Institute For Historical Review - IHR

In June 1945 the US Army Chemical Warfare Service prepared a 30-page plan for a preemptive poison gas attack on Japanese cities.

Major General William N. Porter approved the top-secret report. Only five copies were made. Its existence became public in July 1991.
The plan designated 50 urban and industrial targets. Twenty-five cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe and Kyoto, were listed as especially suitable for gas attacks. Detailed maps showed the gas attack zones.

Tokyo was the largest target. The first attack was set for 15 days before the planned November 1 Kyushu landings.
American bombers were to drench Tokyo and other cities in an early-morning attack with 54,000 tons of phosgene gas.
The report stated: “Gas attacks of the size and intensity recommended on these 250 square miles of urban population might easily kill 5,000,000 people and injure that many more.”

Planners called for four kinds of gas, including phosgene, mustard gas and hydrogen cyanide. An attack of this size against an urban city of large population, the report said, should be used to initiate gas warfare.
Fleet Admiral Ernest King received a secret report on poison gas from General George C. Marshall on June 14, 1945.

President Truman met at the White House on June 18, 1945, with his principal military and civilian advisers to discuss the overall plan for the invasion of Japan. The gas attack plan was apparently approved at that conference.

Orders to step up production of poison gas were given on June 21, 1945. Historians Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar wrote in 1995 that the plan “raised the killing of enemy civilians to a level far beyond anything seen in World War II. No [other] known military document from World War II recommends such wholesale killing of civilians.” The June 1945 report is the source.

Full article:
https://ihr.org/journal/v16n3p12_Weber.html
#HistoricalReview #WWII

In November 1945 the International Military Tribunal opened at Nuremberg.

Nahum Goldmann, later president of the World Jewish Congress, reported that the tribunal was the brain-child of World Jewish Congress officials. Only after persistent effort were they able to persuade Allied leaders to accept the idea.

Soviet judge Iola T. Nikitchenko stated at the planning conference: “The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment.”

Lieutenant Colonel Murray Bernays, a US Army officer, was described by historian Robert Conot as “the guiding spirit leading the way to Nuremberg.” Bernays persuaded War Secretary Henry Stimson to accept the idea of putting the defeated German leaders on trial.

Colonel David Marcus, chief of the US government’s War Crimes Branch in 1946 and 1947, selected almost all of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Marcus later became a commander of Zionist Haganah forces in Palestine.

Chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson declared in his opening address that the Nazis had a plan “to annihilate all Jewish people.”

British alternate judge Sir Norman Birkett wrote in a private letter in April 1946 that the trial was “only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political.”

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone referred to the proceedings as Jackson’s “high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg.” Iowa Supreme Court justice Charles F. Wennerstrum, who presided at one of the later Nuremberg trials of German generals, said after the sentences: “If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here.”

Nahum Goldmann’s account of the tribunal’s origins appears in his memoir.

Full article:
https://ihr.org/journal/v12p167_webera-html
#HistoricalReview #Nuremberg

German soldiers of the Second World War have often been portrayed as rigid, unimaginative, and brutish. The record of professional military analysts is different.

U.S. Army Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, after systematic comparison of combat results, concluded that 100 German soldiers were the equivalent of 120 American, British or French soldiers, or 200 Soviet soldiers. “On a man for man basis,” he wrote, “German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances.”

This held whether they were attacking or defending, outnumbered or not, with or without air superiority.

Max Hastings observed that “the Americans, like the British, never matched the dogged professionalism of the German soldier.” German troops showed greater tactical flexibility; the Allied image of the inflexible “squarehead” was propaganda. Martin van Creveld and John Keegan reached similar conclusions.

The advantages were real: mission-oriented tactics, initiative at junior levels, and a professional culture that turned civilians into effective combatants more rapidly than their opponents. These qualities persisted even in 1944–45 under severely deteriorating conditions.

Tactical performance was not enough. Germany was outproduced, outnumbered, and fighting a multi-front war against coalitions whose combined industrial and manpower resources were overwhelming. Strategic decisions, resource allocation, and the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union on the same side decided the outcome.

Weber’s essay separates combat effectiveness from the larger political and economic realities that determined the result. The two questions; why they fought so well, and why they still lost are distinct.

Full essay with sources:
https://ihr.org/other/bestsoldiers
#HistoricalReview #WWII

The letters on the wartime soap were RIF.
In ghettos and camps they were read as Rein jüdisches Fett, “pure Jewish fat.” The story that German authorities boiled victims into soap moved from rumor into Allied evidence.
At Nuremberg the Soviet prosecutor put a bar and a “recipe” into the record. Britain’s Hartley Shawcross told the court that bodies had been used “to make good the wartime shortage of soap.” The Tribunal’s judgment repeated the charge.

The same story had already been used against Germany in 1917. In 1925 the British government admitted that earlier version was a lie.

In 1945 it was sworn as history.

Weber’s point was not that every wartime horror story is invented. It was that this one was.

It was circulated in 1942 by Stephen S. Wise and the World Jewish Congress, then endorsed by Allied governments, then written into a judgment that still shapes how the war is taught. When the evidence failed, the story was reclassified as a “rumor.”

https://ihr.org/leaflet/soap

In 2010, Mark Weber opened an IHR meeting in San Diego with a fact that was already hard to deny.

