Their intent was to provoke another world war that would destroy Germany completely and prevent its ability to challenge U.S.-UK global supremacy
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (1887-1975) was a Harvard graduate and friend of Theodore Roosevelt who was a top aide to Adolf Hitler from 1923 to 1937.
Although he loathed Hitler’s persecution of Jews, Hanfstaengl wrote Hitler’s speeches and helped polish his image while working to ensure that he received positive press coverage.
Hanfstaengl, presenting himself as a loyal German, was recruited to work for Anglo-American intelligence while running his family’s art gallery in New York City according to Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd, authors of Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (Trine Day, 2025).
Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Auslandspressechef der NSDAP
5748-34
[1934; Scherl Bilderdienst]
Hanfstaengl had been put in contact with Hitler by Captain Truman Smith, a U.S. military intelligence officer who referred to Hitler as “a remarkable fellow” who was “going to play a big part.”[1]
A “big part,” that is, in a scheme to manipulate into power a reactionary German leader who would wage another war on Russia. The ultimate goal was the destruction of two countries that could challenge Anglo-American hegemony.
Hitler may have been chosen because a U.S. Navy intelligence report specified that after he had been gassed in World War I, he had been taken to the hospital and subjected to hypnosis by a Dr. Edmund Forster, and programed to believe that he would “have troops that would someday invade Russia and kick the Communists out.”
Political researcher Mae Brussell wrote: “they hypnotized him so that he would always believe that he’d be a great leader, like Joan of Arc.”
Milieu of Spies
During World War I, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the uncle of CIA Director Allen Dulles and a key architect of U.S. intervention in the Great War, had set up a State Department Secret Service that was closely integrated with the British intelligence services and served as a forerunner of both the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Macgregor and O’Dowd show Hanfstaengl’s close connection with key figures associated with Lansing’s service and British intelligence, and who were involved in spying and false-flag operations designed to make Germany look like an aggressor in World War I.
The key figures included:
Leland Harrison, a Harvard and Eton College graduate who served as Second Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in London from 1910 to 1912;
Belle da Costa Greene, curator of the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum who was a British intelligence agent;
Guy Gaunt, the head of British intelligence in New York, and his replacement William Wiseman;
Michael Crowley, a British agent provocateur who posed as an Irish nationalist;
Frank Harris, a friend of Winston Churchill who was editor of The London News; and
Truman Smith, a Yale graduate and grandson of a U.S. Senator from Connecticut who was sent by the American embassy in Germany to assess Hitler in 1922.[2]
According to Macgregor and O’Dowd, Hanfstaengl was “not simply an outsider who just happened to be passively connected to all of the above individuals involved in the murky world of Anglo-American secret intelligence…he was one of them.”[3]
Mentoring a Fascist
Hanfstaengl’s introduction to Hitler by Truman Smith came in 1922 after he gave an incendiary speech at a Munich beer hall in 1922 in which he harangued Jews, communists and socialists who would later all be sent to concentration camps.[4]
After their first meeting, Hanfstaengl started inviting Hitler to his home in the most fashionable part of Munich and began introducing him to prominent people around Germany. He also provided financing that helped transform the Nazi Party newspaper from a modest once or twice a week paper into a full-sized daily.[5]
Additionally, Hanfstaengl coached Hitler on how to pace his speeches and project his voice, how to use hand motions and how to address an audience with clarity, confidence and impact—skills Hanfstaengl had learned as part of a debating club at Harvard.[6]
Hanfstaengl also pushed for the use of American college-style music at political rallies to excite the crowd, and assisted Hitler in writing his prison memoir Mein Kampf after he was jailed for leading the aborted Munich beer hall putsch.[7]
Before he met Hanfstaengl, Hitler was largely an unknown outside of Munich and lived in a run-down apartment. He was a failed artist who was embittered by his experience fighting in World War I and capitalized on the economic breakdown in Germany that had resulted from a British embargo and the harshly punitive terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty.
Under the latter terms, Germany was forced to cede its industrial heartland to France, give up a quarter of its coal mines and 15% of its farmland along with all of its colonies, and pay ridiculously high war indemnities amounting to $8 billion.[8]
Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wondered what the affable Putzi, “who spoke perfect English with an American accent and was blessed with a cultured New England mother,” was doing mixing with a fascist like Hitler.[9] If only he knew the full story.
Hanfstaengl and the Burning of the Reichstag
Hanfstaengl appears to have been behind the burning of the Reichstag, a false-flag operation carried out on the night of February 27, 1933, that justified the Nazis seizure of power and suspension of habeas corpus rights.
