These critics had various objectives. Some, possibly prompted by their German American heritage, wished to win more lenient economic and political terms for a defeated Germany. Others may have been motivated by their conservative midwestern roots and were wary of foreign entanglements. Many among them were anticommunists who believed that a strong postwar Germany provided the best defense against the spread of Communism. Others, such as Barnes, were World War I revisionists who did not distinguish between one conflagration and the other. While the idea of a strong Germany became the linchpin of American postwar policy, some of the more extreme post-World War II revisionists took it a step further and, echoing a prewar argument, contended that Nazi Germany had also been an excellent defense against Communism but that the Allies had been blind—or blinded—to this fact.
The most extreme revisionist account of America’s entry into World War II, Back Door to War, by Charles C. Tansill, a professor of American diplomatic history at Georgetown University, was published in 1952. Tansill had previously addressed the issue of distorted accounts of American history when he accused Lincoln, whom he called a “‘do-nothing’ soldier, invincible in peace and invisible in war,” of having tricked the South into attacking Fort Sumter and thereby precipitating the Civil War.{34} Tansill’s book made a strong impression on Holocaust deniers who energetically promote it and use his arguments as a foundation for their own. Tansill declared that the “main objective” of American foreign policy during the first half of the twentieth century was “the preservation of the British Empire.” He linked U.S. entry into World War I with the rise of Nazism in Europe, the former having resulted in the latter: “Our intervention completely shattered the old balance of power and sowed the seeds of inevitable future conflict.” According to him this sordid set of affairs did not end with World War I, and in his view America’s entry into World War II was thus an attempt to preserve, irrespective of the cost, the “bungling handiwork of 1919.”{35}
Tansill set out a number of arguments that would become essential elements of Holocaust denial. Most have no basis in fact; for example, Tansill and other revisionists contended that Hitler did not want to go to war with Poland but planned for Germany and Poland to dominate Europe together. If Poland had agreed to Hitler’s scheme that it become the chief satellite in the Nazi orbit, its security would have been guaranteed.{36} It was the Poles’ refusal—prompted by promises they had received from the British and made at Americas urging—to accede to the Nazi plan that was responsible for the outbreak of the war. Therefore it was American machinations that were ultimately responsible for pushing Poland into war and precipitating World War II.{37} Roosevelt, according to this extreme revisionist point of view, played a “grotesque role” in the entire episode by pressing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to make promises to the Poles that could not be fulfilled.{38} These extreme arguments, which are rejected by virtually all historians, ignore the fact that Hitler did not intend to make Poland a satellite but to decimate it and that he regarded the Poles as Untermenschen, less than complete human beings. These arguments also exaggerate Roosevelt’s role in convincing the British and the Poles to go to war. Stretching existing historical evidence to distorted limits, these arguments exonerated Nazi Germany and placed responsibility for the war on the Allies. Not surprisingly, deniers would make them a critical component of the nexus of arguments that together constitute their world view.
Among the extremists who, within months of the end of the war, were engaged in an attempt to lessen Germany’s burden of responsibility were the vanguard of the deniers. They generally agreed that the United States should not have allowed itself to be drawn into the war. But their primary objective was to help Germany regain moral standing in the world. They believed that a strong, revived Germany was the key to the future of Western Europe. They recognized that the Allies in general and Americans in particular were likely to balk at aiding a country that was perceived as vicious, if not genocidal. It was necessary, therefore, to mitigate, if not totally dissipate, the uniqueness of Germany’s wartime behavior. They did so in a number of ways: by portraying Nazi Germany in a positive light, by minimizing the severity of its hostile actions, and by engaging in immoral equivalencies—that is, by citing what they claimed were comparable Allied wrongs.
Some of them were quite sympathetic to Hitler and portrayed him as a leader whose only motivation was the good of his own country. In addition to demonstrating a conciliatory attitude toward Poland, he had sought to avoid war. He was, according to Austin App, a “man of architecture and art, not of armaments and war.” He did not want to go to war and was reluctant to mobilize the German people.{39} Hitler’s Germany had been a society with many positive features that were overlooked because of disproportionate focus on some of its less appealing domestic policies.{40} The war could not be defined as a moral struggle: All sides had been equally devious and, consequently, were equally guilty. In order to free Germany of its particular burden of guilt those engaged in this effort had to address directly the issue of the atrocities committed under the Nazis. The most extreme among them tried to neutralize German actions by directly comparing the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews and murder of millions of others with Allied actions. They contended that the United States had committed wrongdoings of the same magnitude. The ardent isolationist Freda Utley made the same point in The High Cost of Vengeance:
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery no one ever paid a higher compliment to the Nazis than their conquerors…. We reaffirmed the Nazi doctrine that “might makes right.” Instead of showing the Germans that Hitler’s racial theories were both wrong and ridiculous, we ourselves assumed the role of a master race.{41}
The argument that the United States committed atrocities as great, if not greater, than those committed by Germany has become a fulcrum of contemporary Holocaust denial and a theme repeated continually in their literature. But the deniers do not stop with this. In order to achieve their goals, one of which is the historical rehabilitation of Germany, they must “eliminate” the Holocaust. Once they do so, this equation—everyone is equally guilty—becomes even easier to make. If there was no Holocaust and the Allies committed terrible atrocities, then what was so bad about Nazi Germany?
It is also a central argument for those who relativize the Holocaust—that is, those who say the Nazis were no worse than anyone else. For the relativizer, these charges serve as immoral equivalents that mitigate the uniqueness of German wrongs. George Morgenstern, an editor of the Chicago Tribune, offered a mild example of American postwar equalizing, or relativizing, wrongdoings when he argued that none of the Allies had “clean hands” or were real “exemplar[s] of justice.” While the fascist “slave states” were abhorrent to decent people, the British Empire, whose existence was dependent on the “exploitation” of millions of natives, was equally abhorrent.{42} William Neumann, who had been one of the first to attack prewar U.S. foreign policy, believed that Allied atrocities were the “point by point” equivalent of the Nazis’.{43} Stalin had invaded Poland in 1939, England and France had declared war on Germany, and the United States had committed acts of aggression against Germany before Pearl Harbor in the form of lend-lease. Frederick Libby of the National Council for the Prevention of War tried to lessen Germany’s burden by stating that “no nation has a monopoly on atrocities. War itself is the supreme atrocity.”{44}