In 1967, in “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” Barnes charged that what had begun as a “blackout” had now become a “smotherout” as a result of the Eichmann trial. It provided an “unexpected but remarkably opportune moment and an effective springboard for stopping World War II revisionism dead in its track.” Moving close to explicit denial, Barnes argued that the trial revealed
an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged.{46}
The charges against Eichmann and Nazi Germany were based on
fundamental but unproved assumptions that what Hitler and the National Socialists did in the years after Britain and the United States entered the war revealed that they were… vile, debased, brutal and bloodthirsty gangsters.{47}
Barnes attacked popular American weekly and monthly journals for their “sensational articles” about “exaggerated National Socialist savagery.”{48} He repeated what had become a consistent refrain in his articles: Allied atrocities surpassed those of the Germans. The Allied atrocities, to which Barnes made repeated reference, included the bombing of Hamburg, Tokyo, and Dresden and the postwar expulsion of the Sudeten Germans during which, he charged, “at least four millions of them perish[ed] in the process from butchery, starvation and disease.” Using language that was purposely chosen to evoke a comparison to what the Jews “claimed” was done to them, Barnes described the population transfer as “the final solution” for defeated Germans.
In “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” Barnes again stopped short of explicitly denying the existence of gas chambers:
The number of civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during and after the second World War, equalled, if it did not far exceed those liquidated by the Germans and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by methods which were far more brutal and painful that whatever extermination actually took place in German gas ovens.[2], {49}
Once again coming close to, but not quite crossing the boundary into denial, he complained in the same article that Allied atrocities are never “cogently and frankly placed over against the doings, real or alleged, at Auschwitz.”{50}
Barnes tried to argue that the gas chambers were postwar inventions. Ignoring the fact that information on gas chambers in various death camps had been publicized long before the war ended, he falsely claimed that the charges had only been made afterward, when it was necessary to justify the war and its outcome. According to Barnes, when the “court historians” were forced by “revisionists” to admit reluctantly that there were only concentration camps and not death camps in Germany, they needed something else to maintain the evil image of the Nazi empire. It was then, he argued, that they contrived the existence of gas chambers at other camps. Once this allegation was placed in the public domain, the “smotherout” historians changed the focus of their attacks on Nazi Germany. No longer did they emphasize the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s precipitation of the war. They found something far more potent:
What is deemed important today is not whether Hitler started war in 1939 or whether Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor but the number of prisoners who were allegedly done to death in the concentration camps operated by Germany during the war. These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dora, but it was demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska [sic], Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia [sic], and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed.{51}
These new charges kept the public from becoming “bored” by hearing the same stories. To ensure public interest the details were “made more unceasing, exaggerated and inflammatory.”{52} Once again Barnes totally distorted the truth and reshaped the historical record. Information about Chelmno, Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other camps was well known long before the war ended; details about them had been published in the Western press on repeated occasions.
Moreover it was precisely those whom Barnes accused of being “court historians” who, in fact, were responsible for demonstrating that there had been no homicidal gas chambers in German concentration camps. After the war there had been persistent confusion about the difference between concentration camps and death camps. The latter, located outside Germany, had facilities for the express purpose of murdering people, primarily Jews. While there were no death camps in Germany, there were many concentration camps, in which multitudes died from overwork, disease, starvation, beatings, and severe mistreatment. Much of the confusion centered around the idea that there was a functioning homicidal gas chamber in Dachau. This was what historians were trying to clarify in 1962, when Professor Martin Broszat, who served for many years as the director of Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History, wrote to the newspaper Die Zeit to “hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps.” Contrary to deniers’ claims, he said, his letter did not constitute an “admission” on his part but an effort to “set the record straight.”{53} This remains a consistent tactic of the deniers. Every time historians who study the Holocaust correct a mistake in the record, deniers immediately claim that they do so because their previous lies were about to be exposed.[3]
Barnes also tried to recast history by changing the nature of the assignment of the Einsatzgruppen that functioned as the mobile killing units. The Einsatzgruppen entered Soviet territory in July 1941. Between that date and the beginning of the retreat of German forces in the spring of 1943, it is estimated that they murdered well over one million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. Their brutal methods were eventually replaced by the more “efficient” gas chambers. Barnes transformed them from groups whose express task was to murder Jews in Soviet territory into units that were “battling guerrilla warfare behind the lines.” This profile is totally contradicted by reams of documents and the testimony of Einsatzgruppen leaders and members, as well as that of those who saw them massacre Jews. Barnes’s transformation of their role was his means of trying to work around the truth. He did not have to deny that they may in fact have killed some Jews, but, according to his explanation, their actions were justified because their victims were anti-German guerrillas.
But even with all these attempts to twist information and misrepresent established historical fact, Barnes and other revisionists faced a fundamental challenge in their effort to exculpate Nazi Germany. It was difficult to argue that Germany had not committed these outrages when the postwar West German government accepted responsibility for the war and the atrocities.{54} Barnes castigated both the government and the academic community of the Federal Republic of Germany for failing to challenge this “unfair” verdict and the “false dogma[s]” propagated by the Allies and accepted by the Bonn government.{55} The government’s approach to history prevented “the restoration of Germany to its proper position of unity, power and respect among the nations of the world.”{56}
2
The editor of the
3
This is what they have done in relation to the charge that Nazis used Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. When scholars of the Holocaust corrected this notion, the deniers were quick to charge they did so in order to avoid being exposed as willful liars. (See chapter 10.)