Austin J. App and the Proliferation of Holocaust Denial

by T. L.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 2000)

Introduction

The 20th century saw the worst atrocities ever committed in human history. Among these, perhaps no crime stands out in terms of sheer horror as much as the Nazi Holocaust World War II. Under the direction of Adolf Hitler, anywhere from 5 to 6 million Jews (as well as several million members of other "undesirable" group) perished at the hands of the Nazis. The sheer numbers and scale of this tragic episode clearly show intensive central planning that many say the ultra-efficient National Socialist government of Germany could have been capable of. The entire Holocaust "project" would have consisted of construction of the concentration camps, railroads to supply them with equipment as well as prisoners, and of course the instruments of death and the means to dispose of several million corpses. Though the Nazis attempted several different methods of execution, they eventually found that the most proficient method of exterminating Jews was to herd the victims into gas chambers powered by the chemical Zyklon-B. German scientists of the era contributed to the effort by devising ever-more efficient crematoria that could burn several corpses at once.

Almost from the moment the Holocaust became general knowledge following the defeat of Germany and the liberation of the death camps, there have been voices in society that have claimed that the entire Holocaust story was some sort of elaborate hoax. They choose to call themselves revisionists, though anyone interested in the truth of historical fact would do better to label them deniers. They take their own name from a highly respected school of historical thought, that of the necessary process of taking a fresh look at the facts every generation or so in order to come up with new theories and interpretations of events. The actual "school" of Holocaust denial in some ways grew out of the wave of revisionism that followed the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I. Though controversial at the time, this group of historians actually became generally recognized and accepted for their conclusions that Germany had been treated unfairly at the Versailles Conference, particularly where it pertains to the "sole guilt clause" for starting the war. One of these historians, Harry Elmer Barnes, became one of the earliest proponents of Holocaust Denial.

The most troubling aspect of Holocaust Denial lays in the fact that many once credible and respected historians, from Barnes in the 1940s to David Irving today, have crossed over into the pseudoscientific and outright fantastical realm of "revisionism". Such affronts to legitimate historical study have opened the floodgates to all sorts of reinterpretations that threaten to cloud the historical record forever. At best the deniers have simply tried to re-examine the 6 million number, which has some merit because no completely accurate numbers will ever be known. At worst, deniers have used a façade of legitimate historical inquiry to espouse the most traditional and basic forms of anti-Semitism. Holocaust deniers from all different backgrounds, many without any sort of license or background in history (and a few without any discernible academic history whatsoever) have even gone so far as to collectivize their efforts through the Institute of Historical Review. Though the name of the organization implies some sort of authenticity, this organization amounts to little more than a hate group which provides a forum for just about anyone to present outright lies as historical truth. One such person was an English professor named Austin J. App.

App was one of the first outright deniers of the Holocaust, and in reaching these conclusions he drew on many of the later writings of Harry Elmer Barnes. Aside from his reliance on Barnes' name to create an aura of respectability about his work, App demonstrated an utter disregard for any standards of ethical research methods. Early in his career he simply opposed U.S. participation in World War II, from there he developed a keen interest in National Socialism and became an outspoken defender of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. From there he began to develop his infamous "numbers game" to show that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was greatly exaggerated and that many of the supposed 6 million dead were actually in hiding in other countries. Later he became a proponent of moral relativism, attempting to prove that atrocities committed by the Nazis (not including the Holocaust, which by this time he had written off as a complete fabrication) paled in comparison to those committed by the Allies, particularly the Soviet Union. The writings of App have become one of the major cornerstones of modern Holocaust denial and stand as a testament to how far the deniers will go to pervert the truth in order to serve their own agenda.

In recent years the Holocaust denial phenomenon has become significant enough to evoke a response from the academic establishment. In her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory", Deborah Lipstadt studied the evolution of Holocaust denial from a tiny movement consisting of a small group of anti-Semites on the fringe of the extreme right into an international community of hate writers and unqualified historians attempting to eradicate the Holocaust from the historical record. Within the last year the subject of Holocaust denial has spilled over into the courtroom, as David Irving sued Lipstadt for libel on account of passages in her book identifying Irving with the Holocaust deniers as well as neo-Nazi groups. While Irving lost the battle in court, the deniers could yet claim the incident as a victory. The final ruling that essentially discredited Irving as a historian might serve as another piece of evidence the deniers will want to use to prove the international conspiracy that keeps the "truth" from being known. Such is the danger one faces when working against a group that can find a way to make any piece of evidence, no matter how damning, work to their advantage. This study will attempt to show the writings of Austin J. App for what they are: irresponsible, historically inaccurate and anti-Semitic propaganda.

