Allied behavior in the immediate aftermath of the war was not without fault. There had been insufficient planning for this period, and there were many shortcomings in Allied policies. The de-Nazification program was applied unequally, and inequities in punishment resulted from it. But the critics ignored the circumstances that had produced this situation. Furthermore there was no starvation program in Germany, and the rations Germans received far surpassed anything concentration camp inmates were ever given by the Nazis. The vigor of the isolationists’ attacks on the de-Nazification program did not abate even when it became clear that Washington wished to change, if not totally abandon it.
(The degree to which Germans could be singled out for having committed atrocities was a matter of debate from the moment the war ended. The concentration camps had barely been liberated when some critics and commentators began to argue that the reports, official photographs, and films of the camps were being released in order to implant in American minds a feeling of vengeance. James Agee, writing in the Nation of May 19, 1945, attacked the Signal Corps films of concentration camp victims even though he had not seen them. He did not believe it “necessary” to show them: “Such propaganda”—even if true—was designed to make Americans equate all Germans with the few who had perpetrated these crimes.{62} Milton Mayer, in an article in the Progressive, went a step further than Agee. He not only argued against vengeance but questioned whether the films and reports could really be true. “There are, to be sure, fantastic discrepancies in the reports.”{63} Despite overwhelming evidence, doubts persisted.{64})
Respected Americans voiced concern about a spirit of vengeance. They sometimes did so by casting doubt on the veracity of the stories and by defending the perpetrators. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, a vigorous isolationist who had been an advisor to America First, wrote in 1945 that “the wildest atrocity stories” could not change the “simple truth” that “no men are beasts.” (The implicit message in Hutchins’s juxtaposition of the terms “wild atrocity story” with “simple truth” may have been unintended, but it must have had an impact on his readers.) An article in the Progressive by William B. Hesseltine, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, compared the false atrocity stories that had been circulated in the aftermath of the Civil War with those that emerged from Germany after the end of hostilities there.{65}
Years later, in an example of how deniers pervert historical arguments, a virtually identical argument was made by Austin App:
The top U.S. media, possibly because they are dominated by Jews… have no tradition of fairness to anyone they hate…. They have also in wartime subverted much of the public to a frenzy of prejudice. Even in our Civil War, where Americans fought against Americans, Americans of the North were told and came to believe that Choctaw County stunk with dead bodies of murdered slaves and that Southern belles had worn necklaces strung of Yankee eyeballs!… If Yankees could believe that Southern girls wore necklaces of Yankee eyeballs, would they not even more readily believe that Germans made lampshades out of the skins of prisoners, or that they boiled Jews into soap?{66}
Two decades later this argument would be reiterated in an essay in the Holocaust revisionist publication the Journal of Historical Review.{67} (See chapter 9 for a discussion of the Civil War analogy.) By finding what they deemed to be historical parallels, deniers hoped to demonstrate that the Holocaust was not the only time the public had been tricked by historical orthodoxies.
During the early years after the war, Germans also tried to minimize Nazi wrongdoings and place the blame elsewhere. Some German neo-Nazis maintained that German crimes were not as immense as the Allies had charged.{68} Others sought to clear Hitler of any responsibility. In 1952 the Institute for German Post-War History was organized in Tübingen by Dr. Herbert Grabert, who had known connections to extreme-right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. Grabert denounced those who claimed that Hitler had any ambitions to dominate the world,{69} despite the fact that in order to do so he had to ignore the clear statements to the contrary in Mein Kampf (see chapter 5). In 1960 the Committee for the Restoration of Historical Truth—which argued that World War II had been caused by the Versailles treaty, that Britain had long sought a war against Germany, and that Roosevelt had helped push Britain into the war—was founded in Hanover. The committee’s organizers denounced the Jews as a “cancerous growth” on the body politic. When dealing with such an adversary, “human considerations do not enter.”{70} In 1962 Nation Europa, Germany’s foremost neo-Nazi paper, claimed there was no “evidence that Hitler knew of the mad doings of a small clique of criminals.” And in 1963 the Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (German high school teachers newspaper) argued that the Holocaust had been a legitimate “retaliatory action” against Jews, in response to Jewish “business methods” and the murder by Jewish Bolsheviks of German patriots.{71}
By 1950 the foundation had been laid for those who would not simply seek to relativize or mitigate Germany’s actions—the arguments they needed to buttress their charges of a Holocaust “hoax” had been made, some voiced by legitimate historians and others expressed by extremist politicians and journalists. Virtually all the revisionists’ charges were adopted by the deniers, including Germany’s lack of culpability, chicanery by both Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, suppression of the truth after both wars, and use of propaganda—falsified atrocity stories in particular—to whip up public support. These arguments would become crucial elements in the deniers’ attempt to prove that the Holocaust “hoax” is not a unique phenomenon but a link in a chain of tradition whose hallmarks were chicanery, conspiracy, and deception. The French writer Nadine Fresco noted in her analysis of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, “One cannot establish a science whose only ethic is suspicion.”{72} Yet that is what the more extreme World War II revisionists were attempting to do.
Nonetheless, there was one thing these defenders of Nazi Germany and critics of American involvement and postwar Allied policy never suggested: namely that the atrocities in question had not happened. Irrespective of which side of the ocean they were on, they stopped short of this denial. They may have claimed that they were not as bad as had been reported. They may have argued that the Soviets or the Allies had committed similar acts or that Hitler knew nothing about them. They may have also ignored the moral implications of such behavior in order to argue that Allied and Axis behavior were virtually equal. But they did not deny that they were factual. Accusations to that effect were not long in coming, however, gaining currency within a few years after the war.
CHAPTER THREE