Fifth Column - Later Usage

Later Usage

• German minority organizations in Czechoslovakia formed the Sudeten German Free Corps, which aided the Third Reich. Some claimed they were "self-defense formations" created in the aftermath of World War I and unrelated to the German invasion two decades later. More often their origins were discounted and they were defined by the role they played in 1938-39: "The same pattern was repeated in Czechoslovakia. Henlein's Free Corps played in that country the part of Fifth Column".

• In 1945, a U.S. State Department document compared the earlier efforts of Nazi Germany to mobilize the support of sympathizers in foreign nations to the superior efforts of the international communist movement at the end of World War II: "a communist party was in fact a fifth column as much as any Bund group, except that the latter were crude and ineffective in comparison with the Communists". Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1949: "the special Soviet advantage — the warhead — lies in the fifth column; and the fifth column is based on the local Communist parties."

• North Koreans living in Japan, particularly those affiliated with the organization Chongryun (which is itself affiliated with the government of North Korea) are sometimes seen as a "fifth column" by some Japanese, and have been the victims of verbal and physical attacks. These have occurred more frequently since the government of Kim Jong Il acknowledged it had abducted Japanese nationals and tested ballistic missiles.

• Some Israeli Jews, including politicians, rabbis, journalists and historians, have referred to the Arab citizens of Israel (who compose approximately 20% of Israel's population) as a potential fifth column on the ostensible grounds that Arab-Israelis frequently identify more with the Palestinian cause than with the State of Israel or Zionism.

• Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 science-fiction novel Sixth Column describes the work of a "sixth column," a hidden resistance movement fighting an oppressive occupying force of Asians on American soil. The novel included many references to the Spanish events in which the term originated, so as to contrast the–in the author's view–traitorous fifth column with the novel's patriotic sixth.