App's Arguments

Being an active member of several German-American organizations throughout his career, Austin App offered outspoken support for Nazi Germany from the outset of World War II. He contended that an international conspiracy involving the U.S., Britain, and the Zionist movement had pushed Germany into war. In so doing he drew on the writings of World War I revisionists such as Barnes, claiming that Hitler had no goal other than to right the violation of the self determination principle for ethnically German territories such as Danzig, Austria and the Sudetenland. When news of German atrocities began to surface following the end of the war in Europe, App initially set out to justify each crime and exonerate the Nazis from any wrongdoing, arguing essentially that any other country in the same position would have acted the same way. Though at first he did not explicitly deny the Holocaust, he began to assert that mass killings of Jews had been justified because the Jews had not cooperated with the government. In this way he began his long practice of creating moral equivalencies by theorizing the United States would have done the same thing to Japanese American internees had they resisted (Lipstadt 89).

>From there App set about to reduce German atrocities to the lowest common denominator by arguing that all countries involved in the war in fact had engaged in similar "degrees" of atrocity. In order to make this comparison App had to eliminate the fact of the Holocaust altogether. In order to accomplish this he began to devise his infamous "numbers game", which basically consisted of wild misquotes of reference materials such as almanacs to prove the number of Jews in Europe remained essentially stable throughout the war. Now a common theme among many deniers, App used the numbers game to show that the Nazis could not possibly have killed six million Jews, even if they had wanted to (Lipstadt 90). In the summer of 1966 App wrote "That Elusive 'Six Million'", in which he claimed that over time the six million figure would be "happily reducible to only ten percent of the six million. But even now the facts call for at least a fifty per cent deflation." In reaching these conclusions he quoted The World Almanac from 1947. In this same article he quotes the Democratic German Report, which had published the accepted theory that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis "may have been nearer five million" (App 1966).

App continued to exploit this supposed discrepancy in his pamphlet "A Straight Look at the Third Reich", which basically amounted to his most impassioned defense of Nazi Germany. Here he revisits the theme of self-determination, saying that the Allies hypocritically denied the Germans their choice of National Socialism as their form of government. He then sets about on his usual business of absolve Germany of any atrocities it may have committed during the way by demonstrating that the Allies did much worse. Here he begins to focus on actions done by Allied occupiers after the war ended, particularly pertaining to the treatment of German citizens forced out of their homes in territories that were incorporated into Poland. In producing a long list of war atrocities, App purported that the Allies were guilty of virtually every kind of war crime, including rape, mistreatment of POWs, forced repatriation of civilians, and looting. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, App declared the Nazis somehow were innocent of virtually all these crimes. He claims that the Allies created Holocaust story in order to quell their own consciences about atrocities they committed themselves (App

In 1973 App wrote The Six Million Swindle, which not only laid out his fully developed theory of Holocaust denial, but would also become one of the foundational documents of the Institute for Historical Review and for Holocaust deniers in general. He claimed that the Holocaust was a complete fabrication propagated by the still-living "victims" in order to blackmail reparations out of West Germany. He also argued that the Soviet Union helped to support the Holocaust myth in order to cover up the fact that more Jews suffered in areas controlled by Stalin than Hitler. In his continuing effort to shift the focus away from German atrocities he alleged that Poland had treated its Jews far worse than Germany ever did, both before and after the war. App points to a common theme in Europe in which "native populations" had commonly abused the Jews living in their countries before the Nazis ever got there. App formulated a theory that because some Jews survived in Europe, there must have never been an order to exterminate them. His logic behind this assertion went that Nazi Germany was so ultra-efficient that if there had been an order to kill all Jews, it certainly would have been carried out to completion during the five years in which they had the opportunity (App 1973).

