Harry Elmer Barnes (June 15, 1889 – August 25, 1968) was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial.
After receiving a PhD at Columbia University in 1918 Barnes became a professor of history at Clark University before moving to Smith College as a professor of historical sociology in 1923. In 1929 he left teaching to work as a journalist, freelance writer and occasional adjunct professor at smaller schools. In 1919–20 and between 1923 and 1937 he lectured regularly at the New School for Social Research.Goddard, Arthur (1968). Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action. Colorado Springs: R. Myles. p. 16f. Through his prodigious scholarly output, Barnes was once highly regarded as a historian. By the 1950s, however, he had lost credibility and became a "professional pariah".
Barnes published more than 30 books, 100 essays, and 600 articles and book reviews, many for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, where he served as Bibliographical Editor.
Early career
Barnes took a PhD at Columbia in 1918 in history with a study in the history of penology. He was among the graduate students of William Archibald Dunning, who was influential in the history of the Reconstruction era in the United States. In 1917 Barnes published the first edition of An Introduction to the History of Sociology, a collaborative work intended to be a comprehensive summary of sociological development. Barnes lectured widely between 1918 and 1941 on current events and recent history.
During World War I, Barnes had been a strong supporter of the war effort; his anti-German propaganda was rejected by the National Board for Historical Service, which described it as "too violent to be acceptable".Lipstadt, p. 67. After the war, Barnes' views towards Germany reversed: he became as much of a Germanophile as he previously had been Germanophobic.Mombauer, p. 86. Barnes took the view that the United States had fought on the wrong side in World War I.
In the 1920s, Barnes was noted as a vehement advocate that Germany had borne no responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and had instead been the victim of Allied aggression. In 1922, Barnes was arguing that the responsibility for World War I was split evenly between the Allies and the Central Powers. By 1924, Barnes was writing that Austria-Hungary was the power most responsible for the war, but that Russia and France were more responsible than Germany. By 1926, Barnes argued that Russia and France bore the entire responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and the Central Powers none. In Barnes' view, "vested political and historical interests" were behind the "official" account that Germany started World War I.Dawidowicz, p. 32.
Barnes' research on the origins of World War I was generously funded in the 1920s by the German Foreign Ministry, which intended to prove that Germany had not started World War I, as a way of trying to undermine the Treaty of Versailles.Herwig, p. 26. In Barnes' articles on the causes of World War I in The Nation, Current History, The Christian Century, and above all in his 1926 book The Genesis of the World War, he portrayed France and Russia as the aggressors of the July Crisis of 1914, and Germany and Austria-Hungary as the victims of a Franco-Russian plot. In 1922 he wrote an article for the first issue of Foreign Affairs, the foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, having earlier contributed book reviews to The Journal for International Relations, which became Foreign Affairs in 1922. After 1924, Barnes had a close relationship with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a pseudo-historical think-tank based in Berlin secretly funded by the German government and founded by Major Alfred von Wegerer, the former völkisch activist. The centre's sole purpose was to prove Germany was the victim of aggression in 1914, and that the Versailles treaty was morally invalid.Herwig, pp. 22–23, 26. The Centre provided Barnes with research material, made funds available to him, translated his writings into other languages, and funded his trip to Germany in 1926. During Barnes' 1926 trip to Germany, the writer was welcomed for his efforts to, as Barnes described it, "clear Germany of the dishonour and fraud of the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles".Lipstadt, p. 68.
During his European trip, Barnes met with the former German Emperor, Wilhelm II, at his estate in the Netherlands. According to Barnes, the ex-ruler said that he "was happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914." However, Barnes added, "He disagreed with my view that Russia and France were chiefly responsible. He held that the villains of 1914 were the international Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion".
In addition, during this 1926 trip Barnes met all of the surviving German and Austrian leaders of 1914. Based on their statements, he was confirmed in his belief that Germany was not responsible for World War I.Mombauer, pp. 86–87. To assist Barnes with his writings against the so-called Kriegschuldlüge ("war guilt lie"), the Germans put Barnes into contact with Milos Boghitschewitsch, a former Serbian diplomat living in Berlin. He was considered disreputable as, in exchange for German gold, he provided false testimony about the actions of the Serbian government in 1914.Herwig, pp. 23, 26.
In 1926, Barnes published The Genesis of the World War, the first American book written about 1914 that was based upon the available primary sources. He argued that World War I was the result of a Franco-Russian plot to destroy Germany. Wegerer wrote about The Genesis of the World War that it would be "scarcely possible to provide a better book than this one".Mombauer, p. 87.
