Part 22

Dear General Rodriguez:

Upon receipt of this letter will you kindly communicate with me and advise me whether it would be possible for you to come to Los Angeles in the near future to make an address to our organization here. We shall be glad to defray all expenses which will include airplane both ways if you desire it. We shall also offer you bodyguard for your protection if you deem it necessary. Your fight is our fight and it is our desire to have you come to Los Angeles especially to confer with us relative to matters of vital importance to us both. I would suggest that if you can arrange to come, you telegraph me (charges collect) upon receipt of this letter so that I may make arrangements without delay.

Fraternally yours, HENRY ALLEN.

When I went to Mexico to look into Nazi activities, I gave a copy of this letter to the Minister of the Interior. At that time Allen was again in Mexico under the pretense of looking into his mining interests, but a check showed that he had actually gone there to confer secretly with a Mexican army man, General Iturbe. At my request the Mexican Government looked into Allen's movements and learned that he had entered Guaymas, center of Japanese activities, with Kenneth Alexander, Pelley's chief aid.

The connection between Ford's Mexican manager and General Rodriguez might be considered an unfortunate incident for which Ford could not be held responsible. This would be a reasonable assumption if the Nazi-Rodriguez-Ford tie-up in Mexico were an isolated case. The facts, however, show it is not.

The national leader of the Nazi propaganda machine in this country has been on the Ford pay roll. Kuhn was supposed to work for Ford as a chemist, but while on Ford's pay roll he traveled around the United States conferring with other secret Nazi agents and actively directing Nazi work in this country.

Ford has a highly developed and exceedingly efficient espionage system of his own which, among other things, watches what his employees do--even to their home life. Kuhn's activities were known to Harry Bennett, head of the Ford secret service or "Personnel Department," as it is called, and Bennett reports to Ford. Furthermore, Kuhn's Nazi connections had been publicized in both the American and the Nazi press and were no secret. Jews and Christians alike protested to Ford about his employee's anti-democratic work while on the motor magnate's pay roll, but Kuhn was left undisturbed to travel around organizing Nazi groups. In 1938 Ford was given the highest medal of honor which Hitler can give to a foreigner. No statement was ever made as to just what Henry Ford had done for the Nazi Fuehrer to merit the honor.

Simultaneously with Kuhn's intensified work, Ford's confidential secretary, William J. Cameron, became active again. Cameron was editor of Ford's Dearborn Independent when that newspaper published the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" after they had been proved to be forgeries. When a nation-wide protest arose from Jews and Christians who were shocked at seeing one of the richest and most powerful men in the country use his wealth to disseminate race hatred, and when the protest grew into a boycott of his cars, Ford apologized and discontinued the newspaper. But instead of easing his editor out or giving him some other job, he made him his confidential secretary.

When Kuhn went to work for Ford, the national headquarters of the Nazi propaganda machine was moved to Detroit, and the anti-democratic activities increased in intensity. Employing Nazi anti-semitism as the bait to attract dissatisfied and bewildered elements in the population, a new organization made its appearance: The Anglo-Saxon Federation, headed by Ford's private secretary. Headquarters were established in the McCormick Building in Chicago, Room 834, at 332 S. Michigan Ave. and in the Fox Building in Detroit.

In July, 1936, Cameron, obviously because Ford was violently anti-Roosevelt, stepped out as head of the organization and became its Director of Publications. When Winrod was raising money from American industrialists to support the Capitol News and Feature Service, Cameron was among the contributors.

The Anglo-Saxon Federation began to distribute the "Protocols" again. I bought a copy in the Detroit offices of the organization, stamped with the name of the organization. The introduction quotes Ford as approving of them. It states:

Mr. Henry Ford, in an interview published in the New York World. February 17, 1921, put the case for Nilus tersely and convincingly thus:

"The only statement I care to make about the 'Protocols' is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now."