The Nazis accused Dutch communist youth Marinus van der Lubbe of triggering the fire, though in reality it was set up by Herman Goering and other Nazis and van der Lubbe was set up as a patsy.[10]
Hanfstaengl was supposed to have dinner that night at Joseph Goebbels’ house in Berlin, though claimed to have fallen ill and to have stayed the night at the Reichstag palace, Herman Goering’s official residence (since he was head of the Reichstag), which happened to be adjacent to the Reichstag building that was burned.[11]
The palace had ready access to a tunnel where the Nazi arsonists gained entry to the Reichstag. Further suspicious is the fact that despite his illness, Hanfstaengl was the first to alert the London Daily Express and Associated Press of the fire, arranging for Hitler to come and tell them that the communists were behind it.[12]
Nazi Kurt Ludecke said that there once existed a document signed by S.A. (Brownshirts) leader Karl Ernst—who set the fire and was later murdered by fellow Nazis—which implicated Goering, Goebbels and Hanfstaengl in the conspiracy.[13]
Bill de Ropp and Frederick William Winterbotham
According to Macgregor and O’Dowd, William de Ropp (1886-1973) was another British spy who infiltrated Hitler’s inner circle and was a key figure advising him. A fluent German speaker who was a World War I veteran of the British Flying Air Corps, de Ropp was described as “one of the most mysterious and influential clandestine operators of the era.”[14]
Macgregor and O’Dowd state that de Ropp—like Hanfstaengl—had “direct links to the powerful segment of the Anglo-American establishment that was actively promoting Hitler and the Nazis for war with Russia.”[15] Macgregor and O’Dowd added: “It is important to recognize that Putzi Hanfstaengl and Bill de Ropp were not placed directly alongside Hitler to discourage him from war, but to continuously encourage him into preparing for it while at the same time making him believe that Britain would not intervene.”[16]
De Ropp’s handler was a Royal Air Force officer named Frederick William (F. W.) Winterbotham, a leading figure in British intelligence who also came to infiltrate Hitler’s inner circle.
Detesting Bolshevism, Winterbotham conveyed to Hitler his belief that Germany and Britain should deal with the “scourge of communism” together, encouraging Hitler to prepare for war with the Soviet Union.[17]
In 1934, on a trip to Berlin, two of Hitler’s top generals gave Winterbotham detailed information on a planned German invasion of Soviet Russia, which was carried out seven years later.[18]
In line with his covert agenda, Winterbotham led the generals to believe that Great Britain was supportive of the German plan—so they would feel they could go ahead with it.
The Milner Group and 30-Year Plan to Destroy Germany
Macgregor and O’Dowd see the diabolical plot to empower Hitler as being part of a 30-year plan to ensure Anglo-American world dominance that began with the deliberate provocation of World War I.
Macgregor and O’Dowd spend the first part of their book detailing how a secret “Milner” group, associated with Alfred Milner, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Rothschild, Winston Churchill, J. P. Morgan, Woodrow Wilson and others schemed to provoke World War I in an attempt to weaken and destroy Germany and then imposed the Versailles settlement in furtherance of this latter aim.
Macgregor and O’Dowd draw off the work of Carroll Quigley, a history professor at Georgetown University who wrote a book called The Anglo-American Establishment (GSG and Associates, 1981).[19]
Milner was a British colonial administrator who played a significant role in shaping British policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Besides World War I, he schemed to provoke the Boer War in an attempt to help Britain gain access to South Africa’s rich mineral wealth.
In the 1920s, remnants of the Milner group initiated the Dawes and Young plans to rebuild Germany’s economy on terms favorable to U.S.-UK banking interests and so it could pay the Versailles war indemnity. Britain and France needed to obtain Germany’s money so they could repay a massive loan they had received to finance World War I from J. P. Morgan.
More than half the money lent under the Dawes and Owen plans went to large corporations in Germany, which helped build the Nazi military with American help.[20]
The Hearst media and other influential U.S. and British newspapers played their part by presenting Hitler in a flattering light.
Macgregor and O’Dowd suggest that the famous “appeasement policy” by which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acceded to Hitler’s 1938 takeover of the Czech Sudetenland, was part of the diabolical efforts to encourage German aggression with the intent of provoking another world war. Hitler was repeatedly led to believe that he had the support of British leaders because of a shared enmity toward the communist USSR.
Once the war was started, the U.S. and UK set about eviscerating Germany through ferocious air power attacks like over Dresden and Cologne.
The plan worked out spectacularly with the USSR sacrificing more then 25 million people as the U.S. and UK bided their time fighting in North Africa and Italy during the crucial years of 1942-1943, swooping in only at the end to claim victory.
