But, completely unknown to his students, App had a far more dubious side. He inundated newspapers, magazines, politicians, and journalists with letters attacking U.S. intervention in World War II, Allied demands for unconditional surrender, and the imposition of “Morgenthauism” on Germany. The latter was App’s way of placing responsibility for all of Germany’s postwar problems on President Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Of course, Morgenthau’s plan was never put into effect. In fact, Allied treatment of Germany was the exact opposite of the plan. The letters were also App’s self-described attempt to explode the “lies and calumnies” that had been spread about Germany since the war and to prevent Roosevelt and Morgenthau from selling out “Christian Europe to the Red barbarians.” The letters bristled with overt antisemitism and racism. Talmudists, Bolsheviks, and Zionists, all of whom were intimately connected in App’s mind with one another, were blamed for the evils that beset the world after the end of the war.4 Though few of his letters were actually published by the newspapers or magazines that received them, App kept up a steady stream of communiqués.
Though much of what App wrote can be relegated to traditional, almost gutter-level antisemitism, he is nonetheless an important figure in the development and evolution of Holocaust denial. His major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial. Since App posited them in 1973, virtually all deniers have built their arguments on them. The deniers’ tactics may have changed over time, but their arguments have remained the same.
Though App echoed many of Barnes’s views—he stated, for example, that “Hitler was a man of architecture and art, not of armaments and war”5 and that Germany was the victim, not the victimizer—App was a more extreme figure than Barnes. Barnes was avidly pro-German but was not a fascist. He wished to defend Germany against all claims of wrongdoing but did not look for a resurrection of a totalitarian regime, a notion to which App was attracted. His Holocaust denial was more fully developed and explicit far earlier than Barnes’s. As we have seen, Barnes had initially been reluctant to assert openly that the Holocaust was a fraud. Instead he found various ways to suggest it was “theory,” a “doing, real or imagined,” or only an “alleged atrocity.” During the war itself Barnes refrained from overt criticisms of Allied policies. In contrast, Austin App showed no such reluctance. He did not wait for the war to be over to begin building a case in defense of German actions. In 1942, while the Allies were being defeated on all fronts, App sent a steady stream of letters to newspapers, periodicals, and individual journalists expressing a strong sympathy for Germany and its political objectives. Echoing World War I revisionists, he vigorously contested the notion that Germany could be held responsible for starting the war and sought to justify Germany’s prewar behavior.
In May 1942, barely six months after Pearl Harbor, in a letter to CBS radio commentator Elmer Davis, App challenged the notion that Germany desired to “dominate” Europe. According to App, Germany’s territorial conquests did not represent naked aggression but rather the Reich’s aspiration to secure the raw materials and power it needed and, in his view, deserved. At a time when the Allies were being pushed back by the Axis in both Europe and the Pacific, App proclaimed that the “Anglo-Saxon block” would have to give Germany both raw materials and power “commensurate with its talents” or inevitably the Allies would be “terribly mangled and defeated.” App maintained that Germany had gone to war because this was the only way she could obtain what justifiably belonged to her. He argued that the means to end the war and win the peace was to give Germany “precisely the things, which, if we had given them in 1939, would have prevented the war.”6 But App did not stop there. His defense of Germany and his critique of Allied policy continued unabated through the war. In 1943, in the wake of the Casablanca Conference, at which Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that peace could only come to the world by the “total elimination” of Germany and Japan as war powers, he complained to the Columbus Evening Dispatch that to demand unconditional surrender from Germany was “grossly unethical.”7 In 1944, as it became increasingly clear that Germany would be defeated and speculation had begun as to what a postwar Germany would look like, App argued that the Allies perpetrated a war on Germany because of the latter’s legitimate desire to reunite with Danzig (now Gdansk). According to App, the prospect of a reunited Germany had frightened the Allies, and that is why they started the war. In this and numerous other letters App reiterated his central arguments. On the eve of World War II, Germany was emerging as a stronger nation than Britain. This the British and their ally the United States could not abide. According to App the only reason the United States was at war with Germany was that it did not want “anybody in Europe so civilized and so efficient that our kith and kin, Britain, can’t kick them around and tell them what they may or may not do.”8
App maintained this pro-Nazi line—Germany was innocent and the Allies guilty of starting the war—throughout the conflict. Once the war ended, App expanded the parameters of his defense of Germany’s political demands and wartime behaviors. Taking his cue from the World War I revisionists like Beard and Barnes, he argued that Germany had not been responsible for the outbreak of the war. But he did not limit himself to vindicating Germany’s territorial aspirations or attacking supposed Allied political machinations. He now commenced a far more serious endeavor: defending and justifying German atrocities. In May 1945, a week after the end of the war in Europe and while news of the liberation of the concentration camps filled the pages of American newspapers, App argued that what Germany had done was legally justified in the context of the rules of warfare.
