David Hoggan
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David Leslie Hoggan (March 23, 1923–August 7, 1988) was an American historian whose work was the subject of much controversy.
Hoggan was born in Portland, Oregon and received his education at Reed College and Harvard University. At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD for a dissertation on relations between Germany and Poland in the years 1938-1939 in 1948. 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 Lutheran College. When teaching at Munich between 1949 and 1952, Hoggan became fluent in German and married a German woman.
In 1955, Barnes encouraged Hoggan to turn his dissertation into a book, which was published in West Germany as Der Erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War), a book which blamed the outbreak of World War II due to 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. 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 Allied aggression. 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 then the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority. 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. 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 anti-Semitic laws and measures of the Nazis had any deleterious effects on German Jews.
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 was widely attacked as wrong-headed. 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 lie 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 Two, 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.
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 Hoggan's membership in a neo-Nazi group. 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. 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 increasing rancorous and vitriolic to such an extend that in October 1963 the editors of the American Historical Review announced that they cease publishing letters relating to Hoggan’s book in the interests of decorum.
In a 1964 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". 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 majority opinion of historians was that Hoggan’s work was a worthless book that merely sought to acquit Adolf Hitler of responsibility for World War II.
In following years, Hoggan maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial 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 Angles-based publisher specializing in anti-Semitic literature owed and operated by Willis Carto. 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 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review (I.H.R) and a featured speaker at the I.H.R.’s Sixth Conference in 1985. Hoggan died in Menlo Park, California. Hoggan's work has remained popular with anti-Semitic 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.
[edit] Work
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert, Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1990.
[edit] References
- Craig, Gordon The Germans, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Meridian, 1991 ISBN 0-452-01085-3.
- Dawidowicz, Lucy What Is The Use of Jewish history? : Essays, edited and with an introduction by Neal Kozodoy, New York : Schocken Books, 1992, ISBN 0-8052-4116-7.
- Lipstadt, Deborah Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York ; Oxford : Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993, ISBN 0-02-919235-8.