From there he turns his attention to Allied atrocities committed after the war. In these diatribes App uses President Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry J. Morganthau as his main target. App cited the Morganthau Plan, which was formulated prior to the conclusion of the war and intended to reduce Germany to an unindustrialized, agricultural society, as proof that the Allies were capable of far worse atrocities than the Germans ever committed. By showing that Henry Morganthau, a Jew, established the U.S. postwar strategy to completely destroy Germany, App could show that the U.S. government did in fact conspire with Zionists. This collaboration then ordered the mass expulsion of 12,000,000 Germans from territories incorporated into Poland and Czechoslovakia, resulting in the deaths of 2,500,000 Germans. Here again App attempts to establish moral equivalencies, declaring this postwar resettlement program "the mass atrocity in history," and he also declares that in comparison "all real and alleged Nazi war crimes dwindle in size and gravity." App then contends that the Nazi policy concerning the Jews had always been to encourage emigration, and in fact by doing so Nazi Germany simply upheld a long-standing tradition in Europe. He tries to prove how much better this policy would have worked, including the resettlement of the Jews in Madagascar, than the eventual establishment of Israel and the displacement of a million Palestinians (App 1973).The "eight incontrovertible assertions" regarding the Holocaust in The Six Million Swindle best summarizes his career and beliefs and today represent the basic tenets of Holocaust denial in general:

1. The Third Reich wanted to get Jews to emigrate, not to liquidate them physically.

2. Absolutely no Jews were "gassed" in any concentration camps in Germany, and evidence is piling up that none were gassed at Auschwitz.

3. The majority of Jews who died in pogroms and those who disappeared and are still unaccounted for, fell afoul in territories controlled by the Soviet Russians, not in territories under German control.

4. Most of the Jews alleged to have met their death at the hands of Germans were subversives, partisans, spies, and criminals, and also often victims of unfortunate but internationally legal reprisals.

5. If there were the slightest likelihood that the Nazis had in fact executed six million Jews, World Jewry would scream for subsidies with which to do research on the question, and Israel would throw its archives and files open to historians. They have not done so.

6. The Jews and the media who exploit this figure have never offered a shred of valid evidence for its truth.

7. The burden of proof for the six million figure rests on the accusers, not the accused.

8. Obvious evidence that the figure of six million has no scientific foundation is that Jewish scholars themselves present ridiculous discrepancies in their calculations.

Evidence Against App

In "That Elusive Six Million," Austin App correctly quotes Phillip Friedman's book Their Brothers' Keepers by saying that 75% of the Jews in France were spared during World War II, offering "proof" that the Nazis had no intention of exterminating all Jews. App conveniently ends his quotation there, even though Friedman goes on to analyze these figures and concludes that such a high number of Jews survived because of a variety of factors, most prominent being "the attitude of the French population." According to Friedman, "a militant, articulate minority soon became the voice and conscience of France." Germans even showed "disappointment at the accomplishments of French anti-Semites and collaborationists" (Friedman 44). App also points to a passage in Friedman saying, "Dutch, Belgian and French Jews were convoyed by the thousands to Switzerland or to Spain." Here App intentionally misleads the reader by implying that the Nazis themselves undertook such actions, but a complete reading of this passage from Friedman shows the author making a clear statement that the underground carried out such activities and in fact hiding and relocating Jews "became a subsidiary activity of the Resistance" against the Nazis (47). This selective quotation by App represents a common tactic used by deniers, in which they quote legitimate sources to give their work an aura of scholarship, but to quote only passages that seem to support their arguments even though the selected quotations actually mask the intentions of the original writing.

In "That Elusive Six Million" as well as subsequent writings, App also tries to tackle the figure of the six million. He puts forth a hypothesis that over time the number six million will come to be recognized as a hoax and gradually the real number of deaths will become known. His main precedent for this wild theory is the revision of numbers for Dachau camp. This well-known and academically accepted revision stems from the fact that observers originally thought that there had been a functioning gas chamber at Dachau. Later historians came to recognize the difference between a concentration camp and an exterminations camp, and they discovered that Dachau had in fact been a more traditional concentration camp. Subsequently, the number of deaths thought to have occurred at Dachau underwent radical revisions (Lipstadt 78). Deniers before and since App have alluded to this apparent "slip" by the perpetrators of the Holocaust myth. In fact such occurrences prove little other than the well-established reality that the Nazis destroyed many of their records, hence historians have had to attempt to reconstruct the details of the extermination program in order to fully understand the immense dimensions of such a project.

