World War II Revisionism: Hitler as a Man of Peace
This was posted on my site yesterday.
Noble Hitler forced to invade Poland. Now here is truly revisionist History.Except the question is, who is the Revisionist? Is it Dr North reporting and repeating what the Victors of the War have stated OR is it possible that Hitler really wanted Peace and his hand was FORCED to invade Poland after the machinations of both the US and Britain formed an alliance with Poland?
To force Hitler's hand, terrorists apparently began murdering German civilians in such large numbers that had Hitler NOT invaded Poland, every man, woman and child of German ancestry from Poland could have been wiped out.
(Sounds a lot like what the West tried to do to force Putin's hand to get him to invade Ukraine, but that is another more recent Revisionist History. Some things never change!)
At least that is what one author and blogger insists really happened regarding Hitler's invasion of Poland. He INSISTS that this is the REAL STORY that has been omitted and hidden through revisionist history written by the victors.
Interestingly, he is willing to put his money where his mouth is. He is offering a $100 CASH REWARD for the first reader who can prove just one mistatement of a material fact, or find one misquote in his presentation. He further says he will post an immediate retraction on his website IF he is proven wrong!
Any Takers?
Here is the website and the article: http://tomatobubble.com/id570.html
This is revisionist history. But there is nothing new about it.
I don't know who Mike King is. It is his website. I do know this. Anybody who calls a site on European history Tomatobubble.com needs help with his marketing.
Before I discuss Mr. King's thesis with respect to Hitler as a man of peace, I want to go over the basics of revisionist history regarding World War II.
SOFT-CORE WAR REVISIONISM
There are multiple forms of World War II revisionism. One form is the extension of World War I revisionism. That form argues that there was no need for the United States to enter the world war. There were some historians and skilled amateur historians who held this position. The most famous one in academia was the respected historian of American diplomacy, Charles C. Tansill. He taught at Georgetown University. His World War I revisionist book was America Goes to War, published in 1942, the year I was born. A conventional publisher published it: Little, Brown. His revisionist book on World War II had to do with Roosevelt's machinations prior to Pearl Harbor: Back Door to War, published by the then tiny conservative publisher, Regnery, in 1952. By then, he was persona non grata in academia.
Another historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, also was a revisionist historian of both wars. World War I: Genesis of the World War (1926). It was hailed as a great book. After World War II, he also became persona non grata, especially for his collection of anti-interventionist essays by revisionists, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, published by tiny Caxton Press in 1953. Some of his materials are available free here: https://mises.org/profile/harry-elmer-barnes.
The third major figure was the most distinguished of all historians in the liberal camp from 1913 until the 1930's, Columbia University's Charles A. Beard. He was the only man ever to be elected president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. When he wrote his anti-FDR book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, published by Yale University Press in 1948, that ended his reputation. He died that year. He was always thereafter regarded as a man who had betrayed Roosevelt and therefore liberalism. He was excoriated by the academic historical profession. The famous liberal historian, Richard Hofstadter, dismissed him 20 years after his death with this statement: "Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival."
Revisionism with respect to World War I was popular in liberal academic circles until the second half of the 1930's. Then, academic opinion shifted. The story of this shift was told by revisionist historian James J. Martin in a detailed, two-volume history, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 (Devin-Adair, 1964).
HARD-CORE WAR REVISIONISM
Then there is the other form of revisionist history of World War II, the suggestion that the German government did not kill six million Jews. The historian whose name is quietly associated with this theory is David L Hoggan. He wrote an anonymous book, The Myth of the Six Million. He did not put his name on it. It still is published in the holocaust denial movement. I know that he wrote it because he showed me the original manuscript. My office was next door to his in the summer of 1963. I read it. Years later, I read a printed version of it. It was the same book. It is online here.
Hoggan was the author of a history of the coming of the war in Europe in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The German language edition was published in 1961. In this book, he maintained that Hitler was only attempting to enforce what the Riverside treaty had guaranteed to Germany, namely, access to the North Sea through Poland. Germany was supposed to have access to the free city of Danzig. Poland would not allow this. Hoggan maintained that Hitler made a legitimate demand. The Polish government had no legal case.
The English language version of the book had a different title: The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed. It was published in 1989 by the Holocaust Institute for Historical Review, which is known as the most hard-core of the hard-core World War II revisionist organizations. it is available as a PDF download here.
Hoggan had written his doctoral dissertation on this topic when he was at Harvard University. He wrote it under William L. Langer, who soon became the dean of the establishment historians on the issue of the war in Europe and America's entry into it. He had actually been one of the policymakers at the State Department. It was a two-volume defense of what he and his colleagues had engineered to take the United States into the war.
Langer always maintained that Hoggan revised his Ph.D. thesis in order to make it look as though Hitler was not primarily to blame. He said that in his original dissertation, Hoggan placed blame on the English, the Poles, France, and Hitler. Hoggan denied that this was the case. We spoke about it in the summer of 1963. I took his word for it. That was a mistake.
In 1971, I went to Boston in order to do research on my Ph.D. dissertation on Puritan colonial history. I went to Harvard and read his dissertation. Harvard has a rule that the only way you can read a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation is with written permission of the author unless you go to Harvard and read the dissertation. I did not get permission. I sat in Harvard's library and read the dissertation. It was obvious that Langer was telling the truth. It was equally obvious that Hoggan either had lied to me about not making any change in the thesis of his dissertation, or else his nearly photographic memory had failed him on the most important issue of his career. We read this:
Nothing that the British did in 1939 can give them a primary responsibility for the war that broke out between Germany and Poland. British responsibility here enters only indirectly with the Versailles settlement, and in this instance the British were the least to blame of all the great powers for the Versailles solution of the German-Polish question (p. 398).
In Hoggan's 1961 book, the number-one promoter of Polish resistance was Lord Halifax. In chapter after chapter, Hoggan devoted pages to Lord Halifax. For virtually all other modern European historians, Halifax supported Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Halifax was Foreign Secretary from 1938 until the fall of the Chamberlain government in May 1940. If ever there was a piece of revisionist history, it is Hoggan's assessment of the role of Lord Halifax. It is completely opposed to what virtually all specialized diplomatic historians of late 1930's Europe have concluded.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. The two of them agreed to carve up Poland for their respective empires. A week later, Germany invaded Poland. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. There was no declaration of war on the part of the Soviet Union. If this was peaceful revision, I wonder what warlike revision is like.
Mr. King is taking seriously Prof. Hoggan's theory of Hitler as a man who sought peace in 1939 over the Polish question. I do not take this thesis seriously. For a long time, I was willing to give Hoggan the benefit of the doubt. I did want his book to be published in English. I corresponded with Harry Elmer Barnes on this issue in the late 1960's. Barnes also hoped to see it published in English. But my reading of Hoggan's Ph.D. dissertation in 1970, and then 19 years later, the publication of his book in English, persuaded me that he had switched his assessment of responsibility for the outbreak of the war away from Hitler in the direction of Lord Halifax. Halifax received no comparable degree of attention in the dissertation.
Elsewhere on this site, I have discussed my brief relationship with Hoggan in 1963. You can read it here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/17455.cfm