- Christogenea Saturdays
Christogenea Saturdays, August 22nd, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 2: A Count, a Princess, and a Hoax as a Lifestyle
Here we will continue our presentation of The Protocols of Satan, which to a large extent will consist of the second part of our presentation of the booklet, The World Jewish Conspiracy, written by Dr. Karl Bergmeister and published in 1938.
While only history itself, and the actions of so many Jews throughout the last two hundred years of history, can certainly establish the credibility of the so-called “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” as representing the definite plans of World Jewry in the destruction of the Christian nations, we are presenting this booklet as the central part of our objective to demonstrate that the Jewish attempts to label the Protocols as a forgery were in fact fraudulent themselves.
Our source booklet is subtitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion before the Court in Berne”, and it was written to show the abuse and miscarriage of justice which resulted as certain nationalist-leaning politicians were using the Protocols against the Jews in elections in Switzerland, and then in 1933 the so-called “Federation of Jewish Communities of Switzerland” and the “Berne Jewish Community” had brought a lawsuit against those politicians in Berne. Obtaining favorable results in what was basically a mockery of a trial, Jews throughout the West, and especially in Britain, France and the United States, then began to even more fervently use the fraudulent evidence produced at Berne to discredit the Protocols as an “antisemitic” forgery. They continued to do this, and they do it to this day, in spite of the fact that the trial is discredited and that its results were overturned, although because the results were overturned for rather innocuous reasons, the treachery of the original trial proceedings was never fully elucidated in the public records.
As a digression, we have also mentioned an earlier lawsuit by the Jews against Henry Ford for his publication of the Protocols and related materials, which happened in 1927. Perhaps that can be discussed separately at another time.
In his booklet, our author Dr. Bergmeister, after explaining the Berne trial results discusses some of the evidence used in the trial. This evidence consisted primarily of witnesses who had already written articles, or writers whose articles were cited by other witnesses, which were published much earlier than the trial itself. As early as 1921 articles attempting to portray the Protocols as being fraudulent had appeared in newspapers and other print media which were friendly to the Jews, and later, when the lawsuit was tried, some of the authors of those articles, and in other cases witnesses merely citing those articles, were presented to the Berne court as expert witnesses.
However the authors of the original articles in question can all be shown to have either fabricated the statements which they had made in support of their allegations concerning the origin of the Protocols, or had merely repeated such fabricated statements, and they are fully discredited by the historical evidence.
One such witness was the former Princess, Catherine Radziwill, who had given an interview to Jewish reporter Isaac Landman which was published in a February 1921 issue of the The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, which was evidently reprinted by the New York Times. As it turns out, Radziwill, who claimed the Protocols were the work of Russian intelligence officers in France, had her dates all wrong and her circumstances were historically impossible. Additionally, she herself had already been convicted of forgery in South Africa, in a case connected to Cecil Rhodes, and had troubles paying her bills in both New York and London. She was evidently desperate for money, of already compromised morals, and was paid a generous sum for her story.
We left off our last presentation with the Russian historians Lev Aronov, Henryk Baran and Dmitry Zubarev, who in 2009 published an article documenting even further subterfuge connected to the Radziwill account, which fully vindicated our author Dr. Begmeister.
Now we shall proceed to Bergmeister's second repudiation of a Berne witness, which is Armand du Chayla. We had read earlier in this booklet that “on the 12th and 13th of May 1921, the French Count Armand du Chayla published an article in two parts in the Russian paper “Posljednije Nowosti” (“Dernières Nouvelles”) in Paris.” The name of the paper in English is “Latest News”. Now we shall continue with Dr Bergmeister:
The second in this unholy alliance was Comte du Chayla, who was shameless enough to insist before the court upon the correctness of his article (previously referred to).
It was only after the lawsuit was over, that I succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of Sergej Sergejewitsch Nilus, the son of the late S. A. Nilus, deceased in 1930, and the first publisher of the Protocols. [Language such as this is why I sometimes believe that Bergmeister is only a pseudonym for the Berne trial defense expert, Lieut. Colonel Ulrich Fleischhauer. However later in this booklet Fleischhauer is again referred to in the third person, so perhaps our author was only an investigator in his employ, and who later, after the trial, had continued his investigating. In any event, he was intimately involved with the case, as the language “it was only after the lawsuit was over” certainly seems to indicate.] In a detailed statement dated March 24th 1936, Nilus junior states that Comte du Chayla published his report in “Dernières Nouvelles” being fully aware that it was untrue, and thus he is a perfidious liar and slanderer. Nilus junior declared moreover that he himself was the legitimised son of S. A. Nilus, and of the latter's lifelong friend. This lady however was not Madame Natalia Afanassiewna, nor as stated by du Chayla, a Madame Komarowsky, but Natalia Afanassiewna Wolodimerow. She had never at any time been in touch with Ratschkowsky. She had moreover never had anything to do with the Protocols. Nilus junior declared himself prepared to state upon oath that he was himself present when in the year 1901, Major Suchotin, also a friend of his father's, had handed the manuscript over to him. He cannot remember having seen at the time the ominous inkstain upon the front page.
Further enquiries revealed the fact that Comte du Chayla in the year 1921, was Chief of Propaganda on the Staff of the Don Cossack Corps of General Wrangel's Army. During his employment in this capacity, he was discovered to be acting as a Bolshevist agent, and as such was arrested and condemned to death for high treason. General Wrangel however, acting under pressure from the French Ambassador quashed the sentence, and had to content himself with expelling the treasonable officer from the army.
So the French government came to the rescue of a Count who, under the guise of having left France for the Orthodox Church, and under the guise of being friendly to Christian forces in Russia, was acting as a Bolshevik agent. Then several years later the same Count is writing articles in support of Jewry, attempting to provide evidence that the Protocols are a fraud, and lying in the process. The French government support for such a character should not be a surprise, since France has been in the hands of the Jews for over two hundred years.
Here we are going to make a digression, to present what the Russian historians Lev Aronov, Henryk Baran and Dmitry Zubarev wrote concerning Comte du Chayla (they spell the name du Shayla) in their 2009 article entitled Princess Catherine Radziwill and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion': the hoax as a lifestyle. Because of the broken English of the automated translation, we were compelled to do some editing. Of course, the account is still about Radziwill, but we shall see the content of du Chayla's testimony in this:
And yet in February 1921 the name of Catherine Radziwill occurs in the press in connection with the Protocols: it starts with the material which was prepared for Radziwill by Louis Marshall, editor of The American Hebrew, published in the form of interview excerpts from the document. In the next issue of the magazine there was published an interview with a certain Henrietta Hurlbut, a New York lady, who Radziwill herself recommended to the magazine as a person who is able to confirm her information about the Protocols, particularly their most controversial point - the assertion that while living in Paris Russian journalist M. Golovinskiy showed her the original French document when they were fabricated. Whether there were any contacts by Catherine Radziwill with Mrs. Hurlbut is not known, but in a letter to Louis Marshall on February 17, 1921 Radziwill mentions "a lady" who is able to publicly confirm her testimony (for the letter the authors refer the reader to an appendix to the original work).
Sensational information provided by Radziwill came to Europe: published there in the form of an article in the Revue Mondiale, there was a detailed retelling of the U.S. interview with "Jewish Tribune”. And in May 1921, the “Jewish Tribune”, along with the Russian emigre newspaper "Latest News" [The Russian language paper in Paris, the Dernières Nouvelles], edited by P.N. Milyukov, published a lengthy article by Orthodox Frenchman Count Alexander du Shayla, who had shortly before returned to France after eleven years in Russia. It was he who confirmed the existence of the notebook in the French language with a "pale purple" spot on the first page, he allegedly saw Sergei Nilus in 1909 in the Optina [an Orthodox monastery near Kozelsk in Russia, southwest of Moscow]. The A. du Shayla testimony attracted publication in different countries on both sides of the Atlantic.
A few months later statements by Catherine Radziwill and du Shayla become much less important in the debate about the Protocols. In the summer of 1921 the British journalist Philip Graves (1876-1953) in Constantinople buys from a Russian emigrant, “Mr. H.”, a publication of the 19th century, in which it is easily discovered when compared with the text of the Protocols, that in the truest sense it is the basis for the creation of an anti-Semitic document. This edition - “Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu or Machiavelli's politics in the XIX century.” (published in 1864), was directed against the Second Empire of Napoleon III, a political satire by Maurice Joly (1829-1878). This direct evidence of the Protocols being a forgery - though it still remains unconvincing for fans of conspiracy theories - was published in the newspaper The Times in the issues from 16-18 August 1921 and upstaged the previous performances.
The book by Joly, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, obtained by Philip Graves seems to have been the death-knell for the claims for the legitimacy of the Protocols, and we will discuss it further in the near future. For now, Comte du Chayla remains the focal point of our discussion. In a footnote to this same article, Aronov and his fellows say this about du Shayla, in a discussion of various writers evaluating the Protocols:
Researchers excluded Catherine Radziwill from the accounts because of the stories exposing her as a fraud, but who left, and in a prominent place, the testimony of A. du Shayla (G. Bernstein, H. Con), are inconsistent in their decisions. Du Shayla, in that part of his story where he describes the book with the French text, and where there is a discussion about the role of the Police Department in the creation of Protocols, Catherine Radziwill is directly behind the constructed narrative. If you do not believe her, then on what grounds can you believe him? The proximity of the French Count, who departed from Orthodoxy, to the reactionary circles in the period before the First World War (perhaps this is the reason B. Nicholas called him a "crook" in his letters to Vera Cohn-Broido), his stay at the court of Wrangel in the Crimea in 1920, as well as his cooperation with the Soviet Foreign Ministry from 1920 to 1930 (veteran journalist Bernstein might well have know this) were no less reprehensible than the scam which involved Radziwill.
So it certainly seems that, although they themselves may doubt the legitimacy of the Protocols, Aronov and his colleagues understood that du Chayla's testimony was just as unreliable as that of Catherine Radziwill, and should be fully discredited. For us it should be plain, that du Chayla was a crook, a spy, and a tool for the Jews who were attempting to discredit the Protocols.
Upon this matter and upon the previous career of the Count, State Councillor Gregor Petrowitsch Girtschitsch, formerly in the Judge Advocate General's Department of Wrangel's army and at present living in Tunis, has furnished exhaustive information in a report dated the 30th April 1936, such information having added importance in view of the fact that Girtschitsch himself conducted the case against du Chayla. [Where he is being tried by the Cossacks as a Bolshevik spy.]
Already at the beginning of June 1936, Dr. Boris Liffschitz, a Russian Jew practising at the bar in Switzerland, and acting as counsel to du Chayla, was informed of the existence of these declarations, both of which were handed to the court. Du Chayla however omitted to bring any action for libel against S. S. Nilus. He apparently considered discretion to be the better part of valour, and that it was preferable in this instance to take the insult that he was a perfidious liar and slanderer sitting down, rather than take the risk of bringing an action against S. S. Nilus which would expose him to the danger of Nilus proving his contention true.
Yet a third witness has recently come forward in the person of Andrej Petrowitsch Ratschkowsky in Paris. He is the son of State Councillor Ratschkowsky, whom incidentally, Du Chayla falsely described as a general, a rank which he never held. In a written statement dated 13th July 1936, he states that he has searched through all the archives of his late father, which are in his possession, that is to say not only through his private correspondence, but also through all drafts of reports sent to the authorities in St. Petersburg, and that nowhere has he been able to detect the smallest trace of his father ever having had anything to do with the Protocols. He had moreover never had so much as a hint from his father that the Protocols were known to him. His father had never been an Anti-Semite, he had had Jews as friends and collaborators, and more particularly at the time of the publication of the Protocols, his Secretary was the Jew M . Golschmann. Finally his father was never acquainted with the fabulous Madame Komarowsky, who was supposed to have handed the document over to him.
Evidently, Komarowsky is only mentioned by du Chayla, and indeed the name seems to have been invented, which is why she is called “fabulous” here.
Through the reports of those who might be described as the most telling witnesses in the case, namely Nilus junior, Girtschitsch and Ratschkowsky junior, light has finally been brought to bear upon the forger's den. The statements of the crook and ex-Princess Radziwill, now Mrs. K. Danvin, and of the Bolshevist Agent and traitor Comte du Chayla are in all essential points untrue. State Councillor Ratschkowsky had never on any occasion anything to do with the Protocols. Nilus's lifelong friend who according to du Chayla was the go-between who handed him the Protocols, was not called Komarowsky, but Wolodimerow, and was never in contact of any kind with Ratschkowsky.
Here we have the name of the mysterious woman from whom Nilus supposedly received his copy of the Protocols as Wolodimerow according to du Chayla. (But we have seen that refuted by the younger Nilus, who was her son.) However there are other versions of this story which should be presented, and for that we will again resort to the Russians Lev Aronov, Henryk Baran and Dmitry Zubarev, and an August 2007 article entitled (in a crude Google translation) “By the history of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion': Y. D. Glinka and her letter to Emperor Alexander III”:
On April 7, 1902 the famous Russian conservative journalist Mikhail Menshikov told the reading public of the existence of a mysterious document - “quite a thick manuscript,” setting out the “conspiracy against the human race”, compiled by King Solomon and in complete secrecy implemented by “Jewish sages” for three thousand years. [A typical Jewish-Masonic fable.] This acquainted journalists with the document called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Some Petersburg woman, not identified by name, described not without irony but in sufficient detail, an “Elegant apartment, excellent French, all the signs of a good social circle, elegant”, [and then there is a sentence of unclear context where I must insert the words “who is said”] “to communicates directly with the world beyond the grave”. According to the lady, the Protocols had been stolen from a secret Jewish store in Nice [France] and obtained from “a French journalist ... who ... with the utmost haste translated excerpts from the precious documents in Russian".
Over one hundred and four years have passed since that moment, and the literature of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” - one of the best-selling political topics of twentieth century - has become truly immense. Examine their sources, many put forward hypotheses regarding authorship. However, the identity of the “lady: [the automatic translation has “ladies”, which is contrary to the context], who allegedly transferred the Protocols into Russian and brought them to Russia is still a mystery (the French original has yet to be discovered and for a hundred years its existence has been questioned). One of the first publishers of the Protocols, S.A. Nilus, at first said only that they were stolen by a “woman”, and twelve years later added that the Protocols were “obtained from a lady, permanently residing abroad, that this lady...” [This portion of the automated translation is difficult to decipher, and we will skip part of it only to say that another woman, A.N. Sukhotina in Tula is named in connection with the mysterious woman. Sukhotina is evidently related to that Sukhotin from whom Nilus obtained the Protocols.] In the words of the same Sukhotina, Nilus said that “this lady passed on a copy of the manuscript to Sipyagin, the then Minister of Internal Affairs upon his return from abroad”. (Curiously, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire D. S. Sipiagin was killed April 2, 1902 - five days before the appearance of the press article by Menshikov.) Unlike Menshikov, Nilus always maintained that he had never seen the “lady”, and “I do not even know her name”. He did not name the “lady” and a former neighbor of the estate of Sukhotina in Tula was F. P. Stepanov, once in exile in Yugoslavia in 1927, he left a notarized certificate that Sukhotin handed him the manuscript of the Protocols, and cited as the source of all the manuscripts the same unnamed “lady living in Paris.” Unlike Nilus, who said that he “forgot” the name of the lady, Stepanov claimed that Sukhotin did not mention her name.… [This does not mean that Nilus was lying.]
Thus, for 25 years (1902-1927) there are three written evidences of the “lady” who had brought the Protocols to Russia. And only one witness - Menshikov - claimed to have seen “a lady” and to know her name. Two others - Stepanov and Nilus - had never seen the “lady” and did not know her name, or did not remember.
And only another mysterious lady, an active promoter of the Protocols, writing under the pseudonym of Leslie Fry [referring to the book Waters Flowing Eastward], first published the evidence of Stepanov and then gave the name of the mysterious translator of the Protocols. She claimed that it was “the daughter of a Russian general Mademoiselle Justine Glinka.” According to the version of Fry, J. Glinka in 1884 in Paris, bought the French copy of the Protocols from a Jew named Joseph Shapiro, translated the text into Russian and transferred it together with the original to Gendarmerie General Orzhevskomu. Another copy of the translation Glinka gave to Sukhotin when she returned to her estate in Orel.
Aronov and his colleagues go on to present an exhaustive study concerning the validity of this information concerning Justine Glinka, who is sometimes called Juliana Glinka, in debate of whether or not she really had anything to do with the Protocols. Perhaps we shall return to it again in the future, however at this point it is quite peripheral to our discussion, since her name did not arise at Berne. To return to Dr. Bergmeister:
Apart from this question, the research into the origins of the Protocols must be carried out to its very last detail. It would be particularly important to find out from whom Major Suchotin received the Protocols in 1895, or at an earlier date. Here we find ourselves at a dead end, which is all the more difficult to overcome, as the supposedly non-Jewish Soviet State puts difficulties in the way of all enquiries which are likely to prove disadvantageous to the Jews. Moreover the former Member of the Duma, Colonel Baron B. Engelhardt, in a communication from Riga, dated the 2nd April 1935, states that in the Spring of 1917, immediately after the formation of the Provisional Government by the Freemason Prince Lwow, it became the principal care of that government to remove from the Ministry of Home Affairs and from the Police Department all confidential documents having relation either to Jewry or to the Protocols.
Prince Lvov was born in Germany and is said to have descended from the Viking princes of Yaroslavl. His family moved home to Tula in Russia after his birth. During the Russo-Japanese War he organized relief work in the East and in 1905, he joined the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. A year later he was elected to the First Duma, and was nominated for a ministerial position. During the first Russian Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, emperor of Russia, Lvov was made head of the provisional government founded by the Duma in March of 1917. He resigned in July 1917 in favour of Alexander Kerensky. Lvov was arrested when the Bolsheviks seized power later that year. He supposedly escaped and settled in Paris where he died in 1925.
All files and documents of a nature disagreeable to Jewry were collected, and under orders from Prince Lwow handed over against written receipt to the Jewish Politician Winawer, a member of the Masonically influenced Miljukow party. From this time onwards the material in question completely disappeared.
The expert Loosli did, it is true, succeed through the intermediary of the Jewish solicitor Tager in Moscow in borrowing from the Soviet government documents for the composition of his expertise. These however, in spite of desperate efforts on the part of Loosli to nail down Ratschkowsky as the forger of the Protocols, do not afford the smallest ground for this assumption. Moreover apart from this, these documents of which Loosli was as proud as he was of the forgeries of Radziwill and of du Chayla, contain nothing whatever relating to the authorship of the Protocols.
The fact that the authorship and the time of the composition of this document still remain a mystery, does not justify the assumption that the Protocols are an Anti-Semitic forgery; and even less, when the fact is taken into account that their contents are in complete and accurate accord with other Jewish writings, as also with the political occurrences of our time. This document has been in existence for many decades, and its validity has never yet been legally disproved. As long however as a forgery has not been proved, this document may be looked upon as genuine. For it is the inauthenticity of a document which must be proved by those who would attack it, and not its authenticity by those who would defend it. The Berne lawsuit has not cleared up the situation in any way; for of all the theses which have been brought to prove forgery, there is not one that will hold water. One and all rest upon a gross perversion of the facts. Only the guilty, and those who are afraid of the truth, make use of such methods as were used in Berne.
We must express disappointment that the article by Phillip Graves, printed in three parts in the London Times in August of 1921 and which made use of the Joly book in an attempt to discredit the Protocols was not addressed here, although Dr. Bergmeister had mentioned it earlier in this booklet. God willing, we will address the Graves article at length, and the Joly book at greater length in the weeks to come.
