Harry Elmer Barnes - World War II

World War II

In the late 1930s, Barnes emerged as a leading isolationist and German apologist who defended German foreign policy as a legitimate effort to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles, which Barnes regarded as monstrously unfair to Germany. In 1937, Barnes called himself "noninterventionist" opposed to the United States being involved in any sort of foreign war. After World War II, Barnes continued to expound his pre-war views of European diplomacy. In 1939, Barnes published an article that charged British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart with scheming to commit aggression against Germany in the late 1930s. As a result, Vansittart sued Barnes for libel. In a letter to his friend Oswald Villard, Barnes called Vansittart's libel suit a "plot of the Jews and the Anti-Defamation League to intimidate any American historians who propose to tell the truth about the causes of the war". Barnes called Louis Nizer, Vansittart's lawyer, an "Anti-Defamation League stooge" who Barnes alleged had "needled Vansittart into action". Barnes wrote:

If I could raise money enough for a real defense we could make this an international cause celebre, but I cannot fight the thirty million dollars now in the coffers of the Anti-Defamation League to be used for character assassination on empty pockets. If we let them get away with this, we are licked from the start.

The American historian Deborah Lipstadt has argued that the Anti-Defamation League had nothing to do with Vansittart or his libel suit against Barnes, and has argued that Barnes's claims otherwise were a sign of his anti-Semitism. In 1940, the New York World-Telegram newspaper dropped Barnes's weekly column, which led Barnes to claim that this was a result of a conspiracy against him involving MI6, the House of Morgan, and all of the Jewish department store owners in New York City, whom Barnes had alleged threatened the publisher of the New York World-Telegram with the "loss of all advertising if he kept me on any longer".

After the Second World War, Barnes's allegations which were expressed in increasing strident language alienated many, and as a result, Barnes had difficult finding publishers. Most of Barnes's work after 1945 was self-published. In particular, Barnes was emphatic about a historical black-out that he alleged to have covered up the real origins of World War II. In a 1947 pamphlet, The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout, Barnes claimed a massive blackout had been committed with regard to the history of the outbreak of war in 1939 with "court historians" alleged to have suppressed that Hitler was the most "reasonable" leader in the world in 1939, and that France's Premier Édouard Daladier wanted to commit aggression against Germany aided and abetted by a scheming and dishonest British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the same pamphlet, Barnes claimed that as part of the alleged smear campaign that had been committed against Germany, Allied governments had falsely charged Germany with responsibility for crimes that she did not commit.

In a letter to his friend Oswald Villard in 1948, Barnes stated that it was Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt "backed by certain pressure groups" who caused the outbreak of war in 1939. Later in 1948, Barnes wrote up a statement that announced France had repeatedly committed aggression against Germany, and that "Offhand I cannot recall a really unprovoked German invasion of France in modern times". Barnes's statement contained a list of every French invasion of Germany starting in 1552 and ended with: "1918 French invade Germany with American aid. 1944–45 French again ride into Germany on the backs of the Americans".

In a letter to his friend Charles Tansill in 1950, Barnes described German foreign policy in 1939 as the "most reasonable of them all". Barnes wrote it was Britain that "almost solely responsible for the outbreak of war on both the Eastern and Western fronts". In Barnes's view, Germany did not "precipitously launch" an invasion of Poland in 1939, but was instead "forced" into war by British "acts of economic strangulation".

In a 1953 essay "Revisionism and the Historical Black-out", which appeared in Barnes's self-published book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Barnes wrote:

It is no exaggeration to say that the American Smearbund, operating through newspaper editors and columnists, "hatchet-men" book reviewers, radio commentators, pressure-group intrigue and espionage, and academic pressures and fears, has accomplished about much in the way of intimidating honest intellectuals in this country as Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, the Gestapo, and concentration camps were able to do in Nazi Germany.

A strong non-interventionist, Barnes was very publicly opposed to the United States fighting in the Korean War.