Barnes’s work won a broad popular audience in the United States and abroad. In 1926 he visited Germany to deliver a series of lectures that argued that Germany was not guilty for World War I. Barnes waxed euphoric about his reception there, which he described as a “fairy tale.” He was particularly impressed by the “great interest and energy” shown by Weimar scholars and officials in “seeking to clear Germany of the dishonor and fraud of the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles.”{13} While in Europe he even met with the exiled kaiser, Wilhelm II, a considerable honor for a relatively young scholar. According to Barnes the kaiser “was happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914.” But, Barnes recalled, they were not in complete accord: “He disagreed with my view that Russia and France were chiefly responsible. He held that the villains of 1914 were the international Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion.”{14} Barnes did not fully agree with the kaiser on this point, preferring to point at England and France as the primary perpetrators.
During the interwar years Barnes used his World War I revisionism to propound the isolationist cause. Even before World War II had ended he was challenging the official version of its history. He was part of a small group of isolationists who tried to resurrect the movement’s reputation and to sully Roosevelt’s. They were funded by prewar isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. Barnes repeated his World War I arguments and attacked politicians, journalists, and historians who failed to acknowledge Allied responsibility for the war. He assaulted Roosevelt’s policies and defended Hitler’s, contending that virtually all Hitler’s political and military moves, including the invasion of Czechoslovakia, were necessary to “rectify” the injustices of the Versailles treaty.{15} But it was not just the Versailles treaty that was at fault; the real problem was the Allies’ fundamental failure to understand Hitler himself. In a 1950 letter to fellow revisionist Charles Tansill, Barnes described Hitler’s demands in 1939 as the “most reasonable of all,” and in his articles and essays he continuously sought to exonerate Hitler.{16} Barnes did not perceive Hitler as a megalomanic leader who was defeated because he was intent on controlling Europe. It was not the German führer’s ferocity but his humanity that caused his military demise. According to Barnes Hitler’s downfall resulted from his “unwillingness to use his full military power” against innocent English civilians.{17} Contrary to the prevailing consensus, Hitler did not “precipitously launch” an aggressive attack on Poland. In fact, Barnes argued, Hitler made a greater effort to avoid war in 1939 than the kaiser had in 1914. Barnes not only vindicated Hitler but held the British “almost solely responsible” for the outbreak of war on both the Eastern and Western fronts. Hitler did not wantonly stick “a dagger in the back of France” in June 1940 but was “forced” into war by British “acts of economic strangulation.”{18}
In 1952 in a letter to Harvard historian William Langer, who had authored a two-volume defense of America’s prewar policies, Barnes wrote that he considered Roosevelt’s foreign policy “the greatest public crime in human history.”{19} Barnes pursued this argument throughout his career, arguing in 1958 that Roosevelt “lied the United States into war,” and, had he not been able “to incite the Japanese” to attack Pearl Harbor, the tragedies of the war and the even “greater calamities” that resulted from it could well have been avoided.{20} (Barnes had made precisely the same arguments about Wilson and World War I.) Barnes not only believed Hitler “reasonable” and Britain, France, and the United States responsible for the war, he also argued that a pervasive historical “blackout” silenced anyone who might question the notion of German guilt. The blackout was the keystone of a plan to prevent the truth about World War II from emerging. Barnes’s initial assault on this “conspiracy” was contained in a lengthy pamphlet, The Struggle Against Historical Blackout, which appeared in 1947 and which had gone through nine printings by 1952. According to Barnes Western liberals allowed their hatred of Hitler and Mussolini to blind them to France’s aggressiveness, Britain’s duplicity, and Roosevelt’s deception. “Court historians” kept the truth from emerging by quashing any information that might tarnish Roosevelt’s image and silencing critics who questioned American “intervention” in World War II. Scholars suspected of revisionist views were denied access to public documents. Publishers who wished to issue books or periodicals dealing with the topic were intimidated. Material that embodied revisionist facts or arguments was ignored or obscured. Revisionist authors were smeared.{21} This was not simply a case of obtuseness; this was willful deceit. The “court historians” were not just blind or unaware of the facts; they lied, ignored contradictory information, and created new truths. In subsequent years Holocaust deniers would claim that they faced precisely the same situation.{22} According to Barnes, politicians’, diplomats’, and historians’ vindictiveness toward Germany was completely out of proportion to reality, and they knew it. Consequently they needed a rationale to justify their enmity. Thus they accused Germany of starting the war and of unparalleled atrocities.
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.