There are two reasonable avenues by which to upset the supposition that Joly's book is sufficient evidence which discredits the authenticity of the Protocols. The first is this: it seems that the only copy of the Joly book was obtained from a Russian Jew in Turkey. The second is this: Joly himself worked inside the French government for over ten years, and was a Mason in France. He may have simply used the same sources from which the Protocols themselves were taken.
The next portion of our booklet is based on the testimony of certain Jews. These Jews seem to be the self-hating variety which we have seen in the likes of Howard Rosenthal, Myron Fagan, Nathaniel Kapner, Henry Makow and others of more recent times, who always seem to have their own diabolical agenda. When we presented Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies, we saw that the phenomenon of the tattle-tale, self-hating Jew has existed since as early as 13th century France, where the converso-Jew Nicholas Donin exposed the writings of the Talmud before Pope Gregory IX at the Disputation of Paris. Even earlier, another supposedly converted Jew named Theobald explained ritual murder to the English authorities upon the discovery of the crucified and tortured body of young William of Norwich.
We do not advocate pursuing the testimony of Jews, however in certain circumstances and when it is corroborated by established facts, it may be useful. Since this is part of the booklet we have endeavored to present, and also a part of the historical record connected to the history of the Protocols we will proceed and present what Dr Bergmeister has written. Just imagine the irony, that evil Nazis are here employing the testimony of Jews, and that Jews cooperated with antisemitic proponents of the Protocols.
Due to the nature of what follows, we will not have many of our own comments, but only need to present what Dr. Bergmeister has written.
5. Three orthodox Jews stand for the Authenticity of the Protocols.
If up till now I have been principally concerned in the refutation of the assertions made by the opposing side, and have been able to show that Jewry have not been in the position to bring any valid evidence in support of forgery, I will now discuss a few important cases which go to show the authenticity of the Protocols. In this connection, I will quote the declarations of three orthodox Jews.
About the year 1901, in the small Polish city of Schocken, now called Skoki, there lived one Rudolf Fleischmann, an assistant Rabbi, and slaughterer by trade. With this person the local Public Prosecutor, M. Noskowicz, entered into friendly relations. Fleischmann, whose honour had suffered serious injury at the hands of the Chief Rabbi Dr. Veilchenfeld, in that the latter had assaulted his fiancée, complained bitterly to his Christian friend, and related to him much in regard to the anti-Christian writings of the Jews. In this fashion they came to speak about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which at the time were already known in Russia. As Noskowicz has asserted in writing, Fleischmann assured him that the Protocols really did exist, and that they were no forgery. Moreover that they were positively of Jewish origin. He further laid it on him as a duty, to warn his Christian co-religionists and co-citizens of the Jewish danger.
Noskowicz relates a second instance also. In the year 1906, he put the question direct to the well known Rabbi Grünfeld of Swarzedz in Poland, as to whether the Protocols were genuine or not. Thereupon Grünfeld gave him the following characteristically Jewish answer: “My dear Herr Noskowicz, you are too curious, and want to know too much. We are not permitted to talk about these things. I am not allowed to say anything, and you are not supposed to know anything. For God's sake be careful, or you will be putting your life in danger.”
We are in possession of a further statement from the Russian Captain George (Our readers will understand that we cannot give his real name, as we otherwise might endanger the lives of his relatives in Soviet Russia.) In February 1924, in Jugo-Slavia, he visited the Jew Sawelij Konstantinowitsch Ephron, who was a refugee from Soviet Russia. Ephron in his early days had been a Rabbi in Vilna. He went over however to the Greek Orthodox Church, and became a mining engineer in St. Petersburg. He was moreover an author, and wrote under the nom de plume of “Litwin”. He was the Editor of the Monarchist paper “The Light”, and was a contributor to “The Messenger”. He was also the author of the drama going under the name of “The Smugglers”, which contains much severe criticism of Jewry. In consequence of this, he was brutally assaulted by some Jews, and his life being threatened when the Bolshevist revolution broke out he had to fly from his country, arriving finally in Serbia, where he found asylum in a cloister in the neighborhood of Petkowitze in the district of Schabatz. It was there that he died in the year 1926.
When on a certain occasion Captain George questioned him on the subject of the genuineness of the Protocols, Ephron declared with emphasis that he had for long been well acquainted with their contents, indeed for many years before they were ever published in the Christian press. Ephron's words were written down by Captain George who made sure of the matter by obtaining a sworn statement regarding his bona fides from the Arch-Priest of the Russian Church in Paris in the month of October 1928.
Both written declarations, namely that of Public Prosecutor Noskowicz, and that of Captain George were included by Lieut. Colonel Fleischhauer in the expert report which he rendered to the Court in Berne. Like all other evidence offered by Fleischhauer however, these witnesses were completely disregarded by the Marxist Judge.