Initially he focused on a few limited atrocities, such as the German massacre of the inhabitants of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice. When Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in May 1942, the Germans claimed that the villagers of Lidice had helped his assassin. They killed all the men in the village, 192 in all, as well as 71 women. The remaining 198 women were incarcerated in Ravensbrück, where many of them died. Of the 98 children who were “put into educational institutions,” no more than 16 survived. Lidice was razed to the ground.9 The annihilation of this town elicited an intense reaction from the American public. But, App contended, according to international law the killings were justified because the Germans had executed everybody who aided political murders,10 and American law would have supported such action. He offered no evidence of how he concluded that the entire village had aided the assassins. Nor did he explain how murdering all the males and one third of the women, incarcerating the rest, including the children, and razing the entire town could be regarded as applications of international or American law.
Two weeks after vindicating German actions in Lidice, App addressed the killing of the Jews. Having not yet reached the point of overt denial, he simply exonerated the Germans’ actions, basing his argument on two premises. Acknowledging that the Germans had committed “crimes and mistakes,” he insisted that whatever they did any other nation would have done under similar circumstances. In fact, he argued, the United States had acted similarly during the war: Just as Germany had imprisoned Jews, America had arbitrarily imprisoned Japanese Americans.
But that was not App’s only means of exculpating Germany for its persecution of Jews. The truculent behavior of Germany’s victims justified their annihilation. Had the Japanese been as “obstinate” as the German Jews, he argued, “we conceivably would have killed them the same way.”11 App’s exoneration of Germany’s annihilation of the Jews is particularly striking because at this point he was not yet denying that millions had been murdered. Obstinacy was just cause for the killing of millions.
Five months later App changed tactics and moved closer to denial. In an attempt to downplay the severity of Nazi atrocities, he began to obfuscate the existence of gas chambers. In 1945, in a letter to the author of an article on
the war crimes trials, App insisted that the German “so-called offenders” be quickly tried. It was, App noted, “in the interest of impartiality and justice” that “all war criminals of both sides be so tried.” He then proceeded to define what constituted a war criminal:
Just as the Germans who put Germans of Jewish descent into concentration camps because of their race should be tried so Americans who put Americans of Japanese descent into concentration (relocation) camps because of their race must be tried; just as Hitler was to have been tried for attacking Poland (to rectify the self-determination principle violated at Versailles regarding Danzig) so Stalin must be tried for invading Finland (without any justification at all); just as Germans who raped and looted must be tried so the troops under General Eisenhower who raped 2000 Stuttgart girls in one weekend and hundreds of others since and the Russians, who . . . raped . . . looted and pillaged . . . must be tried and if found guilty treated just as you say, according to the Golden Rule and impartial justice, Germans must be treated.12
For obvious reasons App avoided any mention of the German use of gas chambers to murder Jews and other victims. In order to engage in these immoral equivalences—everybody did something wrong and all should be equally punished—App had to eliminate the Holocaust and the murder of multitudes of others in death and concentration camps from the list of atrocities. Some of the atrocities listed by App have never been proven, for example, the Stuttgart rapes. Including the Holocaust and the gas chambers would have spoiled his equation. The Holocaust made it impossible to relativize the behavior of the warring parties, since nothing the Allies had done could compare to the number of people killed by the Germans or the primary method used to kill them. App had to turn the Allies and the Nazis into traditional adversaries embroiled in the horrors of war. Reducing the numbers and deleting this unique technological means from the equation were thus a sine qua non for deniers—one of the reasonable facades behind which they hide: War is an unmitigated evil, all sides are equally responsible, and there is no moral distinction between combatants.
Initially App simply omitted the mass murders and the gas chambers from his account of the war. He shortly recognized, however, that in order to achieve his objective he could no longer just ignore them and commenced an effort to convince the public that they were being fooled. It was an effort he would not abandon for more than three and a half decades.
In 1946, intensifying his campaign to justify German behavior, App began to play the “numbers game,” something all deniers engage in with great fervor. They attempt to demonstrate that it is statistically impossible for six million to have died. Along with their questioning the scientific plausibility of the gas chambers, it is the most critical component of their enterprise. The deniers consciously fix on those aspects of the Holocaust that are the hardest to believe precisely because they demand the greatest leap of the imagination. The use of advanced technology for the purposes of mass murder, and the sheer scope of the endeavor—particularly the number of its victims—help to render this event beyond belief.
App, who engaged in this numerical chicanery even before Paul Rassinier, began in quite a clumsy fashion. First he tried to disprove the Jewish “claim” about the Holocaust by demonstrating that most of Germany’s Jews had survived the war. In a letter to Time magazine in 1946, he declared that Germany never had a Jewish population greater than seven hundred thousand and that when Germany surrendered “there still seemed to be about a half million there.”13
Here App indulged in some of the tactical maneuvers that have come to typify Holocaust denial. First, in his attempt to prove that the numbers were inflated, he more than doubled the actual number of Jewish survivors without offering any proof of how he reached that figure.14 In addition to exaggerating the number of Jewish survivors in Germany after the war, he also gave them a new identity as German Jews. In fact these survivors were not from Germany but came instead from many occupied countries. Many of them had been in concentration camps in the East and, in the latter months of the war, as the Soviet army advanced, had been transferred to Germany on brutal death marches that were part of the Nazis’ effort to prevent camp inmates from falling into Soviet hands. Many died en route, and those who survived found themselves in Germany at the end of the war. Their numbers were augmented by Jews who immediately on liberation began to head west to avoid falling into Soviet hands.
