Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  The charges against Eichmann and Nazi Germany were based on

  fundamental but unproved assumptions that what Hitler and the National Socialists did in the years after Britain and the United States entered the war revealed that they were . . . vile, debased, brutal and bloodthirsty gangsters.47

  Barnes attacked popular American weekly and monthly journals for their “sensational articles” about “exaggerated National Socialist savagery.”48 He repeated what had become a consistent refrain in his articles: Allied atrocities surpassed those of the Germans. The Allied atrocities, to which Barnes made repeated reference, included the bombing of Hamburg, Tokyo, and Dresden and the postwar expulsion of the Sudeten Germans during which, he charged, “at least four millions of them perish[ed] in the process from butchery, starvation and disease.” Using language that was purposely chosen to evoke a comparison to what the Jews “claimed” was done to them, Barnes described the population transfer as “the final solution” for defeated Germans.

  In “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” Barnes again stopped short of explicitly denying the existence of gas chambers:

  The number of civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during and after the second World War, equalled, if it did not far exceed those liquidated by the Germans and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by methods which were far more brutal and painful that whatever extermination actually took place in German gas ovens.2, 49

  Once again coming close to, but not quite crossing the boundary into denial, he complained in the same article that Allied atrocities are never “cogently and frankly placed over against the doings, real or alleged, at Auschwitz.”50

  Barnes tried to argue that the gas chambers were postwar inventions. Ignoring the fact that information on gas chambers in various death camps had been publicized long before the war ended, he falsely claimed that the charges had only been made afterward, when it was necessary to justify the war and its outcome. According to Barnes, when the “court historians” were forced by “revisionists” to admit reluctantly that there were only concentration camps and not death camps in Germany, they needed something else to maintain the evil image of the Nazi empire. It was then, he argued, that they contrived the existence of gas chambers at other camps. Once this allegation was placed in the public domain, the “smotherout” historians changed the focus of their attacks on Nazi Germany. No longer did they emphasize the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s precipitation of the war. They found something far more potent:

  What is deemed important today is not whether Hitler started war in 1939 or whether Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor but the number of prisoners who were allegedly done to death in the concentration camps operated by Germany during the war. These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dora, but it was demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska [sic], Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia [sic], and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed.51

  These new charges kept the public from becoming “bored” by hearing the same stories. To ensure public interest the details were “made more unceasing, exaggerated and inflammatory.”52 Once again Barnes totally distorted the truth and reshaped the historical record. Information about Chelmno, Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other camps was well known long before the war ended; details about them had been published in the Western press on repeated occasions.

  Moreover it was precisely those whom Barnes accused of being “court historians” who, in fact, were responsible for demonstrating that there had been no homicidal gas chambers in German concentration camps. After the war there had been persistent confusion about the difference between concentration camps and death camps. The latter, located outside Germany, had facilities for the express purpose of murdering people, primarily Jews. While there were no death camps in Germany, there were many concentration camps, in which multitudes died from overwork, disease, starvation, beatings, and severe mistreatment. Much of the confusion centered around the idea that there was a functioning homicidal gas chamber in Dachau. This was what historians were trying to clarify in 1962, when Professor Martin Broszat, who served for many years as the director of Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History, wrote to the newspaper Die Zeit to “hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps.” Contrary to deniers’ claims, he said, his letter did not constitute an “admission” on his part but an effort to “set the record straight.”53 This remains a consistent tactic of the deniers. Every time historians who study the Holocaust correct a mistake in the record, deniers immediately claim that they do so because their previous lies were about to be exposed.3*

  Barnes also tried to recast history by changing the nature of the assignment of the Einsatzgruppen that functioned as the mobile killing units. The Einsatzgruppen entered Soviet territory in July 1941. Between that date and the beginning of the retreat of German forces in the spring of 1943, it is estimated that they murdered well over one million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. Their brutal methods were eventually replaced by the more “efficient” gas chambers. Barnes transformed them from groups whose express task was to murder Jews in Soviet territory into units that were “battling guerrilla warfare behind the lines.” This profile is totally contradicted by reams of documents and the testimony of Einsatzgruppen leaders and members, as well as that of those who saw them massacre Jews. Barnes’s transformation of their role was his means of trying to work around the truth. He did not have to deny that they may in fact have killed some Jews, but, according to his explanation, their actions were justified because their victims were anti-German guerrillas.