The case of Ephron interested me quite exceptionally, and I therefore got into touch with different colonies of Russian emigrés with a view to finding people who had been acquainted with him. The results were altogether beyond my expectations. I discovered a Russian who had formerly fought in Wrangel's Army, Wassilij S. (his real name is also concealed) [but below he is identified as Wassilij Smirinow] who had made friends with Ephron at Petkowitze and who actually handed me a short treatise upon the Protocols in the Russian language written by Ephron himself. It is actually the concept of a letter addressed by Ephron in the year 1921, to the Russian Emigrant paper, edited by Burtzew in Paris, "Obschtscheje djelo" (La Cause Commune). Ephron had at about this time read an article in this paper, in which a writer by name of A. J. Kuprin questioned the genuineness of the Protocols, and pretended to show that they were a forgery on the assumption that the Jews were incapable of producing an anti-Christian work of this description. The indignant Ephron thereupon wrote the following letter to the Editor:
“In my quiet cloister (I am living in a Serbian monastery.) it is seldom that I see a newspaper. The other day however a copy of the 'Obschtscheje djelo' came into my hand, and in it I read a feuilleton [feature, probably article here] by A. J. Kuprin entitled 'Guslitzkaja Fabrika'. [This appears to means 'Guslitsky Fabrication', in reference to a monastery in Kurovskoye, about 60 miles east of Moscow.] In this feuilleton Monsieur Kuprin discusses the Zionist Protocols of Nilus, and describes for the benefit of the reader the impressions which he gets from the perusal of this book. Whatever conclusion he comes to in this instance in regard to the genuineness of the Protocols, is a matter of little or no interest to me, for in the matter under consideration, Monsieur Kuprin cannot be considered an authority in any sense of the word. In spite of the above however, my attention was drawn to certain statements in this feuilleton . Monsieur Kuprin writes: 'What surprises one in the Protocols is this downright, blind, stupid, one might say uniform hate against Christianity, which only an unimaginative and commonplace Jew-baiter, writing in accordance with his feelings against the Jews, could ascribe to the Elders of Zion. Every word of these Protocols breathes blood, revenge, slavery, destruction and ruin. One does not only feel the deadly and poisonous power of the word, but also the paralysing commonplace. When the diplomats of two different countries set out to ravish a portion of a third, or when two financiers set about plucking some trustful pigeons, they do not usually call things by their proper names, but are wont to conceal the hard reality with kindly words and tasteful forms. These 70 Elders, the highest authority of an intelligent people, and no doubt themselves also highly cultivated persons, would it is clear be ashamed of such a primitive and pogrom-like brutality as is attributed to them in the Protocols.'
“The above quotation from the article of this well meaning author breathes passionate resentment against the Protocols, and the Christian conscience of the writer cannot reconcile itself to the wickedness and the hate against Christianity with which the Protocols are permeated. He is unable therefore to acknowledge that they are genuine, and out of goodness of heart he cannot recognize them. Thus must it be. It is difficult to come to terms with life when such wickedness and such hate are found to exist. To an author brought up and educated in Christian ethics, they may seem impossible and an absurdity. But nevertheless... This wickedness and this hatred of Christianity among the chosen people [sic] have both existed in the past, and exist up to the present day.
“I propose to the well meaning author that he communicate with Monsieur Pasmanik, and ask him to be kind enough to translate the following words taken from the prayer which every Jew is bound to repeat thrice daily. (I take it that Monsieur Pasmanik is cognisant of ancient Hebrew, and is also familiar with the prayers.)
"'SCHAKETZ TISCHAKZENU, SAWE TISSAWENU, KI CHEREM, 'HU'... ' [This means something along the lines of “you will to the utmost abhor it, you should feel the ultimate disgust for it, for it is something cursed, shame!”, which is a prayer spoken by Jews in reference to the Cross of Christ.]
“These words, I repeat it, and I hope that Monsieur Pasmanik will confirm what I say, are repeated three times a day by every Jew in his prayers. Now if Monsieur Pasmanik will accurately translate the words of the Hebrew prayer, and Monsieur Kuprin comes to hear of their meaning, he will surely understand that as a Christian, and as a man of honour, he is bound publicly to withdraw what he has said in the above quoted statement, a statement clearly dictated by goodness of heart, and from feelings of Christian charity, and in no way attributable to any knowledge of Judaism, or of Jewish ethics.
“P. S. If in the course of the next fifteen days Monsieur Pasmanik does not communicate the meaning of the Hebrew prayer to A. I. Kuprin, I will print a translation in the Nowoje Wremja [the name of a Russian newspaper which seems to mean “New Newspaper”], as much for his own edification, as for the edification of other writers similarly placed, who have erred in all good faith.”
Upon Ephron's Russian concept the following further notes are to be found, and also a translation of the Hebrew text:
“Up to the sixties of the previous century these words were printed in the Hebrew prayer books; at the beginning of the sixties however, they were forbidden by the Russian censorship, which naturally did not prevent the Jews then, as it does not prevent them now, from repeating them three times a day.”
“'Schaketz tischakzenu', thou shall utterly detest it, (the Cross of Christ), 'Save tissawenu', thou shalt utterly abhor it, 'Ki cherem', for it is a cursed thing. 'Hu', fye!” (For this curse the Jews make use of Deuteronomy VII, 26.) [The passage has nothing to do with Christ, but the Jews certainly can not make use of it appropriately, as it is the Jews themselves who are accursed by the God of he Bible.]