By official Allied policy, all displaced persons (DPs) were to be returned to their homes as rapidly as possible. But a significant number adamantly refused to be repatriated to Poland, the Soviet Union, and other Communist bloc countries and petitioned to be allowed to enter Palestine or the United States. The British were firmly opposed to their entry into Palestine, and the Americans would only allow a very limited number to immigrate into the United States. As a result of the controversy over these DPs, the fact that practically all the Jews then in Germany were not actually German Jews was widely publicized and would have been well known to someone like App, who followed events so closely.
In the same letter, App suggested that among the putative Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities were many who had died of “legitimate” causes and many who were not really dead at all but were living in comfort in the Western Hemisphere. He wrote to Time magazine demanding that it investigate
just how many Jews were executed and for what; how many died of abuse in concentration camps and for what; how many were said to have been killed when they simply died of old age. And how many were in one way or another brought into the United States, Mexico and Canada. An AP dispatch . . . states that the United States had rescued 3,000,000 refugees. Most of them appear to have been Jews, yet Judge Simon F.[sic] Rifkind recently stated that the Nazis slew 6,000,000 Jews. What are the facts?15
The facts were quite simple: The United States had rescued many European refugees. But it had not allowed three million refugees, Jewish displaced persons, survivors, or refugees of any ethnic group to immigrate. In fact, App was using a crafty but obvious ploy. The AP dispatch he cited was based on the report of the military governor of the American Zone on the repatriation—not the immigration into America—of the approximately three million DPs who were in the American zones in Germany and Austria at the end of the war. The report and the dispatch clearly indicated that the vast majority of the DPs had been returned to their homes by December 1945. Moreover, nowhere in the governor’s report was there any indication that the refugees in question were Jews.16 Most of the Jews who were allowed into the United States after the war did not begin arriving until the early 1950s.
But App was not just trying to cast doubt on the number of Jews that had been killed. He was also suggesting, none too subtly, that a major deception was being perpetrated by Jewish leaders who claimed that millions had been killed despite the fact that many of those millions were still alive. App would repeatedly return to this theme—supposedly dead Jews were really hiding in America—and in the future he would do so more directly. Indeed, in 1973 he cited a 1947 statement by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, an adviser on Jewish affairs to the U.S. army commanders in Germany and Austria. Bernstein believed that the “only realistic solution” for the DP problem in Germany was resettlement in either the United States or Palestine. As App put it, “That may explain why since 1945 New York [has been] a Jewish Sodom and Gomorrah and Washington, D.C., a half Jewish and half Negro employment agency!” falsely implying that sending DPs to the United States was exactly how the issue had been resolved.17
In 1949 App sent another of his periodic letters to Time, again urging it to investigate the matter of the number of Jewish dead “thoroughly.” He also made one of the most radical calculations to date of the actual number of victims involved in the Holocaust “hoax.”
When I came to Europe in June I had calculated from the best sources then available to me that about 1,500,000 Jews had lost their lives through the Nazis, some because they were partisans and spies, killed as America did or would have killed persons g
uilty of similar offenses. After being here a month, evidences are accumulating that even that estimate is too high.18
App provided no evidence to substantiate his claim. App’s efforts resonated with those who were interested in resurrecting the Nazis’ image. (In 1952 a former member of the German Foreign Office under the Nazis pared the figure down to 1,277,212.19) But at this point App was breaking new ground. None of the other deniers, including Bardèche, Rassinier, or Barnes, had made such extreme suggestions.
Years later App described this visit to Europe. His account reveals the tremendous antipathy he felt toward the Jews he found there. “When I visited Germany and Austria in 1949 I found them deluged with uncouth-looking Eastern Jews.” These Jews were “arrogant to all Germans,” App wrote. “They all seemed to engage in black marketeering, and the German police seemed forbidden to touch them. They lied, cheated and stole from Germans, almost at will.”20 (App obviously knew that the Jews remaining in Germany at the end of the war were not German Jews.) App’s description relies on all the traditional stereotypes used by antisemites—financial knavery, the power of the Jewish minority over the innocent majority, arrogance, and deception—a mendacious refrain that would be a constant theme in his work. In addition, he continued to dispute the number of dead and urged other deniers to do likewise throughout his career.
In 1965 App escalated his attack on the Holocaust by denouncing the figure of six million as a “smear terrorizing myth,” and, despite the mass of evidence to the contrary, claiming that there was not a “single document, order, blue-print” that proved that the Nazis intended to annihilate the Jews. He offered a strange argument to prove his point: The fact that some survived now constituted proof that none were killed. App tautologically maintained it was “obvious” that the accusation was false “from the fact that they did not exterminate them. Every Jew who survived the German occupation is proof of this.” He argued that Nazi Germany was so efficient that “not a calf was born without their record nor a pig slaughtered.” Had the Nazis decided to kill all Jews, “They would have done so—they had five years to do it in.”21
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