11 Spring 2026 In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the joint statement demonstrated in detail how and why The Protocols was an antisemitic forgery and debunked its claim that Bolshevism was in fact a Jewish movement that constituted a key element of the purported global Jewish conspiracy. The joint statement specifically referred to Ford yet again as follows: Ford, in the fullness of his knowledge, unqualifiedly declares the Protocols to be genuine and argues that practically every Jew is a Bolshevik. We have dealt sufficiently with both these falsehoods. It is useless in a serious document to analyze the puerile and venomous drivel that he has derived from the concoctions of professional agitators. He is merely a dupe. Precisely how much of a dupe Ford was in believing in the authenticity of The Protocols became clear the following year when the Constantinople correspondent of the London Times revealed that it had in fact been plagiarized, to a large extent verbatim, from an 1865 book by a French writer, Maurice Joly, entitled The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a thinly veiled satiric attack on French Emperor Napoleon III. This book neither mentions nor even obliquely refers to Jews. The London Times exposé was published in full in The New York Times on September 4, 1921.3 Henry Ford’s promotion of The Protocols specifically, and antisemitic conspiracy theories generally, acquires heightened significance in light of a New York Times article headlined “Berlin Hears Ford Is Backing Hitler,” published on December 20, 1922.4 This appears to be the Times’ very first mention of Hitler and the crux of the article was a rumored report that Ford was “financing Adolph [sic.] Hitler’s nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Munich.” This was before Hitler’s failed 1923 Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” before he wrote — or dictated — Mein Kampf while an inmate in Landsberg Prison, and before he and his Nazi Party emerged as an ultranationalist force on the Weimar Republic’s political spectrum. According to this article, “there is some ground for suspicion that Hitler is spending foreign money” to pay for his “spacious” and “splendidly furnished” Munich headquarters. The article further highlighted that: The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford [presumably, the recently published German edition of The International Jew]. If you ask one of Hitler’s underlings for the reason of Ford’s popularity in these circles he will smile knowingly but say nothing. Shortly thereafter, in early March 1923, Hitler was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that, I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany.5 It is against this background that one should consider Hitler’s subsequent depiction of Jews in Mein Kampf and his and the Nazi Party’s anti-Jewish rhetoric — not as in any way original diatribes but rather as the regurgitation of antisemitic conspiracy theories that had been widely promulgated by Henry Ford, among others. 3. “Proof that the ‘Jewish Protocols’ Were Forged,” N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 4, 1921, § 7, at 1. 4. “Berlin Hears Ford Is Backing Hitler,” N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 20, 1922, at 2. 5. Quoted in Jonathan R. Logsdon, “Power, Ignorance, and Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford and His War on Jews,” available at https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html
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