David Hoggan
Encyclopedia
David Leslie Hoggan was an American
historical writer, author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German
and English language
s.
, Oregon
, and received his education at Reed College
and Harvard University
. At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD
in 1948 for a dissertation on relations between Germany
and Poland
in the years 1938–1939. His adviser described his dissertation as "no more than a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate". The American historian Peter Baldwin
noted that Hoggan's dissertation, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe, was easily the most reasonable and sane of all Hoggan's writings. During his time at Harvard, Hoggan befriended Harry Elmer Barnes
, whose thinking would have much influence on Hoggan. Subsequently, Hoggan had a series of teaching positions at the University of Munich, San Francisco State College, the University of California
at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, and Carthage College
. When teaching at Munich between 1949 and 1952, Hoggan became fluent in German
and married a German woman. Reflecting his pro-German tendencies, in a 1960 review of a book by an Austrian writer Hans Uebersberger, Hoggan claimed that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was a result of a conspiracy involving the governments of Serbia
and Russia
, and that as such, Austria-Hungary
and its ally Germany
were the victims of a Russo-Serbian provocation designed to cause a world war.
as Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War). It blamed the outbreak of World War II
on an alleged Anglo
-Polish
conspiracy
to wage aggression
against Germany
. Hoggan charged the alleged conspiracy was headed by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax
, who, Hoggan contended, had seized control of British foreign policy in October 1938 from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
who was allegedly assisted by Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck
in what Hoggan called a monstrous anti-German plot. In Hoggan’s opinion, after the Munich Agreement
, an obsessively anti-German Lord Halifax decided to wage a war of annihilation against the German people. Hoggan argued that Hitler
's foreign policy was entirely peaceful and moderate, and that it was Nazi Germany
that was in Hoggan's opinion an innocent victim of Anglo-Polish aggression in 1939:
The crux of Hoggan's thesis was presented when he wrote:
Hoggan argued that Britain had been guilty of aggression and in the form of the "Hunger blockade", genocide against the German people in World War I. In World War II, Hoggan claimed that Britain was even guilty of aggression, and in the form of "area bombing" and the blockade, even more guilty of genocide against the German people. Moreover, Hoggan accused the Polish government of engaging in what he called hideous persecution of its German minority, and claimed that the Polish government's policies towards the ethnic German minority were far worse than the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority. Moreover, Hoggan charged that all of the German anti-Semitic laws were forced on the Germans by anti-Semitism in Poland as in Hoggan's opinion German anti-Semitic laws were the only thing that stopped the entire Jewish population of Poland from immigrating to the Reich. Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reich-mark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany
after the 1938 Kristallnacht
pogrom
as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht). A particular area of controversy centered around Hoggan’s claim that the situation of German Jewry before World War II
was extremely favorable to the Jewish community in Germany, and that none of the various antisemitic laws and measures of the Nazis had any deleterious effects on German Jews.
Hoggan argued that because German Jewish doctors and dentists as late as 1938 could still participate in the German national insurance program that proved that Nazi anti-Semitism was not that harsh. Critics of Hoggan such as Deborah Lipstadt
contend that Hoggan ignored the efforts on the part of the Nazi regime to stop "Aryan" Germans from seeing Jewish physicians and dentists throughout the 1930s, and that in July 1938 a law was passed withdrawing the licenses from Jewish doctors. Likewise, Hoggan argued that because in an American State Department cable of September 1938 from the American Embassy in Berlin mentioned that 10% of all German lawyers were Jews, that this proved the mildness of Nazi anti-Semitism. Lipstadt argued that Hoggan was guilty of selective quotation since the entire message concerns the discriminatory laws against German Jewish lawyers such as banning Jewish lawyers from serving as notaries. Moreover, Lipstadt noted that Hoggan ignored the reason for the message, namely that on September 27, 1938 German Jews were forbidden to practice law in Germany. Another area of criticism concerned Hoggan's treatment of the decision to end Judaism as an officially recognized religion in Germany. In Germany, the government had traditionally imposed a religion tax in which the proceeds were turned over to one's faith organization. In the Nazi era, Jews continued to pay the tax, but synagogues no longer received the proceeds. Hoggan claimed that this meant that synagogues could not "profit" at the expense of non-Jewish Germans, and falsely presented this move as mere secularization measure (Christian churches continued to receive the proceeds of the religion tax in Nazi Germany).
In the early 1960s, Hoggan's book attracted much attention, and was the subject of a cover story in Der Spiegel
magazine in its May 13, 1964 edition. Hoggan's thesis of Germany as victim of aggression was widely attacked as simply wrong-headed. In regards to his sympathies, it was argued that Hoggan was an ardent Germanophile
and a compulsive Anglophobe
, Polophobe, and an anti-Semite. Further increasing fanning the flames of the criticism was the revelation that Hoggan had received his research funds from and that he himself was a member of several neo-Nazi groups in the United States
and West Germany
, and the charge that Hoggan had wilfully misinterpreted and falsified historical evidence to fit his argument. Another source of controversy with Hoggan's choice of publisher, the firm of Grabert Verlag which was run by former Nazi named Herbert Grabert, who had led a neo-pagan cult before World War II, had served as an official in Alfred Rosenberg
's Ministry of the East during the war, and after the war made little secret of his beliefs about what he regarded as the rightness of Germany's cause during the war. When Der erzwungene Krieg was translated into English
in 1989, it was published by the Institute for Historical Review
.