Franciszek Piper confronts a similar problem about the number of deaths to occur in Auschwitz-Birkenau in his essay "The Number of Victims". In it he describes the basic concept of how the number of Holocaust victims gets calculated. He begins by explaining the fundamental problem with Auschwitz that prisoners who had survived the camp claimed that "millions" had died there while the remaining records recovered by the Soviet Union could only confirm 100,000 deaths (Piper 61). For a time official Soviet figures showed that upwards of 4 million Jews died at Auschwitz alone. In the absence of reliable records, the Soviet Union had relied on testimony given by Rudolf Hoss stating, "at least 2.5 million people were put to death, gassed, and subsequently burned thereâ€|" He adds that half a million more people died of exhaustion and illness, making a total of 3 million deaths. A former prisoner who had served in the commandant's office as a clerk estimated the number of deaths at 4.5 million (Piper 64). Aided by the fall of the Soviet Union, a new study was undertaken in 1990 which consisted of searches through the archives of several Eastern European countries. The findings of this study supported those of another described by Piper that took place in 1980, in which researchers estimated the number of deaths by subtracting all known reductions in the prisoner population of Auschwitz (by transfer, escape, or release) from the number people to have been deported and transported to the camp (Piper 68).

In a further attempt to exonerate Germany from any war crimes it committed or may have committed, App argues that one cannot fairly assess a regime based on atrocities committed during wartime. This contention has some merit, but does not deal with the crimes committed against German Jews from the time Hitler came to power until the outbreak of war. Public beatings of Jews, discrimination in court, and deportations to Dachau became commonplace within months of Hitler coming to power (Gilbert 32-33). This sequence of random and illogical discrimination against Jews eventually resulted in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of their citizenship, their right to marry or engage in extra-marital sexual intercourse with non-Jews, and forbid Jews to fly the German flag. In general these laws effectively removed Jews from German life (Gilbert 47-48). In November 1938 a massive outbreak of anti-Jewish violence known as Kristallnacht broke out in retaliation for the murder of an official at the German embassy in Paris, in what the Nazis declared was part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Germany. In the violence that followed, 91 Jews died, tens of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were looted, 191 synagogues were destroyed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps (Gilbert 69-70). Jews even received harsher treatment than other prisoners in camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau (Gilbert 57-58). All of this occurred before the outbreak of war.

App repeatedly bemoans Jewish control of American policy concerning Germany following World War II, attacking the Morganthau Plan as an instrument of destruction and Jewish vengeance against Germany. An examination of the historical facts reveals that App actually had some degree of insight about the Morganthau Plan long before many other scholars as a result of Allied cover-ups, but again his selective use of facts that support his hypothesis caused him to misrepresent the historical record. The opening of the KGB's archives in recent years has led to the discovery of much troubling information about Allied behavior in Germany in the years immediately following the end of the war. The western press long perpetuated the notion that the Morganthau Plan never went into effect because President Truman feared the discontentment that such a destructive arrangement could ferment in Germany. Such bitterness toward the Allies, if left unchecked, would turn the western half of Germany into fertile ground for the continued expansion of the Soviet bloc (Mee Potsdam 16). Truman did accept Secretary Morganthau's resignation just before leaving for Potsdam (Gormly 31). This effectively dismisses Austin App's contention of a Zionist conspiracy controlling U.S. policy on Germany, even though the Morganthau Plan itself actually stayed in effect for several years and resulted in great suffering for the German people. The "Morganthau Plan" as put into effect by the Allied occupiers had little to do with the man whose name it bore. A small but powerful minority within the U.S. government, including General David Eisenhower, felt that the German people should pay for the sin of supporting the Nazi regime (Bacque 25-30).

