There were also those who, not satisfied with attacking Roosevelt or equating German and American wrongdoing, went a step further and portrayed Germany as the much-maligned victim of Allied aggression. Such arguments served as the model for those who would eventually seek not just to exculpate Germany for the Holocaust but to deny its existence altogether. According to these postwar revisionists, the bombing of Dresden and Cologne as well as Allied postwar policy toward Germany were equivalent to Nazi atrocities. They assailed Allied acquiescence in allowing the bifurcation of Germany and Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, ignoring the fact that the West had no alternative short of armed conflict with the Soviets. They demanded, and succeeded in getting, special American immigration permits for Germans.{45} Ignoring similar conditions in other parts of Europe, they accused the United States of allowing the German people to starve and insisted that special relief plans be instituted to help Germany. Isolationist forces in the Senate persuaded a total of thirty-four senators to inform the president jointly that Germany and Austria were “facing starvation on a scale never before experienced in Western Civilization.”{46} Utley and other revisionists falsely claimed that, for three years after their unconditional surrender, the Allies had kept the Germans on rations that were less than or, at best, the same as those in a concentration camp.
Many of these isolationists seemed—according to Justus Doenecke, who has written a sympathetic portrait of them—to draw righteous justification from the fact that they had found a way to portray Germany as the victim and the United States as the victimizer and “malicious power.”{47} Some World War II revisionists found it hard to exonerate the German political and military leaders who led the nation in war. Instead they attempted to distinguish between the behavior of the “people” as opposed to their “leaders,” depicting the Germans as a people who had themselves been persecuted and victimized. While there may have been elements of truth in their charges, these extremists carried them to a point where fantasy subsumed reality.{48}
Relativists and German apologists cited the Allies mass transfer of German citizens from Czechoslovakia and Poland in the immediate aftermath of the war as the ultimate example of Allied brutality. Sen. William Langer (R-ND), who had vigorously opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy, spoke of a “savage and fanatical plot” to destroy fifteen million German women and children.{49} Senator Langer claimed that three million of the German refugees had died en route.{50} Freda Utley described these population transfers as “crimes against humanity.” Her choice of this particular phrase, which had already gained wide currency as a result of the Nuremberg indictments, was telling. (Eventually Utley would become one of the most vocal of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s supporters, branding one of those he accused of being a Communist spy as a “Judas cow,” an animal who led others to be slaughtered).{51} Using a tactic that typified the actions of those who, in their quest to defend Nazi Germany, stopped short of denying the atrocities, she compared these transfers with what had been done to the Jews. According to her the expulsion of millions of people from their homes for the sole “crime” of being part of the German “race” was an “atrocity” equivalent to “the extermination of the Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis.” Utley continued: “The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful.”{52}
She exonerated the German war criminals who were tried at Nuremberg because what they did was “minor in extent if not in degree” compared with the postwar behavior of the Russian armies and the “genocide” committed by Poles and Czechs against Germans.{53} Taking the tactic of immoral equivalencies to its ultimate extreme, she argued that “there was no crime the Nazis had committed which we or our allies had not also committed.”{54} Although Utley was an extremist who did not abandon her political beliefs even after the war, such charges were not only made by extremists. The Chicago Tribune accused the French of not permitting more than half a million German prisoners of war to return home. According to the paper they were being kept as “slaves,” denied food sufficient to allow them to work, and beaten by “Moroccan savages.”{55}
Many of the critics focused on a plan proposed toward the end of the war by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, which would have prevented the economic rehabilitation of Germany. Though the plan was never put into effect, World War II revisionists and Holocaust deniers claim it was and cite it as an example of the Allies’ diabolical attitude toward Germany and of the way Germany was to be made the victim of Allied postwar retribution. Henry Regnery, who published much of the World War II revisionist material, issued a pamphlet comparing Morgenthau’s proposal with the Nazi plan to destroy millions of Jews through starvation.{56} The fact that Morgenthau was not only a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet but an identifying Jew was something these critics were quick to exploit.[2]
These postwar isolationists and World War II revisionists also cast Germany as the victim by stressing the “inhumanity” and “injustice” of the Allied war crimes trials and de-Nazification programs. (Lindbergh accused the Allies of imposing an “eye for an eye” punishment.) They questioned the legality of the Nuremberg trials and accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding them, arguing that had the outcome of the war been reversed the Allied leaders would have found themselves in the docket. Beard also attacked the trials.{57} Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) argued that the trials were marked by a “spirit of vengeance,” and the Chicago Tribune declared that Russia’s participation transformed them into a “kangaroo court.”{58} Congressman Rankin accused the court at Nuremberg of having “perpetrated more outrages than any other organization of its kind.” He found it particularly appalling that Soviet Communist Jews, who he argued, bore responsibility for the murder of tens of millions of Christians, should be able to sit in judgment of “German soldiers, civilians and doctors, five or six years after the war closed.”{59} Robert McCormick, probably America’s most influential isolationist, refused to have dinner with former Attorney General Francis Biddle because, as a result of his role in the Nuremberg trials, McCormick considered him a “murderer.”{60} The New York Daily News declared that the defendants’ “real crime was that they did not win.”{61}
2
In 1977, denier James Martin described Morgenthau’s plan as an example of running postwar Germany “according to the Old Testament instead of the New.” He claimed the plan had been implemented and resulted in the German population transfers, which he called the “most barbarous event of the history of Europe…. It is rare that one ever sees an animal forced to endure under such degraded and forlorn circumstances.” Martin, a member of the