In a critical review of Hoggan's book, the British historian Frank Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that all of the incidents that occurred in Danzig (modern Gdańsk
, Poland
) in 1939 were Polish provocations of Germany egged on by Britain. Spencer noted that all of the incidents were cases of German provocations of Poland rather than vice-versa, and that the Poles would have defended their rights in Danzig regardless of what British policy was. Likewise, Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia
was a generous German move to offer autonomy to the Czechs, and thought that Hoggan's complaint that it was most unjust that German minorities in Eastern Europe did not enjoy the same "autonomy" that Hitler offered to the Czechs in March 1939 to be simply laughable. Spencer noted that Hoggan's claim that Hitler's order on April 3, 1939 to begin planning for Fall Weiss was not a sign of moderation on the part of Hitler as Hoggan claimed, and noted Hoggan simply ignored the German Foreign Office's instructions to ensure that all German-Polish talks over Danzig issue failed by making unreasonable demands on the Poles. In particular, Spencer argued against Hoggan's claim that the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was not designed to partition Poland, but was instead a thoughtful attempt on the part of Joachim von Ribbentrop
to persuade Joseph Stalin
to abandon the idea of world revolution.
The American historian Donald Detwiler wrote that for Hoggan Hitler was a basically reasonable statesmen whose efforts to undo an unjust Versailles treaty were thwarted by a brutal Britain intent upon a war of extermination against the German people, and thereby completing the war of aggression against Germany that Britain had began in 1914. Detwiler went on to write that Hoggan's book was "false" and "vicious" in its conclusion that Britain was the aggressor and Germany the victim in 1939.
Andreas Hillgruber
, one of Germany's leading military-diplomatic historians noted that there was a certain "kernel of truth" to Hoggan's thesis in that Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that in attacking Poland in 1939 would not result in a British declaration of war against the Reich, but went to argue that the major point of Hoggan's argument that Britain was seeking a war to destroy Germany was simply a "preposterous" misreading of history.
One of Hoggan's leading detractors was the historian Hans Rothfels
, the director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte
(Institute for Contemporary History), who used the journal of the Institute, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte to attack Hoggan and his work, which Rothfels saw as sub-standard pseudo-history attempting to masquerade as serious scholarship. In a lengthy letter to the editor of the American Historical Review
in 1964, Rothfels exposed the Nazi background of Hoggan's patrons. Another leading critic was the U.S. historian Gerhard Weinberg
, who wrote a harsh book review in the October 1962 edition of the American Historical Review. Weinberg noted that Hoggan's method comprised taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and ignored evidence in favor of German intentions for aggression such as the Hossbach Memorandum
. Moreover, Weinberg noted that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology to support his thesis such placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig
(modern Gdańsk
, Poland) to the Reich in October 1938 in 1939, thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure. Finally, Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives. As an example, Weinberg noted during a meeting between Neville Chamberlain
and Adam von Trott zu Solz
in June 1939, Hoggan had Chamberlain saying that the British guarantee of Polish independence given in March 1939: "did not please him personally at all. He thereby gave the impression that Halifax was solely responsible for British policy". As Weinberg noted, what Chamberlain actually said in response to criticism from Trott zu Solz of the Polish guarantee was: "Do you [Trott zu Solz] believe that I undertook these commitments gladly? Hitler forced me into them!" In response, 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 a 1963 article, the German historian Helmut Krausnick, who was of the leading scholars associated with the Institute for Contemporary History accused Hoggan of manufacturing much of his "evidence". Krausnick commented: "rarely have so many inane and unwarrented theses, allegations, and 'conclusions' ... been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history". Hoggan's former professors at Harvard described his book as bearing no resemblance to the PhD dissertation that he had submitted in 1948. Another point of criticism was the decision of two German historical societies to award Hoggan the Leopold von Ranke
and Ulrich von Hutten
Prizes for outstanding scholarship; many such as the historian Gordon A. Craig
felt that by honouring Hoggan, these societies had destroyed the value of the awards. The Berliner Tagesspiegel newspaper criticized "these spectacular honors for a historical distortion". The German Trade Union Council and the Association of German Writers both passed resolutions condemning the awards while the Minister of the Interior in the Bundestag called the awards a "crude impertinence". In a letter, Rothfels commented that most of the people associated with the two historical societies had a "clear-cut Nazi past".
