Harry Elmer Barnes

Harry Elmer Barnes (June 15, 1889 – August 25, 1968) was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial.

After receiving a PhD at Columbia University in 1918 Barnes became a professor of history at Clark University before moving to Smith College as a professor of historical sociology in 1923. In 1929 he left teaching to work as a journalist, freelance writer and occasional adjunct professor at smaller schools. In 1919–20 and between 1923 and 1937 he lectured regularly at the New School for Social Research. Through his prodigious scholarly output, Barnes was once highly regarded as a historian. By the 1950s, however, he had lost credibility and became a "professional pariah".

Barnes published more than 30 books, 100 essays, and 600 articles and book reviews, many for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, where he served as Bibliographical Editor.

Barnes took a PhD at Columbia in 1918 in history with a study in the history of penology. He was among the graduate students of William Archibald Dunning, who was influential in the history of the Reconstruction era in the United States. In 1917 Barnes published the first edition of An Introduction to the History of Sociology, a collaborative work intended to be a comprehensive summary of sociological development. Barnes lectured widely between 1918 and 1941 on current events and recent history.

During World War I, Barnes had been a strong supporter of the war effort; his anti-German propaganda was rejected by the National Board for Historical Service, which described it as "too violent to be acceptable". After the war, Barnes' views towards Germany reversed: he became as much of a Germanophile as he previously had been Germanophobic. Barnes took the view that the United States had fought on the wrong side in World War I.

In the 1920s, Barnes was noted as a vehement advocate that Germany had borne no responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and had instead been the victim of Allied aggression. In 1922, Barnes was arguing that the responsibility for World War I was split evenly between the Allies and the Central Powers. By 1924, Barnes was writing that Austria-Hungary was the power most responsible for the war, but that Russia and France were more responsible than Germany. By 1926, Barnes argued that Russia and France bore the entire responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and the Central Powers none. In Barnes' view, "vested political and historical interests" were behind the "official" account that Germany started World War I.

Barnes' research on the origins of World War I was generously funded in the 1920s by the German Foreign Ministry, which intended to prove that Germany had not started World War I, as a way of trying to undermine the Treaty of Versailles. In Barnes' articles on the causes of World War I in The Nation, Current History, The Christian Century, and above all in his 1926 book The Genesis of the World War, he portrayed France and Russia as the aggressors of the July Crisis of 1914, and Germany and Austria-Hungary as the victims of a Franco-Russian plot. In 1922 he wrote an article for the first issue of Foreign Affairs, the foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, having earlier contributed book reviews to The Journal for International Relations, which became Foreign Affairs in 1922. After 1924, Barnes had a close relationship with the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War, a pseudo-historical think-tank based in Berlin secretly funded by the German government and founded by Major Alfred von Wegerer, the former völkisch activist. The centre's sole purpose was to prove Germany was the victim of aggression in 1914, and that the Versailles treaty was morally invalid. The Centre provided Barnes with research material, made funds available to him, translated his writings into other languages, and funded his trip to Germany in 1926. During Barnes' 1926 trip to Germany, the writer was welcomed for his efforts to, as Barnes described it, "clear Germany of the dishonour and fraud of the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles".

During his European trip, Barnes met with the former German Emperor, Wilhelm II, at his estate in the Netherlands. According to Barnes, the ex-ruler said that he "was happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914." However, Barnes added, "He disagreed with my view that Russia and France were chiefly responsible. He held that the villains of 1914 were the international Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion".