Harry Elmer Barnes

Harry Elmer Barnes (born June 15, 1889 in Auburn , † August 25, 1968 in Malibu ) was an American historian and sociologist. Barnes represented historical revisionist views on the origins of the First and Second World Wars . In his view, Adolf Hitler was peace-loving and did not start World War II with the attack on Poland . Towards the end of his life, Barnes advocated the Holocaust-denying theses .

Life and work until December 1941

Barnes received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 1918 . He then worked for two years as a full professor at Clark University . From there he moved in 1923 as a full professor to Smith College , a respected women's college, and taught there until 1929 historical sociology and history, which he considered his major. Barnes was a very versatile historian. By the mid-1930s he was a recognized scientist and prolific historian. He wrote 30 books, over 100 essays, and over 600 book reviews and magazine articles. On the one hand, Barnes was one of the liberal reformers: He was against the alcohol ban in the USA , against censorship and the death penalty , campaigned for a reform of the penal system, was for sexual liberation , for contraception and more equality for women and people of color. On the other hand, Barnes was very committed to advocating opinions that differed from the mainstream of liberal US historians.

From 1924 Barnes denied the German responsibility for the origin of the First World War. Germany was peace-loving. On the other hand, Great Britain and France had advocated a risky policy with Russia that led to war. Germany and Austria were the victims of the July crisis . The Allies deliberately drove Germany to war. In addition, after its end they would have blamed Germany for the war and, with the Treaty of Versailles, forced a dictated peace which was very disadvantageous for Germany . The USA's entry into the war was a mistake. The US should stay out of foreign conflicts. These theses were published by Barnes et al. a. in the journals Nation and Current History . They found an attentive hearing in Germany, for example at the Central Office for Research into the Causes of War , which was subordinate to the Foreign Office and headed by the former colonial officer Major Alfred von Wegerer and disguised as a citizens' initiative , which was supposed to counteract the German guilt for the World War enshrined in the Versailles Treaty. The staff secretly procured archival material and literature for Barnes, printed his articles and arranged for translations.

Barnes published his theses in 1926 in his book Genesis of the World War and Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt . As a result, he was invited to Germany by Heinrich Schnee for the summer of 1926 and 1927, where he gave lectures at the most important universities. Schnee was president of another front organization of the Foreign Office, the “Working Committee of German Associations” (ADV), a more propagandistic parallel organization to the “Central Office”, which tried to deny any involvement of Germany in the emergence of the First World War. Barnes was received almost like a state guest: many meals and receptions were held for Barnes. In Berlin he was invited to lunch at the Eden Hotel by a group of prominent scientists and journalists, according to his own account . A representative of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg , who was unable to attend, also took part . In Bavaria, the ADV organized a meal in his honor, at which Prime Minister Heinrich Held gave the welcoming address. The reception in Austria was just as positive. Barnes used the time to advance his research. He interviewed people from the management level of the imperial era in Germany and Austria to get to know their views on the development of the world war. He also gave lectures about his work, which were very well received in Germany. A highlight of his trip was a two-day stay in Doorn Castle in the Netherlands with the former German Emperor . As Barnes reported, Wilhelm II was glad that he did not blame him for the outbreak of the world war. However, he did not hold France and Russia responsible for the outbreak of war, like Barnes, but rather “Freemasonry” and “International Judaism” . Barnes' book was translated into German with the help of ADV and published in 1928. Barnes' theses that the USA should pursue an isolationist policy and stay out of international conflicts, that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, were shared by a group of American historians, including Sidney Bradshaw Fay , Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, William L. Langer . This attitude was viewed as academic history revisionism, but it was considered serious. Barnes is considered to be a co-founder of this attitude, which questions the responsibilities of individual countries for the origin of the world war.

On the other hand, Barnes had more difficulties with colleagues he worked with, because he was always very convinced of his own ideas. A friend wrote after his death: "Harry had a big mistake, he was always true to his convictions and stuck to his views even when the tide had turned". Barnes often publicly accused colleagues who disagreed with dishonest motives. They are opportunistic and often give up the pursuit of “truth and justice” in order to secure their financial status and acquire wealth. Phrases such as "treason and defamation" were common vocabulary for Barnes.

At college, Barnes' work with young women was valued, but also viewed critically. In the late 1920s, a group of concerned parents formed who wanted to take action against Barnes because some parents viewed him as indoctrinal. Before there was an argument, Barnes left college in 1929 and became a freelance publicist. From now on he also worked as a journalist. Barnes found a job with the Scripps Howard Corporation newspapers . There he wrote a daily column in the World Telegram newspaper .

Since his research on World War I, Barnes believed that the United States should stay out of international conflict. This isolationism was widespread and also formed a guideline for official American foreign policy in the 1930s. The expansive foreign policy of National Socialist Germany made many Americans pay attention to developments in Europe. The USA remained officially strictly neutral until the end of 1941 , although there was sympathy for the European democracies, one after the other being occupied by the Germans. Many Americans saw developments in Europe as a threat. Not so Barnes, who, even after the defeat of the Allies in France in June 1940, polemicized against a cautious relaxation of the neutrality policy. The US began cautiously to support Great Britain , which could do nothing against Germany without their help. However, official neutrality was maintained.

At the same time, Barnes remained stubbornly neutral in his thinking. This led to his dismissal from the editorial staff of the World Telegram in May 1940 . When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 , many Americans felt even more threatened.

The United States had not become a member of the League of Nations . Since 1931, Japan had repeatedly made its claim to determine political affairs in the Western Pacific. In 1931 it occupied Manchuria , in 1937 it invaded China and occupied Nanjing . In 1940 Japan had conquered large areas in China and occupied French Indochina . The US reacted very cautiously, despite supporting China's fight against the Japanese. In 1941, negotiating with Japan, they tried to curb its urge to rule East Asia. Japan took part in the talks but had actually been preparing the attack on Pearl Harbor since the spring of 1941 . Japan intended to eliminate the US Pacific fleet stationed there in order to have a free hand in East Asia.

At the time of increasing threats to the West and the USA from National Socialist Germany and Japan, a strong isolationist movement developed in the USA. Barnes was also at its head. He was Vice Chairman of the Keep America Out of War Congress and at times spokesman for the America First Comitee . Many Americans were organized in this committee, including many writers and politicians. At the beginning of December 1941 the movement had its maximum number of members. On December 7th, without a declaration of war and without warning, Japan attacked the US Pacific fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor and sank it almost completely. The next day, the US declared that it was at war with Japan. The neutrality to Germany was not affected. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Henceforth the USA led the Second World War against Germany, Italy and Japan together with England, the Soviet Union and many other states. The America First movement disbanded, its political assessment had proven wrong. Most of their protagonists henceforth avoided mentioning their former involvement in this movement.

After the USA entered the Second World War

Barnes served in the penal system during the war. He worked as a consultant and historian on the project to use prisoners for the time of the war as workers for arms production. Ideologically, he essentially stuck to his isolationist attitude. He had a very different view of World War II than almost any of his colleagues. He claimed that Hitler did not want war, and that before the German attack on September 1, 1939, his intentions against Poland were purely peaceful. Hitler only wanted Danzig and secure access to East Prussia . The English and French, however, had encouraged Poland to take a bellicose attitude towards Germany and thus provoked the war. One of the main culprits for the escalation is Franklin D. Roosevelt , who secretly supported England and France and thus contributed to their aggressive behavior. Barnes accused the president of having known in advance of the impending attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and of having knowingly accepted it. He first promoted this conspiracy theory in his 1947 publication The struggle against historical blackout. (See also the conspiracy theories on the attack on Pearl Harbor ) With this, he manipulated the American voters and their politicians to actively intervene in the war against Germany, Italy and Japan instead of staying out of it. This type of revisionism found no approval among fellow historians and the American public. Barnes almost became a " pariah " among historians. The only academic posts he received after 1930 were visiting professorships in sociology. Intentional speeches at some institutions have been boycotted. He had to have some books printed privately or they were only accepted by non-academic publishers with a different thematic focus.

With regard to the Holocaust , Barnes was initially reluctant. He initially assumed that the number of victims and the extent of them had been overestimated by historical studies . He later developed into one under the influence of the Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier . After 1945 he encouraged David L. Hoggan to publish his work, in which Germany's guilt for the outbreak of World War II was denied. In his own work, Barnes supported Hoggan's theses. The lexicon of coming to terms with the past counts Barnes and Hoggan among US-based history falsifiers and Holocaust deniers. 1967 Barnes also denied the systematic murder of Jews in extermination camps such as Auschwitz , Treblinka and other Polish and Eastern European locations. Because the Allies had found no evidence of the systematic extermination of the Jews when the concentration camps to the west such as Dachau , Belsen , Buchenwald , Sachsenhausen and Dora were liberated , Barnes claimed in an essay in 1967 that there had been no systematic extermination of Jews, not even in the extermination camps to the east, which were not sufficiently well known. He claimed the list of concentration camps would be enlarged at will. He was not aware that “by definition hardly anyone had returned from these extermination camps” who could have given testimony to the murder of the Jews. From "the Wannsee Conference Barnes had obviously never heard of". During this time Barnes approached right-wing extremism in Europe . He was the first American historian to deny that there was a Holocaust.

On August 25, 1968, Barnes died at the age of 79 in Malibu, California .

reception

Barnes' historical revisionist theses on both world wars are justified by extremism researchers such as Armin Pfahl-Traughber, among other things, with the fact that he played down the German responsibility for the First World War and the German main culprit for the Second World War, and instead, mainly because of the political attitude of an American isolationist saw the US government as the real culprit. With the support of the history revisionist Hoggan, Barnes also distanced himself from the standards of his subject. Historian Jürgen Zarusky has regarded Barnes as one of the "key figures of Holocaust deniers" since at least 1998.

Fonts (selection)

• A history of the penal, reformatory, and correctional institutions of the state of New Jersey —analytical and documentary . Ph. D. Columbia. University 1918. Printed Trentin, New Yersey 1918.
• Was Guilt and the literature of disillusionment. Verlag Hans Robert Engelmann, Berlin 1925. (Article). The only German translation in Der deutsche Gedanke. Magazine issue 30, 1925. (Editor-in-chief Paul Rohrbach )
• Genesis of the World War and Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt. AA Knopf, New York, London 1926. Revised edition Knopf 1929. German translation published as:

The Origin of World War - An Introduction to the War Guilt Problem . Foreword by Max von Montgelas , Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1928. (Montgelas was an employee of the Central Office for Research into the Causes of War , which had secretly promoted Barne's work.)

• In Quest of Truth and Justice. Debunking the War Guilty Myth (1928)
• World Politics in Modern Civilization. The Contribution of Nationalism, Capitalism and Militarism to Human Culture and International Anarchy (1930)
• The story of punishment - a record of man's inhumanity to man . Stratford company, Boston 1930.
• War guilt and Germany's future. Working Committee of German Associations, Berlin 1930.
• A Refutation of the Versailles War Guilt Thesis . Transl. from the German by Edwin H. Zeydel. Introduction by Harry Elmer Barnes. Original German work by Wegerers: The refutation of the Versailles war guilt thesis . Hobbing, Berlin 1928.
• The history of western civilization. With Henry David. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New-York 1935.
• The greatest fraud in all history. Contribution to Berlin monthly issue. 1933.
• A history of political theories . Macmillan, New York 1935.
• The Struggle Against Historical Blackout. (1947)
• What Roosevelt Pushed Into War by Popular Demand in 1941? (1952)
• Perpetual war for perpetual peace. A critical examination of the foreign policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its aftermath. Edited with the collaboration of WH Chamberlin, PL Greaves Jr, GA Lundberg. The Caxton press, Caldwell (Idaho) 1953. German translation as:

Hypocrisy exposed. (Eternal war for everlasting peace). Revision of American historiography. Foreword and collaboration by Herbert Grabert , Verlag KH Priester 1961. (Critical examination of American foreign policy since Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

• The rebirth of historical research into truth. Publishing house of the university teacher newspaper , Tübingen 1961.
• Blasting the Historical Blackout. Professor AJP Taylor's "The Origin of The Second World War". Its Nature, Reliability, Shortcomings and Implications (1962)
• Revisionism and Brainwashing (1963). German translation as:

The German War Guilt Question. A justification by David L. Hoggan . Publisher Die deutsche Hochschullehrerzeitung, Tübingen 1964.

• Pearl Harbor after a Quarter of Century. In Arthur Goddard ed .: Harry Elmer Barnes - Learned Crusader. Ralph Miles, Colorado Springs 1968.
• Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays. Cato Institute, San Francisco 1980, (Cato Paper Ser., No. 12) ISBN 0-932790-18-6 .

literature

• David Aaronovitch : Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. Jonathan Cape, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-224-07470-4 . Several editions also as a paperback, e.g. B. Vintage books, London 2010, ISBN 9780099478966 .
• Ben Austin: A Brief History of Holocaust Denial . Jewish Virtual Library.
• Justus Drew Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, available upon payment through JSTOR.
• Justus Drew Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of a 'Usable' Past. The History Teacher, vol. 8, no. 2, 1975, pp. 265-276. Can be viewed via JSTOR after payment. [www.jstor.org/stable/491528].
• Goddard, Arthur (ed.): Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action. Ralph Myles Publisher, Colorado Springs 1968.
• Holger Herwig: Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War. In: International Security 12, No. 2, (1987), pp. 5-44.
• Eugene C. Murdock: On the Entry of the United States into World War II. In Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1956, No. 1, (Counts Barnes among the revisionist authors who advocate the conspiracy theory; Roosevelt and his close advisers knew beforehand about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and deliberately kept it quiet because they put the USA in the Second World War would have wanted to drift.)

Web links

• Literature by and about Harry Elmer Barnes in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Justus D. Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, p. 311.
2. ^ Justus D. Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, p. 312.
3. ^ Herwig Holger: Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War. In: International Security 12, No. 2, (1987), p. 26.
4. ^ Marguerite Fisher: An all overall overview. In Arthur Goddard (ed.): Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action. Ralph Myles Publisher, Colorado Springs 1968. pp. 25 ff.
5. ^ Ulrich Heinemann: The suppressed defeat. Political Public and War Guilt Question in the Weimar Republic. Vanndenbhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1983 p. 114.
6. ↑ Jürgen Zarusky: Denial of the Holocaust. The anti-Semitic strategy after Auschwitz. In the Federal Examination Office for Writings Harmful to Young People Current - Official Bulletin. Annual conference, Marburg, 9./10. November 1999, p. 7.
7. ^ Marguerite Fisher: An all overall overview. In Goddard, Arthur (ed.): Harry Elmer Barnes… Colorado Springs 1968. pp. 25 ff.
8. ↑ Deborah Lipstadt : Denial of the Holocaust. Right-wing extremism with method. With an introduction by Micha Brumlik , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 349960101X . P. 128ff.
9. ^ Herwig Holger: Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War. In: International Security 12, No. 2, (1987), p. 26.
10. ^ Herwig Holger: Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War. In: International Security 12, No. 2, (1987), p. 26.
11. ^ Murray Rothbard: Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP. In: Left & Right 1968, reproduced on the homepage of the American Ludwig von Mises Institute , December 21, 2007.
12. ^ Justus D. Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, p. 322.
13. ^ Justus D. Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, p. 313.
14. ^ Marguerite Fisher: An all overall overview. In Arthur Goddard (ed.): Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action. Ralph Myles Publisher, Colorado Springs 1968. pp. 22 f.
15. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber : The Apologists of the "Auschwitz Lie" - Meaning and Development of Holocaust Denial in Right-Wing Extremism . In: Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie 8 (1996), pp. 75–101, here p. 82.
16. ^ Justus D. Doenecke: Harry Elmer Barnes. In: Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1973, p. 312.
17. ↑ Stephen E. Atkins: Holocaust Denial as an International Movement . ABC-CLIO, 2009, ISBN 978-0-313-34538-8 , p. 146.
18. ^ Peter Knight: Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, 2003, ISBN 978-1-57607-812-9 , p. 322.
19. ↑ Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz : Lexicon of "coping with the past" in Germany. Debate and discourse history of National Socialism after 1945 , transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2nd, unchanged. Edition 2009, ISBN 978-3-89942-773-8 , p. 88.
20. ^ Everything according to David Aaronovitch : Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. Jonathan Cape, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-224-07470-4 . S. 104. Online excerpts from David Aaronovitch: Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History. viewed November 3, 2018.
21. ↑ Ben Austin: A Brief History of Holocaust Denial . "Jewish Virtual Library.
22. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber: The Apologists of the “Auschwitz Lue” - Significance and Development of Holocaust Denial in Right-Wing Extremism , in: Yearbook Extremism & Democracy 8 (1996), pp. 75-101, here pp. 81 f.
23. ↑ Jürgen Zarusky: Denial of the Holocaust. The anti-Semitic strategy after Auschwitz. In the Federal Examination Office for Writings Harmful to Young People Current - Official Bulletin. Special edition annual conference, Marburg, 9./10. November 1999, p. 7.
24. ↑ [1]