David Hoggan - Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial

In following years, Hoggan maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups. In 1969 a short book was published called The Myth of the Six Million, denying the Holocaust. The book listed no author, but the work was by Hoggan, though published without his permission. This should not be confused with his earlier book of 1965 called The Myth of the 'New History', on America's wars. The Myth of the Six Million was published by the Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles-based publisher specializing in antisemitic literature owned and operated by Willis Carto. Hoggan sued Carto in 1969 for publishing the book (written in 1960) without his permission; the case was settled out of court in 1973.

The Myth of the Six Million was one of the first books, if not the first book, in the English language to deny the Holocaust. In The Myth of the Six Million, Hoggan argued that all of the evidence for the Holocaust was manufactured after the war as a way of trying to justify what Hoggan called a war of aggression against Germany. The Myth of the Six Million was published with a foreword by "E.L. Anderson", which was apparently a pseudonym for Carto. As part of The Myth of the Six Million, there was an appendix comprising five articles first published in The American Mercury. The five articles were "Zionist Fraud" by Harry Elmer Barnes, "The Elusive Six Million" by Austin App, "Was Anne Frank's Diary a Hoax" by Teressa Hendry, "Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist" by "Herbert C. Roseman", "The Jews that Aren't" by "Leo Heiman", and a favorable review of Paul Rassinier's work by Barnes.

Hoggan was accused in The Myth of the Six Million of re-arranging words from documents to support his contentions. One of Hoggan's critics, Lucy Dawidowicz, used the example of the memoirs of an Austrian Social Democrat named Benedikt Kautsky imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp and later at the Auschwitz death camp who wrote: "I should now briefly to refer to the gas chambers. Through I did not see them myself, they have been described to me by so many trustworthy people that I have no hesitation in reproducing their testimony". Dawidowicz accused Hoggan of re-arranging the sentence to make it sound like Kautsky declared they were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

In the 1970s, Hoggan turned to writing about American history in German. Hoggan's books about American history, his Der unnötige Krieg (The Unnecessary War) and the Das blinde Jahrhundert (The Blind Century) series, have been described as "a massive and bizarre critique of the course of American history from a racialist and wildly anti-Semitic perspective".

In the 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and a featured speaker at the IHR's Sixth Conference in 1985. His work has remained popular with antisemitic groups, but is generally dismissed by historians as little more than an apologia for Nazi Germany. In the opinion of historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Hoggan was a pioneer of the Holocaust denial industry in the 1960s, and he has been accused of blazing a trail that many subsequent Holocaust deniers followed.