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.
Early life 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 from 1938 to 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".Dawidowicz, Lucy "Lies About the Holocaust" pages 31-37 from Commentary, Volume 70, Issue # 6, page 32. 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.Baldwin, Peter “The Historikerstreit In Context” from Reworking The Past edited by Peter Baldwin, Boston : Beacon Press, 1990 page 35
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 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, San Francisco State College, the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carthage College. When teaching at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 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.Hoggan, David Review of Oesterreich Zwischen Russland und Serbien: Zur Suedslawischen Frage und der Entstehung des Ersten Weltkrieges by Hans Uebersberger page 87 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 32, Issue # 1, March 1960
In 1955, Barnes encouraged Hoggan to turn his dissertation into a book and it was published in West Germany as (The Forced War).Lipstadt, Deborah (1993). Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Free Press/Macmillan/Penguin. It blamed the outbreak of World War II on an alleged Anglo-Polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany. Hoggan charged that 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, 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.Spencer, Frank (July 1965). "Review of Der erzwungene Krieg". International Affairs 41(3). pp 506–507. 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; and that all of the German anti-Semitic laws were forced on the Germans by anti-Semitism in Poland as – he claimed – German anti-Semitic laws were the only thing that stopped the entire Jewish population of Poland from emigrating to the Reich. He justified the huge one billion Reichsmark fine () imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 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 (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 noted that as late as 1938 German-Jewish doctors and dentists could still participate in the German national insurance program, and argued that this proved that Nazi anti-Semitism was not that harsh. 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. Likewise, Hoggan cited a September 1938 cable from the American Embassy in Berlin to the State Department, which mentioned that 10% of all German lawyers were Jews, and argued that this proved the mildness of Nazi anti-Semitism. Lipstadt argued that Hoggan was guilty of disregarding the reason for the cable, which was that on September 27, 1938, German Jews were forbidden to practice law in Germany, and of selective quotation since the cable as a whole concerns the discriminatory laws against German Jewish lawyers.
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; the proceeds of this were turned over to the individual taxpayer'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 merely a secularization measure (Christian churches continued to receive the proceeds of the religion tax in Nazi Germany).
In the early 1960s, Hoggan's book attracted much attention, and was the subject of a cover story in 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 and Polophobe and an anti-Semite.
Critics alleged that Hoggan had wilfully misinterpreted and falsified historical evidence to fit his argument; further fanning the flames of criticism was the revelation that Hoggan had received his research funds from and was himself a member of several neo-Nazi groups in the United States and West Germany. Another source of controversy was Hoggan's choice of publisher, the firm of Grabert Verlag. This was run by Herbert Grabert, a former Nazi 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 what he regarded as the rightness of Germany's cause during the war. When was translated into English in 1989, it was published by the Institute for Historical Review.
In a critical review of Hoggan's book, the British historian Frank Spencer took issue with its claim that all of the incidents that occurred in Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) in 1939 were Polish provocations of Germany egged on by Britain. Spencer stated that all these incidents were cases of German provocations of Poland rather than vice versa, and that the Poles would have defended their rights in Danzig regardless of what British policy was. Likewise, Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a generous German move to offer autonomy to the Czechs, and thought that Hoggan's complaint that it was most unjust that German minorities in Eastern Europe did not enjoy the same "autonomy" that Hitler offered to the Czechs in March 1939 was simply laughable. Spencer also stated that Hitler's order on April 3, 1939, to begin planning for was not a sign of moderation on the part of Hitler, as Hoggan claimed, and noted Hoggan simply ignored Hitler's instructions to the German Foreign Office's to ensure that all German-Polish talks over the Danzig issue failed by making unreasonable demands on the Poles. In particular, Spencer argued against Hoggan's claim that the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was not designed to partition Poland, but was instead a thoughtful attempt on the part of Joachim von Ribbentrop to persuade Joseph Stalin to abandon the idea of world revolution.
The American historian Donald Detwiler wrote that for Hoggan, Hitler was a basically reasonable statesman who tried to undo an unjust Treaty of Versailles. Detwiler went on to write that Hoggan's book was "false" and "vicious" in its conclusion that Britain was the aggressor and Germany the victim in 1939.
Andreas Hillgruber, one of Germany's leading military-diplomatic historians, noted that there was a certain "kernel of truth" to Hoggan's thesis, in that Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that attacking Poland in 1939 would not result in a British declaration of war against the Reich, but went on to argue that the major point of Hoggan's argument, that Britain was seeking a war to destroy Germany, was simply a "preposterous" misreading of history.Hillgruber, Andreas (1981). Germany and the Two World Wars. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 74, 77.