Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia in 1917 and maintaining their control over one-sixth of the landmass of the world when the war was over.

Stalin accepted Lenin’s view and believed that another equally exhausting new world war among those capitalist nations would enable the socialist revolution to be extended all the way across the European continent. In a secret speech before Communist Party members in January 1925, Stalin said that the Soviet Union would not be able to stay out of a future war; but when action was taken by the USSR it should be at the end of the conflict to tip the scales toward an outcome favorable for world revolution.

Weeks argues that Stalin’s appeal for “collective security” in the 1930s was not to defeat fascism, but to prevent Britain and France from aligning with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In the typical Marxist paranoia of class conspiracy and conflict, the trick, in Stalin’s mind, was to prevent all the capitalist countries from ganging up on the homeland of socialism in Soviet Russia.

Weeks includes as an appendix to his book a translation of a previously secret speech that Stalin delivered on August 19, 1939, four days before the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact was signed in Moscow on August 23. Stalin explained that peace prevented the spread of communism; war, on the other hand, provided the destruction and destabilization that was the entrée to revolution.

Comrades! It is in the interest of the USSR, the Land of the Toilers, that war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc. Everything must be done so that the war lasts as long as possible in order that both sides become exhausted. Namely for this reason we must agree to the pact proposed by Germany, and use it so that once this war is declared, it will last for a maximum amount of time.

If the Nazis were defeated, Stalin argued, “the sovietization of Germany follows inevitably and a Communist government will be established.” And if the war had weakened the Western allies enough, “This will likewise ensure the sovietization of France.”

If the Nazis were to win at the end of a long war they would be exhausted and have to rule over a large area, which would preoccupy them from attacking the Soviet Union; and “these peoples who fell under the ‘protection’ of a victorious Germany would become our allies. We would have a large arena in which to develop the world revolution.” But regardless of the eventual victor, the Communist Parties in all these countries needed to keep up their propaganda and subversion so the groundwork would have been prepared for that revolution when the time came.

Thus, in Stalin’s mind, Hitler’s drive for a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany was in fact a tool for him to use for advancing the global cause of communism. By freeing Hitler of the fear of a two-front war, Nazi Germany would invade Poland, the British and French might then declare war on Germany, and a prolonged war in central and western Europe would drain the capitalist nations, while leaving the Soviet Union neutral in the world conflict. This would enable Stalin to continue to build up Soviet military power, enter the war at a time of his own choosing, and bring communism to Europe through use of the Red Army.

But the collapse of France in June 1940 changed the configuration of forces and the likely length of the war. Hitler attempted to draw Stalin actively into the Axis alliance against the British Empire in November 1940; when that failed because Stalin’s price for participation seemed too high, Hitler ordered the plans to be set in motion for the invasion of the USSR in the spring of 1941.

From the documents that have started to become available in Moscow, Weeks explains, it is evident that Stalin now shifted to a more aggressive military strategy against Nazi Germany. A huge military buildup of Soviet forces along the border with Germany (in what had been Poland) was set in motion. But the controversy has been about whether this buildup was for defensive or offensive purposes.

The documents show that no plan or preparations were organized for the construction of defense positions. The deployment and order of battle were virtually all consistent with an offensive strategy, not the repulse of an anticipated attack. The configuration of these forces explains why the Germans faced no serious defense positions when they invaded, and why they were able to initially capture so many Soviet soldiers and advance so rapidly into Soviet territory—in the first six months of the German invasion seven million Red Army soldiers were either captured or killed, and 500,000 square miles of Soviet territory were occupied.

Furthermore, there has come to light the full text of a Soviet General Staff document from May 15, 1941, that explicitly presents the plan to “Preempt the enemy by deploying against and attacking the German Army at the very moment when he has reached the deployment stage but is still not able to organize its forces into a front or coordinate all his forces.”

Was this just a plan prepared by the Soviet military, or was this reflective of Stalin’s intentions? Ten days earlier, on May 5, Stalin spoke at a reception for recent graduates of Red Army officer schools, and declared that the time for mere defense was over now that the Soviet military had been reconstructed and was ready for battle. “Now is the time to go from defense to offense.”

