In May 1942, barely six months after Pearl Harbor, in a letter to CBS radio commentator Elmer Davis, App challenged the notion that Germany desired to “dominate” Europe. According to App, Germany’s territorial conquests did not represent naked aggression but rather the Reich’s aspiration to secure the raw materials and power it needed and, in his view, deserved. At a time when the Allies were being pushed back by the Axis in both Europe and the Pacific, App proclaimed that the “Anglo-Saxon block” would have to give Germany both raw materials and power “commensurate with its talents” or inevitably the Allies would be “terribly mangled and defeated.” App maintained that Germany had gone to war because this was the only way she could obtain what justifiably belonged to her. He argued that the means to end the war and win the peace was to give Germany “precisely the things, which, if we had given them in 1939, would have prevented the war.”{6} But App did not stop there. His defense of Germany and his critique of Allied policy continued unabated through the war. In 1943, in the wake of the Casablanca Conference, at which Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that peace could only come to the world by the “total elimination” of Germany and Japan as war powers, he complained to the Columbus Evening Dispatch that to demand unconditional surrender from Germany was “grossly unethical.”{7} In 1944, as it became increasingly clear that Germany would be defeated and speculation had begun as to what a postwar Germany would look like, App argued that the Allies perpetrated a war on Germany because of the latter’s legitimate desire to reunite with Danzig (now Gdansk). According to App, the prospect of a reunited Germany had frightened the Allies, and that is why they started the war. In this and numerous other letters App reiterated his central arguments. On the eve of World War II, Germany was emerging as a stronger nation than Britain. This the British and their ally the United States could not abide. According to App the only reason the United States was at war with Germany was that it did not want “anybody in Europe so civilized and so efficient that our kith and kin, Britain, can’t kick them around and tell them what they may or may not do.”{8}
App maintained this pro-Nazi line—Germany was innocent and the Allies guilty of starting the war—throughout the conflict. Once the war ended, App expanded the parameters of his defense of Germany’s political demands and wartime behaviors. Taking his cue from the World War I revisionists like Beard and Barnes, he argued that Germany had not been responsible for the outbreak of the war. But he did not limit himself to vindicating Germany’s territorial aspirations or attacking supposed Allied political machinations. He now commenced a far more serious endeavor: defending and justifying German atrocities. In May 1945, a week after the end of the war in Europe and while news of the liberation of the concentration camps filled the pages of American newspapers, App argued that what Germany had done was legally justified in the context of the rules of warfare.
Initially he focused on a few limited atrocities, such as the German massacre of the inhabitants of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice. When Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in May 1942, the Germans claimed that the villagers of Lidice had helped his assassin. They killed all the men in the village, 192 in all, as well as 71 women. The remaining 198 women were incarcerated in Ravensbrück, where many of them died. Of the 98 children who were “put into educational institutions,” no more than 16 survived. Lidice was razed to the ground.{9} The annihilation of this town elicited an intense reaction from the American public. But, App contended, according to international law the killings were justified because the Germans had executed everybody who aided political murders,{10} and American law would have supported such action. He offered no evidence of how he concluded that the entire village had aided the assassins. Nor did he explain how murdering all the males and one third of the women, incarcerating the rest, including the children, and razing the entire town could be regarded as applications of international or American law.
Two weeks after vindicating German actions in Lidice, App addressed the killing of the Jews. Having not yet reached the point of overt denial, he simply exonerated the Germans’ actions, basing his argument on two premises. Acknowledging that the Germans had committed “crimes and mistakes,” he insisted that whatever they did any other nation would have done under similar circumstances. In fact, he argued, the United States had acted similarly during the war: Just as Germany had imprisoned Jews, America had arbitrarily imprisoned Japanese Americans.
But that was not App’s only means of exculpating Germany for its persecution of Jews. The truculent behavior of Germany’s victims justified their annihilation. Had the Japanese been as “obstinate” as the German Jews, he argued, “we conceivably would have killed them the same way.”{11} App’s exoneration of Germany’s annihilation of the Jews is particularly striking because at this point he was not yet denying that millions had been murdered. Obstinacy was just cause for the killing of millions.
Five months later App changed tactics and moved closer to denial. In an attempt to downplay the severity of Nazi atrocities, he began to obfuscate the existence of gas chambers. In 1945, in a letter to the author of an article on the war crimes trials, App insisted that the German “so-called offenders” be quickly tried. It was, App noted, “in the interest of impartiality and justice” that “all war criminals of both sides be so tried.” He then proceeded to define what constituted a war criminaclass="underline"
Just as the Germans who put Germans of Jewish descent into concentration camps because of their race should be tried so Americans who put Americans of Japanese descent into concentration (relocation) camps because of their race must be tried; just as Hitler was to have been tried for attacking Poland (to rectify the self-determination principle violated at Versailles regarding Danzig) so Stalin must be tried for invading Finland (without any justification at all); just as Germans who raped and looted must be tried so the troops under General Eisenhower who raped 2000 Stuttgart girls in one weekend and hundreds of others since and the Russians, who… raped… looted and pillaged… must be tried and if found guilty treated just as you say, according to the Golden Rule and impartial justice, Germans must be treated.{12}
For obvious reasons App avoided any mention of the German use of gas chambers to murder Jews and other victims. In order to engage in these immoral equivalences—everybody did something wrong and all should be equally punished—App had to eliminate the Holocaust and the murder of multitudes of others in death and concentration camps from the list of atrocities. Some of the atrocities listed by App have never been proven, for example, the Stuttgart rapes. Including the Holocaust and the gas chambers would have spoiled his equation. The Holocaust made it impossible to relativize the behavior of the warring parties, since nothing the Allies had done could compare to the number of people killed by the Germans or the primary method used to kill them. App had to turn the Allies and the Nazis into traditional adversaries embroiled in the horrors of war. Reducing the numbers and deleting this unique technological means from the equation were thus a sine qua non for deniers—one of the reasonable facades behind which they hide: War is an unmitigated evil, all sides are equally responsible, and there is no moral distinction between combatants.