Support for Hoggan came from the historian Kurt Glaser, after examining The Forced War and its critics' arguments in Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Kriegsschuldfrage (The Second World War and the Question of War Guilt), found, that while some criticisms had merit, "It is hardly necessary to repeat here that Hoggan was not attacked because he had erred here and there—albeit some of his errors are material—but because he had committed heresy against the creed of historical Orthodoxy." The German historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte
has often defended Hoggan as one of the great historians of World War II. The Italian historian Rosaria Quartararo praised Der erzwungene Krieg as "perhaps still ... the best general account from the German side" of the period immediately before World War II. The American historian of Fascist Italy, MacGregor Knox expressed the view that historians like Quartararo were not helping her credibility as a scholar by praising Hoggan. Hoggan's mentor, Barnes, besides helping Hoggan turn his dissertation into the book Der erzwungene Krieg wrote a glowing blurb for the book's jacket.
In 1976, the book March 1939: the British Guarantee to Poland by the British historian Simon K. Newman was published. Newman's thesis was somewhat similar to Hoggan's in that he argued that Britain was willing to risk a war with Germany in 1939, though Newman's book differed sharply from Hoggan's in that besides being based upon British archives that were closed in the 1950s, it was Neville Chamberlain
rather than Lord Halifax who was seen as driving British foreign policy. Newman denied there was ever a policy of appeasement as popularly understood. Newman maintained that British foreign policy under Chamberlain aimed at denying Germany a "free hand" anywhere in Europe, and to the extent that concessions were offered they were due to military weaknesses, compounded by the economic problems of rearmament. Most controversially, Newman contended that the British guarantee to Poland in March 1939 was motivated by the desire to have Poland as a potential anti-German ally, thereby blocking the chance for a German-Polish settlement of the Danzig (modern Gdańsk
, Poland) question by encouraging what Newman claimed was Polish obstinacy over the Danzig issue, and thus causing World War II. Newman argued that German-Polish talks on the question of returning Danzig had been going well until Chamberlain's guarantee, and that it was Chamberlain's intention to sabotage the talks as a way of causing an Anglo-German war. In Newman's opinion, the guarantee of Poland was meant by Chamberlain as a "deliberate challenge" to Germany in 1939. In this way, Newman argued that World War II, far from being a case of German aggression was really just an Anglo-German struggle for power. Newman wrote that World War II was not "Hitler's unique responsibility..." and rather contended that "Instead of a German war of aggrandizement, the war become one of Anglo-German rivalry for power and influence, the culmination of the struggle for the right to determine the future configuration of Europe". Newman's conclusions were controversial in their own right, and historians such as Anna Cienciala and Anita Prazmowska have published refutations of his conclusions.
Based upon extensive interviews with the former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet
, Hoggan followed up Der erzwungene Krieg with Frankreichs Widerstand gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg (France's Resistance to the Second World War) in 1963. In that book, Hoggan argued that the Third Republic had no quarrel with the Third Reich and had been forced by British pressure to declare war on Germany in 1939.
was a "preventive war" forced on Germany in 1941. Hoggan blamed the German defeat in World War II to Hitler's reluctance to rearm on the proper scale due to his alleged love of peace, and argued that Germany was defeated only because of overwhelming material odds, but praised the "grit and courage" of the Germans in resisting the Allied onslaught against them. In Hoggan's opinion, too many American historians were "slow to grasp the central British role in bringing about either the Second World War and the Cold War". In a review of The Myth of the 'New History, the American historian Harvey Wish commented that the book appeared to be little but an isolationist, pro-German Anglophobic rant about the fact that the United States in alliance with Britain had fought Germany in the two world wars.
groups. In 1969 a short book was published called The Myth of the Six Million, denying the Holocaust. The book listed no author, but the work was by Hoggan, though published without his permission. This should not be confused with his earlier book of 1965 called The Myth of the 'New History, on America's wars. The Myth of the Six Million was published by the Noontide Press
, a small Los Angeles-based publisher specializing in antisemitic literature owned and operated by Willis Carto
. Hoggan sued Carto in 1969 for publishing the book (written in 1960) without his permission; the case was settled out of court in 1973.
The Myth of the Six Million was one of the first books, if not the first book, in the English language to deny the Holocaust. In The Myth of the Six Million, Hoggan argued that all of the evidence for the Holocaust was manufactured after the war as a way of trying to justify what Hoggan called a war of aggression against Germany. The Myth of the Six Million was published with a foreword by "E.L. Anderson", which was apparently a pseudonym for Carto. As part of The Myth of the Six Million, there was an appendix comprising five articles first published in The American Mercury
. The five articles were "Zionist Fraud" by Harry Elmer Barnes
, "The Elusive Six Million" by Austin App
, "Was Anne Frank's Diary a Hoax" by Teressa Hendry, "Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist" by "Herbert C. Roseman", "The Jews that Aren't" by "Leo Heiman", and a favorable review of Paul Rassinier
's work by Barnes.