It is fairly clear, now, that Stalin, having helped to start the Second World War through his pact with Hitler, was readying to attack Germany and begin the process of sovietizing the European continent. Hitler, guided by his own aggressive ambitions, merely beat him to the punch by striking first. But even out of the actual turn of events, Stalin succeeded in imposing communism on half of Europe for almost half a century.

Stalin, however, was not pleased with even this outcome. At the Potsdam Conference, after the defeat of Germany, President Truman went up to Stalin and congratulated him on the Soviet Army’s conquest of Berlin. Stalin glumly replied that the Russian Army under Czar Alexander I had reached Paris in the war against Napoleon.

Richard Ebeling is president of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

by Joshua Muravchik

Encounter Books • 2002 • 417 pages • $27.95.

Reviewed by Tyler Cowen

The history of socialism is a sad, bitter, and bloody story. Arguably it is mankind’s greatest tragedy of all time. Joshua Muravchik notes that regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered over 100 million people since 1917. Nor have those same regimes brought economic prosperity or equality of opportunity, as the rhetoric of socialism invariably promises.

Muravchik is well positioned to present such a history of socialism. He grew up in a socialist family where socialism was treated as a religious faith, and he was once national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League. He is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a very learned man.

The book starts with the role of Babeuf in the French Revolution, a key advocate for socialism. We then hear about Robert Owen’s experimental socialist colony in New Harmony, about Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Mussolini, and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. The final section of the book deals with the socialist collapse, covering American labor leaders, Deng and Gorbachev, and the fall of social democracy as an ideal. Each chapter is clear, to the point, and full of facts. The author focuses on portraits of thinkers who have been instrumental in propagating the socialist philosophy and its corresponding economic institutions. Those portraits are simultaneously enlightening and depressing.

The book nonetheless reads as a disappointment overall. It is difficult to find a central thesis about why socialism was ever so appealing, or why it was subsequently given up by so many. We are told repeatedly that socialism was a utopian vision that sought to remake the world. True, but why would such an obviously flawed idea enjoy such a long and broad reign? What is the underlying human imperfection behind the attraction to socialism? Given the author’s background, it is odd how little psychological insight the book conveys. Instead we get a tightly controlled narrative, fine as far as it goes but never gripping or compelling.

The choice of subject matter is problematic as well. Why start with Babeuf and the French Revolution? It is unlikely that the true root of the socialist ideal lies with this thinker, despite the author’s claim that the French Revolution was the “manger in which socialism was born.” Babeuf is instead one in a long line of mistaken visionaries, drawing his ideas from numerous longstanding elements of the Western tradition, including Christianity. In any case, surely socialism is but one example of a broader, more common kind of error, and presumably an error that still lies with us.

There is little else in this book to criticize, other than its failure to take more chances. The book would have been better, I believe, if the author had tried to establish insightful psychological portraits, going far beneath the surface, of leading socialist thinkers. Such portraits would help the reader understand how such smart people could have adhered to such vicious fallacies even in the face of strong intellectual criticism and evidence of their failure in practice. Furthermore, the different portraits could have been done so as to draw out elements of commonality or contrast, and relate a core thesis to the social-science literature on belief, cognition, psychology, or economics.

My favorite hypothesis for the popularity of socialism (and numerous other ideologies) cites the capacity of human beings to deceive themselves, considering only information that supports their point of view. This self-deception faculty is rampant in human nature and human history. Still, we would like to have some indication of when the tendency for self-deception gets turned on to such a strong extent, and how it becomes socially validated and extended. On this point much work remains to be done.

In the meantime, it is always useful to have a book that reminds us of the socialist tragedy of the twentieth century. And for those of us who do not know the relevant history, Muravchik offers a highly readable and trustworthy source on numerous personalities and events associated with that tragedy. But Heaven on Earth does not offer what I buy books for, namely, the “A-HA!” feeling of some new insight or perspective.

