Harry Elmer Barnes - Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial

In 1955, Barnes first met David Hoggan, and played a key role in helping Hoggan turn his 1948 PhD dissertation The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe into his 1961 book, Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War), "based on, but quite different from, the dissertation," in which Hoggan blamed Britain and Poland for World War II. In 1963, Barnes self-published a pamphlet, Blasting the Historical Black-out, in which he offered some praise for A. J. P. Taylor's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War. The only criticism Barnes had for Taylor was that he thought that Hoggan's book was better. In Blasting the Historical Black-out, Barnes about the "alleged wartime crimes of Germany" and that "Even assuming that all the charges ever made by the Nazis by anybody of reasonable sanity and responsibility are true, the Allies did not come off much, if any better". Barnes went to write that the suffering by ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War II were "obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis".

In response to an extremely negative review of Der erzwungene Krieg by the American historian Gerhard Weinberg in the American Historical Review in October 1962, Barnes and Hoggan wrote a series of letters attempting to rebut Weinberg's arguments, who in his turn wrote letters replying to and rebutting the arguments of Hoggan and Barnes. The exchanges between Hoggan and Barnes on one side and Weinberg on the other became increasingly rancorous and vitriolic to such an extent that in October 1963 the editors of the American Historical Review announced that they would cease publishing letters relating to Hoggan's book in the interests of decorum.

In his 1962 pamphlet, Revisionism and Brainwashing, Barnes claimed that there a "lack of any serious opposition or concerted challenge to the atrocity stories and other modes of defamation of German national character and conduct". Barnes went to write that in his view there was "a failure to point out the atrocities of the Allies were more brutal, painful, mortal and numerous than the most extreme allegations made against the Germans". Starting at this time, Barnes started to cite the French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier, whom Barnes called a "distinguished French historian" whom Barnes claimed had exposed the "exaggerations of the atrocity stories". In a 1964 article entitled "Zionist Fraud" published in The American Mercury, Barnes wrote that:

The courageous author lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on those whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner.

In 1964, Barnes and Rassinier met, and became friends. As a result, Barnes translated Rassinier's book The Drama Of the European Jews into English, which was published by an anti-Semitic publishing house called Liberty Bell.

Using Rassinier as a his source, Barnes claimed that Germany was the victim of aggression in both 1914 and 1939, and the Holocaust was just propaganda to justify a war of aggression against Germany in the latter case. Barnes took the view that World War II had ended in disaster for the West with Germany divided and the United States locked into the Cold War, made the all worse in Barnes's eyes, as his view Germany never wanted war. Barnes claimed that in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", required that the Allies make the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds. Barnes claimed there were two false claims made about World War II, namely that Germany started the war in 1939, and the Holocaust, which Barnes denied. In Barnes's opinion: "Hitler setting off the war was also deemed responsible for the wholesale extermination of the Jews, for it was admitted that this did not begin until a considerable time after war broke out." Barnes went to claim: "The size of the German reparations to Israel has been based on the theory that vast numbers of Jews were exterminated at the express order of Hitler, some six million being the most usually accepted number" (emphasis in the original). In his 1966 essay "Revisionism: A Key to Peace", Barnes wrote:

Even if one were to accept the most extreme and exaggerated indictment of Hitler and the National Socialists for their activities after 1939 made by anybody fit to remain outside a mental hospital, it is most alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful then that alleged extermination in gas ovens. (Emphasis in the original.)

In 1967 pamphlet, "The Public Stake in Revisionism", Barnes claimed that the alleged historical "blackout" with regards to World War II had now become a "smotherout" as a result of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Writing about the Eichmann trial of 1961, Barnes claimed that the trial showed "an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged" (emphasis in original). Barnes claimed that the charges against Eichmann rested on "fundamental but unproved assumptions that what Hitler and the National Socialists did in the years after Britain and the United States entered the war revealed that they were ... vile, debased, brutal and bloodthirsty gangsters" (emphasis in the original). Barnes accused the American media of publishing "sensational articles" about "exaggerated National Socialist savagery". Barnes described the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe as the "final solution" for the German people, and writing of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1945–46 claimed that "at least four million of them perished in the process from butchery, starvation and disease". Barnes wrote in his view that the Anglo-American bombing offensive together with the expulsions of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe were far worse than anything the Nazis were alleged to have done. In "The Public Stake in Revisionisim", Barnes wrote that "The number of civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during, and after the Second World War, equaled, if it did not far exceed those liquidated by the Germans and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by methods which were far more brutal and painful then whatever extermination actually took place in German gas ovens". Barnes claimed that certain unnamed "court historians" were guilty of ensuring that Allied war crimes were never "cogently and frankly placed over against the doings, real or alleged, at Auschwitz". Barnes admitted to the existence of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, but denied there were ever death camps. Barnes charged that when "court historians" were forced by "revisionists" to admit there were no death camps that the evidence for gas chambers at the death camps was manufactured. Barnes claimed that:

What is deemed important today is not whether Hitler started war in 1939 or whether Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbour, but the number of prisoners were allegedly done to death in the concentration camps operated by Germany during the war. These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dora, but it was demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonoska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Breznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed."

Barnes claimed that "court historians" to keep the public from getting "bored", manufactured stories about German crimes against humanity that were "made more unceasing, exaggerated and inflammatory". In response to Barnes's claims, in 1962 the German historian Martin Broszat wrote a letter arguing for the differences between concentration and death camps. In his letter to the Die Zeit newspaper, Broszat wrote that he wanted to "hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps". In his letter, Broszat claimed this was not an "admission" that there was no Holocaust, but rather an attempt to "set the record straight" about the differences between concentration and death camps. Broszat noted the differences between concentration camps, which were places where the inmates were consistently mistreated, but were not the subject of annihilation, and death camps, which existed solely for the purpose of exterminating their inmates. Broszat denied there was a functioning gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp (though he noted that one was built shortly before the end of the war as part of the effort to convert Dachau into a death camp, but was never used). Broszat commented that though there were many concentration camps in Germany, all of the German death camps for the genocide of the European Jews were located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Broszat argued that this confusion between in the public's mind between concentration and death camps, and the tendency to erroneously describe Dachau as a death camp was aiding the early Holocaust deniers like Paul Rassinier, David Hoggan, and Barnes who were making much of the fact that there was no functioning gas chamber at Dachau. In the same way, Barnes denied that the Einsatzgruppen murdered millions of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, and instead claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were merely "battling guerilla warfare behind the lines".

Barnes often attacked West Germany for apologizing to the Jews for the Holocaust. Barnes wrote that the West German government should challenge the "unfair" verdict and "false dogmas" of World War II, which he claimed prevented "the restoration of Germany to its proper position of unity, power and respect among the nations of the world". Barnes drew unfavorable contrasts between the Weimar Republic, which had in the 1920s vigorously fought the so-called Kriegsschuldlüge ("war guilt lie") that Germany started the First World War in 1914 with the "masochistic" behavior of the government of Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s. Barnes accused Adenauer of having "brainwashed" and "indoctrinated" the German people into believing an "indictment of German responsibility for the war". Barnes went on to accuse Adenauer of "opposing the discovery and publication of the truth". Barnes professed to be "deeply puzzled" that the West German government was willing to accept responsibility for the Holocaust and its "downright disinclination to seek to refute the most outrageous charges of cruelty and barbarism leveled against Germany by conscienceless atrocity mongers and the continuation to this very day of not-so-little Nuremberg trials". In 1962, Barnes attacked the West German president Heinrich Lübke for asking for a speech in Israel for forgiveness for the German people for the Holocaust. Barnes called the speech "almost incredible grovelling" and "subserviency" to the Jews. Barnes often claimed that Jews had promoted the view, which he considered false, that Jews had been the victims of anti-Semitism throughout the ages. Barnes claimed that those questioned this view were unjustly labeled anti-Semitic. According to Barnes, those behind the "smotherout" about Nazi Germany believed that "it was far worse to exterminate Jews, even at the ratio of two Gentiles to one Jew, than to liquidate Gentiles".

Lipstadt's 1993 book Denying the Holocaust devotes chap. 4, "The First Stirrings of Denial in America" to Barnes as the main link between revisionism in the 1920s (re-evaluation of German responsibility for the First World War) and the emergence in the 1950s of Holocaust Denial (arguing that the Jewish holocaust either did not happen or was exaggerated by wartime Allied propaganda and postwar Jewish politics.) The main difference, however, is that the German government of the 1920s enthusiastically supported and promoted Barnes's views as exonerating their country, while the postwar West German government accepted national responsibility for the Holocaust, solicited forgiveness and paid reparations to Jewish survivors. This difference meant that Barnes in his later years allied himself with American and European antisemites and cranks rather than with respectable or official opinion. Author Lucy Dawidowicz concurs.