Burtzew never published this letter. He also suppressed it in his evidence before the Court in Berne. Whether Ephron also sent it to the Nowoje Wremja [Russian New Newspaper] as he intended, is not known.
It is altogether characteristic of Ephron's attitude to the Protocols, that it was just an article which pretended to prove them a forgery which he took as an occasion for repudiating any such theory. He does not express any direct opinion as to their authenticity, but it is sufficient that he denies to Kuprin the right to express any opinion upon the matter, upon the grounds that he does not understand the subject, and that he energetically repudiates the latter's attempt to establish a forgery. His attitude comes even more clearly to light in the following report compiled by Wassilij Smirinow in the presence of two witnesses on the 15th of December 1936, viz:
“After my arrival in Jugo-Slavia in the year 1921, in my capacity of an officer in General Wrangel's army, I came across a group of Russian emigrants in the village of Petkowitze, in the district of Schabatz, where it had been suggested that I should live.
“In the vicinity of this village, the Serbian monastery of St. Petko is to be found. As I heard shortly afterwards, in this monastery lived Sawelij Konstantinowitsch Ephron, who had found a home there, as age and infirmity (he was at the time 72) prevented him from doing any active work. Ephron had come there on the recommendation of Bishop Michael of Schabatz, in whose diocese this cloister was situated. Bishop Michael had in former times been the head of a Serbian religious house in Moscow.
“It was at this time that I first began to receive the 'Obschtscheje djelo' [the Russian Emigrant paper edited by Burtzew in Paris, La Cause Commune], three copies of which were forwarded to me from Paris with a view to its distribution among the Russian emigrants. Ephron came to hear that I was receiving the 'Obschtscheje djelo', and sent me a message through one of the Russians asking me to visit him, and saying that he would much like to see the paper in question. I visited him in the course of the next few days, and began also to send him the paper. Thus it was that my acquaintance with Ephron began.
“Later, in No. 440 of the above periodical, a feuilleton written by Kuprin appeared under the title of 'Guslitzkaja Fabrika' [Guslitsky Fabrication], in which he attacked the author of the Protocols for the blind and bloodthirsty hate against Christianity exhibited in them. Kuprin further expressed doubts regarding the capability of the Jews to express such sentiments. What he meant was that only the most ordinary type of Jew-baiter could ascribe such sentiments to them.
“This attitude of Kuprin to the Protocols disturbed Ephron very much, and on the occasion of my next visit, he started to relate to me the opinion which he had formed of the feuilleton in question. He had a reply to Kuprin already written, and addressed to the Editor of 'Obschtscheje djelo', which he asked me to despatch. In the course of a further conversation regarding this feuilleton, he became very indignant about Kuprin's ignorance of the theme he had handled. He held him to be completely incompetent to express any opinion on the nature of the case.
“On the occasion of this conversation, Ephron handed me the concept of the letter he had written to Kuprin with the words: 'Take it, my dear friend, it may perhaps be of use to you some day.'
“In connection with this feuilleton of Kuprin's, there began between us the most open hearted conversations in the course of which he told me what he knew regarding the Zionist Protocols. In view of the fact that it is such a long time ago, I cannot now remember everything that he said, but one or two leading points which have graven themselves on my memory I will now quote in inverted commas, making use to the best of my recollection of Ephron's own words. He asked me once whether I had read the Protocols through, and on my replying in the affirmative, he began to say that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were in point of fact not the original Protocols at all, but a compressed extract of the same. Then he said to me that he was very much troubled in his conscience as to whether he should reveal the secret of their origin or not, for he did not know whether in so doing he would be doing more harm than good.
“I cannot here remember the exact course of our conversation, but as far as I know I had put to him a question regarding the origin and the existence of the original Protocols. In answer, he excitedly caught hold of me by the lapel of my coat, and said literally:
“'My dear friend, in the matter of the origin, and of the existence of the original Protocols, there are only ten men in the entire world who know, and one of them is your servant.' In saying these words he touched his breast with his forefinger and added: 'My dear friend (this was his favourite mode of address where I was concerned), if you come to me often enough, it is just possible that I may bring myself to reveal this secret to you.'
“It was a short time after this that a position was offered me in Belgrade, and to my great regret I was compelled to part with him for good. It was in this fashion that he took the secret of the Protocols with him into the grave. He died 2 to 3 years after my departure, as I afterwards heard.
“From what he told me, I learnt that he was a Jew, and that he went over to the Orthodox Church in Russia. After his conversion, he was a missionary in Central Asia, and was also a correspondent of the Academy of Science. He was moreover Editor of the paper 'Istorritscheskij Wjestnik'. [This appears to be an alternate spelling of Istoricheskiy Wjestnik, or Historical Herald. After we determined this, we found it spelled nearly in this manner in another testimony given below.] He had a son, who had been an officer in the Russian Army.
“I have attached the aforementioned concept of Ephron's letter to Kuprin hereto.”
“The above statements I am at all times ready to confirm on oath.”
