Many weeks later, Elizabeth Bentley finally walked into the FBI ready to do everything in her power to make amends to her native country.
In some ways it was simultaneously a triumph and a tragedy. For her, personally, it was a triumph. It was the chance she needed to square herself with her conscience and her country. However, in 1948, when she gave her sworn testimony before a congressional committee, it threatened to become a tragedy. The Communist press was joined by many so-called “liberal” factions to accuse her of being everything from a degenerate to a psychopathic liar or a victim of insanity. It took time and corroborative testimony of many witnesses to finally halt the clamor.
Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers have testified that they were both typical members of a small but extremely dangerous segment of Americans who, through misguided ideologies, swelled the ranks of Communism during the interval between World War I and the close of World War II. The vast majority passed through the same evolution—first, an ideological conversion followed by a desire to take action; secondly, an exposure to the hard-core realities of Communism in actual operation; and finally, an awakening followed by a dynamic determination to desert the delusion and fight it from the outside.
Fortunately for America, as well as for its citizens who served the Communist cause, these erstwhile members of the party usually returned to the American way of life more loyal to its principles than when they left. Only a few have still refused to open their eyes and ears to all that has been revealed. This unreclaimed group still labors day and night in a dedicated service to “the cause.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Communism and World War II
While Communist espionage channels were being perfected in the United States, similar subversive networks were being built throughout the world. Soon Stalin found the state secrets of all the major powers pouring in so fast that he was able to play the world-wide game of power politics like a professional gambler who sits at the poker table carefully planning his strategy as he reads the marked cards held by each of the other players.
We now know that it was from this supremely satisfying position of political omniscience that Stalin initiated a series of schemes which had their part in precipitating World War II. Defected Russian Intelligence officers have revealed that World War II was fomented and used by the Russian leaders as an important part of the long-range strategy for the expansion of World Communism. This chapter will answer the following questions:
• What is the explanation for Stalin’s attempt to reach a secret understanding with Hitler in 1933?
• Why did Stalin claim credit for starting World War II?
• Why did Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 surprise Communists throughout the world?
• Was Stalin caught off guard when Hitler scrapped the pact and attacked Russia?
• What was the U.S. attitude during the early months of the Nazi invasion of Russia? What changed that attitude?
• What do you deduct from this statement in 1942 by a Presidential advisor: “Generations unborn will owe a great measure of their freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people”? Did Allied leaders appear to have had a basic understanding of Communist strategy?
• How did the Communist leaders use Lend-Lease to get atomic bomb secrets?
• When did U.S. coexistence with Communism begin? Name the four steps of degeneration through which it passed. On what presumption was Russia made a full partner with the U.S. in shaping the post-war world?
• How do you account for the fact that the United Nations Charter follows the format of the Russian Constitution of 1936 rather than the format of the League of Nations? Would you feel there was any significance in the fact that the general secretary for the organization which drew up the charter was Alger Hiss?
• What was the attitude of the Communist leaders when they emerged from World War II as the second greatest political power on earth?
The Rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany
It is said that Communism was largely responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. It will be recalled that when the German Kaiser capitulated in 1918 the Communists tried to take over Germany. Anti-communist political groups immediately sprang up and through a frantic coalition they prevented the Communists from seizing power. It was in this anti-Communist atmosphere that Adolf Hitler began his political career. He joined the National Socialists (Nazi) Party which had a strong anti-Bolshevik platform and by 1921 he had become its leader.
Hitler organized his notorious Nazi Storm Troopers to retaliate against a spreading rash of Communist violence. He had his Brown Shirts trained in street fighting, rioting and the suppression of political opponents by direct physical attack. By 1923 the Storm Troopers numbered 10,000 and Hitler felt strong enough to try and take over the German province of Bavaria. But this uprising failed. Hitler was thrown into prison and while there began expressing his frustrated ambitions in a feverish manuscript on total war called Mein Kampf—My Battle. In this book Hitler revealed that he was not only bitterly anti-communistic but that he stood for outright violation of the Treaty of Versailles. He said he would fight for the complete restoration of Germany as a world power. He was planning for the creation of a great Nordic empire embracing all the people of German blood in Europe regardless of their national residence. Mein Kampf constituted a threat to every nation bordering on Germany. It also contained a threat against Russia because Hitler declared that the natural course of German expansion would eventually carry the Nazi conquest into the fertile Ukrainian agricultural region and then into the rich Russian oil fields.
Later as Stalin watched Hitler cudgel and jostle his way into power he recognized in the Nazi dictator a formidable opponent of his own breed and kind. He saw that Hitler was shrewd and ruthless. He was completely amoral. He had no compunction whatever against violence, the purging of his own people, the use of deceit in propaganda, nor the sacrifice of millions of lives to achieve personal power. Materialism had produced precisely the same product in Germany that it had produced in Russia. Although called by different names Nazism and Communism were aimed at the same identical mark and were forged in very similar ideological molds.
Perhaps this explains why Stalin secretly tried to negotiate a personal understanding with Hitler shortly after the latter came into power during 1933. One of Stalin’s leading secret agents, General W. G. Krivitsky, has furnished the details tails of these efforts.{75} When Stalin’s gestures of friendship were rejected by Hitler; Stalin knew the German Fuehrer could be dealt with only as an outright enemy.
Stalin then hastened to gain the sympathies of the democracies. He attempted to identify Russia’s policies with the political and economic welfare of freedom-loving people in other nations. He called this campaign the “Popular Front.” At the Seventh World Congress of the International in 1935, he instructed loyal Communists in every country to combine with any political groups which opposed Hitler and his allies—even right wing parties which the Communists had previously attacked. Judged by its results, the “Popular Front” was the most successful tactic ever adopted by Communist strategists. It permitted Communists to associate openly with the most conservative and highly respected political groups in capitalist countries.
The Communists Claim Credit for Starting World War II