Denying the Holocaust

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Barnes claimed that only ten years after the war had he concluded that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war or for the atrocities of which it was accused. He wrote in 1962: “For a decade following 1945 I was convinced that the best thing which could have happened to Germany and the world in pre-war days would have been the assassination of Hitler, say around 1938 or early 1939, if not much earlier.”23 He claimed that it was only with great reluctance that he was weaned from this view of an evil Nazi Germany and forced by the evidence to accept a new truth. This assertion is disingenuous in light of what he wrote in 1947, in The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, as well as the opinions he expressed in private correspondence. Indeed, the war had barely ended when Barnes began to blame the Allies and exonerate Hitler.

  More significantly his protestations that he reluctantly revised his notion of the truth when he came into contact with revisionist literature are reminiscent of the tactics adopted by many conspiracy theorists and by Holocaust deniers in particular. Virtually all of them claim to have been enlightened only after being forced by the evidence to abandon their previously mistaken beliefs. On being confronted with a preponderance of “information” contradicting their original conclusion that there was a Holocaust, they ashamedly acknowledge that they have been victims of a hoax. They apparently think that this contention adds plausibility to their new beliefs. It also prevents them from being accused of having harbored hostile attitudes toward Jews or having had fascist sympathies.

  The fact is, however, that Barnes did not have to be convinced to adopt this view, nor did he wait ten years to espouse it. In a letter to Villard dated June 1948, Barnes said that Roosevelt and Churchill, “backed by certain pressure groups,” were more responsible than Hitler for the war. That same year he argued that throughout history France had repeatedly invaded Germany without provocation. “Offhand,” he wrote in a private communiqué, “I cannot recall a really unprovoked German invasion of France in modern times.”24 To buttress his point he prepared a list of all the French invasions of Germany, beginning in 1552 and concluding his list with two twentieth-century entries:

  1918—French invade Germany with American aid

  1944–45—French again ride into Germany on backs of Americans25

  He failed to acknowledge that both of these “invasions” were in response to massive German attacks.

  Despite this evidence to the contrary, Barnes continued to assert that it was only in 1955, when he came upon a dissertation completed at Harvard by David Leslie Hoggan, that he realized that “Hitler had not desired war” and that Britain was almost “exclusively responsible.”26 Hoggan, then teaching in the History Department of the University of California at Berkeley, convinced Barnes that Hitler had not desired war in 1939. Hoggan argued that Hitler “had made more moderate demands on Poland than many leading American and British publicists had recommended in the years after Versailles. Moreover, Hitler had offered in return an amazing concession to Poland that the Weimar Republic would never even remotely countenance.”27

  Barnes was instrumental in helping Hoggan publish his book—The Forced War (Der erzwungene Krieg)—which is based on, but quite different from, the dissertation. According to one of Hoggan’s advisers at Harvard, his dissertation had been “a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies in 1939, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate.” But when it was published in Germany in 1961 by Herbert Grabert, it was a very different book.28 Hoggan portrayed the English and the Poles as having willfully provoked the war and the Germans as innocent victims who tried every means to avert a confrontation. This was a war that had been imposed on Hitler.

  Though it was not his main focus, Hoggan also addressed the question of Germany’s treatment of the Jews. In an attempt to rehabilitate Germany’s reputation and relieve Hitler and the Nazis of any particular onus, he argued that Poland’s treatment of its Jewish population was far more brutal than Germany’s. In fact, he asserted, most of Germany’s antisemitic measures were taken in order to preempt Poland from expelling its Jewish population into the Reich.29 Hoggan continually represented Nazi Germany’s Jewish policies as benign or, at the very least, as better than Poland’s. Hoggan suggested that the fine levied on German Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht was simply an equitable way to keep Jews from getting rich from the destruction by “pocket[ing] vast amounts of money from the German insurance companies.”30 He failed to note that the moneys were payments reimbursing Jews for property that had been destroyed. In fact the fine was designed not to keep Jews from obtaining insurance payments but to confiscate virtually all of the Jewish population’s remaining liquid assets.31 And contrary to all reports, Hoggan also claimed that no Jews had been killed either during the pogrom or in its immediate aftermath.

