Austin Joseph App (1902 - 1984) 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 during World War II. He is known for his work denying the Holocaust, and he has been called the first major American holocaust denier.
In the 1950s, App often wrote articles for Conde McGinley's anti-semitic journal Common Sense.
In 1973 App laid out eight "axioms", or what he described as "incontrovertible assertions" about the Holocaust in his 1973 pamphlet The Six Million Swindle:
- Emigration, not extermination, was the German Nazi plan for dealing with Germany's "Jewish problem".
- No Jews were gassed in any German concentration camps and not at Auschwitz either.
- Jews who disappeared during the years of World War II and have not been accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German, control.
- The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people whom the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies, and criminals.
- If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened its archives to historians.
- All evidence to support the "hoax" of six million dead rests upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.
- It is incumbent upon the accusers to prove the six million figure.
- Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims. (App 1973, 1977).
In February 1976, App published an article "The Sudeten-German Tragedy" in Reason magazine, where App criticised the post World War II expulsion of the Sudeten Germans as "one of the worst mass atrocities in history."
App also published A Straight Look at the Third Reich , a defense of Nazi Germany, and The Curse of Anti-Anti-Semitism, supporting the argument that the entire Jewish community is responsible for the death of Christ. App's work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the holocaust. App "inundated" magazines, newspapers and politicians with Anti-Semitic letters complaining about Frankin D Roosevelt entering World War II without which Hitler could have won the war. App equated Communists and Jews, blaming them both for Germany's post war problems. Few of the letters were ever published.
He worked to get Germans and Austrians the chance to emigrate to the United States instead of holocaust survivors.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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