Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes (June 15, 1889 – August 25, 1968) was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial.
[8] After 1924, Barnes had a close relationship with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a pseudo-historical think-tank based in Berlin secretly funded by the German government and founded by Major Alfred von Wegerer, the former völkisch activist.
He held that the villains of 1914 were the international Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion".
[13] Barnes wrote in his preface that "the truth about the causes of the World War is one of the livest and most important practical issues of the present day.
It is basic to the whole matter of the present European and world situation, resting as it does upon an unfair and unjust Peace Treaty, which was itself erected upon a most uncritical and complete acceptance of the grossest forms of war-time illusions concerning war guilt.
Probably the German public was somewhat more favorable to military activity than the English people, but ... the Kaiser made much more strenuous efforts to preserve the peace of Europe in 1914 than did Sir Edward Grey.
[7] Though most German historians in the 1920s regarded Barnes merely as a propagandist whose work was mainly meant to appeal to a mass as opposed to an academic audience, the right-wing German historian Hans Herzfeld called Barnes's work "a document in the struggle against the war guilt thesis whose noble spirit cannot be appreciated enough".
[16] In 1926, the American historian Bernadotte Schmitt wrote about The Genesis of the World War that: "It must be said that Mr. Barnes' book falls short of being the objective and scientific analysis of the great problems which is so urgently needed.
Later, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not want to go to war with the United States and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor.
[6] He also contested many aspects of the Holocaust, claiming death figures were far lower[19] and arguing that all sides were guilty of equally awful atrocities.
In 1939, Barnes published an article that claimed British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart was "scheming to commit aggression" against Germany in the late 1930s.
[20] In a letter to his friend Oswald Villard, Barnes said that Vansittart's libel suit against him was 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".
The writer responded by complaining the action was due to a conspiracy against him, involving MI6 intelligence service, the House of Morgan, and all of the Jewish department store owners in New York City.
[22] Barnes' allegations of warmongering in both government and in the historical profession alienated colleagues and made it difficult for his writings to gain publication.
[6] In his 1947 pamphlet, "The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout", Barnes claimed that "court historians" 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 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the U.S. President Franklin D.
"[24] In Barnes' view, Germany did not "precipitously launch" an invasion of Poland in 1939, but was instead "forced" into war by "acts of economic strangulation" issued by the Chamberlain cabinet.
[23] In a 1953 essay, "Revisionism and the Historical Black-out", which appeared in Barnes' self-published book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, he 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 as 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.
[26] 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.
[27] Barnes referred to the "alleged wartime crimes of Germany" and wrote 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".
[27] Barnes asserted that the suffering of ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War II was "obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis.
[28] In a 1964 article entitled "Zionist Fraud", published in The American Mercury, Barnes wrote: "The courageous author [Rassinier] 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.
[29] Barnes claimed that, in order to justify the "horrors and evils of the Second World War", the Allies made the Nazis the "scapegoat" for their own misdeeds.
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 than that alleged extermination in gas ovens."
)[30][excessive quote] In his 1967 pamphlet, "The Public Stake in Revisionism", Barnes wrote that the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 showed "an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged" (emphasis in original).
Writing of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1945–46, he claimed that "at least four million of them perished in the process from butchery, starvation and disease".
[31] In response, the German historian Martin Broszat wrote a letter in 1962 clarifying and defining the differences between concentration and death camps.
[32] 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".
[32] 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.
