When the Daily 'Hate' Mail Supported Hitler

Racist for over a century against immigrants and those fleeing oppression

Ralph Miliband

The controversy over the Mail's anti-Semitism began over the attack on Ed Miliband's father, Ralph Miliband, whom I once debated and knew from the Socialist Society.  The idea that he 'hated' Britain is of course rubbish, but no doubt, like any socialist he hated the Britain of speculators, toffs, Cameroonians and privilege.  In other words, ruling class Britain complete with its prejudices and bias.  It is noticeable that in all her witterings, Melanie Phillips would have something to say about the newspaper which supported   the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists.  You might be fooled into thinking that the Daily Mail had an anti-fascist record as it attacks its opponents on the left as ‘fascists’. However the truth is a lot stranger. 

To dismiss the Miliband charges first.  The fact that the article was written by Geoffrey Levy, who is Jewish, is irrelevant.  Jews are as susceptible to the Mail Shilling as any one else.  It is what he wrote that is important and this was a vicious attack on a Marxist Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany, served in the navy, but who hated the class nature of Britain and its iniquities, such as the fact that a tax-exile in France can try and sully the reputation of the late Ralph Miliband.  It neatly conflates the fact of being Jewish and a refugee is to make one an 'enemy'.  So yes, the article was anti-Semitic and Levy is a collaborator of the Zionist brand.
　

Rothermere and friend

Rothermere supported the attempt to build fascism in Britain

In Nazi Youth in Control [Daily News 4.9.33] Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail wrote that

‘I WRITE from a new country on the map of Europe. Its name is Naziland. Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete,’ which is certainly one way of putting it.

Rothermere waxed lyrical about the attractions and support of German people for Hitler, ‘forgetting’ to mention that the total vote for the Communist KPD and SPD in the last free elections in November 1932, was greater than that for the Nazis.

'Something far more significant than a new Government has arisen among the Germans. There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth. Youth has taken command. On a visit, which I am paying to Northern Germany I find-, the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out of-the-way villages as in the largest cities.'

Like most ruling class apologists for Hitler (most were members of the Anglo-German Fellowship) Rothermere considered the reports about Nazi brutality were figments of the imagination:

‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for him self, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’

Rothermere made light of fascist violence against the workers of Italy under Mussolini, thousands of whom were butchered, comparing it to a nursery governess:

‘The administration of a few doses of castor oil to Communist adversaries.’  Perhaps in his visit he could have taken in the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

But it in his naked anti-Semitism, whereby he justified Hitler, that Rothermere showed his true contempt: Under the title

JEWISH OFFICIALS IN KEY POSITIONS
'THE German nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were 20 times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew. . It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.'

To Rothermere Hitler’s actions were to prevent Jewish ‘abuses’. They were of course entirely justified as there was in effect a Jewish conspiracy to take over the German Civil Service. What Rothermere omits to mention is the successive waves of legislation, beginning with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933 which de-Jewified the Civil Service (essay compare this with the Judaisation of the Galilee and other parts of Israel).

In other words Rothermere was quite prepared to justify anti-Semitism as the price of smashing communism and the labour movement. In this he was not alone. In his two-volume book on fascism, Robert Black quotes Lloyd George thus:

‘If the powers that be succeeded in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative-Socialist regime (SPD) nor a Liberal regime, but extreme Communism... A Communist Germany would be intimately more formidable than a Communist Russia.’ [Robert Black, p. 417, Fascism in Germany, pp. 296/297, Steyne Publications, 1975.
Nor was this attitude to anti-Semitism confined to non-Jews. Chaim Weizmann, President of the (World) Zionist Organisation and first President of the State of Israel wrote of Major Evans-Gordon MP, founder of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League, which campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia that:

‘"Looking back now, I think our people were rather hard on him." And why? Because:

The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen.’ To the Zionists anti-Semitism was a ‘natural phenomenon’ which could not be fought and this of course explains the collaboration with anti-Semitism including the Nazis (especially in the 1933-1939 period).

The Daily Mail is Zionist now (& sometimes anti-Semitic) but it reserves its venom for more recent immigrants

Of course today the pro-Zionist Daily ‘Hate’ Mail has transferred its venom onto Black and Asian immigrants but it is useful to remind ourselves what they said about the Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia in 1900 and Hitler in 1930:

The Mail not only denied the 'atrocity stories' Hitler but it opposed letting into Britain Jewish refugees

"The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage: the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed"

Indeed the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail did indeed warn of the Jewish peril. Throughout the 1930’s it and Lord Rothermere supported Hitler. In January 1934 appeared the famous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ article on the Mail’s front page. It was only after the BUF debacle at Olympia in July 1934 that the Mail began withdrawing its support.

The Mail's famous headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' -  an attempt to build a native fascist organisation

Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

Or go back further "They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare." Daily Mail, 3^rd February 1900.