The truth about the First World War remains hidden. Serious historians, researchers and interested members of the public have been thwarted in their attempts to find out what really happened. In 1914 the first casualty of war was the truth and even a century later members of the British Establishment persist in disseminating their lies and myths. They have much to hide. We will demonstrate that facts about the causes of the war, the questionable events during it, and ludicrous claims made afterwards, were all subjected to rigid censorship, misinformation, propaganda, carefully selected documentary ‘proofs’, unsubstantiated ‘evidence’ and complicit, officially approved histories. The Secret Elite not only caused the war but dictated afterwards how it was recorded and translated into history. It was their war, and we are taught their history. Professor Quigley warned of the inherent danger of the Secret Elite’s ‘triple-front penetration’ of politics, the press and education. ‘No country that values its safety’ he declared, should allow what this cabal of elites accomplished:
‘that is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period. [1]
The Secret Elite dictated the publication of official documents, not only their own sources, but also those of the defeated nations. Their control of the historical record was absolute. They decided what would or would not be allowed into the public domain. For example, the British Blue Book, which contained the diplomatic exchanges in the weeks preceding the war, was presented to Parliament on 6 August, 1914, supposedly to prove Britain’s good intent and absolve her from any responsibility. Arranged in chronological order, the telegrams appeared to be complete, candid and convincing: a studied confirmation of Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s ‘determined efforts to preserve peace’. [2] Years later evidence released from Moscow in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution clearly showed that three of the telegrams Grey had presented to Parliament as crucial proof of his attempts to prevent war had never even been sent. The claim by the British ambassador in St Petersburg that, with one exception, all of the diplomatic exchanges between him and the Foreign Office were included in the Blue Book [3] was a scandalous lie. Professor Sydney Fay of Harvard found that ‘more than a score’ had not been included and that important passages from telegrams and letters had been judiciously cut. [4]
The Russian Orange Book contained 79 documents that emphasised her efforts for peace, but it concealed the truth about Russia’s general mobilisation that led directly to war, and falsely blamed Austria and Germany. [5] The Orange Book omitted the conciliatory proposals that had been made by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the July crisis, and all evidence of the aggressive Franco-Russian policies that had been agreed between President Poincare of France and the Czar. [6] The long-delayed French Yellow Book likewise suppressed incriminating telegrams altogether and altered others to imply the French desire for peace and German responsibility for the war. The Secret Elite were ruthless in their manipulation of official documents like the British Blue Book. The French Yellow and Russian Orange Books were likewise riddled with omissions and misinformation to conceal the truth and were faithfully portrayed by their propaganda machines as evidence of German war guilt. With the advantage of evidence not available at the time, their collusion is now obvious. In 1914, only the Secret Elite’s trusted agents knew of the diplomatic and foreign office connivance between Britain, France and Russia throughout the month of July 1914. [7]
The Secret Elite went to great lengths to cover all traces of their conspiracy. Letters to and from Alfred Milner, their undisputed leader, were culled, removed, burned or otherwise destroyed. [8] Milner’s remaining papers, held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, bear witness to the zeal with which much evidence of wrongdoing has been obliterated. Secret dispatches that he sent to his friend Lord Selborne have disappeared. Milner burned private and personal telegrams [9] and what remains of the cull undertaken by his wife after his death represents only the bare rump of his voluminous correspondence.
Incriminating letters sent by King Edward VII, himself a member of the inner-core of the Secret Elite, were subject to an order that on his death they must be destroyed immediately. Admiral Jacky Fisher, erstwhile First Sea Lord, noted in his Memories that he had been advised by Lord Knollys, the king’s private secretary, to burn all letters sent to him by the king. Fisher consequently burned much of his royal correspondence but couldn’t bear to part with it all. [10] Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, leading international banker and founder member of the secret society, likewise ordered that his papers and correspondence be burned posthumously lest his political influence and interventions became known. As his biographer commented, one can but ‘wonder how much of the Rothschilds’ political role remains irrevocably hidden from posterity’. [11] If anything, the systematic conspiracy of the Secret Elite’s place-men in the British government to cover all traces of their devious machinations was far worse.
Even if we assume that the surviving records of the Committee of Imperial Defence were accurate, what remains tells us more about what is missing. Cabinet records for the July Crisis, covering the 4th to the 21st, relate almost exclusively to Ireland. [12] Discussion about the Balkans? None. Fears about the dangers implicit in the Austro-Serbian dispute? Nowhere. Belgium? No mention. No papers remain that raised concerns about a German invasion of Belgium. It had to appear that this conundrum had suddenly been sprung on Britain. While the official notice in the Public Record Office List of Cabinet Papers warns that ‘the papers listed … are certainly not the whole of those collectively considered by Cabinet Ministers’, the gap is breathtaking, and no effort has been made to explain why crucial records are missing or what happened to them. No Cabinet Papers whatsoever, from 14 July until 20 August, survived the cull. By which time the First World War had entered its third week. It beggars belief that so much has disappeared, [13] and the logical question is, why?
Much is missing in Britain’s official record of the First World War, but in fairness to the librarians and custodians of the Public Record Office, they could only catalogue what they were given. The British public has a right to know the full extent of what has been secretly retained, hidden, or gone ‘missing’. In the early 1970s, the Canadian historian Nicholas D’Ombrain began researching War Office records. He noted: The Registry Files were in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of the policy of ‘weeding’. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five-sixths.’ [14]
Astonishingly, a large amount of ‘sensitive’ material was actually removed as the academic went about his business. Where did it go? Who authorised its removal? In addition, D’Ombrain noted that minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence and ‘circulation and invitation lists’ together with much ‘routine’ correspondence had been destroyed. [15] What still required to be hidden from historians and researchers in 1970? That D’Ombrain found five-sixths of the total files melting away in front of him demonstrated clearly that others still retained a vested interest in keeping the evidence of history hidden. D’Ombrain is but one of a number of historians thwarted by the ‘disappearance’ of documentation.