Barnes was opposed to the idea of World War I as "just war", which he believed to have been caused by the economic imperialism of France and Russia. In 1925, Barnes wrote: "If we can but understand how totally and terribly we were 'taken in' between 1914 and 1918 by the salesmen of this most holy and idealistic world conflict, we shall be the better prepared to be on our guard against the seductive lies and deceptions which will be put forward by similar groups when urging the necessity of another world catastrophe in order to 'crush militarism', 'make the world safe for democracy', put an end to all further wars, etc."
In his preface to The Genesis of the World War, Barnes called World War I an "unjust war against Germany". Barnes wrote in his preface that "the truth about the causes of the World War is one of the livest and most important practical issues of the present day. It is basic to the whole matter of the present European and world situation, resting as it does upon an unfair and unjust Peace Treaty, which was itself erected upon a most uncritical and complete acceptance of the grossest forms of war-time illusions concerning war guilt."
Barnes said when writing The Genesis of the World War, he was compelled by "an ardent desire to execute an adequate exposure of the authors of the late World War in particular". According to Barnes, the responsibility for World War I was as follows: "In estimating the order of guilt of the various countries we may safely say that the only direct and immediate responsibility for the World War falls upon Serbia, France and Russia, with the guilt about equally distributed. Next in order—far below France and Russia—would come Austria, though she never desired a general European war. Finally, we place Germany and England as tied for last place, both being opposed to war in the 1914 crisis. Probably the German public was somewhat more favorable to military activity than the English people, but ... the Kaiser made much more strenuous efforts to preserve the peace of Europe in 1914 than did Sir Edward Grey."Mombauer, p. 88.
The German government so liked Barnes's writings on the causes of World War I that it provided free copies of his articles to hand out at German embassies around the world. Though most German historians in the 1920s regarded Barnes merely as a propagandist whose work was mainly meant to appeal to a mass as opposed to an academic audience, the right-wing German historian Hans Herzfeld called Barnes's work "a document in the struggle against the war guilt thesis whose noble spirit cannot be appreciated enough".Herwig, p. 27. The German-Canadian historian Holger Herwig has commented that Barnes's work on the origins of World War I, together with others of a similar bent, did immense scholarly damage, as generations of university students accepted Barnes' "apologias" for Germany as the truth. In 1969, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor called The Genesis of the World War "the most preposterously pro-German" account of the outbreak of war in 1914.Taylor, A. J. P. (1969). War by Time-Table: How the First World War Began. London: MacDonald & Co. p. 126. .
In 1926, the American historian Bernadotte Schmitt wrote about The Genesis of the World War that: "It must be said that Mr. Barnes' book falls short of being the objective and scientific analysis of the great problems which is so urgently needed. As a protest against the old notion of unique German responsibility for the war, it will be welcomed by all honest men, but as an attempt to set up a new doctrine of unique Franco-Russian responsibility, it must be unhesitatingly rejected. The war was a consequence, perhaps inevitable, of the whole system of alliances and armaments, and in the origin, development, and working of that system, the Central Powers, more particularly Germany, played a conspicuous part. Indeed, it was Germany that put the system to the test in July 1914. Because the test failed, she is not entitled to claim that no responsibility attaches to her."Mombauer, p. 103.
In 1980, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote that the work of so-called World War I revisionists like Barnes has been discredited since 1961 when the German historian Fritz Fischer published his book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grasping at World Power).Dawidowicz, pp. 31–32.
Barnes's very public attacks on the idea of World War I as a just war, and his thesis that the United States should not have fought in the war, won him the admiration and friendship in the 1920s of many people in the United States such as Oswald Garrison Villard, the Socialist leader Norman Thomas, the critic H. L. Mencken, and the historian Charles A. Beard. Long regarded as a leader of the progressive intelligentsia, Barnes joined many of its intellectual leaders such as Beard in opposing from the left the New Deal and, at the price of their reputations, American entry into World War II. Later, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not want to go to war with the United States and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor.Barnes, Harry Elmer "Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century" (1966 Left Right Press) He also contested many aspects of the Holocaust, claiming death figures were far lowerAtkins, pp. 146–147. and arguing that all sides were guilty of equally awful atrocities.
World War II In the late 1930s, Barnes emerged as a leading isolationist and German apologist who defended German foreign policy as a legitimate effort to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles, which Barnes regarded as monstrously unfair to Germany. In 1937, Barnes identified as a "noninterventionist". After the outbreak of World War II, Barnes continued to expound his pre-war views of European diplomacy.