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a contributor to www.volokh.com and www.marginalrevolution.com. His most recent book is Creative Destruction.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

by Charles Wheelan

W. W. Norton • 2002 • 288 pages • $25.95 hardcover; $15.95 paperback

Reviewed by E. Frank Stephenson

Charles Wheelan’s goal in writing Naked Economics is to introduce people who might otherwise have avoided economics texts and courses larded with graphs and equations to “a subject that is provocative, powerful, and highly relevant to almost every aspect of our lives.” Wheelan largely achieves his commendable goal, for Naked Economics is a nifty primer that does indeed “walk through some of the most powerful concepts in economics while simplifying the building blocks or skipping them entirely.”

Not surprisingly, since the author’s day job is writing for The Economist, the chapter on international trade is one of the book’s strongest. He begins the chapter by asking readers to imagine there is an invention that, in rich and poor countries alike, is capable of turning corn into stereo equipment, soybeans into cars, or Windows software into fine French wines. Wheelan then reveals that such an invention already exists. It’s trade. From that beginning, he proceeds to explain that trade makes us richer by allowing greater specialization in production, is mutually beneficial because it is based on voluntary exchange, and helps consumers by lowering the prices they pay for both imported and domestic goods. Not yet finished extolling the virtues of international trade, Wheelan turns to slaying the myths of “sweatshop labor” and a trade-fostered environmental “race to the bottom.”

Wheelan’s chapter titled “The Power of Markets” is another of his better ones. He uses the question “Who feeds Paris?” as a springboard for explaining how markets are “a powerful force for making our lives better,” how they use “prices to allocate scarce resources,” how “markets are self-correcting,” and how “every market transaction makes all parties better off.” And readers of this magazine will be reminded of F. A. Hayek and Leonard Read when the author writes that “Prices are like giant neon billboards that flash important information.” The only significant weakness of this chapter is Wheelan’s nearly exclusive focus on market outcomes; the chapter could have been strengthened by the inclusion of more discussion about the mechanics of how markets work.

Although he does not credit it by name, Wheelan also provides a nice introduction to the public-choice school of economics. In the chapter “The Power of Organized Interests,” he takes on pork-barrel spending and logrolling, and reveals how small interests such as mohair farmers and ethanol producers can effectively wrangle beneficial legislation out of the political process. The chapter also introduces the concept of rent-seeking and explains how regulations such as occupational licensing can become powerful tools for self-interested individuals to extract rewards that they would be unable to obtain in the marketplace.

There’s much else to like about Naked Economics. Wheelan debunks the notion that “overpopulation” hinders economic growth and skewers the fixed-number-of-jobs fallacy underlying France’s 35-hour workweek. He recognizes the importance of property rights and institutions. He discusses inflation as a tax on money holdings and the government’s ability to use monetary policy for political purposes (the political business cycle). And Wheelan correctly labels Social Security “one big pyramid scheme,” even though his discussion focuses more on demographic issues than on liberty.

Unfortunately, as Burton Malkiel notes in his foreword, Naked Economics is “well balanced.” Thus while one does get nice treatments of markets, trade, and public choice, one must also endure Wheelan’s views on SUVs, suburban sprawl, fast food, global warming, and trade-induced “cultural homogenization.” Readers sharing this magazine’s love of freedom should expect to utter an occasional groan. On the topics of externalities and macroeconomic policy in particular, Wheelan envisions a large and active role for government.

A minor complaint is also in order. Readers who believe not all economic research is mathematical gibberish will be pleased that Naked Economics is sprinkled with examples of economists’ relevance. However, the citations are somewhat erratic, and there are some noteworthy omissions (including James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s pioneering research in public choice, and Adam Smith in the chapter on markets; the trade chapter contains too much Paul Krugman and too little David Ricardo).

Early in the book, Wheelan writes, “Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.” Indeed, so is Naked Economics. Although the reader must endure occasional outbursts of statism, the trade-off is well worth it, for Charles Wheelan has written a lively introduction to the sexiest discipline known to mankind, economics.

Frank Stephenson is an associate professor of economics at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.

Speer was among the top National Socialists put on trial at Nuremberg. There he incurred the wrath of his co-defendants by blaming Hitler and admitting personal guilt for having contributed to his evil regime. This sincerity on Speer’s part may have saved him from the hangman’s noose, for when the penalties were announced, he was not condemned to death, but “only” to twenty years in Spandau prison.