Official memoirs covering the origins of the First World War were very carefully vetted. Sir Edward Grey’s Twenty-Five Years is an appalling excuse for a record of fact, and the convenience of his failing memory rings hollow. Lloyd George’s War Memoirs contain numerous pieces that suggest a censor’s pen. Instead of detailing the help he received from Lord Rothschild at the very start of the war, Lloyd George restrained his comment to ‘it was done’, [16] leaving the reader to wonder precisely what ‘it’ was. He does however draw attention to the controversial and self-glorifying diaries written by Sir Douglas Haig, Commander of the British Army, and radically altered by Lady Haig to the extent that there were two versions of the supposedly same record. Haig’s re-written and frequently altered diaries were liberally used by his biographer, and family friend, Duff Cooper to glorify him. [17] The version that Haig sent directly to King George V criticised many of his fellow commanders, but these were removed by Lady Haig lest Sir Douglas’s reputation be affected. [18] A great deal more will be said at appropriate times about Sir Douglas Haig. When Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador at Petrograd, an important player in the Secret Elite’s trusted diplomatic corps, penned his memoirs, My Mission to Russia and other Diplomatic Memories, it contained information that the Establishment considered too revealing for publication. His daughter Meriel stated that he was obliged to omit passages from his book on pain of losing his pension. [19] Take care. Memoirs have been tampered with.
Bad as this is, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the Secret Elite’s outrageous theft of the historical record from across Europe. In the immediate post war years, hundreds of thousands of important documents pertaining to the origins of the 
First World War were taken from their countries of origin to the west coast of America and hidden away in locked vaults at Stanford University. The documents, which would without doubt have exposed the real perpetrators, had to be removed to a secure location and hidden from prying eyes.
Herbert Hoover, a future US President, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth task of removing incriminating documents from Europe. During the war, Hoover played a major role for the Secret Elite in operating an emergency food-supply organisation that was allegedly created to save starving Belgian civilians.
No government gave official sanction to the removal of historical documents. It was theft dressed as a philanthropic act of preservation for the benefit of future historians. Indeed, like the thief in the night, stealth was the rule of thumb. Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University and a close friend of Hoover from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Hoover recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. They used letters of introduction and logistical support from Hoover to collect the documentary evidence and establish a network of representatives throughout Europe. [20] They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [21]
Hoover recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [22] Hoover’s Secret Elite controllers were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. Other documents relating to military aspects of the war itself were ignored. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, surprisingly, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the Czarist archives pertaining to the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ‘Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’ [23]
The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence relating to the old Czarist regime that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on the top secret negotiations which went on between the Russian Foreign Office and Paris and London before the war started. They had to remove the evidence of Russian mobilisation because it proved that Germany acted in self defence. It might at first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Americans to remove another 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. [24] According to the New York Times they bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, [25] but clearly there were darker forces at play.
The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’ – a ‘gift’, according to Hoover, from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained this away by claiming that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, [26] but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the Kaiser’s wartime conduct of the German empire. [27] Where then is the vital evidence to prove Germany’s guilt? Had there been proof it would have been released immediately. There was none. Taking possession of the German archives was especially crucial since they would have proved conclusively to the world that Germany had not started the war.
The ‘Hoover War Library’ became so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. [28] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and keys to the padlocks were allowed access. In 1941, 22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, the first carefully selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that few if any First World War historians have ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material from that source. Indeed, it is a startling fact that no war historian has ever written about this illicit theft of European documents to America: documents that relate to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history. And so the theft of history remains a crime for which no-one has ever faced trial, because no government has ever laid formal charges. Perhaps they should.
[1] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo American Establishment, p. 197.
[2] Sidney B Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. I, p. 5.
[3] George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, vol. 1, p. 100.
[4] Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. I, p. 29.
[5] Ibid., p. 5.
[6] Barnes, Genesis of the World War, p. 40.
[7] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp 252-300.
[8] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 551, in footnote.
[9] Milner Papers, Milner to Selborne, 5 April 1899, Bodleian Library, Ms.Eng.Hist. c.688.
[10] Baron John Arbuthnott Fisher, Memories and Records, vol. 1, p. 21.
[11] Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild, vol. II, p. 319.
[12] Cabinet Papers, CAB 37/120/ 69, 81, 90.
[13] List of Cabinet Papers, 1880–1914. PRO booklet.
[14] d’Ombrain, War Machinery and High Policy, preface, p. xiii.
[15] Ibid.
[16] David Lloyd George War Memoirs, Vol.1, p. 70.
[17] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, Vol. II, pp 2011-2015.
[18] Nikolas Gardner, Trial By Fire, pp. 228-230.
[19] Meriel Buchanan, The Dissolution of an Empire, pp. 192–207.
[20] Charles G. Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives, p. 5.
[21] Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library
[22] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[23] Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library
[24] Ibid.
[25] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[26] Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library
[27] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[28] Hoover Institution, Stanford University
held on the frontier at Salonika on 23 May 1917, Apis and eight of his associates were indicted on various trumped up charges, unrelated to Sarajevo, and sentenced to death, Two others were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The Serbian High Court reduced the number of death sentences to seven and King Alexander commuted another four, leaving Apis and two others to face the firing squad. [8]
Hidden History of the First World War 