In May 1943, Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that “the British are trying to arrange this matter so that the British and Americans hold the leg for Stalin to kill the deer,” which all fit in with the larger strategic design.
The design was driven in large part by Wall Street and London bankers who financed Hitler’s financial bagmen, like Fritz Thyssen, a client of Brown Brothers Harriman, a firm run by Joseph Biden’s mentor Averell Harriman and which was associated with the Bush family.
Wall Street bankers venerated Hitler because of his attacks on organized labor and the political left and desire to expunge the Soviet Bolshevik menace—a goal shared by the U.S. State Department. Furthermore, huge profits could be made off of war.
Afterwards, it was spun that the entire German population was collectively guilty for starting World War II, with the influence of Western intelligence services and the Anglo-American banking elite and leadership class ignored.
According to Macgregor and O’Dowd, the considerable German resistance to Hitler was also deliberately played down as was the fact that British government leaders refused to support coup plots against the Nazis or efforts to assassinate Hitler.[21]
Myth of the Good War
Fitting with the observation of CovertAction Magazine founder Philip Agee, U.S. and British intelligence agencies can be seen to have functioned in Germany during World War II and in the period leading up to it as tools of big business and banking interests that controlled government policy and drove the quest for global dominance.
The success of the covert operation to empower Hitler paid dividends in that Germany’s destruction in World War II along with that of Soviet Russia ensured Anglo-American dominance in the post-war era.
Through the first quarter of the 21st century, Germany housed 40 U.S. military bases and its government was subservient to the U.S.—epitomized in its support for U.S. aggression directed against Russia via its Ukraine proxy.[22]
Japan—which had tried to establish an empire to counter European empires in the Pacific—became a de facto U.S. neo-colony after its crushing defeat in World War II, hosting dozens of U.S. military bases and supporting U.S. efforts to sustain dominance in Southeast Asia.
The U.S. entered World War II through the back door by declaring war against Japan the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, which the FDR administration allowed to go forward.
World War II may be considered the “good war” in popular memory in the U.S. and UK, but Macgregor and O’Dowd’s revisionist history shows that to be a fairy tale.
The evidence they present indicates that the U.S. and UK intelligence agents helped enable Hitler’s rise as part of a scheme to destroy two potential rival imperial powers. Since that time, they have spearheaded a massive cover-up by infiltrating academia and controlling the writing of history.
Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2025), 464-69, 477, 479. Hitler was considered a gifted orator who was further valued because of his intent to destroy Marxism-Leninism and Germany’s political left. ↑Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 464-69, 477, 479. ↑
Ibid., 472. ↑
Ibid., 480, 481. ↑Ibid., 486. ↑
Ibid., 483. Hanfstaengl claimed that the “Sieg Heil” salute was a copy of a technique used by football cheerleaders at Harvard. ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 485. ↑
Ibid., 526. ↑
Ibid., 495. ↑
Ibid., 515. ↑
Idem. ↑
Ibid., 516. Daily Express reporter Sefton “Tom” Delmer had previously joined Hanfstaengl and Hitler on Hitler’s private plane and had worked for a branch of British intelligence. ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 517. ↑
Ibid., 497. ↑
Ibid., 498. ↑
Idem., 498. De Ropp remained at Hitler’s side until 1940. ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 502, 509. ↑
Ibid., 521. ↑
It has been suggested that Quigley was the in-house historian of the Milner group and its heirs who wanted their existence made known. ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 531. The Dawes Plan was named after Charles G. Dawes, a banker tied to the J. P. Morgan group whose prior career was tainted by a Republican Party payoff scandal in Illinois. The Young Plan was conceived by Owen D. Young, yet another senior player in the J. P. Morgan dynasty who had been chairman of General Electric in New York (General Electric was a large combine created by Morgan in 1892). Macgregor and O’Dowd suggest that the Dawes and Young plans were conceived by J. P. Morgan and Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, and enabled Wall Street’s effective takeover of the German economy. Morgan thereafter controlled a considerable portion of German industry. Macgregor and O’Dowd wrote that, after implementation of the Dawes Plan, Germany became “an economic prisoner to the Anglo-American bankers…the internal beauty of the scam was that the ‘loans’ to Germany were really intended to restore Germany’s military-industrial potential that would be used to wage the Anglo-American bankers’ next war.” ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd suggest that leading players in the anti-Nazi resistance requested help from the British government, which spurned them. Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 605. ↑
Macgregor and O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler, 605. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Also, refer to Starikov here:
https://archive.org/details/nikolai-starikov-who-set-hitler-against-stalin
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