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 Americans{25}
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 practice.”{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}