Hoggan was accused in The Myth of the Six Million of re-arranging words from documents to support his contentions. One of Hoggan's critics, Lucy Dawidowicz
, used the example of the memoirs of an Austrian Social Democrat named Benedikt Kautsky imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp and later at the Auschwitz
death camp who wrote: "I should now briefly to refer to the gas chambers. Through I did not see them myself, they have been described to me by so many trustworthy people that I have no hesitation in reproducing their testimony". Dawidowicz accused Hoggan of re-arranging the sentence to make it sound like Kautsky declared they were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In the 1970s, Hoggan turned to writing about American history
in German. Hoggan's books about American history, his Der unnötige Krieg (The Unnecessary War) and the Das blinde Jahrhundert (The Blind Century) series, have been described as "a massive and bizarre critique of the course of American history from a racialist and wildly anti-Semitic perspective".
In the 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review
(IHR) and a featured speaker at the IHR's Sixth Conference in 1985. His work has remained popular with antisemitic groups, but is generally dismissed by historians as little more than an apologia for Nazi Germany
. In the opinion of historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz
and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Hoggan was a pioneer of the Holocaust denial
industry in the 1960s, and he has been accused of blazing a trail that many subsequent Holocaust deniers followed.
. He died there of a heart attack on 7 August 1988. Hoggan's last book, published posthumously in 1990, was Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert which detailed what he claimed were Germany's innocence in and incredible suffering in both world wars due to an anti-German
Anglo-American "crusader mentality" due to envy of German economic success.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historical writer, author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
s.
Early life
Hoggan was born in PortlandPortland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
, and received his education at Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in 1948 for a dissertation on relations between Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
in the years 1938–1939. His adviser described his dissertation as "no more than a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate". The American historian Peter Baldwin
Peter Baldwin (professor)
Peter Baldwin is a professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated at Yale and Harvard and has written several books on Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries: The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875-1975; Contagion and...
noted that Hoggan's dissertation, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe, was easily the most reasonable and sane of all Hoggan's writings. During his time at Harvard, Hoggan befriended Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes was a prominent American historian in the 20th century. A "progressive who had some classical liberal impulses," he was associated for virtually his entire career with Columbia University.-Early career:...
, whose thinking would have much influence on Hoggan. Subsequently, Hoggan had a series of teaching positions at the University of Munich, San Francisco State College, the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, and Carthage College
Carthage College
Carthage College is a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Situated in Kenosha, Wisconsin midway between Chicago, Illinois and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the campus is on the shore of Lake Michigan and is home to 2,500 full-time and 900 part-time...
. When teaching at Munich between 1949 and 1952, Hoggan became fluent in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and married a German woman. Reflecting his pro-German tendencies, in a 1960 review of a book by an Austrian writer Hans Uebersberger, Hoggan claimed that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
Franz Ferdinand was an Archduke of Austria-Este, Austro-Hungarian and Royal Prince of Hungary and of Bohemia, and from 1889 until his death, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. His assassination in Sarajevo precipitated Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against Serbia...
was a result of a conspiracy involving the governments of Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
and Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, and that as such, Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
and its ally Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
were the victims of a Russo-Serbian provocation designed to cause a world war.
Der erzwungene Krieg
In 1955, Barnes encouraged Hoggan to turn his dissertation into a book and it was published in West GermanyWest Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
as Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War). It blamed the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
on an alleged Anglo
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
-Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
conspiracy
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
to wage aggression
Aggression
In psychology, as well as other social and behavioral sciences, aggression refers to behavior between members of the same species that is intended to cause humiliation, pain, or harm. Ferguson and Beaver defined aggressive behavior as "Behavior which is intended to increase the social dominance of...
against Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. Hoggan charged the alleged conspiracy was headed by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, , known as The Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934 and as The Viscount Halifax from 1934 until 1944, was one of the most senior British Conservative politicians of the 1930s, during which he held several senior ministerial posts, most notably as...
, who, Hoggan contended, had seized control of British foreign policy in October 1938 from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
who was allegedly assisted by Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck
Józef Beck
' was a Polish statesman, diplomat, military officer, and close associate of Józef Piłsudski...
in what Hoggan called a monstrous anti-German plot. In Hoggan’s opinion, after the Munich Agreement
Munich Agreement
The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...
, an obsessively anti-German Lord Halifax decided to wage a war of annihilation against the German people. Hoggan argued that Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's foreign policy was entirely peaceful and moderate, and that it was Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
that was in Hoggan's opinion an innocent victim of Anglo-Polish aggression in 1939:
[Hitler] had made more moderate demands on Poland than many leading American and British publicists had recommended in the years after Versailles. Moreover, Hitler had offered in return an amazing concession to Poland that the Weimar Republic would never even remotely countenance.
The crux of Hoggan's thesis was presented when he wrote:
In London, Halifax succeeded in forcing on the British Government a deliberate policy of war despite the fact that most of the prominent British experts on Germany argued for a policy of German-English friendship. In Warsaw, Beck was prepared to collaborate fully with Halifax's war plans despite the warnings from numerous Poles who were horrified by the prospect of seeing their land destroyed.
German, Italian, French, and other European leaders did all they could to avert the great catastrophe, but in vain, while Halifax's war policy, accompanied by the secret blessings of Roosevelt and Stalin, carried the day...
The Second World War arose from the attempt to destroy Germany.
