Victor E. Marsden - Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler

Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler

Henry Ford purchased the Dearborn Independent with the publication therein of a series of articles in from 1920 through 1922 which were subsequently published in four volumes, as The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.

When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, both Germany and the U.S. were flooded with mass-produced anti-Semitic literature, at the core of which was the text of the Protocols of Zion. Ford placed his personal wealth, acquired from his ownership of the Ford Motor Company, and financed not only the writing in his Dearborn Independent, but the subsequent worldwide distribution of The International Jew. Hitler, on the other hand, directed the machinery of the German Reich to finance and produce anti-Semitic literature. The nameless hired editors of The Protocols were faced with a dilemma: the text had no author, and was too brief for a book. It consisted of a collection 24 or 27 chapters — a mere short appendix (actually chapter XII, the last chapter) in a Russian language 1905 book, by Sergei Nilus, prophesying the coming of the Anti-Christ. Nilus was merely the translator, however, and could not consistently explain or account for the "appendix," for which he denied authorship. By 1934, and thereafter, the name of Victor E. Marsden proved to be the appropriate solution to the literary need that every book needs an author or an editor. Marsden, its translator, had been dead for 14 years. It was therefore decided by these nameless editors to make him also its glosser. And since 1934, when the expanded edition was produced by Ford's and Hitler's agents, Marsden's name has stuck to it.