Hoggan’s book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy and concerning Germany’s treatment of the Jews. His dissertation contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in turning this “solid conscientious piece of work” into a Nazi apologia. One German historian observed that “rarely have so many inane and unwarranted theses, allegations and ‘conclusions’… been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history.”{36} Gerhard Weinberg, in his review of the book in the American Historical Review, described it as full of fabrications, twisted evidence, and transpositions of the sequence of events. All public statements by Hitler that substantiated Hoggan’s thesis were taken at face value, as when Hitler professed that he only wanted peace. All statements, public or private, which did not agree, were ignored.{37} Hoggan’s contribution to Holocaust denial is significant. He buttressed the bogus notion that Germany was the victim, the Allies the victimizers, and the war easily preventable. In addition his Harvard credentials and his association with Berkeley, however tenuous, provided a measure of credibility to a movement that had thus far been relegated to the scholarly fringes.
Beginning in the 1960s Barnes began to pay increasing attention to the issue of German atrocities. He did not explicitly state that the atrocity stories were fabricated. Instead he suggested that they were inaccurate and politically motivated. In a 1962 publication, Revisionism and Brainwashing, he condemned the “lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct.” Attempting to deflect the charges of German atrocities, Barnes relied on immoral equivalencies arguing that there was a “failure to point out that the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans.”{38} This form of relativism was becoming a fundamental component of Holocaust denial.
During this period Barnes was exposed to Paul Rassinier’s claims that the Holocaust was a hoax. Apparently it was Rassinier’s work that prompted Barnes to contend that the atrocity stories were fabrications. Barnes described Rassinier as a “distinguished French historian” and applauded him for questioning the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps in Germany and for exposing the “exaggerations of the atrocity stories.”{39} (See chapter 8.) In an essay entitled “Zionist Fraud,” which originally appeared in the American Mercury, Barnes heaped lavish praise on Rassinier and expressed support for many of the Frenchman’s accusations:
The courageous author [Rassinier] lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner.{40}
Still engaged in fighting both world wars, Barnes found that Rassinier’s defense of Germany and his attempt to remove from its shoulders the blame for atrocities validated his most precious historical conviction: the Allies were the real culprits. For Barnes, Rassinier’s denial constituted important historical ammunition and intellectual proof that World War II was just like World War I. Germany was the wonderful nation it had always been, and America had once again needlessly entered the conflagration. Why was this fact not generally known by most Americans? Barnes had a simple answer. There was a conspiracy to blame Germany for terrible atrocities and wildly exaggerate the wrongs it had committed.
These “allegations” and “exaggerations” against Germany were not just capricious, Barnes argued, but served an important purpose for historians and political leaders from the Allied nations. They were essential to protect the reputation of prominent American, English, and French leaders who had supported appeasement during the 1930s. The leaders displayed a benign attitude to Hitler and other Nazi leaders even after the “worst aspects of the Hitler regime had been in operation for some years,” including the persecution of the Jews under the Nuremberg Laws.{41} In light of their positive assessments of Hitler and National Socialism during the prewar period, it was difficult for them to justify their subsequent condemnations of Hitler as a “pathological demon.” How could he have been a reasonable leader in the 1930s and the epitome of evil ten years later? Something “different and dramatic” was needed to “make the thesis of diabolism sink in and stick.” Without it these “eminent [prewar] eulogists” would appear to be “silly dupes.” The allegations regarding the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war were thus part of the plan to protect the reputations of Allied leaders who had previously sought to appease Hitler. Now they could portray him as a “madman,” whose potential for evil was not known until the war itself.
But it was not only the prewar “eulogists” who needed to justify their war with Hitler. The postwar legacy of the “attempt to check ‘the Nazi madman’” was “even more ominous than the war.” From Barnes’s isolationist perspective, the war had been a disaster for the Allies. Germany was divided. Stalin was stronger than before. The Soviet Union controlled much of Eastern Europe, including portions of Germany, and the United States had to spend billions to rebuild and arm Western Europe. All this resulted from an attempt to stop Hitler, who, Barnes contended, had no interest in going to war against the Allies. In order to justify the “horrors and evil results of the Second World War,” those who had led the Allies into war also needed to justify their efforts.{42} There were two false dogmas that “met the need perfectly”: Germany’s diabolism in provoking the war and committing massive atrocities. Hitler and national socialism became the Allies’ “scapegoat.”{43} According to Barnes these two accusations were linked in a pernicious fashion:
Hitler’s setting off the war was also deemed responsible for the wholesale extermination of Jews, for it was admitted that this did not begin until a considerable time after war broke out.
Though not yet willing to deny the Holocaust, he did cast doubt on it by declaring it a theory at best:
The size of the German reparations to Israel has been based on the theory that vast numbers of Jews were exterminated at the express order of Hitler, some six million being the most usually accepted number.{44}
A few years later Barnes again raised questions about the veracity of the Holocaust in his article, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace.” Apparently reluctant explicitly to deny the Holocaust, Barnes relativized the “alleged” atrocities of the Germans as he had previously done:
Even if one were to accept the most extreme and exaggerated indictment of Hitler and the National Socialists for their activities after 1939 made by anybody fit to remain outside a mental hospital, it is almost alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged extermination in gas ovens.{45}