Even more damaging evidence against App's contention of Jewish control over the United States lies in the conduct of the U.S. toward the Jews before and during the war. The U.S. State Department was against any release of large numbers of Jews from Germany because of the pressure this would put on the United States to accept tens of thousands of Jews as refugees and Britain would be pressured to make Palestine available as well. Neither nation had any desire to participate in such an action (Wyman 113-115). In fact, the 21,000 Jews admitted by the United States during the war only came to about 10 percent of the number that could have come in under the immigration quota laws already in place at the start of the war (Wyman 125-129). The government agency created to deal with such issues, the War Refugee Board, had little authority and received very little government funding (Wyman 285). Despite reliable reports surfacing in American newspapers as early as November 1942 about a systematic execution of Jews by the Nazis, there was little public support for a change in any of these government policies (Wyman 20-26). The American public's firm stance on this issue owes itself to deeply engrained anti-Semitism and anti-immigration sentiments that permeated American attitudes at that time (Wyman 10). Most damaging of all, the War Department rejected several pleas to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz or even the railroad tracks that led to the camp. Despite government objections that doing so would divert resources from essential war operations, during the same time period the U.S. conducted extensive bombing of areas not far from Auschwitz, and on two occasions even bombed industrial facilities within Auschwitz itself (Wyman 288-307).

Deniers such as App also love to claim that Hitler never issued any explicit order for the extermination of the Jews. Even if such a policy had existed, Hitler himself knew nothing about it. While no such written documents actually exist, high-ranking Nazi officials stated unambiguously after the war that they had very specific orders concerning the Jews and that it was equally clear that these orders had come from the Fuhrer himself. Adolf Eichmann testified at his trial that although he never saw a written order, "Heydrich told me 'The Fuhrer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews'" (Gilbert 168). Such a massive undertaking as the elimination of an entire race would require massive central planning, which happened in Nazi Germany starting with the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 (Gilbert 280). App's contention that the Germans would have and could have killed all the Jews if they had wanted to simply lacks common sense. Even the most efficient regime in the world (and the Holocaust certainly proves Nazi Germany was a fairly efficient society) cannot accomplish all of its goals. As Deborah Lipstadt points out, the Nazis also had planned to win the war (93). App's contention that the existence of some Jewish survivors proves that none died is so ridiculous as to not even require refutation. His own argument contradicts itself because he rests a large part of his numbers argument on the relatively small reduction in the Jewish population of Germany from the beginning to the end of the war, even though he personally observed Germany and Austria "deluged with uncouth-looking Eastern Jews" in 1949 (App 1973). Hence even App obviously knew that many of the Jews living in Germany at war's end were refugees from the east.

The True Picture

The Holocaust deniers present a problem from a historiography standpoint because they do not use ethical research methods. Instead of offering a hypothesis and then examining all available evidence in order to prove or disprove that hypothesis, Holocaust deniers like App trick the reader by only using evidence that supports the thesis and everything else automatically gets discarded. That can be especially deceiving in cases where writers like App actually quote reputable writers and documents but chop those sources up to make them fit into the thesis as well. In other words, in the writings of App the nonexistence of the Holocaust is a foregone conclusion. Any evidence that shows otherwise automatically gets classified as either a fabrication or another part of the vast conspiracy perpetrated by an odd coalition of Jews, Communists, and high ranking American officials that App believed had created the story of the Holocaust. These writings cannot qualify as good historical study because they cover up one set of crimes to expose the veracity of another. Certainly the Allies committed horrible atrocities both during and after World War II, and these acts of violence should be recognized and condemned along with those of the Nazis. But such an academic effort cannot and should not come at the expense of belittling or dismissing the very real atrocities committed by the Nazis, including the attempted extermination of European Jews.

Charles Maier's book The Unmasterable Past confronts the problem of Austin App's moral equivalencies. One of App's repeated contentions (even before he reached the point of explicit Holocaust denial) was that those Jews who did die at the hands of the Nazis were justifiably executed spies and other enemies of the regime. As Maier brings out, such rationalizations stem from a declaration by Chaim Weizmann in the first days after the outbreak of the war that all Jews worldwide would support and fight on the side of the British (Maier 67). Such a declaration might be able to indeed justify Germany's imprisonment of all Jews under their control, just as the United States had done to its citizens of Japanese descent on the West Coast and to a smaller degree to Italian- and German-Americans on the East Coast. But because the Jews did not have a nation at that time, nobody had any real authority to speak on behalf of "World Jewry", nor did Jews have any means of organizing militarily into a cohesive unit. In addition, it must again be brought out that German Jews had already endured over six years of constantly escalating persecution and violence. If such a united voice existed in 1939 to speak out on behalf of all the Jews of the world in support of Britain's commencing war effort against Hitler, that voice would have done so as a valid protest against an already existing anti-Jewish policy in effect in Nazi Germany (Maier 68). Only by putting these facts aside can the Holocaust deniers make a case for the just internment of the Jews.

