Barnes’s ire at the Adenauer government for its “masochistic” behavior was heightened by his comparison of it with the Weimar government’s attitude toward World War I. Barnes complained that none of the open-mindedness he had discovered during his trip to Germany in the Weimar period was evident in the Federal Republic. The Bonn government had “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” the German people into accepting an “indictment of German responsibility for the war. According to Barnes the postwar German leadership did more than acquiesce in the charges brought against it. It furthered the “smother-out” by “opposing] the discovery and publication of the truth.”{57} Barnes claimed to be “deeply puzzled” about the Adenauer government’s acceptance of responsibility for German precipitation of the war and its “downright disinclination to seek to refute the most outrageous charges of cruelty and barbarism levelled against Germany by conscienceless atrocity mongers [and] the continuation to this very day of not-so-little Nuremberg trials.”{58} Barnes did not, of course, consider the possibility that West Germany did not contest the accusations because they were true and West Germans, from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on down, knew it. Instead he condemned German leaders for “smearing” people like Rassinier and for the “sheer lunacy” of paying reparations “based on atrocity stories.”{59} This was a precise repetition of Barnes’s behavior in relation to World War I revisionism. Convinced that his view constituted objective truth, he dismissed any information that challenged his conclusion, treating it as the work of perverted minds.
Barnes found West Germany’s relationship with the State of Israel particularly galling. He was nonplussed by a speech given by the president of the West German Bundestag in Israel in 1962 in which he acknowledged Germany’s wrongdoings and asked for forgiveness for the Holocaust. Barnes characterized the speech as “subserviency” and “almost incredible grovelling.”{60} He was appalled by the German decision to send a group of volunteers to work in Israel as a form of penance. Barnes’s disgust, as a non-German, at the German leader’s request from Israel for forgiveness and at German citizens’ desire to work on Israeli kibbutzim, is noteworthy. Barnes and Rassinier helped set the tone for subsequent Holocaust denial with their particular contempt for the Jewish state, its supporters, and Jews in general.
The roots of Barnes’s views about the Holocaust and his attitudes toward Israel go beyond his deep-seated Germanophilia and revisionist approach to history: They can be found in his antisemitism. While this animus did not generally pervade his articles until the late 1960s, privately he had given voice to it as early as the 1940s. In an article published immediately after the war he suggested that Lord Vansittart (Robert Gilbert Vansittart), who served as Britain’s permanent under-secretary of the British Foreign Office until the beginning of 1938 and after that as chief diplomatic adviser to His Majesty’s Government, should be tried along with the Nazis for having helped precipitate the war. Vansittart, who was an anti-Nazi, is often singled out by revisionists and deniers as one of those chiefly responsible for pushing England to adopt anti-German policies. In response to Barnes’s attacks, Vansittart decided to sue for libel and asked the prominent American lawyer, Louis Nizer, to represent him. When the suit was announced in the Washington Post, Barnes complained to Oswald Garrison Villard. Both staunch isolationists, Villard and Barnes had regularly exchanged letters regarding America’s “misguided” foreign policy. (However, despite his ardent conviction that American policy had been wrong, Villard did not share Barnes’s views regarding atrocities or the victimization of Germany.) Barnes described the suit as a “plot of the Jews and the Anti-Defamation League to intimidate any American historians who propose to tell the truth about the causes of the war.” He attacked Louis Nizer as an “Anti-Defamation League stooge,” who had “needled [Vansittart] into action,” and bemoaned his inability to counter the inordinate power and financial resources of the other side:[4]
If I could raise money enough for a real defense we could make this an international cause celebre, but I cannot fight the thirty million dollars now in the coffers of the Anti-Defamation League to be used for character assassination on empty pockets. If we let them get away with this, we are licked from the start.{61}, [5]
Barnes’s blaming his problems on a Jewish lawyer and a Jewish organization’s success in needling a prominent British official into action is another indication of his antipathy toward Jews and the degree to which he subscribed to antisemitic stereotypes. It is also an example of Barnes’s pattern of accusing others of conspiring against him. Peter Novick of the University of Chicago, who has closely examined Barnes’s correspondence, describes it as constituting a “full clinical record” of his abusiveness toward those who disagreed with him and his conviction that he was the target of innumerable conspirators. When the New York World-Telegram dropped his column in 1940, he blamed British intelligence, the Morgan bank, and Jewish department store owners in New York City, who, Barnes claimed, threatened the publisher with “loss of all advertising if he kept me on any longer.”{62}
Yet Barnes apparently also understood that, like all deniers, he faced a fundamental obstacle. As long as they could be dismissed as antisemitic extremists, they would never make headway with the general public. If their work was perceived as simply a reworked expression of an age-old animus, it would have no credibility. Barnes tried to preempt this accusation by turning it back on those who made it: He accused those who charged that the deniers were antisemites of using this label as a means of silencing anyone who questioned the “official” version of history. According to Barnes, the keystone of this effort was the claim that Jews had been subjected to unique persecution and atrocities. This aspect of the hoax was ingenious in that it enabled its architects to muzzle critics. Anyone who dared to question the official version of history was labeled an antisemite. Employing tactics that again reflected his personal hostility towards Jews, Barnes charged those behind the “smotherout” with believing that “it [was] far worse to exterminate Jews, even at the ratio of two Gentiles to one Jew, than to liquidate Gentiles.”{63} When Barnes or like-minded people challenged this assertion in the name of “non-racial humanitarianism,” they were accused of being antisemitic, which was considered “worse than parricide or necrophilia.”{64}
Barnes’s standing as a historian is a matter of some dispute. His early works on World War I won positive reviews, and for many years his was considered to be a serious though extreme historical voice. His personal attacks on those who disagreed with him and his writings about World War II alienated many of his earlier followers but did not totally cost him his credibility as a historian. In his later years, while he was writing pamphlets about a “smotherout” and a “theory” of the Holocaust, his books were being used as required texts in university-level Western Civilization courses.[6] When “The Public Stake in Revisionism”—in which he referred to the “doings real or alleged at Auschwitz” and described the Einsatzgruppen as “battling guerrillas”—appeared in the journal of Rampart College, Robert LeFevre, the college dean, writing in the journal, demonstrated the academic community’s willingness to regard Barnes’s behavior as excusable excesses: “There are places where Dr. Barnes’ understandable frustration is indicated by the use of emotive words and that may be unfortunate although it can be forgiven.”{65}
4
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was a favorite target of the revisionists. In a confidential report written in 1944 John Flynn cited the ADL as one of the groups responsible for a program to silence isolationists and “destroy the[ir] reputations” by intimidating them and anyone who might be influenced by them. In 1947 the
5
Villard admonished Barnes about making these claims: “I do not think for a moment that you need lay this to the Jews. [Vansittart] is a hard, aggressive fighter as his books have shown and when he chose Nizer as his counsel he picked the man who got a $100,000 verdict against Victor Ridder, which the judge cut to $50,000. Englishmen are very sensitive about libels…. I don’t believe he needed the slightest prodding from anybody.”
6
Students at Harvard and Columbia have told me that they had no idea he was writing in this fashion when they were using his books.