Austin App

Austin Joseph App (1902-1984) was a German-American professor of medieval English literature who taught at the University of Scranton and LaSalle University. He is known for his work on the Holocaust, and he has been accused of Holocaust denial by mainstream historians.

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 probably 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).

App’s work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, the California center of Holocaust denial founded in 1978. The Institute’s chief spokesman in the UK is David Irving, an admirer of Adolf Hitler. (Irving 1977). Irving’s nemesis has been the American Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt, who has spearheaded the scholarly battle against Holocaust deniers. Irving lost his libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher. (Lipstadt 1993, 2005; Evans 2001).

References

App, Austin Joseph (1973) "The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses." Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press. New edition (1976) Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press.

App, Austin Joseph (1977) "German-American Voice for Truth and Justice: Autobiography". Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press.

Irving, David John Cawdell (1977) "Hitler’s War." New York: Viking Press.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1993) "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." New York: The Free Press.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2005) "History on Trial: My Day in Court with Holocaust Denier David Irving." New York: Ecco.

Evans, Richard J. (2001) "Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial." New York: Basic Books.