Just as German persecution of the Jews even before the start of World War II must be recognized, so too do historians have to come to grips with the newly emerging reality about the implementation of the Morganthau Plan. Designed mainly by Morganthau and Eisenhower, the Morganthau Plan did in fact aim to punish the German people for their actions during the war. Contrary to App's assertions, however, Morganthau did not act out of a singular desire to avenge his fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as Morganthau and Eisenhower put their plan together in the summer of 1944. While reports of the death camps had filtered out to the Western democracies much earlier, the full dimensions of the Holocaust were not known until the liberation of the death camps and thus was not a major factor in the formulation of postwar strategy. Eisenhower personally did not concern himself with the implications of such a plan for the German economy and felt that punishment of Germany should not be limited to Nazi officials and SS troops (Bacque 25-26). Morganthau did leave his Cabinet post within a few months of Truman assuming the presidency, but this may have had more to do with Morganthau overstepping his authority on other issues than the Plan itself (Bacque 37). Historians have traditionally taken Morganthau's "resignation" to mean his plan was also abandoned, but the most recent evidence shows that the plan continued to dominate Allied policy without the man whose name it bore for several more years.

Fallout from the Morganthau Plan began to affect Germany before the war even ended. When word of the plan leaked to the German high command, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels frightened the remaining soldiers with the threat of de-industrialization and slavery so much that the Germans resisted unconditional surrender up until the bitter end (Bacque 27-28). These fears turned out to be well founded, as the most immediate victims of Allied postwar policy proved to be German prisoners of war. Official U.S. military documents report that the POW camps maintained in Germany during 1945 had conditions similar to those of a Japanese camp whose commandant was executed for war crimes in 1946. The conditions of these camps grew steadily worse following Germany's surrender. Many prisoners who had been treated humanely during the war began to receive greatly reduced food rations immediately following surrender, being neglected to a point where eventually starvation began to set in (Bacque 29). The postwar phase of the Morganthau Plan commenced with the dismantling of Germany's government and armed forces, as well as the trying of war criminals. The de-industrialization program quickly reduced German production to 25 percent of prewar levels, compared with 105 percent during the winter of 1944-45, while the war continued to rage on (Bacque 30).

The conference of the Big Three Allies (the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain) at Potsdam in July-August 1945 effectively planned the postwar future of Germany. A large part of these negotiations inevitably focused on the issue of Poland. Roosevelt had determined long before the Potsdam Conference ever took place that the United States would be willing to support Poland's annexation of East Prussia and various other territories on Germany's eastern frontier. This issue became especially important at Potsdam when Stalin refused to withdraw from the portion of Poland that the Soviet Union had annexed as a result of its secret pact with Hitler in 1939 (Bacque 100). Since the Red Army had rolled right through Poland on its way to Berlin, the entire country was under Stalin's control and Truman and Churchill had little room to negotiate. Stalin also made it clear that he had every intention of Poland having a government that would be "friendly" to the Soviet Union, emphasizing the fact that Russia had been invaded by Germany through Poland twice within the course of thirty years and earlier European policy had been to support Polish governments that were hostile to the Soviet Union (Mee Potsdam 61-63). Churchill voiced objections to incorporating territories into Poland where eight million Germans lived, but Stalin insisted that most of the Germans in the area had already fled (Gormly 49-50). The agreement made at Potsdam actually led to the expulsion of about 14 million Germans, the loss of about a quarter of Germany's territory, and much of its best farmland.

