David L. Hoggan

David Leslie Hoggan (March 23, 1923 – August 7, 1988) was an American author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German and English languages.

He was antisemitic, maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi groups, chose a publishing house run by an unregenerate Nazi, and engaged in Holocaust denial.

Hoggan was born in Portland, Oregon, and received his education at Reed College and Harvard University.

Critics of Hoggan such as Deborah Lipstadt contend that Hoggan ignored the efforts on the part of the Nazi regime to stop "Aryan" Germans from seeing Jewish physicians and dentists throughout the 1930s, and that in July 1938 a law was passed withdrawing the licenses from Jewish doctors.

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.

In Hoggan’s opinion, after the Munich Agreement, an obsessively anti-German Lord Halifax decided to wage a war of annihilation against the German people.

Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reichsmark 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 (in fact, 91 German Jews died).

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 antisemitic laws and measures of the Nazis had any deleterious effects on German Jews.

Hoggan argued that because German-Jewish doctors and dentists as late as 1938 could still participate in the German national insurance program that proved that Nazi anti-Semitism was not that harsh.

Likewise, Hoggan argued that because in an American State Department cable of September 1938 from the American Embassy in Berlin mentioned that 10% of all German lawyers were Jews, that this proved the mildness of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Lipstadt argued that Hoggan was guilty of selective quotation since the entire message concerns the discriminatory laws against German Jewish lawyers such as banning Jewish lawyers from serving as notaries.

Moreover, Lipstadt noted that Hoggan ignored the reason for the message, namely that on September 27, 1938, German Jews were forbidden to practice law in Germany.

Another area of criticism concerned Hoggan's treatment of the decision to end Judaism as an officially recognized religion in Germany.

In Germany, the government had traditionally imposed a religion tax in which the proceeds were turned over to one's faith organization.

In the Nazi era, Jews continued to pay the tax, but synagogues no longer received the proceeds.

Hoggan claimed that this meant that synagogues could not "profit" at the expense of non-Jewish Germans, and falsely presented this move as mere secularization measure (Christian churches continued to receive the proceeds of the religion tax in Nazi Germany).

The American historian and chair of the board of the Center for Jewish History, Peter Baldwin noted that Hoggan's dissertation, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe, 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.

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 Anglo-Polish aggression in 1939:

"[Hitler] had made more moderate demands on Poland than many leading American and British publicists had recommended in the years after Versailles. Moreover, Hitler had offered in return an amazing concession to Poland that the Weimar Republic would never even remotely countenance."

The crux of Hoggan's thesis was presented when he wrote:

"In London, Halifax succeeded in forcing on the British Government a deliberate policy of war despite the fact that most of the prominent British experts on Germany argued for a policy of German-English friendship. In Warsaw, Beck was prepared to collaborate fully with Halifax's war plans despite the warnings from numerous Poles who were horrified by the prospect of seeing their land destroyed.

German, Italian, French, and other European leaders did all they could to avert the great catastrophe, but in vain, while Halifax's war policy, accompanied by the secret blessings of Roosevelt and Stalin, carried the day ...

The Second World War arose from the attempt to destroy Germany."

Hoggan claimed that Britain was guilty of aggression against the German people.

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 than the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority.

Moreover, Hoggan charged that all of the German anti-Semitic laws were forced on the Germans by anti-Semitism in Poland as in Hoggan's opinion German anti-Semitic laws were the only thing that stopped the entire Jewish population of Poland from emigrating to the Reich.

At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD in 1948 for a dissertation on relations between Germany and Poland in the years 1938–1939.

His adviser described his dissertation as "no more than a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate".

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 and it was published in West Germany as Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War).

It blamed the outbreak of World War II on an alleged Anglo-Polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany.

Reflecting his pro-German tendencies, in a 1960 review of a book by an Austrian writer Hans Uebersberger, Hoggan claimed 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 the early 1960s, Hoggan's book attracted much attention, and was the subject of a cover story in Der Spiegel magazine in its edition of May 13, 1964.

Hoggan's thesis of Germany as victim of aggression was widely attacked as simply wrong-headed.

In regards to his sympathies, it was argued that Hoggan was an ardent Germanophile and a compulsive Anglophobe, Polophobe, and an anti-Semite.

Further 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 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 II, 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.