When Ford was on the witness stand in a libel suit some fifteen years ago and admitted his ignorance of matters with which even grammar school children are familiar, the country laughed. His ignorance, however, is his own affair, but when he takes no step to curb his personal representative from working with secret foreign agents to undermine a friendly government, it becomes a matter, it appears to me, of importance to the people of this country and the Government of the United States.

FOOTNOTES:

The man who forged the "Protocols" originally and who subsequently confessed to having done so.

Nazi Agents in American Universities

The universities are too important a training ground for Nazi agents to ignore. A few professors in some of our universities have joined the growing list of anti-democratic propagandists. Some of them are German subjects and do not disguise their pro-Nazi bias; others carry on their propaganda as a "scholarly analysis" of the Hitler regime--with a fervor, however, that smacks of the paid propagandist.

German exchange students, too, studying at some of our universities, are active in various efforts to draw native Americans within the sphere of Nazi influence. Some of these students came here ostensibly to study for degrees, but devote most of their time to spreading Nazi ideology and meeting with secret Nazi agents and military spies. Such was Prince von Lippe of the University of Southern California.

Von Lippe is not an American citizen as so many of the agents are. With no visible means of support, he received expenses from a total stranger--oddly enough, Count von Buelow whose home overlooked the naval base in San Diego and who was constantly in conferences with Nazi agents. It was to Count von Buelow, you recall, that Hermann Schwinn brought Schneeberger as soon as he arrived on his way to Japan, and von Buelow took him around while Schneeberger photographed areas in the military and naval zone. A number of very secret conferences were held while Schneeberger was on the West Coast, in the home of Dr. K. Burchardi, a Los Angeles physician who visits Nazi ships with Schwinn and von Buelow (on one occasion Schneeberger summoned Burchardi to come with him to a Nazi ship which had just docked in Los Angeles--and the physician dropped his work and went).

German exchange students, when they enter this country, are under instructions to report to the German-American Bund. On July 4, 1936, three exchange students--a young lady and two young men--entered Los Angeles while on a motor tour of the country. They were students at Georgia Tech. In Los Angeles they went directly to the Deutsches Haus and presented a letter of introduction to Hermann Schwinn who assigned them quarters at the home of Max Edgan, one of Schwinn's lieutenants. The students then made a detailed report to Schwinn on the political work they were carrying out at Georgia Tech.

But the professors are the chief hope of Nazi agents attempting to spread the idea of totalitarian government and a bit of race hatred as the bait to attract some elements in the population. Some of the professors and some of their activities follow briefly:

Professor Frederick E. Auhagen, formerly of the German Department, Seth Low Junior College, Columbia University.

Dr. Auhagen came to this country in 1923 and worked as a mining engineer in Pennsylvania. From 1925 to 1927 he was with the Foreign Department of the Equitable Trust Co.; then became connected with Columbia University in 1927. He is not an American citizen and constantly refers to Germany as "my native country."

This professor is one of the leading academic apologists for Herr Hitler in the United States. Besides carrying on his pro-Nazi propaganda in the classroom, he does a great deal of lecturing, sometimes appearing before the Foreign Policy Association. On one occasion, in an address before the Men's Club of the Baptist Church at Rockville, Long Island, he stated that Seth Low Junior College was opened "in order to keep Hebrew faces off the campus at Columbia University."

Auhagen never tried to hide his sympathies with Nazism. Preceding a debate on February 1, 1936, before the City Club of Cleveland, he gave press interviews as a Nazi, and in the debate upheld Hitler as the savior of Germany and world civilization. With a fervor far removed from professorial calm, he explained that American newspaper dispatches about the treatment of Jews and Catholics in Germany were exaggerated.

"As to criticism of Germany's treatment of Catholics," he said again in Denver, Colorado on July 26, 1935, "that is not true!"

Professor Frederick K. Krueger, of Wittenberg college, with whom Auhagen is rather closely identified in arranging and giving talks about Nazis and totalitarian government, at every opportunity issues press interviews along the same line. In them he explains that the anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States press does not represent the editors, but is dictated by Jews who "control the press, the motion pictures and other organs of public opinion."