The Dearborn Independent

1903

A forgery. This is the history of a lie. In 1903 a Russian newspaper began printing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to be the secret minutes of Jewish leaders plotting to rule the world. The Protocols is a forgery: those meetings never took place and those leaders never existed. This story follows how it was carried across the world, who paid for the carrying, who fought it, and what the regime it reached then did.

17 Aug 1921

Copied. On 17 August 1921 The Times of London printed the proof. Its reporter Philip Graves set passages of the Protocols beside Maurice Joly’s French satire of 1864, a book that never mentions Jews, and showed that the Protocols had plagiarised it in large part. The Times called the Protocols a “fake” and a “clumsy forgery.”

1920

Into America. The Protocols, a forgery, reached Henry Ford through the Russian exile Boris Brasol, who published an American edition in 1920 with his own commentary. Accounts differ on the hand-over: Michael Feldberg and Ford’s first editor, E. G. Pipp, point to Brasol, and the Holocaust Museum says Ford’s secretary, Ernest Liebold, received a copy in June 1920. Ford’s paper then told readers to distrust anyone who said the text was fake. It was fake.

Nov 1918

A small-town weekly. In November 1918 Henry Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, a weekly in his home town. The Benson Ford archive says he wanted a forum to answer what he felt were the press’s misreadings of his opinions. Ernest Liebold, his private secretary, became general manager, and by The Atlantic’s account made the purchase on Ford’s behalf. The first issue under Ford came out on 11 January 1919.

Apr 1920

The editor leaves. E. G. Pipp, who had edited the paper from the start, resigned in protest in April 1920, and William J. Cameron, the lead writer, took his place. The Holocaust Museum says Cameron went on to write most of the articles in the series that followed. Bridge Michigan reports a general view that Ford talked over ideas with Liebold, who told Pipp and Cameron to turn them into stories.

22 May 1920

A memo. The weekly was losing money, Bridge Michigan reports, and a veteran newspaperman urged Liebold in a memo to “find an evil to attack.” On 22 May 1920 the paper began “The International Jew” on its front page and ran it for 91 more issues. The Holocaust Museum says it was meant to raise profits and spread Ford’s antisemitic ideas. Its charges against Jews were false, and it leaned on the forged Protocols.

1921

Paid for and carried. Ford covered the losses. The Holocaust Museum says every buyer of a Model T was signed up for a subscription, dealers were required to hand out copies, and free copies went to clergy and community groups. Liebold paid a network of investigators to gather material on community leaders, Bridge Michigan reports. Circulation counts differ, 700,000 at the peak by the ADL and over 900,000 by the Benson Ford archive, and that peak came in 1925 and 1926, after the series had stopped.

1922

Four volumes, and German. From November 1920 the Dearborn Publishing Company gathered the series into four paper-bound volumes, the last in May 1922, and chose not to copyright them, so anyone could print more. Theodor Fritsch published a German edition, which the Holocaust Museum says was in its 21st printing by 1922, while also counting six German printings from 1922 to 1924. The Protocols had been in German since 1919, and the Nazi Party secured the copyright to that edition in 1929. The book was translated into 12 languages by one count and at least 16 by another.

1921

The protest. Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee wired Ford that the articles were a libel on a whole people. By its own account the ADL was asked in September 1920 to counter the series and issued a pamphlet against it. In 1921 more than 100 prominent Americans, among them Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft, signed “The Perils of Racial Prejudice.” The paper kept printing.

1923

An exposure and a suit. Herman Bernstein of the New York Herald wired Ford in June 1920 that he could not imagine Ford had approved the articles, and the paper answered that he had already made up his mind. In 1921 he published The History of a Lie, which the Holocaust Museum calls the first exposure of the Protocols for American readers. He sued Ford for libel in 1923 over an interview in which Ford had spoken of him, and says he was attacked in Ford’s name after his exposures. Ford avoided being served, and the case was settled in 1927.

