In a previous article, I mentioned that the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation had tried to suppress historical revisionism after World War II. Like the approach used by our modern day “expert class” to silence debates about carbon taxes and the COVID-19 response, the approach used after World War II to silence debate was to declare everything a “settled science.” “The question of war responsibility in relation to 1939 and 1941 is taken for granted as completely and forever settled,” Harry Elmer Barnes wrote in his opening essay on the Historical Blackout. With regard to the war in the Far East, Barnes added that “this is supposed to be settled with equal finality by asking the question: ‘Japan attacked us, didn’t she?’”
Unfortunately, I wrote the first section of my previous article in a cursory fashion. I left out the important details concerning how dangerous historical revisionism after World War I had been to some of the major lies of that war. The purposes of this article are to explore in more detail the “Crown Council Myth” and to show how revisionist history exposed this lie.
Harry Elmer Barnes on the “Crown Council Myth”
In the spring of 1966, Rampart College published a symposium (a collection of journal articles on the same topic) on revisionism. The lead article in this symposium, also by Harry Elmer Barnes, mentioned the application of revisionist history to the “Crown Council Myth.” Barnes based his argument on two sources, namely, Sidney B. Fay, “the leading American revisionist dealing with the outbreak of war in 1914” and Paul Schwarz, “the personal secretary to the German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim.” (Constantinople, a major city in Turkey, is now called Istanbul). Barnes presented three iterations of this “Crown Council Myth” showing how the lie developed over time.
The first iteration of the myth was fairly brief. Baron von Wangenheim had a mistress in Berlin who wanted to see him in the early days of the first World War. The Baron obviously had to conceal the real reason for his trip from his wife, so he invented a simple lie. He told her that the German Kaiser (Emperor) had summoned him to Berlin.
When the Baron returned from Berlin, “he told his wife about the fanciful crown council that he had dreamed up.” The Kaiser, according to this second iteration of the lie, gathered together ambassadors, financiers, and leading German government officials at this “Crown Council” to tell them that he had decided to take Germany to war in two weeks.
The third iteration of this myth occurred a short time later when the Baron went to a diplomatic reception with his wife. At that event, the Ambassador of the United States to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, asked von Wangenheim about his trip to Berlin. Because his wife was present and standing next to him, the Baron decided to double down on his lie, and he repeated it to the American Ambassador. Barnes further suggested that additional embellishments or modifications may have occurred at this point in time since “liquor may have stimulated his [the Baron’s] imagination or lessened his restraint” but added that what was precisely said will probably never be known. Unfortunately for the world, Morgenthau propagated the Baron’s lie as a historical true fact.
Former Kaiser William II on the “Crown Council Myth”
In late 1929, T. St. John Gaffney, the former United States Consul General at Dresden and Munich, wrote to the former Kaiser “in order finally to get at the truth.” The former Kaiser replied in his own handwriting. A facsimile of his actual handwritten response was included in Gaffney’s article that appeared in Current History, a journal published by the University of California Press:
The Lie of the ‘Potsdam Crown-War-Council’ was concocted with all its exciting details by MY OWN!! Ambassador, pretending to have attended the Council personally, to give more probability to his story! It is a vile, malevolent Lie without the slightest foundation of truth. No Chiefs of Army & Navy were present. . .. No Bankers, no Captains of Industry were assembled, no Ambassadors bidden to be present: all Wangenheim’s personal FICTION! That was the result of Dr. Kurt Jagow’s investigations, who published them about a year ago. The ‘Potsdam Crown Council’ is a Myth, a Lie, never took place.
The Great Historical Significance of the “Crown Council Myth” to World History
The “Crown Council Myth,” due to its sensational nature, “had a great influence upon Allied propaganda against Germany at the end of the war,” according to Barnes. The “Crown Council Myth” was “exploited by the more vindictive makers of the Treaty of Versailles. Gaffney lamented the fact that “Secretary Lansing and Dr. James Brown Scott, President Wilson’s representatives on the Commission of Fifteen, in the report adjudging the Kaiser and the Imperial Government as solely guilty of causing the war, featured this bogus ‘Crown Council’ as one of their convincing proofs.” In particular, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles declared that “Germany and its allies are guilty of having caused all losses and damages which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nations suffered in consequence of the war.” According to Barnes, “historians are agreed that it was the Treaty of Versailles which prepared the way for the Second World War.” Therefore, Baron von Wangenheim’s “Crown Council Myth” “may have had some direct relation to the sacrifice of millions of lives and astronomical expenditures of money in the wars since 1939.”
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Image: Public domain.