Hoggan argued that Britain had been guilty of aggression and in the form of the "Hunger blockade", genocide against the German people in World War I. In World War II, Hoggan claimed that Britain was even guilty of aggression, and in the form of "area bombing" and the blockade, even more guilty of genocide against the German people. Moreover, Hoggan accused the Polish government of engaging in what he called hideous persecution of its German minority, and claimed that the Polish government's policies towards the ethnic German minority were far worse than the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority. Moreover, Hoggan charged that all of the German anti-Semitic laws were forced on the Germans by anti-Semitism in Poland as in Hoggan's opinion German anti-Semitic laws were the only thing that stopped the entire Jewish population of Poland from immigrating to the Reich. Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reich-mark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
after the 1938 Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht). A particular area of controversy centered around Hoggan’s claim that the situation of German Jewry before World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
was extremely favorable to the Jewish community in Germany, and that none of the various antisemitic laws and measures of the Nazis had any deleterious effects on German Jews.
Hoggan argued that because German Jewish doctors and dentists as late as 1938 could still participate in the German national insurance program that proved that Nazi anti-Semitism was not that harsh. Critics of Hoggan such as Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Esther Lipstadt, Ph.D. is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust and The Eichmann Trial. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University...
contend that Hoggan ignored the efforts on the part of the Nazi regime to stop "Aryan" Germans from seeing Jewish physicians and dentists throughout the 1930s, and that in July 1938 a law was passed withdrawing the licenses from Jewish doctors. Likewise, Hoggan argued that because in an American State Department cable of September 1938 from the American Embassy in Berlin mentioned that 10% of all German lawyers were Jews, that this proved the mildness of Nazi anti-Semitism. Lipstadt argued that Hoggan was guilty of selective quotation since the entire message concerns the discriminatory laws against German Jewish lawyers such as banning Jewish lawyers from serving as notaries. Moreover, Lipstadt noted that Hoggan ignored the reason for the message, namely that on September 27, 1938 German Jews were forbidden to practice law in Germany. Another area of criticism concerned Hoggan's treatment of the decision to end Judaism as an officially recognized religion in Germany. In Germany, the government had traditionally imposed a religion tax in which the proceeds were turned over to one's faith organization. In the Nazi era, Jews continued to pay the tax, but synagogues no longer received the proceeds. Hoggan claimed that this meant that synagogues could not "profit" at the expense of non-Jewish Germans, and falsely presented this move as mere secularization measure (Christian churches continued to receive the proceeds of the religion tax in Nazi Germany).
In the early 1960s, Hoggan's book attracted much attention, and was the subject of a cover story in Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
magazine in its May 13, 1964 edition. Hoggan's thesis of Germany as victim of aggression was widely attacked as simply wrong-headed. In regards to his sympathies, it was argued that Hoggan was an ardent Germanophile
Germanophile
A Germanophile is a person who is fond of German culture, German people, and Germany in general, exhibiting as it were German nationalism in spite of not being an ethnic German or a German citizen. Its opposite is Germanophobia...
and a compulsive Anglophobe
Anglophobia
Anglophobia means hatred or fear of England or the English people. The term is sometimes used more loosely for general Anti-British sentiment...
, Polophobe, and an anti-Semite. Further increasing fanning the flames of the criticism was the revelation that Hoggan had received his research funds from and that he himself was a member of several neo-Nazi groups in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
, and the charge that Hoggan had wilfully misinterpreted and falsified historical evidence to fit his argument. Another source of controversy with Hoggan's choice of publisher, the firm of Grabert Verlag which was run by former Nazi named Herbert Grabert, who had led a neo-pagan cult before World War II, had served as an official in Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
's Ministry of the East during the war, and after the war made little secret of his beliefs about what he regarded as the rightness of Germany's cause during the war. When Der erzwungene Krieg was translated into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
in 1989, it was published by the Institute for Historical Review
Institute for Historical Review
The Institute for Historical Review , founded in 1978, is an American organization that describes itself as a "public-interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history." Critics have accused it of being an antisemitic "pseudo-scholarly...
.
In a critical review of Hoggan's book, the British historian Frank Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that all of the incidents that occurred in Danzig (modern Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
) in 1939 were Polish provocations of Germany egged on by Britain. Spencer noted that all of the incidents were cases of German provocations of Poland rather than vice-versa, and that the Poles would have defended their rights in Danzig regardless of what British policy was. Likewise, Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was the majority ethnic-Czech protectorate which Nazi Germany established in the central parts of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia in what is today the Czech Republic...
was a generous German move to offer autonomy to the Czechs, and thought that Hoggan's complaint that it was most unjust that German minorities in Eastern Europe did not enjoy the same "autonomy" that Hitler offered to the Czechs in March 1939 to be simply laughable. Spencer noted that Hoggan's claim that Hitler's order on April 3, 1939 to begin planning for Fall Weiss was not a sign of moderation on the part of Hitler as Hoggan claimed, and noted Hoggan simply ignored the German Foreign Office's instructions to ensure that all German-Polish talks over Danzig issue failed by making unreasonable demands on the Poles. In particular, Spencer argued against Hoggan's claim that the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was not designed to partition Poland, but was instead a thoughtful attempt on the part of Joachim von Ribbentrop
Joachim von Ribbentrop
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.-Early life:...
to persuade Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
to abandon the idea of world revolution.
