Initially App simply omitted the mass murders and the gas chambers from his account of the war. He shortly recognized, however, that in order to achieve his objective he could no longer just ignore them and commenced an effort to convince the public that they were being fooled. It was an effort he would not abandon for more than three and a half decades.
In 1946, intensifying his campaign to justify German behavior, App began to play the “numbers game,” something all deniers engage in with great fervor. They attempt to demonstrate that it is statistically impossible for six million to have died. Along with their questioning the scientific plausibility of the gas chambers, it is the most critical component of their enterprise. The deniers consciously fix on those aspects of the Holocaust that are the hardest to believe precisely because they demand the greatest leap of the imagination. The use of advanced technology for the purposes of mass murder, and the sheer scope of the endeavor—particularly the number of its victims—help to render this event beyond belief.
App, who engaged in this numerical chicanery even before Paul Rassinier, began in quite a clumsy fashion. First he tried to disprove the Jewish “claim” about the Holocaust by demonstrating that most of Germany’s Jews had survived the war. In a letter to Time magazine in 1946, he declared that Germany never had a Jewish population greater than seven hundred thousand and that when Germany surrendered “there still seemed to be about a half million there.”{13}
Here App indulged in some of the tactical maneuvers that have come to typify Holocaust denial. First, in his attempt to prove that the numbers were inflated, he more than doubled the actual number of Jewish survivors without offering any proof of how he reached that figure.{14} In addition to exaggerating the number of Jewish survivors in Germany after the war, he also gave them a new identity as German Jews. In fact these survivors were not from Germany but came instead from many occupied countries. Many of them had been in concentration camps in the East and, in the latter months of the war, as the Soviet army advanced, had been transferred to Germany on brutal death marches that were part of the Nazis’ effort to prevent camp inmates from falling into Soviet hands. Many died en route, and those who survived found themselves in Germany at the end of the war. Their numbers were augmented by Jews who immediately on liberation began to head west to avoid falling into Soviet hands.
By official Allied policy, all displaced persons (DPs) were to be returned to their homes as rapidly as possible. But a significant number adamantly refused to be repatriated to Poland, the Soviet Union, and other Communist bloc countries and petitioned to be allowed to enter Palestine or the United States. The British were firmly opposed to their entry into Palestine, and the Americans would only allow a very limited number to immigrate into the United States. As a result of the controversy over these DPs, the fact that practically all the Jews then in Germany were not actually German Jews was widely publicized and would have been well known to someone like App, who followed events so closely.
In the same letter, App suggested that among the putative Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities were many who had died of “legitimate” causes and many who were not really dead at all but were living in comfort in the Western Hemisphere. He wrote to Time magazine demanding that it investigate
just how many Jews were executed and for what; how many died of abuse in concentration camps and for what; how many were said to have been killed when they simply died of old age. And how many were in one way or another brought into the United States, Mexico and Canada. An AP dispatch… states that the United States had rescued 3,000,000 refugees. Most of them appear to have been Jews, yet Judge Simon F.[sic] Rifkind recently stated that the Nazis slew 6,000,000 Jews. What are the facts?{15}
The facts were quite simple: The United States had rescued many European refugees. But it had not allowed three million refugees, Jewish displaced persons, survivors, or refugees of any ethnic group to immigrate. In fact, App was using a crafty but obvious ploy. The AP dispatch he cited was based on the report of the military governor of the American Zone on the repatriation—not the immigration into America—of the approximately three million DPs who were in the American zones in Germany and Austria at the end of the war. The report and the dispatch clearly indicated that the vast majority of the DPs had been returned to their homes by December 1945. Moreover, nowhere in the governor’s report was there any indication that the refugees in question were Jews.{16} Most of the Jews who were allowed into the United States after the war did not begin arriving until the early 1950s.
But App was not just trying to cast doubt on the number of Jews that had been killed. He was also suggesting, none too subtly, that a major deception was being perpetrated by Jewish leaders who claimed that millions had been killed despite the fact that many of those millions were still alive. App would repeatedly return to this theme—supposedly dead Jews were really hiding in America—and in the future he would do so more directly. Indeed, in 1973 he cited a 1947 statement by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, an adviser on Jewish affairs to the U.S. army commanders in Germany and Austria. Bernstein believed that the “only realistic solution” for the DP problem in Germany was resettlement in either the United States or Palestine. As App put it, “That may explain why since 1945 New York [has been] a Jewish Sodom and Gomorrah and Washington, D.C., a half Jewish and half Negro employment agency!” falsely implying that sending DPs to the United States was exactly how the issue had been resolved.{17}
In 1949 App sent another of his periodic letters to Time, again urging it to investigate the matter of the number of Jewish dead “thoroughly.” He also made one of the most radical calculations to date of the actual number of victims involved in the Holocaust “hoax.”
When I came to Europe in June I had calculated from the best sources then available to me that about 1,500,000 Jews had lost their lives through the Nazis, some because they were partisans and spies, killed as America did or would have killed persons guilty of similar offenses. After being here a month, evidences are accumulating that even that estimate is too high.{18}
App provided no evidence to substantiate his claim. App’s efforts resonated with those who were interested in resurrecting the Nazis’ image. (In 1952 a former member of the German Foreign Office under the Nazis pared the figure down to 1,277,212.{19}) But at this point App was breaking new ground. None of the other deniers, including Bardèche, Rassinier, or Barnes, had made such extreme suggestions.
Years later App described this visit to Europe. His account reveals the tremendous antipathy he felt toward the Jews he found there. “When I visited Germany and Austria in 1949 I found them deluged with uncouth-looking Eastern Jews.” These Jews were “arrogant to all Germans,” App wrote. “They all seemed to engage in black marketeering, and the German police seemed forbidden to touch them. They lied, cheated and stole from Germans, almost at will.”{20} (App obviously knew that the Jews remaining in Germany at the end of the war were not German Jews.) App’s description relies on all the traditional stereotypes used by antisemites—financial knavery, the power of the Jewish minority over the innocent majority, arrogance, and deception—a mendacious refrain that would be a constant theme in his work. In addition, he continued to dispute the number of dead and urged other deniers to do likewise throughout his career.