In 1965 App escalated his attack on the Holocaust by denouncing the figure of six million as a “smear terrorizing myth,” and, despite the mass of evidence to the contrary, claiming that there was not a “single document, order, blue-print” that proved that the Nazis intended to annihilate the Jews. He offered a strange argument to prove his point: The fact that some survived now constituted proof that none were killed. App tautologically maintained it was “obvious” that the accusation was false “from the fact that they did not exterminate them. Every Jew who survived the German occupation is proof of this.” He argued that Nazi Germany was so efficient that “not a calf was born without their record nor a pig slaughtered.” Had the Nazis decided to kill all Jews, “They would have done so—they had five years to do it in.”{21}
The notions that the Third Reich was too efficient for any Jews to have escaped, and that it could have killed them all if it wanted to, became standard components of deniers’ arguments.{22} The fallacious logic of App’s argument was obvious, however. Nazi Germany was a relatively efficient society, but this efficiency was not unlimited nor was every goal the regime set for itself realized: Nazi Germany lost the war. Neither was it realized with regard to the Jews: Denmark and Bulgaria saved their Jews. And many Jews fought in partisan units, and thousands were held in concentration camps throughout the war.
But there is something even more disturbing about App’s argument than its sublime illogic and cruelty. The horrific implications of his claim become evident when we locate the assumptions of his argument. Scholars often focus on the scientific and technological aspects of the horror and on its unimagined and unimaginable scale. These, as we have seen, are the things that strain credibility and so require the largest leap of faith. But, as the theologian Richard Rubenstein has observed, the greatest horror of Nazi Germany was its breaching of a moral barrier of social organization. It was this inhuman social organization that enabled the Nazis to realize their goal of annihilating masses of Jews with such technologically advanced instruments.{23} Thus, because they made the latter possible the bureaucratic achievements of the Nazis were more frightening than the technological ones.
Max Weber, writing long before the evolution of Nazism, understood the potential power of bureaucracy in social organization. According to Weber bureaucracy is valued the more it is absolutely dehumanized. The more successfully it eliminated emotions from its official business the more “perfect” it became. The absolute bureaucratic organization demanded optimum precision, unity, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, and strict subordination.{24} Weber also understood that bureaucracies rarely, if ever, achieve this level of efficiency although that is their aim. The Nazis were keenly aware of the critical role the bureaucratic mechanism could play in allowing them to realize their plans. They knew that just as Weber taught, they had to demand complete “dehumanization” from their system if they were to realize their goals. They may not have achieved an ideally operating bureaucratic system but not for lack of trying. Consequently some Jews may have survived. Ironically, then, in App’s attempt to defend Nazi Germany from the standpoint of its bureaucratic efficiency, he pinpointed its essential horror.
By 1973 App’s fully evolved Holocaust denial was laid out in his pamphlet, The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses. His use of the term swindle in the title is another of his not so subtle attempts to link his Holocaust hoax arguments to traditional antisemitic imagery. In the pamphlet App explained that the Holocaust hoax was a plot jointly inspired and nurtured by Communists and Jews. In the late 1950s he had argued that the “utterly unsubstantiated” claims of six million dead worked only to benefit the Reds.{25} According to App the Soviets had a very good motive for participating in this hoax: They wished to hide the grim fact that more Jews had come to “grief” in Stalin-controlled territory than in Nazi-occupied lands. Whatever atrocities had occurred were committed by the Soviets themselves, not the Nazis. The Holocaust hoax conveniently allowed them to shift the blame onto the Germans.
But the Soviets were not in this alone. App charged that “Talmudic” leaders were well aware of the “horrid truth” that the atrocity charges had been fabricated and the Germans innocent. But if the Jews knew this why did (and do) they go along with it? What was (and is) their motive for blaming Germany if they know the USSR was really responsible? App offered a simple and, for those inclined toward antisemitism, completely logical answer. These Jews knew the truth but did not publicize it for a practical reason: The Bolsheviks could not be successfully blackmailed for reparations for “either real or fabricated corpses.”{26} As long as money was their ultimate objective, blaming the USSR served no purpose. Germany, on the other hand, had both the financial ability and the political inclination to pay in order to remove the stain from its reputation. In an article in American Mercury entitled “The Elusive Six Million,” App elaborated on this point and accused Zionists, of wanting to “use the figure of six million vindictively as an eternal club for pressuring indemnities out of West Germany and for wringing financial contributions out of American Jews.”{27} The Zionists—who were, according to App, identical with the Bolsheviks in terms of their propensity for evil—thus emerge as the main force behind the Holocaust myth.[1] In The Six Million Swindle, written shortly after the Yom Kippur War, App left no doubt as to the Jews’ rationale. “The Talmudists have from the beginning used the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany into ‘atoning’ with the twenty billion dollars of indemnities to Israel.”{28} (App exaggerated wildly. The actual sum Germany paid to Israel was $110 million. Far larger sums were paid to individuals.{29}) Moreover, he claimed, Israel and its supporters continued to use the “fradulent six million casualty” to achieve their political and military objectives.
It was “secret unacknowlege[sic] guilt” that caused the United States to side with Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Here too is another basic flaw in App’s reasoning. According to him the U.S. government played a pivotal role in fostering the notion of the hoax. Why would the government be motivated to act by unacknowledged guilt when it knew the charges were a hoax? For App all claims of Israel’s importance to American security were nothing but “hogwash and hypocrisy.” For him Israel was a “millstone about America’s neck and we and Germany are its feedtrough.”{30} Israel manipulated public opinion in America and Germany by exploiting the myth of the Holocaust denial. In 1974 App returned to this theme, tying together its essential elements. He argued that at least five hundred thousand of the Jews who were supposedly gassed in German concentration camps were actually in Israel, where they received “huge” reparations from Germany. Other putative victims were really in New York, where they had helped precipitate the 1973 energy crisis by “blackmailing” Nixon into rushing several billion dollars’ worth of weaponry to Israel so it could “clobber” the Arabs. The “Talmudists” had a secret ally in their efforts to manipulate foreign policy: the media. Jews used “their media,” which for App included, among others, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, to cry themselves “hoarse” because the Arabs refused to sell oil to the West.{31} App was not the first to link Jewish control of the media to the Holocaust hoax—Rassinier had done so previously—but App made it a central element of his argument. He repeatedly returned to the theme of Jewish domination of the media.{32} It was through their domination of the press that Jews had been able not only to perpetrate this hoax but subsequently to control the foreign and domestic policies of nations around the world. This theme of Jewish control of the media was a traditional component of modern antisemitism. At the core of antisemitism from the far-right end of the political spectrum was the image of the Jews as a permanent source of unrest and revolutionary zeal in society.{33} According to these antisemites the media was one of the primary tools Jews used to foster that unrest. They ignored the paradox inherent in this accusation. If Jews controlled the media why did it treat Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews in such a lackadaisical fashion during the 1930s and 1940s.
1
This argument was used by the deniers until the Soviets adopted a sharp anti-Zionist policy. It then became difficult to claim the existence of a Zionist-Soviet plot, and the deniers stopped repeating this argument.