In his two books (Inside the Third Reich and Spandau), both based on notes written in prison and smuggled out, he portrays himself basically as “unpolitical” and generally unaware of the Nazi atrocities. But now to set history straight, we have Gitta Sereny’s account.

Sereny, Austrian-born, educated in France and England, and married to an American, has lived for years in London and is a British journalist.^[1] Into That Darkness, her book about Franz Stangl, Nazi Commandant of the Treblinka death camp, attracted Speer’s attention when it was published. He wrote Sereny in 1977, and after some correspondence and months of lengthy phone calls, they collaborated on a profile of him for the London Sunday Times Magazine. They spent almost three weeks in conversation working on the profile and in the course of this decided to work together on a book.

Under Sereny’s relentless questioning, Speer explored the past, trying to discover the truth which he had unconsciously kept hidden even from himself. Sereny gained respect for his sincerity in his personal “battle with truth.” Four years into their relationship, in September 1981, Speer died.

Sereny decided to complete the book alone and proved herself a skillful sleuth. She interviewed every friend and associate of Speer’s who agreed to see her. In time Sereny found out a great deal about Speer, his life, family, friends, emotions, ideas, and the Nazi regime. This prodigiously researched book is a remarkable tour de force—it is biography, history, psychoanalysis, and detective story all combined.

Speer was bright, ambitious, hard-working, and energetic, but by his own account not a particularly brilliant architect. Yet, he was an exceptional person—capable, disciplined, thoughtful, conscientious, resourceful, and talented, as evidenced by his account of how he survived twenty years of confinement at Spandau. But he was also aloof, self-centered, proud, and incapable of close friendship.

Speer’s early success began when, after completing in record time a couple of assignments for the National Socialist Party, he came to Hitler’s attention. Hitler, a frustrated architect himself, felt drawn to this attractive young architect and Speer soon became one of Hitler’s inner circle. Speer was seduced in large part by the opportunities Hitler gave him to fulfill his architectural ambitions—to design grandiose structures, spectacular parade grounds, elaborate government offices, and even the entire city of Berlin with a massive triumphal arch and an ostentatious domed hall.

In the summer of 1941, however, Speer turned to war work and erected factories all over Europe for war production and air raid shelters. He also directed the repair of bomb-damaged transport facilities in the conquered East. Then in February 1942, Speer was named Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and Munitions Production. Speer’s efficiency in planning and organizing production, which had been demonstrated in his construction projects, made him invaluable to the war effort. He became No. 2 in Germany in terms of power and authority. Thus Speer, one of the best and brightest, joined the “worst” at the top of the Nazi hierarchy. As Minister of Armaments he had to use great ingenuity to acquire workers and keep armament production going during the war. Millions of forced laborers were brought from the east, from concentration camps, and from German-occupied territories to work long hours, often under dreadful conditions, in the plants he willingly controlled. His use of forced labor was the basis for the principal charge against him at Nuremberg.

In spite of his powerful positions and his close association with Hitler, Speer claimed at Nuremberg that he had always remained ignorant of most of the Nazi crimes. After Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) when Jewish synagogues, shops, and homes were burned, he admitted only to having been disturbed by the disorder of broken windows and smoldering buildings; he claimed no knowledge of what such maltreatment of the Jews foretold. He admitted that he should have known but, teflon-coated to the end, he succeeded in convincing himself and others that he had known little about the Nazi brutalities.

Sereny was determined to discover the true extent of his knowledge about the maltreatment of forced laborers and about the persecution and extermination of the Jews and other minorities. She became convinced that he was concealing the truth even from himself. For weeks, with his too pat answers to all such questions, well-honed and practiced over years, he succeeded. Only at the very end did she ferret out a confession from him which, she believed, if stated at Nuremberg would have condemned him to death.

1.   Gitta Sereny’s father died when she was just two years old. She and her older brother were raised by their mother, Margit Herzfeld Sereny, in chaotic, inflationary Vienna of the 1930s. In 1938 their mother remarried and became Mrs. Ludwig von Mises. As a student and friend of Professor and Mrs. Mises, I came to know Gitta personally.