Mar 1927

Sapiro. In April 1924 the paper began articles claiming, falsely, that Aaron Sapiro, who organised farmers’ marketing co-operatives, was part of a Jewish plot to control American farmers. He sued in 1925, and the trial opened in Detroit in March 1927. Cameron testified that he alone was responsible, until a former employee swore Ford had told him he meant to expose Sapiro, the ADL says. Ford was hurt in a car accident before he could testify, and the judge declared a mistrial. The museum cites alleged bribery of a juror, and JSTOR Daily’s account of Victoria Woeste’s study says his security force engineered it. The suit settled in July 1927.

30 Jun 1927

The retraction. In June 1927 Ford approved a statement calling the Protocols “gross forgeries” and asking forgiveness. Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee drafted it, the Holocaust Museum and The Atlantic say, and one account says an assistant signed it. Ford said he had left the paper to the men in charge, yet in 1921 he had said of the Protocols that they “fit in with what is going on.” They are a forgery, and his own paper never printed the retraction.

Nov 1927

An order nobody obeyed. The Holocaust Museum says Ford ordered copies burned and overseas publishers to stop, and on 1 November 1927 he wrote to Fritsch ending any right to publish the book in any language. The orders were ignored, and the book kept circulating through the 1930s. The Independent’s last issue under Ford came in December 1927. After Marshall died in 1929 their understanding that the book would not be republished lapsed, JSTOR Daily reports from Woeste’s study.

1922

A picture in Munich. In late 1922 The New York Times reported a rumour in Berlin that Ford was funding Hitler, and noted a large picture of Ford on the wall of Hitler’s office and copies of Ford’s book in the anteroom. Hitler denied taking Ford’s money but called him an inspiration, and in 1931, Bridge Michigan reports, told a Detroit News reporter, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” No source used here shows that Ford paid him.

1925

Mein Kampf. In 1925 Hitler praised Ford in Mein Kampf, his antisemitic book, and kept a portrait of Ford in his office, the Holocaust Museum says. David Lewis wrote that Hitler’s speeches against Jews were frequently based on Ford’s literature, and Thomas Weber says Ford confirmed for Hitler a false idea already forming in his mind. The museum also says Hitler took up antisemitic conspiracy theories common in Munich after the Protocols appeared in German in 1919, and that when and why he adopted his worldview is debated. This story found no historian who limits Ford’s part, so what the sources here show is admiration and confirmation, not origin.

Jul 1938

The medal. On Ford’s 75th birthday in July 1938 Hitler sent him greetings and awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honour Germany gave a foreigner, the Holocaust Museum says. The German vice consul in Detroit handed it over at the Ford offices in Dearborn, Bridge Michigan reports, and the news set off a backlash across the U.S. Ford said that taking a medal “from the German people” meant no sympathy with Nazism. In 1940, the museum adds, he joined the America First Committee.

1945

What the regime did. Under Hitler’s leadership Nazi Germany perpetrated the Holocaust, the systematic persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people. The Nazi Party’s publishing house issued 22 printings of the Protocols by 1938, the Holocaust Museum counts. No source used here says that Ford’s book caused the killing, and this story does not say so.

23 May 1946

Nuremberg, 1946. On trial, Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Party’s youth leader, said in his own defence that Ford’s book was the decisive antisemitic book he read and the one that influenced his comrades. The court did not test this, and the presiding judge cut him off as irrelevant. It found that he took part in deporting the Jews of Vienna, where “bulletins describing the Jewish extermination were in his office.” It convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to twenty years.

1947

Afterwards. In 1942 Ford wrote to the ADL that he supported no agitation against his Jewish fellow citizens, though in June 1940 he had told a reporter the war was made by “the international Jewish bankers,” which is false. In his 2001 book Neil Baldwin finds the 1927 apology brought no change of attitude, citing Ford’s private notebooks, and Business Week, reviewing it, says a boycott of Ford cars led to the 1942 letter. The Holocaust Museum says the company’s German subsidiary, Ford Werke, used forced laborers and that Henry Ford had no influence there; the story Who Sold What to Whom? covers it. Ford died in 1947.

2017

Still in print. Ford’s retraction did not stop the book. It has long been in the public domain, so anyone can reprint it, and the Holocaust Museum notes that the literature published under his name is still available in print and online. The ADL, which records such reuse, says haters post old texts like this one to make their beliefs look lasting. The Protocols is still published too, although journalists, courts and governments have exposed it as a lie since the 1920s.