Today Barnes’s work is generally dismissed by scholars because of his obsession with a conspiracy theory related to America’s entry into World War II. However, he remains something of a cult historian for members of the Libertarian party, who subscribe to Barnes’s style of revisionist scholarship. They have kept his works in print and made his books widely available in their bookstores. While the Libertarians can still be considered a fringe group, more disturbing was the 1975 edition of History Teacher, a publication of the Society for History Education, which at the time was housed at California State University at Long Beach. History Teacher is designed to aid teachers in finding interesting ways to present historical information to their students. This edition, entitled “Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a ‘Usable’ Past,” identified Barnes as someone who practiced the “scholarship of commitment.” Thus, notwithstanding his notions regarding the Holocaust and other aspects of World War II, Barnes’s legacy was still at least somewhat intact. According to Justus Doenecke, author of the profile on Barnes, the causes Barnes “heralded resemble our own and the dilemmas he faced are hauntingly familiar.” Barnes’s views regarding Hitler, the power of the Jews, atrocities committed by the Allies, or the Holocaust were never mentioned in this lengthy essay. Instead Barnes was portrayed as a useful model for those who believed in the relevance of history. His conviction that Allied atrocities overshadowed those of the Germans was also ignored, although there is a passing reference to his tendency to present views that are only “partially digested.” Having chosen to rely on Barnes’s work, any teacher who came upon his views about the Holocaust might take them seriously. After all, would History Teacher have suggested Barnes as a role model if they were not valid?{66}
CHAPTER FIVE
Austin J. App
The World of Immoral Equivalencies
Harry Elmer Barnes was not the only American academic who attempted to exonerate Germany by denying the Holocaust. Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton and LaSalle College, also played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United States. Though not as prominent as Barnes, he was far more virulent and began explicitly denying the Holocaust within a few years after the war. By the late 1950s he was not only writing to the Catholic Brooklyn Tablet offering “proof” that the figure of six million was “a bloated libel,” but was appearing before varied audiences accusing Jews of perpetrating a massive hoax.{1}
Like Barnes, App was mainly concerned to lift the moral burden of the atrocities charge from the shoulders of a defeated and divided Germany. In contrast to Barnes, App had no independent standing in the academic world. An active member of various German American groups, App was an ardent defender of Germans and Nazi Germany. He served for several years as president of the five-thousand-member Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, founded in 1945. Though it never reached its membership goal of three million, it was part of a successful postwar congressional lobbying effort to allocate a substantial number of the immigration slots that had been intended for Holocaust survivors to Germans and Austrians.{2}
Born in Milwaukee in 1902 to German immigrant parents, App attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English literature. At the University of Scranton, where he taught from 1934 to 1942, he received its faculty medal as an outstanding educator. He served for a brief period in the army in 1942 but for unknown reasons was released within a short time after his induction. He subsequently joined the faculty of LaSalle College, where he remained throughout the rest of his teaching career. At LaSalle, where he taught medieval English literature and was known for pronouncing Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and other Old and Middle English works in the original, some of his students regarded him as a sort of “dry arrangement” the college kept on its staff to achieve accreditation. They had no idea of his other activities.{3}
But, completely unknown to his students, App had a far more dubious side. He inundated newspapers, magazines, politicians, and journalists with letters attacking U.S. intervention in World War II, Allied demands for unconditional surrender, and the imposition of “Morgenthauism” on Germany. The latter was App’s way of placing responsibility for all of Germany’s postwar problems on President Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Of course, Morgenthau’s plan was never put into effect. In fact, Allied treatment of Germany was the exact opposite of the plan. The letters were also App’s self-described attempt to explode the “lies and calumnies” that had been spread about Germany since the war and to prevent Roosevelt and Morgenthau from selling out “Christian Europe to the Red barbarians.” The letters bristled with overt antisemitism and racism. Talmudists, Bolsheviks, and Zionists, all of whom were intimately connected in App’s mind with one another, were blamed for the evils that beset the world after the end of the war.{4} Though few of his letters were actually published by the newspapers or magazines that received them, App kept up a steady stream of communiqués.
Though much of what App wrote can be relegated to traditional, almost gutter-level antisemitism, he is nonetheless an important figure in the development and evolution of Holocaust denial. His major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial. Since App posited them in 1973, virtually all deniers have built their arguments on them. The deniers’ tactics may have changed over time, but their arguments have remained the same.
Though App echoed many of Barnes’s views—he stated, for example, that “Hitler was a man of architecture and art, not of armaments and war”{5} and that Germany was the victim, not the victimizer—App was a more extreme figure than Barnes. Barnes was avidly pro-German but was not a fascist. He wished to defend Germany against all claims of wrongdoing but did not look for a resurrection of a totalitarian regime, a notion to which App was attracted. His Holocaust denial was more fully developed and explicit far earlier than Barnes’s. As we have seen, Barnes had initially been reluctant to assert openly that the Holocaust was a fraud. Instead he found various ways to suggest it was “theory,” a “doing, real or imagined,” or only an “alleged atrocity.” During the war itself Barnes refrained from overt criticisms of Allied policies. In contrast, Austin App showed no such reluctance. He did not wait for the war to be over to begin building a case in defense of German actions. In 1942, while the Allies were being defeated on all fronts, App sent a steady stream of letters to newspapers, periodicals, and individual journalists expressing a strong sympathy for Germany and its political objectives. Echoing World War I revisionists, he vigorously contested the notion that Germany could be held responsible for starting the war and sought to justify Germany’s prewar behavior.