Soon afterward the Allies began the brutal process of relocating German citizens from territories incorporated into Poland and Czechoslovakia. A civilian report assembled by the German government during the Cold War documented the Soviet-supervised expulsion of Germans from the Oder-Neisse territories so often invoked by Austin App. This study estimated German deaths at 20,000 and deportations to the Gulag (the KGB's prison system) at 218,000. Years later, the opening of the KGB's archives revealed even these numbers to be a gross underestimate, documenting 271,672 deportations and 66,481 deaths (Bacque 84). Most of the German soldiers who remained in the eastern provinces at the conclusion of the war were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union or Poland. Civilians were forced out of their homes, and many were captured and forced into slave labor in the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were actually brought to the old Nazi concentration camps, now under Polish control. This phenomenon repeated itself in several countries throughout Europe from which Germans were expelled. Few Germans survived deportation to the Nazi death camps and even fewer could later bring themselves to even speak of their experience, which has contributed to the almost complete cover-up of these atrocities in the Western press (Bacque106-107). The lack of documentation and unwillingness by the general public to believe these postwar atrocity stories bear an ironic resemblance to the arguments used by writers such as App in their attempt to prove that the Holocaust never happened.

Redemption finally came to Germany in the form of the Marshall Plan. While most studies of the postwar period from 1945-1950 have usually regarded the Marshall Plan as the centerpiece of American rebuilding efforts in Europe, it did not go into effect until April 1948. When it did, it signaled a dramatic shift in American policy that supported a popular sentiment that had been prevalent since 1945. Although Germany received less assistance from the Marshall Plan per capita than most other countries (and actually was not included in the Plan until a year after it began), the German economy began a dramatic turnaround that within a decade placed Germany right back near the top of the list of the wealthiest nations in Europe. Germany was also the only country to pay back any Marshall Plan money to the United States, and almost did so in full (Bacque 171-173). U.S. High Commander Clay oversaw this economic revival, helped in some ways by the fact that as a foreign occupier he did not have to be as attentive to the needs and the will of the people as a democratically elected government. General Clay also received a pleasant surprise when the occupying forces discovered that, after clearing away the rubble, the actual industrial capacity of Germany had not been seriously damaged. In the long term, the economic revival in the three western occupation zones precipitated the collusion of the three into a cohesive unit that would become West Germany (Mee Marshall Plan 257). The economic security of the new nation, all the more amazing for the absence of natural resources lost in the rural eastern zone that fell under Soviet control, gave Allied command the confidence they demanded that West Germany would not become desperately poor and fall prey to communism.

The most dangerous aspect of Holocaust denial lies in the fact that the deniers use a respected school of historical study, revisionism, as a jumping off point to a realm of literature that has no academic merit. Some aspects of Austin App's writings could actually qualify as legitimate revisionism. He denounced the postwar atrocities in Germany long before most historians even recognized the need for a closer investigation of this period in history. But App uses these horrible truths to try and mask the reality of another. Ironically, he used very much the same method of lying of which he accuses the Allies. While he claimed that the Allies invented the story of the Holocaust in order to divert attention from the horrible atrocities which they committed, App exposed the tragedy of atrocities committed against the Germans after the war as proof that the German people had been innocent victims all along and therefore not capable of such an horrendous atrocity as the Holocaust. The fatal flaw in App's methodology is that he reaches a totally illogical conclusion based on sometimes, though obviously not always, accurate information. This is not to speak of the numerous instances where he blatantly misrepresents his sources, nor the times when he has no sources to speak of. If moral equivalencies were even possible to make, one would first have to accept the plain reality of atrocities on both sides. App cannot compare German internment of the Jews with American internment of the Japanese, and then go on to place the blame for the mass murder of Germans by the Allies while setting aside the mass murder of Jews by the Germans. The historiography lesson to be learned from the writings of Austin App, if any, is the absolute importance of ethical representation of evidence whether or not it supports one's thesis.

Works Cited

App, Austin J. "A Straight Look at the Third Reich."
http://www.faem.com/app/app.htm.

App, Austin J. "That Elusive Six Million."
http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/tmotsm/A3.html#. 8 Mar. 2000.

App, Austin J. "The Six Million Swindle." Boniface Press: 15 Dec. 1973.

Bacque, James. Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950. London: Little, Brown and Co., 1997.

Friedman, Philip. Their Brothers' Keepers. New York: Crown, 1957.

Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.

Gormley, James L. From Potsdam to the Cold War: Big Three Diplomacy 1945-1947. Wilmington: SR Books, 1990.

Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Mee Jr., Charles L. The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Mee Jr., Charles L. Meeting at Potsdam. New York: M. Evans & Co., 1975.

Piper, Franciszek, et al. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.