David L. Hoggan

Hoggan was born in Portland, Oregon, and received his education at Reed College and Harvard University. At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD in 1948 for a dissertation on relations between Germany and Poland in the years 1938–1939, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe. His adviser described it as "no more than a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate". The American historian and chair of the board of the Center for Jewish History, Peter Baldwin noted that it was easily the most reasonable and sane of all Hoggan's writings. 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 College. When teaching at Munich between 1949 and 1952, Hoggan became fluent in German and married a German woman. Reflecting his pro-German tendencies, Hoggan claimed in a 1960 review of a book by an Austrian writer, Hans Uebersberger, that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a result of a conspiracy involving the governments of Serbia and Russia, and that as such, Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany were the victims of a Russo-Serbian provocation designed to cause a world war. == ==

In 1955, Barnes encouraged Hoggan to turn his dissertation into a book and it was published in West Germany as (The Forced War). It blamed the outbreak of World War II on an alleged Anglo-Polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany. Hoggan argued that Hitler's foreign policy was entirely peaceful and moderate, and that it was Nazi Germany that was an innocent victim of Anglo-Polish aggression in 1939: The crux of Hoggan's thesis appears in his words as follows: Accordingly, Hoggan claimed that Britain was guilty of aggression against the German people. He also 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 than the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority; One of Hoggan's leading detractors was the historian Hans Rothfels, the director of the Institute for Contemporary History, who used the journal of the institute, the 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 the Nazi background of Hoggan's patrons. 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. Weinberg stated that Hoggan's method involved taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and ignored evidence in favor of German intentions for aggression, such as the Hossbach Memorandum. Weinberg also stated that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology to support his thesis, such as placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) to the Reich in 1939 (it was in October 1938), thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure. The newspaper criticized "these spectacular honors for a historical distortion". Support for Hoggan came from the historian Kurt Glaser, after examining The Forced War and its critics' arguments in (The Second World War and the Question of War Guilt), found that while some criticisms had merit, "It is hardly necessary to repeat here that Hoggan was not attacked because he had erred here and there—albeit some of his errors are material—but because he had committed heresy against the creed of historical Orthodoxy." The German historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte has often defended Hoggan as one of the great historians of World War II. The Italian historian Rosaria Quartararo praised as "perhaps still ... the best general account from the German side" of the period immediately before World War II. Hoggan's mentor, Barnes, besides helping Hoggan turn his dissertation into the book wrote a glowing blurb for the book's jacket. Newman maintained that British foreign policy under Chamberlain aimed at denying Germany a "free hand" in Europe, and to the extent that concessions were offered, they were due to military weaknesses, compounded by the economic problems of rearmament. Based upon extensive interviews with the former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, Hoggan followed up with (''France's Resistance to the Second World War'') in 1963. In that book, Hoggan argued that the Third Republic had no quarrel with the Third Reich and had been forced by British pressure to declare war on Germany in 1939. ==''The Myth of the 'New History'''==

In his 1965 book, ''The Myth of the 'New History': The Techniques and Tactics of the New Mythologists of American History'', Hoggan attacked all of the so-called "mythologist" historians who justified dragging America into unnecessary wars with Germany twice in the 20th century. According to Hoggan, the "mythologists" were Anglophiles, Liberals, internationalists, and "anti-Christians" (by which Hoggan apparently meant Jews). Repeating his argument from , Hoggan argued that Hitler was a man of peace who was "the victim of English Tory conspiracy in September 1939 ... Halifax conducted a single-minded campaign to plunge Germany into war and in such a way as to make Germany appear the guilty party". Hoggan again argued that, incited by Britain, Poland was planning to attack Germany in 1939, and went on to argue that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Germany in 1941. Hoggan blamed the German defeat in World War II on Hitler's reluctance to rearm on the proper scale due to his alleged love of peace, argued that Germany was defeated only because of overwhelming material odds, and praised the "grit and courage" of the Germans in resisting the Allied onslaught against them. In Hoggan's opinion, too many American historians were "slow to grasp the central British role in bringing about either the Second World War and the Cold War". In a review of ''The Myth of the 'New History'', the American historian Harvey Wish commented that the book appeared to be little but an isolationist, pro-German Anglophobic rant about the fact that the United States in alliance with Britain had fought Germany in the two world wars. ==Holocaust denial==

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 had a foreword, by "E. L. Anderson", but listed no author; it was by Hoggan (written in 1960) but published without his permission Its author (Hoggan) was accused of re-arranging words from documents to support his contentions. In the 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and a featured speaker at its Sixth Conference in 1985. His work has remained popular with antisemitic groups. ==Final years==

During his final years David Hoggan lived with his wife in Menlo Park, California. He died there of a heart attack on 7 August 1988. Hoggan's last book, published posthumously in 1990, was (My comments on Germany: The Anglo-American crusade idea in the 20th century) which detailed what he claimed were Germany's innocence in and incredible suffering in both world wars due to an anti-German Anglo-American "crusader mentality" reflecting "envy" of German economic success. ==Work==

Books • Der erzwungene Krieg. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1961). • Translated into English as The Forced War : When Peaceful Revision Failed. Costa Mesa, Calif.: 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, Calif.: 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, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review (1985). . • Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1990). Articles • "President Roosevelt and the Origins of the 1939 War." Journal of Historical Review, vol. 4, no. 2, Special Issue: Roosevelt and War in Europe, 1938-1940 (Summer 1983), pp. 205–255. Reviews • Review of Oesterreich Zwischen Russland und Serbien: Zur Suedslawischen Frage und der Entstehung des Ersten Weltkrieges by Hans Uebersberger. Journal of Modern History, vol. 32, no. 1 (Mar. 1960), p. 87. ==References==