The American historian Donald Detwiler wrote that for Hoggan Hitler was a basically reasonable statesmen whose efforts to undo an unjust Versailles treaty were thwarted by a brutal Britain intent upon a war of extermination against the German people, and thereby completing the war of aggression against Germany that Britain had began in 1914. Detwiler went on to write that Hoggan's book was "false" and "vicious" in its conclusion that Britain was the aggressor and Germany the victim in 1939.
Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian. Hillgruber was influential as a military and diplomatic historian.At his death in 1989, the American historian Francis L...
, one of Germany's leading military-diplomatic historians noted that there was a certain "kernel of truth" to Hoggan's thesis in that Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that in attacking Poland in 1939 would not result in a British declaration of war against the Reich, but went to argue that the major point of Hoggan's argument that Britain was seeking a war to destroy Germany was simply a "preposterous" misreading of history.
One of Hoggan's leading detractors was the historian Hans Rothfels
Hans Rothfels
Hans Rothfels was a nationalist conservative German historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours...
, the director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte
Institut für Zeitgeschichte
The Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich was conceived in 1947 under the name Deutsches Institut für Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit...
(Institute for Contemporary History), who used the journal of the Institute, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte to attack Hoggan and his work, which Rothfels saw as sub-standard pseudo-history attempting to masquerade as serious scholarship. In a lengthy letter to the editor of the American Historical Review
American Historical Review
The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association, established in 1895 "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." It targets readers...
in 1964, Rothfels exposed the Nazi background of Hoggan's patrons. Another leading critic was the U.S. historian Gerhard Weinberg
Gerhard Weinberg
Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of World War II. Weinberg currently is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the...
, who wrote a harsh book review in the October 1962 edition of the American Historical Review. Weinberg noted that Hoggan's method comprised taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and ignored evidence in favor of German intentions for aggression such as the Hossbach Memorandum
Hossbach Memorandum
The Hossbach Memorandum was the summary of a meeting on November 5, 1937 between German dictator Adolf Hitler and his military and foreign policy leadership where Hitler's future expansionist policies were outlined. The meeting marked a turning point in Hitler's foreign policies, which then began...
. Moreover, Weinberg noted that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology to support his thesis such placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig
Free City of Danzig
The Free City of Danzig was a semi-autonomous city-state that existed between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig and surrounding areas....
(modern Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
, Poland) to the Reich in October 1938 in 1939, thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure. Finally, Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives. As an example, Weinberg noted during a meeting between Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
and Adam von Trott zu Solz
Adam von Trott zu Solz
Adam von Trott zu Solz was a German lawyer and diplomat who was involved in the conservative opposition to the Nazi regime, and who played a central part in the 20 July Plot...
in June 1939, Hoggan had Chamberlain saying that the British guarantee of Polish independence given in March 1939: "did not please him personally at all. He thereby gave the impression that Halifax was solely responsible for British policy". As Weinberg noted, what Chamberlain actually said in response to criticism from Trott zu Solz of the Polish guarantee was: "Do you [Trott zu Solz] believe that I undertook these commitments gladly? Hitler forced me into them!" In response, 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 a 1963 article, the German historian Helmut Krausnick, who was of the leading scholars associated with the Institute for Contemporary History accused Hoggan of manufacturing much of his "evidence". Krausnick commented: "rarely have so many inane and unwarrented theses, allegations, and 'conclusions' ... been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history". Hoggan's former professors at Harvard described his book as bearing no resemblance to the PhD dissertation that he had submitted in 1948. Another point of criticism was the decision of two German historical societies to award Hoggan the Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources , an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .-...
and Ulrich von Hutten
Ulrich von Hutten
Ulrich von Hutten was a German scholar, poet and reformer. He was an outspoken critic of the Roman Catholic Church and a bridge between the humanists and the Lutheran Reformation...
Prizes for outstanding scholarship; many such as the historian Gordon A. Craig
Gordon A. Craig
Gordon Alexander Craig was a Scottish-American historian of German history and of diplomatic history.-Early life:...
felt that by honouring Hoggan, these societies had destroyed the value of the awards. The Berliner Tagesspiegel newspaper criticized "these spectacular honors for a historical distortion". The German Trade Union Council and the Association of German Writers both passed resolutions condemning the awards while the Minister of the Interior in the Bundestag called the awards a "crude impertinence". In a letter, Rothfels commented that most of the people associated with the two historical societies had a "clear-cut Nazi past".