Americans no longer believed their children would live better than they had. Polls showed a long-term rise in the share who said the country was “on the wrong track” and “in a state of decline.”
Sixteen years later the same question still produces the same answer. Recent direction-of-country averages put “right direction” near one-quarter of the public.

The example he used was not a pamphlet. It was a sitting president.

In a 1972 White House conversation, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham spoke about what they called a Jewish “stranglehold” on the media. Graham said it had to be broken “or the country’s going down the drain.” Nixon answered that he believed it, and that he could never say so.

Full address (Nov. 13, 2010):
https://ihr.org/other/nov10weber.html

For decades after 1945, distinguished historians spoke with confidence about Hitler’s social and economic views without first assembling what he himself had written and said.

Rainer Zitelmann did the real work. As a young doctoral student he went through Mein Kampf, the speeches, neglected party articles, and private remarks to colleagues. Nearly half of the resulting book is quotation.

The picture that emerges is not an incoherent madman and not a conventional conservative. It is a revolutionary who treated the social question as central, and who won a large following in part because many Germans believed he had answers to it.

What those answers actually were is still rarely examined on its own terms.

F. Roger Devlin’s review of Zitelmann’s Hitler’s National Socialism is here:
ihr.org/other/DevlinZi
#HistoricalReview #WWII

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Official justifications centered on weapons of mass destruction and democracy.
The deeper driver, according to multiple senior American officials at the time, was the strategic interest of a single foreign state.
Mark Weber examined the record in a 2008 address that remains uncomfortably relevant.

https://ihr.org/other/aug08weber-html

Before America entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt was secretly collaborating with British intelligence to pull the United States into the conflict against Germany despite overwhelming public opposition to another European war.
The operation was extensive and deliberately hidden from the American people. Winston Churchill himself was blunt about Britain’s strategy. He told his son: “I shall drag the United States in!"

British agents ran active propaganda and political warfare operations on American soil with White House approval.
They planted fake news stories in major U.S. newspapers, rigged polls, disrupted isolationist groups like America First, and used forgeries to discredit opponents. One of the most notorious examples was a fabricated “secret map” that Roosevelt presented to the nation in October 1941, claiming it showed Hitler’s plan to conquer South America.

https://ihr.org/other/rooseveltbritishcollusion

#WWII #History #Roosevelt

In 2012, the owner and publisher of a major Jewish community newspaper wrote that Israel’s leaders should order the assassination of a U.S. President if he was deemed “unfriendly” to Israel. The column appeared in the Atlanta Jewish Times.

Full article with quotes, sources, and Mark Weber’s analysis:
- https://ihr.org/other/AtlantaJewishTimesAdler

Original article HQ:
- https://archive.is/HaoI

Gawker Links (removed but archived):
- https://archive.is/Zwh5r

When you arrest a bunch of Marxist revolutionaries, you shouldn't be surprised to have arrested a lot of Jews...

“Rosa Luxemburg was also Jewish by ancestry. It was true, said Weber, that Jews were very disproportionately involved in the Communist movement both in Germany and in other countries.”

https://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/20weber.html

In the final chaotic days of the Second World War, as Germany faced total collapse, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was suddenly thrust into an unexpected position of leadership. To his complete astonishment, Adolf Hitler had named him successor in his last political testament. Dönitz later reflected that he believed the appointment was meant to allow a senior military officer to bring the conflict to an end.

“This took me completely by surprise…. I assumed that Hitler had nominated me because he wished to clear the way to enable an officer of the Armed Forces to put an end to the war…. My policy was simple ,to try and save as many lives as I could….”

In those desperate hours Dönitz focused on protecting German civilians and soldiers from further ruin.

https://ihr.org/journal/v04p305_thompson-html

#History #WWII #Dönitz

One of the most intriguing “what if” episodes of the Second World War is Rudolf Hess’s daring solo flight to Britain in May 1941. In this moving account written by his son, we learn how Hess, then Hitler’s deputy, took off in a Messerschmitt 110 on a personal mission to end the tragic conflict between two nations he admired. The available evidence suggests Hitler knew in advance, yet the flight remains shrouded in mystery because key British documents are still classified. What really motivated this dramatic gesture, and how did it reshape the power structure around Hitler in the years that followed?

Full IHR article by Wolf Rüdiger Hess
https://ihr.org/journal/v13n1p24_hess-html

#History #WWII

One of the most suppressed chapters in modern American history is the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. Survivor and author James Ennes describes how what officials called “friendly fire” was in reality a prolonged, carefully coordinated assault. It has been called the most carefully planned “accident” in the history of warfare. Even after a torpedo explosion, Israeli boats pulled close enough to read the ship’s American name and flag before continuing to fire for another 40 minutes. What does this event reveal about how certain truths are buried or rewritten?

Full IHR interview with James Ennes: https://ihr.org/journal/v21n3p19_ennes-html

#History #USSLiberty #HiddenHistory

History often hides surprising details about how the modern world was shaped. During the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Russia and influenced the 20th century, Jews, who made up only about five percent of the population, played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early years. Key figures such as Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the Red Army, while Yakov Sverdlov and others held top positions in the party and state apparatus. What does this reveal about the complex human forces behind major historical upheavals?

https://ihr.org/journal/v14n1p-4_weber-html

#History #BolshevikRevolution #HiddenHistory