Though App identified the main force behind the Holocaust hoax as the “Talmudists and Bolsheviks,” he believed there was another participant in the spread of this slander. At the end of the war, when the Americans and British “invaded” Germany, they saw the results of their indiscriminate bombing. The Allies knew, App wrote, that they had been responsible for more destruction than any “vandals of history except the Bolsheviks.” Recognizing that their people would not understand or condone the “unnecessary barbarism,” Allied leaders needed something that would save them from the condemnation that was sure to come. It was then, according to App, that they discovered that their only “salvation” was to “manufacture” and “harp on a mountain of atrocities,” particularly those against the Jews. Harping on Jews as victims was particularly efficacious for the Allied leaders because, App explained, Jews controlled the media and the media would play a critically important role in disseminating the hoax. And their plan worked. They exaggerated real and phony Third Reich atrocities to such monstrous proportions that Allied crimes were totally ignored. They then took matters a step further by instilling such a guilt complex in Germany that the Germans felt compelled to pay unprecedented sums of reparations to Jews and Israel.{34}
But even when he linked the Holocaust hoax to the Allies’ need for a camouflage in which to hide their own outrages, App did not absolve the “Talmudist leaders.” In fact, he maintained that the Jews were ultimately responsible for Allied actions and actually controlled Allied policy. This leap enabled him to argue that Soviet and American atrocities against the German people were the result of Jewish influence. App focused on the two people he considered responsible for these atrocities. Not surprisingly, both of them were Jews. American Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Ilya Ehrenburg, a member of the Soviet Antifascist Committee, were to blame for the Soviet soldiers’ rape of German women and plunder of German property. App argued, without offering a shred of proof, that Ehrenburg personally urged Soviet soldiers to commit rape, against the German people. (Ehrenburg did call for vengeance but not for rape.) This vindicative Jewish Communist supposedly gave the most “beastly directive in history: Rape the German women as booty!” Similarly, App blamed virtually every American action against the Germans on Henry Morgenthau. It is true that Morgenthau, after learning of the horrors of the German annihilation of the Jews, proposed that in the postwar period Germany be converted into a country that was primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.{35} As we have seen, the plan was never seriously considered and was subsequently completely abandoned by President Truman. But App claimed that the plan had been put into effect, at least in part. He contended that Morgenthau not only bribed Churchill to stiffen the treatment of German prisoners of war but also inspired the Allies to starve and “abuse-unto-death” several million of these prisoners. This was obviously a Jewish plot, App argued, because “Christians at their worst are not as barbarous as Communists and Jews at their average.”{36} Thus, when the Jews saw that the Allies were going to deal leniently with the Germans in the postwar period, they went into action. According to App the American army was planning to allow the German prisoners to be repatriated as soon as possible after the war. But this did not happen despite the fact that it was what the army leadership and “our Christian citizens” wanted. App had a simple explanation as to how the “tribalists” were able to prevent it. They kept “screeching the lie that the Germans ‘gassed’ 6,000,000 of them. It was the Jews who kept screaming for abusing German prisoners of war, for keeping them from home, for slave-laboring them…. This is the voice of the Talmudists, the barbarians of the Morgenthau Plan!”{37}
As his rhetoric about the Jewish role in directing Allied policy escalated, the two became fused in his mind. No longer did he even speak of the Jews’ ability to direct Allied policy. For App, Allied tactics and the Jews’ objectives became one: Allied policy, at its worst, was Jewish policy. This is most evident at the end of A Straight Look at the Third Reich. Immediately after discussing Allied atrocities, without any indication that the subject of his diatribe had changed, App wrote:
Not finding the Nazis guilty of real war crimes at all commensurate with the monstrous ones of the victors, they resorted to the only alternative open to hypocrites and liars namely to fabricate a mass atrocity. This they did with the legend of the six million Jews “gassed.” …This is a fabrication and swindle.{38}
Allied policymakers and Jewish leaders had become one and the same to App. He then fell back on the same approach that Harry Elmer Barnes had utilized, accusing those behind the hoax of “smear terroriz[ing]” and branding as an antisemite anyone who tried to investigate this myth in a scholarly fashion.{39}
It was not by chance that App relied on the New Testament phrase “hypocrites and liars” to describe Jews. In fact it served two purposes for him: It was a means of drawing on antisemitic imagery that would resonate with many non-Jews. Moreover, for him the Jews of the twentieth century who perpetrated this hoax were essentially the same as the New Testament Jews who were depicted as crucifiers of Jesus. In the forward to the 1975 edition of his collected letters, App noted that just as his letters failed to ease Germany’s fate and prevent the atrocity stories from gaining currency, so too Jesus of Nazareth was unable to prevent his crucifixion. But that did not mean that either Jesus’ or App’s struggle was wrong. Both these martyrs were defeated by the same adversaries. App implied that the ancestors of the “World War Talmudists” had crucified Jesus, and now their descendants thwarted those who wished to tell the truth.[2]
By the end of The Six Million Swindle App had fully formulated his Holocaust denial, offering readers what he described as eight “incontrovertible assertions” that demonstrate the fallaciousness of the figure of six million, which the media kept repeating “ad nauseam without any evidence.” These basic assertions—which were eventually adopted by the Institute for Historical Review as well as other revisionist groups as the fundamental tenets of Holocaust denial—fall into three distinct categories. First they absolve the Nazis by arguing that they never had any plan for annihilating Jews and that the means supposedly used for annihilation were technologically impossible. They only wanted Jews to emigrate, and if any Jews did die it was the USSR that was ultimately responsible. Second, they legitimate the killing of those Jews who died by contending that they were killed for justifiable reasons. Third, they blame the perpetuation of this hoax on Israel and Jewish leaders and scholars, all of whom have material and political interests in its dissemination.
2
This was not the only time App relied on biblical themes to depict Jews. In 1948 he called for the reeducation of Jews “away from their eye for an eyeism.” (App,