Support for Hoggan came from the historian Kurt Glaser, after examining The Forced War and its critics' arguments in Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Kriegsschuldfrage (The Second World War and the Question of War Guilt), found, that while some criticisms had merit, "It is hardly necessary to repeat here that Hoggan was not attacked because he had erred here and there—albeit some of his errors are material—but because he had committed heresy against the creed of historical Orthodoxy." The German historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte is a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 to 1991. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg...
has often defended Hoggan as one of the great historians of World War II. The Italian historian Rosaria Quartararo praised Der erzwungene Krieg as "perhaps still ... the best general account from the German side" of the period immediately before World War II. The American historian of Fascist Italy, MacGregor Knox expressed the view that historians like Quartararo were not helping her credibility as a scholar by praising Hoggan. Hoggan's mentor, Barnes, besides helping Hoggan turn his dissertation into the book Der erzwungene Krieg wrote a glowing blurb for the book's jacket.
In 1976, the book March 1939: the British Guarantee to Poland by the British historian Simon K. Newman was published. Newman's thesis was somewhat similar to Hoggan's in that he argued that Britain was willing to risk a war with Germany in 1939, though Newman's book differed sharply from Hoggan's in that besides being based upon British archives that were closed in the 1950s, it was Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
rather than Lord Halifax who was seen as driving British foreign policy. Newman denied there was ever a policy of appeasement as popularly understood. Newman maintained that British foreign policy under Chamberlain aimed at denying Germany a "free hand" anywhere in Europe, and to the extent that concessions were offered they were due to military weaknesses, compounded by the economic problems of rearmament. Most controversially, Newman contended that the British guarantee to Poland in March 1939 was motivated by the desire to have Poland as a potential anti-German ally, thereby blocking the chance for a German-Polish settlement of the Danzig (modern Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
, Poland) question by encouraging what Newman claimed was Polish obstinacy over the Danzig issue, and thus causing World War II. Newman argued that German-Polish talks on the question of returning Danzig had been going well until Chamberlain's guarantee, and that it was Chamberlain's intention to sabotage the talks as a way of causing an Anglo-German war. In Newman's opinion, the guarantee of Poland was meant by Chamberlain as a "deliberate challenge" to Germany in 1939. In this way, Newman argued that World War II, far from being a case of German aggression was really just an Anglo-German struggle for power. Newman wrote that World War II was not "Hitler's unique responsibility..." and rather contended that "Instead of a German war of aggrandizement, the war become one of Anglo-German rivalry for power and influence, the culmination of the struggle for the right to determine the future configuration of Europe". Newman's conclusions were controversial in their own right, and historians such as Anna Cienciala and Anita Prazmowska have published refutations of his conclusions.
Based upon extensive interviews with the former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet
Georges Bonnet
Not to be confused with the French Socialist Georges MonnetGeorges-Étienne Bonnet was a French politician and leading figure in the Radical-Socialist Party.- Early career :...
, Hoggan followed up Der erzwungene Krieg with Frankreichs Widerstand gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg (France's Resistance to the Second World War) in 1963. In that book, Hoggan argued that the Third Republic had no quarrel with the Third Reich and had been forced by British pressure to declare war on Germany in 1939.
The Myth of the 'New History
In his 1965 book, The Myth of the 'New History': The Techniques and Tactics of the New Mythologists of American History, Hoggan attacked all of the so-called "mythologist" historians who justified dragging America into unnecessary wars with Germany twice in the 20th century. According to Hoggan, the "mythologists" were Anglophiles, Liberals, internationalists, and "anti-Christians" (by which Hoggan apparently meant Jews). Repeating his argument from Der erzwungene Krieg, Hoggan argued that Hitler was a man of peace who was "the victim of English Tory conspiracy in September 1939... Halifax conducted a single-minded campaign to plunge Germany into war and in such a way as to make Germany appear the guilty party". Hoggan again argued that, incited by Britain, Poland was planning to attack Germany in 1939, and went on to argue that Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
was a "preventive war" forced on Germany in 1941. Hoggan blamed the German defeat in World War II to Hitler's reluctance to rearm on the proper scale due to his alleged love of peace, and argued that Germany was defeated only because of overwhelming material odds, but praised the "grit and courage" of the Germans in resisting the Allied onslaught against them. In Hoggan's opinion, too many American historians were "slow to grasp the central British role in bringing about either the Second World War and the Cold War". In a review of The Myth of the 'New History, the American historian Harvey Wish commented that the book appeared to be little but an isolationist, pro-German Anglophobic rant about the fact that the United States in alliance with Britain had fought Germany in the two world wars.
Holocaust denial
In following years, Hoggan maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi and Holocaust denialHolocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
groups. In 1969 a short book was published called The Myth of the Six Million, denying the Holocaust. The book listed no author, but the work was by Hoggan, though published without his permission. This should not be confused with his earlier book of 1965 called The Myth of the 'New History, on America's wars. The Myth of the Six Million was published by the Noontide Press
Noontide Press
Noontide Press is an American publishing entity which describes itself as a publisher of "hard-to-find books and recordings from a dissident, 'politically incorrect' perspective." It publishes numerous antisemitic titles, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The International Jew...