  But even with all these attempts to twist information and misrepresent established historical fact, Barnes and other revisionists faced a fundamental challenge in their effort to exculpate Nazi Germany. It was difficult to argue that Germany had not committed these outrages when the postwar West German government accepted responsibility for the war and the atrocities.54 Barnes castigated both the government and the academic community of the Federal Republic of Germany for failing to challenge this “unfair” verdict and the “false dogma[s]” propagated by the Allies and accepted by the Bonn government.55 The government’s approach to history prevented “the restoration of Germany to its proper position of unity, power and respect among the nations of the world.”56

  Barnes’s ire at the Adenauer government for its “masochistic” behavior was heightened by his comparison of it with the Weimar government’s attitude toward World War I. Barnes complained that none of the open-mindedness he had discovered during his trip to Germany in the Weimar period was evident in the Federal Republic. The Bonn government had “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” the German people into accepting an “indictment of German responsibility for the war. According to Barnes the postwar German leadership did more than acquiesce in the charges brought against it. It furthered the “smother-out” by “opposing] the discovery and publication of the truth.”57 Barnes claimed to be “deeply puzzled” about the Adenauer government’s acceptance of responsibility for German precipitation of the war and its “downright disinclination to seek to refute the most outrageous charges of cruelty and barbarism levelled against Germany by conscienceless atrocity mongers [and] the continuation to this very day of not-so-little Nuremberg trials.”58 Barnes did not, of course, consider the possibility that West Germany did not contest the accusations because they were true and West Germans, from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on down, knew it. Instead he condemned German leaders for “smearing” people like Rassinier and for the “sheer lunacy” of paying reparations “based on atrocity stories.”59 This was a precise repetition of Barnes’s behavior in relation to World War I revisionism. Convinced that his view constituted objecti
ve truth, he dismissed any information that challenged his conclusion, treating it as the work of perverted minds.

  Barnes found West Germany’s relationship with the State of Israel particularly galling. He was nonplussed by a speech given by the president of the West German Bundestag in Israel in 1962 in which he acknowledged Germany’s wrongdoings and asked for forgiveness for the Holocaust. Barnes characterized the speech as “subserviency” and “almost incredible grovelling.”60 He was appalled by the German decision to send a group of volunteers to work in Israel as a form of penance. Barnes’s disgust, as a non-German, at the German leader’s request from Israel for forgiveness and at German citizens’ desire to work on Israeli kibbutzim, is noteworthy. Barnes and Rassinier helped set the tone for subsequent Holocaust denial with their particular contempt for the Jewish state, its supporters, and Jews in general.

  The roots of Barnes’s views about the Holocaust and his attitudes toward Israel go beyond his deep-seated Germanophilia and revisionist approach to history: They can be found in his antisemitism. While this animus did not generally pervade his articles until the late 1960s, privately he had given voice to it as early as the 1940s. In an article published immediately after the war he suggested that Lord Vansittart (Robert Gilbert Vansittart), who served as Britain’s permanent under-secretary of the British Foreign Office until the beginning of 1938 and after that as chief diplomatic adviser to His Majesty’s Government, should be tried along with the Nazis for having helped precipitate the war. Vansittart, who was an anti-Nazi, is often singled out by revisionists and deniers as one of those chiefly responsible for pushing England to adopt anti-German policies. In response to Barnes’s attacks, Vansittart decided to sue for libel and asked the prominent American lawyer, Louis Nizer, to represent him. When the suit was announced in the Washington Post, Barnes complained to Oswald Garrison Villard. Both staunch isolationists, Villard and Barnes had regularly exchanged letters regarding America’s “misguided” foreign policy. (However, despite his ardent conviction that American policy had been wrong, Villard did not share Barnes’s views regarding atrocities or the victimization of Germany.) Barnes described the suit as a “plot of the Jews and the Anti-Defamation League to intimidate any American historians who propose to tell the truth about the causes of the war.” He attacked Louis Nizer as an “Anti-Defamation League stooge,” who had “needled [Vansittart] into action,” and bemoaned his inability to counter the inordinate power and financial resources of the other side:4*

  If I could raise money enough for a real defense we could make this an international cause celebre, but I cannot fight the thirty million dollars now in the coffers of the Anti-Defamation League to be used for character assassination on empty pockets. If we let them get away with this, we are licked from the start.61, 5*

  Barnes’s blaming his problems on a Jewish lawyer and a Jewish organization’s success in needling a prominent British official into action is another indication of his antipathy toward Jews and the degree to which he subscribed to antisemitic stereotypes. It is also an example of Barnes’s pattern of accusing others of conspiring against him. Peter Novick of the University of Chicago, who has closely examined Barnes’s correspondence, describes it as constituting a “full clinical record” of his abusiveness toward those who disagreed with him and his conviction that he was the target of innumerable conspirators. When the New York World-Telegram dropped his column in 1940, he blamed British intelligence, the Morgan bank, and Jewish department store owners in New York City, who, Barnes claimed, threatened the publisher with “loss of all advertising if he kept me on any longer.”62