(Signed) Wassilij Smirinow. [Supposedly a pseudonym.]
Former Commandant A. M. Dept.,
Propaganda Section, G. H. Q. South Russian Forces.
As a result of further investigation, I was fortunate enough to find yet another Russian, who over a period of years had been personally acquainted with Ephron. This was Wassilij Michailowitsch Choroschun who lived at Petkowitze in Jugoslavia, and who at the time of Ephron's residence there, was the business administrator of the monastery in the town.
Choroschun has given the following written declaration:
“During the period between June 1924 and November 1929, I was resident at the Cloister of St Paraskewa (Petka), in the Province of Schabatz in Jugoslavia. To the different duties which the Prior of this religious house, the monk Aristarch, laid upon me belonged that of conducting the business affairs of the cloister. I consequently became familiar with the archives of the cloister, and with all matters pertaining to the persons it contained.
“As regards Sawelij Konstantinowitsch Ephron, I associated with him from the moment of his arrival in the monastery, up to the time of his decease. According to the letter of recommendation from Bishop Michael of Schabatz, which was entered in our files under the number 191, Ephron arrived at the cloister on June the 7th 1921. His decease took place on the night of the 23d of June 1925. He died alone and without witnesses. All his personal belongings, his notes, and his books were sent by General Tolstow, who was also resident in the cloister, to the office of the Agent for Russian Refugees in Belgrade at that time one Paleolog. I often had talks with Ephron. He used to tell me about his past, and used to communicate to me his thoughts upon different matters, and among them upon the Jewish question. I remember that he told me that he completed his rabbinical training at Vilna, and that afterwards he became a rabbi. He said that after he came to know of a certain secret law among the Jews (he did not say which) in which the hatred of humanity which it propounds had impressed him most, he decided to break with Jewry. After he had broken with Jewry, he entered the School of Mines in St Petersburg, and qualified there. Afterwards he took to a literary career. He became a collaborator on the "Nowoje Wremja" [the New Newspaper, where Ephron had said he would publish his letter to Kuprin concerning the La Cause Commune article on the Protocols], editor of Komarow's newspaper "Swet" [Light], and of the "Istoritscheskij Wjestnik" [Historical Herald], and Secretary of the Slavonic Committee.
“It was during the time that he was on this Committee, that he became acquainted with the Prior of the Serbian Monastery in Moscow, the Archimandrite Michael, who afterwards when Bishop of Schabatz, arranged for his reception into the Cloister of Saint Paraskewa. Ephron told me that he had two sons who had remained in Soviet Russia, and who occasionally sent him money. I remember that on the day of his death 50 Dollars arrived from one of his sons. On one occasion Ephron made me a present of Nilus's book on the Zionist Protocols. I remember that on this occasion he said to me: 'They (the Protocols) are an actual fact, and every word of them is true.' In his conversations on the subject of Jewry, he asserted with all emphasis, that the Jews have secret books which they show to nobody but to the initiated.
“Three or four months before his death, the author Rodionoff wrote to him from Mostar [apparently a town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina] urging him to reveal the secrets of Jewry. S. K. Ephron did not however wish to do this, as he was awaiting the visit of the Metropolitan Antonius, to whom he wished to reveal everything concerning the Jews. In his letters to Ephron, the Metropolitan Antonius promised him that he would visit the cloister in company with General Netschwolodow, who was coming from Paris for the purpose. In the last few days, as he felt death approaching, Ephron often gave expression for his distress at the Metropolitan not having arrived. He was apparently possessed with a great longing to reveal to him the secret of Jewry which was tormenting him. Unfortunately the Metropolitan never came, and thus did it come about that the secret was entrusted by Ephron to no-one.
“Testified by the undersigned
Wassilij Michailowitsch Choroschun,
Petkowitze, District of Schabatz, Jugoslavia.
February 3d, 1937.”
The declarations of the Assistant Rabbi Fleischmann, of Rabbi Grünfeld and of the former Rabbi Ephron taken together, give incontrovertible proof of the correctness of the assumption that the Protocols are a genuine Jewish document. Of a particularly convincing order is the information supplied by Ephron to the three Russian witnesses Captain George, Major Smirnow and the Administrator Choroschun. From his testimony the following fact also becomes clear namely that the Protocols were drawn up before the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, and were already known to the initiated in Jewry; and moreover that the text which we possess through the intermediary of Nilus is a compressed extract only of an as yet undiscovered, and far more extensive secret document. It is therefore of particular importance to note that in this respect, Nilus makes practically the same assumption on page 54 of the third edition of his book, namely that the manuscript which had come into his hands was evidently “a fragment only of some very much more important manuscript, of which the beginning, and many details have either been lost, or may never even have been found.” [We have not yet been able to locate a similar statement in the translation of the fourth edition of Nilus' book published by Small & Maynard.]
We will leave Part 6 of our booklet, which is titled “The Contents confirm the Authenticity” because presenting it we will have some contention with out author Dr. Bergmeister. However he alone cannot be blamed for his misunderstanding of all things Biblical, and for his misidentification of the Jews themselves.