, a small Los Angeles-based publisher specializing in antisemitic literature owned and operated by Willis Carto
Willis Carto
Willis Allison Carto is a longtime figure on the American far right. He describes himself as Jeffersonian and populist, but is primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.-Influences on Carto:...
. Hoggan sued Carto in 1969 for publishing the book (written in 1960) without his permission; the case was settled out of court in 1973.
The Myth of the Six Million was one of the first books, if not the first book, in the English language to deny the Holocaust. In The Myth of the Six Million, Hoggan argued that all of the evidence for the Holocaust was manufactured after the war as a way of trying to justify what Hoggan called a war of aggression against Germany. The Myth of the Six Million was published with a foreword by "E.L. Anderson", which was apparently a pseudonym for Carto. As part of The Myth of the Six Million, there was an appendix comprising five articles first published in The American Mercury
The American Mercury
The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s...
. The five articles were "Zionist Fraud" by Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes
Harry Elmer Barnes was a prominent American historian in the 20th century. A "progressive who had some classical liberal impulses," he was associated for virtually his entire career with Columbia University.-Early career:...
, "The Elusive Six Million" by Austin App
Austin App
Austin Joseph App was a controversial German-American professor of medieval English literature who taught at the University of Scranton and La Salle University. App defended Germans and Nazi Germany vehemently...
, "Was Anne Frank's Diary a Hoax" by Teressa Hendry, "Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist" by "Herbert C. Roseman", "The Jews that Aren't" by "Leo Heiman", and a favorable review of Paul Rassinier
Paul Rassinier
Paul Rassinier was a French pacifist, political activist, and author. He was also an anti-Nazi French Resistance fighter, and a prisoner of the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. A journalist and editor, he wrote hundreds of articles on political and economic subjects...
's work by Barnes.
Hoggan was accused in The Myth of the Six Million of re-arranging words from documents to support his contentions. One of Hoggan's critics, Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
, used the example of the memoirs of an Austrian Social Democrat named Benedikt Kautsky imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp and later at the Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
death camp who wrote: "I should now briefly to refer to the gas chambers. Through I did not see them myself, they have been described to me by so many trustworthy people that I have no hesitation in reproducing their testimony". Dawidowicz accused Hoggan of re-arranging the sentence to make it sound like Kautsky declared they were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In the 1970s, Hoggan turned to writing about American history
History of the United States
The history of the United States traditionally starts with the Declaration of Independence in the year 1776, although its territory was inhabited by Native Americans since prehistoric times and then by European colonists who followed the voyages of Christopher Columbus starting in 1492. The...
in German. Hoggan's books about American history, his Der unnötige Krieg (The Unnecessary War) and the Das blinde Jahrhundert (The Blind Century) series, have been described as "a massive and bizarre critique of the course of American history from a racialist and wildly anti-Semitic perspective".
In the 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review
Institute for Historical Review
The Institute for Historical Review , founded in 1978, is an American organization that describes itself as a "public-interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history." Critics have accused it of being an antisemitic "pseudo-scholarly...
(IHR) and a featured speaker at the IHR's Sixth Conference in 1985. His work has remained popular with antisemitic groups, but is generally dismissed by historians as little more than an apologia for Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. In the opinion of historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Hoggan was a pioneer of the Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
industry in the 1960s, and he has been accused of blazing a trail that many subsequent Holocaust deniers followed.
Final years
During his final years David Hoggan lived with his wife in Menlo Park, CaliforniaMenlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
. He died there of a heart attack on 7 August 1988. Hoggan's last book, published posthumously in 1990, was Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert which detailed what he claimed were Germany's innocence in and incredible suffering in both world wars due to an anti-German
Anti-German sentiment
Anti-German sentiment is defined as an opposition to or fear of Germany, its inhabitants, and the German language. Its opposite is Germanophilia.-Russia:...
Anglo-American "crusader mentality" due to envy of German economic success.
Work
- Review of Oesterreich Zwischen Russland und Serbien: Zur Suedslawischen Frage und der Entstehung des Ersten Weltkrieges by Hans Uebersberger page page 87 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 32, Issue # 1, March 1960.
- Der erzwungene Krieg, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1961, translated into English as The Forced War : When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, California : Institute for Historical Review, 1989, ISBN 0939484285.
- Frankreichs Widerstand gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg Tübingen: Verlag der Deutschen Hochschullehrer-Zeitung, 1963.
- The Myth of the Six Million Los Angeles, California : The Noontide Press, 1969, ISBN 0906879892.
- Der unnötige Krieg, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag 1976.
- Das blinde Jahrhundert- Amerika—das messianische Unheil, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1979.
- Das blinde Jahrhundert- Europa—Die verlorene Weltmitte, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1984.
- The Myth of New History Techniques and Tactics of Mythologists, Costa Mesa, California : Institute for Historical Review, 1985, ISBN 0317385119.
- Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1990.
External links
- The Forced War - When Peaceful Revision Failed
- The Forced War from Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
- A Brief Review of Hoggan's Life
- A Brief History of Holocaust Denial
- The Origins of the Second World War Reflections on Three Approaches to the Problem