Archive/File: holocaust/usa/ihr app.001 Last-Modified: 1994/07/04 "...Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton and LaSalle College, also played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United States. Though not as prominent as Barnes, he was far more virulent and began explicitly denying the Holocaust within a few years after the war. By the late 1950s he was not only writing to the Catholic _Brooklyn Tablet_ offering 'proof' that the figure of six million was a 'bloated libel,' but was appearing before varied audiences accusing Jews of perpetuating a massive hoax.<1> ...App was mainly concerned to lift the moral burden of the atrocities charge from the shoulders of a defeated and divided Germany. In contrast to Barnes, App had no indenpendent standing in the academic world. An active member of various German American groups, App was an ardent defender of Germans and Nazi Germany. He served for several years as president of the five-thousand-member Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, founded in 1945. Though it never reached its membership goal of three million, it was part of a successful postwar confressional lobbying effort to allocate a substantial number of the immigration slots that had been intended for Holocaust survivors to Germans and Austrians.<2> [...] ...App ... inundated newspapers, magazines, politicians, and journalists with letters attacking U.S. intervention in World War II, Allied demands for unconditional surrender, and the imposittion of 'Morgenthauism' on Germany. The latter was App's way of placing responsibility for all of Germany's postwar problems on President Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Of course, Morgenthau's plan was never put into effect. In fact, Allied treatment of Germany was the exact opposite of the plan. The letters were also App's self-described attempt to explode the 'lies and calumnies' that had been spread about Germany since the war and to prevent Roosevelt and Morgenthau from selling out 'Christian Europe to the Red barbarians.' The letters bristled with overt antisemitism and racism. Talmudists, Bolshevicks, and Zionists, all of whom were intimately connected in App's mind with one another, were blamed for the evils that beset the world after the end of the war.<4> Though few of his letters were actually published by the newspapers or magazines that received them, App kept up a steady stream of communiques." (Lipstadt, 85-86) Lipstadt's end-notes: <1> Arnold Forster, "The Ultimate Cruelty," ADL Bulletin (June 1959), pp. 7-8 <2> "New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold," September 7, 1948; Leonard Dinnerstein, "America and the Survivors of the Holocaust," (New York, 1982), p.222 <3> Thomas R. O'Donnell to Deborah E. Lipstadt, April 18, 1991; Thomas R. O'Donnell, telephone interview with author, Oct. 1992 <4> Austin App, "Foreward," _Morgenthau Era Letters_, 2nd printing (Tacoma Park, Md., 1975). Work cited Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.
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