  In an attempt to demonstrate that the Jews had not really been discriminated against and were in quite a secure position as late as 1938, Hoggan noted that in early 1938 Jewish doctors and dentists were still participating in the German national compulsory insurance program. This “guaranteed them a sufficient number of patients.”32 Hoggan failed to cite the many obstacles that were put in the way of Jewish medical personnel, including that by 1938 it had become a radical if not illegal act for a German to use a Jewish doctor. Furthermore, in July 1938 a decree was enacted withdrawing licenses from Jewish physicians. Again, ignoring the host of laws and regulations that severely limited Jews’ ability to function in German society, he argued that Jewish lawyers had been free to practice as late as 1938. Citing information contained in a letter to the State Department from the American ambassador in Germany, Hoggan noted that, as of 1938, 10 percent of German attorneys were Jews. If this was indeed correct, how could it be argued that they were being persecuted? The ambassador did mention that 10 percent of the lawyers were Jews, but in a context quite different from the one in which Hoggan presented it. The ambassador had written to Washington to report that the situation of Jewish lawyers, which had been deplorable for a long time, was growing worse. “As early as 1933 pressure was exerted to oust Jews from the legal profession,” the ambassador told the State Department. Jews faced exceptional obstacles in seeking admission to the bar, and Jewish attorneys were prevented from serving as notaries—a measure, according to the ambassador, which, “in view of the wide requirements and high charges for notarial services in Germany, constituted a considerable handicap to the Jewish legal profession.”33 Thus, although as late as 1938, 10 percent of all lawyers may well have been Jews, since they were barely able to function they were lawyers in name only. They were barred from court and prevented from performing an array of tasks fundamental to their profession. Moreover, Hoggan neglected to say why the ambassador was reporting on the situation of Jewish lawyers. On September 27, 1938, Nazi Germany completely banned Jews from the practice of law.

  Hoggan also totally distorted the implications of the Nazi decision to end the Jewish community’s status as an officially sanctioned religious body. For many years the German government had collected a religion tax, which was turned over to the individual’s designated religious community, from every German resident. Essentially the government served as a transfer agency, collecting funds from German citizens and transmitting them to their religious community. The American ambassador reported that because the Jewish community was no longer an officially sanctioned entity, it would no longer receive the “taxes levied upon [its] members by the State for the meeting of community expenses.” In other words, Jews would continue to pay the tax, but the government would not give it to their community. Hoggan gave an entirely different—and dishonest—slant to this decision. Making it sound as though the Jewish community was supported by the state, he wrote that the new law “meant that German public tax receipts would go no longer to the Jewish church.” Then, in an effort to diminish further the impact of the decree, Hoggan falsely claimed that it had simply brought German practice into “conformity with current English practic
e.”34 He failed to note that the same was not done to other religious communities and ignored the ambassador’s comment that the new law constituted “discriminatory” legislation that would greatly hamper “the social and welfare world of the already seriously harassed Jewish Gemeinde [community].”35

  Hoggan’s book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy and concerning Germany’s treatment of the Jews. His dissertation contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in turning this “solid conscientious piece of work” into a Nazi apologia. One German historian observed that “rarely have so many inane and unwarranted theses, allegations and ‘conclusions’ . . . been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history.”36 Gerhard Weinberg, in his review of the book in the American Historical Review, described it as full of fabrications, twisted evidence, and transpositions of the sequence of events. All public statements by Hitler that substantiated Hoggan’s thesis were taken at face value, as when Hitler professed that he only wanted peace. All statements, public or private, which did not agree, were ignored.37 Hoggan’s contribution to Holocaust denial is significant. He buttressed the bogus notion that Germany was the victim, the Allies the victimizers, and the war easily preventable. In addition his Harvard credentials and his association with Berkeley, however tenuous, provided a measure of credibility to a movement that had thus far been relegated to the scholarly fringes.

  Beginning in the 1960s Barnes began to pay increasing attention to the issue of German atrocities. He did not explicitly state that the atrocity stories were fabricated. Instead he suggested that they were inaccurate and politically motivated. In a 1962 publication, Revisionism and Brainwashing, he condemned the “lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct.” Attempting to deflect the charges of German atrocities, Barnes relied on immoral equivalencies arguing that there was a “failure to point out that the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans.”38 This form of relativism was becoming a fundamental component of Holocaust denial.

  During this period Barnes was exposed to Paul Rassinier’s claims that the Holocaust was a hoax. Apparently it was Rassinier’s work that prompted Barnes to contend that the atrocity stories were fabrications. Barnes described Rassinier as a “distinguished French historian” and applauded him for questioning the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps in Germany and for exposing the “exaggerations of the atrocity stories.”39 (See chapter 8.) In an essay entitled “Zionist Fraud,” which originally appeared in the American Mercury, Barnes heaped lavish praise on Rassinier and expressed support for many of the Frenchman’s accusations:

  The courageous author [Rassinier] lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner.40

  Still engaged in fighting both world wars, Barnes found that Rassinier’s defense of Germany and his attempt to remove from its shoulders the blame for atrocities validated his most precious historical conviction: the Allies were the real culprits. For Barnes, Rassinier’s denial constituted important historical ammunition and intellectual proof that World War II was just like World War I. Germany was the wonderful nation it had always been, and America had once again needlessly entered the conflagration. Why was this fact not generally known by most Americans? Barnes had a simple answer. There was a conspiracy to blame Germany for terrible atrocities and wildly exaggerate the wrongs it had committed.

  These “allegations” and “exaggerations” against Germany were not just capricious, Barnes argued, but served an important purpose for historians and political leaders from the Allied nations. They were essential to protect the reputation of prominent American, English, and French leaders who had supported appeasement during the 1930s. The leaders displayed a benign attitude to Hitler and other Nazi leaders even after the “worst aspects of the Hitler regime had been in operation for some years,” including the persecution of the Jews under the Nuremberg Laws.41 In light of their positive assessments of Hitler and National Socialism during the prewar period, it was difficult for them to justify their subsequent condemnations of Hitler as a “pathological demon.” How could he have been a reasonable leader in the 1930s and the epitome of evil ten years later? Something “different and dramatic” was needed to “make the thesis of diabolism sink in and stick.” Without it these “eminent [prewar] eulogists” would appear to be “silly dupes.” The allegations regarding the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war were thus part of the plan to protect the reputations of Allied leaders who had previously sought to appease Hitler. Now they could portray him as a “madman,” whose potential for evil was not known until the war itself.

  But it was not only the prewar “eulogists” who needed to justify their war with Hitler. The postwar legacy of the “attempt to check ‘the Nazi madman’” was “even more ominous than the war.” From Barnes’s isolationist perspective, the war had been a disaster for the Allies. Germany was divided. Stalin was stronger than before. The Soviet Union controlled much of Eastern Europe, including portions of Germany, and the United States had to spend billions to rebuild and arm Western Europe. All this resulted from an attempt to stop Hitler, who, Barnes contended, had no interest in going to war against the Allies. In order to justify the “horrors and evil results of the Second World War,” those who had led the Allies into war also needed to justify their efforts.42 There were two false dogmas that “met the need perfectly”: Germany’s diabolism in provoking the war and committing massive atrocities. Hitler and national socialism became the Allies’ “scapegoat.”43 According to Barnes these two accusations were linked in a pernicious fashion:

  Hitler’s setting off the war was also deemed responsible for the wholesale extermination of Jews, for it was admitted that this did not begin until a considerable time after war broke out.

  Though not yet willing to deny the Holocaust, he did cast doubt on it by declaring it a theory at best:

  The size of the German reparations to Israel has been based on the theory that vast numbers of Jews were exterminated at the express order of Hitler, some six million being the most usually accepted number.44

  A few years later Barnes again raised questions about the veracity of the Holocaust in his article, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace.” Apparently reluctant explicitly to deny the Holocaust, Barnes relativized the “alleged” atrocities of the Germans as he had previously done:

  Even if one were to accept the most extreme and exaggerated indictment of Hitler and the National Socialists for their activities after 1939 made by anybody fit to remain outside a mental hospital, it is almost alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged extermination in gas ovens.45

  In 1967, in “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” Barnes charged that what had begun as a “blackout” had now become a “smotherout” as a result of the Eichmann trial. It provided an “unexpected but remarkably opportune moment and an effective springboard for stopping World War II revisionism dead in its track.” Moving close to explicit denial, Barnes argued that the trial revealed

  an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged.46