  Yet Barnes apparently also understood that, like all deniers, he faced a fundamental obstacle. As long as they could be dismissed as antisemitic extremists, they would never make headway with the general public. If their work was perceived as simply a reworked expression of an age-old animus, it would have no credibility. Barnes tried to preempt this accusation by turning it back on those who made it: He accused those who charged that the deniers were antisemites of using this label as a means of silencing anyone who questioned the “official” version of history. According to Barnes, the keystone of this effort was the claim that Jews had been subjected to unique persecution and atrocities. This aspect of the hoax was ingenious in that it enabled its architects to muzzle critics. Anyone who dared to question the official version of history was labeled an antisemite. Employing tactics that again reflected his personal hostility towards Jews, Barnes charged those behind the “smotherout” with believing that “it [was] far worse to exterminate Jews, even at the ratio of two Gentiles to one Jew, than to liquidate Gentiles.”63 When Barnes or like-minded people challenged this assertion in the name of “non-racial humanitarianism,” they were accused of being antisemitic, which was considered “worse than parricide or necrophilia.”64

  Barnes’s standing as a historian is a matter of some dispute. His early works on World War I won positive reviews, and for many years his was considered to be a serious though extreme historical voice. His personal attacks on those who disagreed with him and his writings about World War II alienated many of his earlier followers but did not totally cost him his credibility as a historian. In his later years, while he was writing pamphlets about a “smotherout” and a “theory” of the Holocaust, his books were being used as required texts in university-level Western Civilization courses.6* When “The Public Stake in Revisionism”—in which he referred to the “doings real or alleged at Auschwitz” and described the Einsatzgruppen as “battling guerrillas”—appeared in the journal of Rampart College, Robert LeFevre, the college dean, writing in the journal, demonstrated the academic community’s willingness to regard Barnes’s behavior as excusable excesses: “There are places where Dr. Barnes’ understandable frustration is indicated by the use of emotive words and that may be unfortunate although it can be forgiven.”65

  Today Barnes’s work is generally dismissed by scholars because of his obsession with a conspiracy theory related to America’s entry into World War II. However, he remains something of a cult historian for members of the Libertarian party, who subscribe to Barnes’s style of revisionist scholarship. They have kept his works in print and made his books widely available in their bookstores. While the Libertarians can still be considered a fringe group, more disturbing was the 1975 edition of History Teacher, a publication of the Society for History Education, which at the time was housed at California State University at Long Beach. History Teacher is designed to aid teachers in finding interesting ways to present historical information to their students. This edition, entitled “Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a ‘Usable’ Past,” identified Barnes as someone who practiced the “scholarship of commitment.” Thus, notwithstanding his notions regarding the Holocaust and other aspects of World War II, Barnes’s legacy was still at least somewhat intact. According to Justus Doenecke, author of the profile on Barnes, the causes Barnes “heralded resemble our own and the dilemmas he faced are hauntingly familiar.” Barnes’s views regarding Hitler, the power of the Jews, atrocities committed by the Allies, or the Holocaust were never mentioned in this lengthy essay. Instead Barnes was portrayed as a useful model for those who believed in the relevance of history. His conviction that Allied atrocities overshadowed those of the Germans was also ignored, although there is a passing reference to his tendency to present views that are only “partially digested.” Having chosen to rely on Barnes’s work, any teacher who came upon his views about the Holocaust might take them seriously. After all, would History Teacher have suggested Barnes as a role model if they were not valid?66

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Austin J. App

  The World of Immoral Equivalencies

  Harry Elmer Barnes was not the only American academic who attempted to exonerate Germany by denying the Holocaust. Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton and LaSalle College, also played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United
States. Though not as prominent as Barnes, he was far more virulent and began explicitly denying the Holocaust within a few years after the war. By the late 1950s he was not only writing to the Catholic Brooklyn Tablet offering “proof” that the figure of six million was “a bloated libel,” but was appearing before varied audiences accusing Jews of perpetrating a massive hoax.1

  Like Barnes, App was mainly concerned to lift the moral burden of the atrocities charge from the shoulders of a defeated and divided Germany. In contrast to Barnes, App had no independent standing in the academic world. An active member of various German American groups, App was an ardent defender of Germans and Nazi Germany. He served for several years as president of the five-thousand-member Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, founded in 1945. Though it never reached its membership goal of three million, it was part of a successful postwar congressional lobbying effort to allocate a substantial number of the immigration slots that had been intended for Holocaust survivors to Germans and Austrians.2

  Born in Milwaukee in 1902 to German immigrant parents, App attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English literature. At the University of Scranton, where he taught from 1934 to 1942, he received its faculty medal as an outstanding educator. He served for a brief period in the army in 1942 but for unknown reasons was released within a short time after his induction. He subsequently joined the faculty of LaSalle College, where he remained throughout the rest of his teaching career. At LaSalle, where he taught medieval English literature and was known for pronouncing Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and other Old and Middle English works in the original, some of his students regarded him as a sort of “dry arrangement” the college kept on its staff to achieve accreditation. They had no idea of his other activities.3