Dr. Austin App: German, Catholic Patriot and 'Original Revisionist'

Early Days

Austin Joseph App was born on May 24th, 1902, to Catholic, German, immigrant parents. August Heinrich App and Katharina Obermaier, his parents, were married in 1901, and they moved into an apartment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The apartment “had no electricity, and no hot water”¹ he informs us, but the family eventually bought a farm in Mequon, a community about twelve miles northwest of Milwaukee. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 prompted the young ten-year-old Austin to begin reading the daily newspapers. One day the young Austin was on the family farm, and he took notice of two cocks who had been fighting for some months. He would later muse in his Autobiography:

Why did they fight each other? Because one was less democratic than the other? Or because they did not understand each other? Or could not communicate? Did the final victor fight to make the world safe for democracy? Or to end all wars? Humbug and hypocrisy. They fought each other because of rivalry, because of power politics. That is the truth of it. In World War I the U.S. finally turned on Germany rather than Russia or England, because Germany was, not more wrong, but more strong. In World War II it turned on Hitler, not on Stalin, for the same reason. On every count Stalin was a barbarian, compared to Hitler. Any attempt to equate our intervention against the third Reich with crusadism or idealism is a calculated swindle against the people.

That bloody duel of these two mighty roosters also disqualified for me another myth in the relations of men and nations. It is a myth dear to Americans, namely, that persons and nations fight because they do not know each other well enough, because they do not speak the same language, they do not live contiguous enough. Utter hogwash. These two roosters were of the same breed, crowed the same way, had the same friends -- and fought each other to the death. So did the North and the South in the Civil War. We fought two wars against our English cousin -- same language, same customs; and two with our next nearest of kin, the Germans, whose language is a cognate of English, and whom we knew and understood best of all peoples in the world after those of the British Isles. We were twice allies of the Russians, whom we do not understand at all and who are the least contiguous to us. If we have not yet fought Ireland, it is not because we understand the Irish, but because they have not yet challenged our supremacy of the sea! One could in fact be cynical and say human nature is intrinsically so inclined to evil that the better they know each other the more likely they are to fight -- and the more bitterly: civil wars are notoriously the most brutal. And since their premature liberation from colonialism, the Africans -- for example, in the Congo and in Nigeria -- have killed more fellow Africans in a few decades than the European Christian colonizers killed in several hundred years! Had the American government lived by the lesson of what the farmyard has taught me, both world wars would have been avoided -- and future generations would have been spared a lot of hypocritical balderdash inflicted on the world as history.²

He attend both minor and major seminary for eight years at St. Francis near Milwaukee, obtaining his B.A., eventually earning his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Catholic University in Washington D.C., in 1929.

His first major publication was in December of 1946, History’s Most Terrifying Peace: Thirteen Original Articles (109pp.). This work addresses several main controversial issues: The treacheries of presidents Woodrow Wilson (WW I) and Franklin Roosevelt (WW II); as well as the atrocity committed by the communist Russians, the rape of 100,000 Austrian women, some girls, not yet in their teens.³

He spent the majority of his academic career at LaSalle (1948-’68), and it was during this period that he authored most of his controversial essays and pamphlets. He died in May of 1984, but his autobiography, German-American Voice for Truth and Justice, was penned in 1977. In the Foreword of his autobiography we let the author speak for himself, discussing the state of society and the Church:

And what is left of the free world is infiltrated, is being subverted, is inexorably slipping from democracy to socialism ever closer to bolshevism. Everywhere the Christian religion is eroding; most of Protestantism sounds more socialistic than Christian; and my own Roman Catholicism is short on vocations and long on clerical kooks and on defectors, marrying usually nuns or divorcees!⁴

Dr. App undoubtedly had his enemies, even from his own Catholic employer, LaSalle College. He says in his Autobiography:

During my twenty years at La Salle, my annual salary increased from about $4,000 a year to about $10,000. This was satisfactory to me. But in twenty years I was not promoted from associate to full professor…In short, the college was afraid to promote me.⁵

And why, one might ask, was he denied a full professorship? He held controversial historical views and voiced them on such topics as the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the Korean Conflict, etc. The following is a small sampling of a commencement speech Dr. App gave to the graduates of St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX, May 29th, 1945. These remarks were given toward the close of World War II:

If we reconstruct Europe and Asia the way the North reconstructed the South - then the next few generations will be ruined. In 1865 Lincoln’s malice-towards-none-charity-for-all plan was sabotaged for one of hate and vengeance by men whose ‘plan for dealing with the beaten South was to crush it so that it would never rise again’ (Edwin Muller, ‘They Called it Reconstruction,’ Reader’s Digest. October 1944., p. 121). Have you not heard these very same words applied by like saboteurs of justice to Germany and Japan?…In 1867 Stevens and his Radicals demanded an iron clad oath barring all Southerners from vote and office who had ever given aid or comfort to the Confederacy. This excluded nearly all whites- as a similar rule of aid and comfort to the Nazi Party would exclude the vast majority of Germans. Their plan was to ‘re-educate the South, forcibly. There was an influx of Yankee school teachers, burning to show the South the error of its ways…They taught that…Robert E. Lee was a perjured traitor, that Sherman’s march to the sea was a glorious crusade’ (James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, p. 125)⁶

App was a “titanic figure of postwar revisionist historiography,” writes Keith Stimely, in his 1984 obituary article, “Austin T. App, 1902-1984,” found in the Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1984. In fact, App was considered one of the seminal authors behind the formation of the Institute for Historical Review, which grew out of the first-ever revisionist conference held at Northup University in Los Angeles, California, 1979. He was one of the contributing authors to the official journal of the Institute, the Journal of Historical Review, whose first publication was in the Spring of 1980. Dr. App rightfully stands alongside other pioneer revisionist historians as Paul Rassinier, Dr. Arthur Butz, and Robert Faurisson.

He was also one of the founding members of the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups (NCAEG). David Livingstone, writing for the website ordoabchao.ca, writes of App:

A founder of the NCAEG was Austin App, who was also active in the IHR. App belonged to the German American National Congress (also known by its German acronym DANK). App wrote The Six Million Swindle, asserting that the Nazi extermination of Jews didn’t happen.

In the aftermath of World War II App was extremely critical of the Morgenthau Plan, a plan devised by Roosevelt’s Jewish, Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, which was meant to “starve the German people out of existence.”⁷ In his booklet titled The Curse of Anti Anti-Semitism he says the following about Adolph Hitler’s Final Solution:

That Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ for European Jews meant extermination is a lie. (It meant resettlement to a homeland of their own). That the concentration camps were death camps is a lie. (They were work camps and more justified than Roosevelt’s camps for the Nisei and Issei). That Jews were gassed or executed only because of their race is a lie…That anywhere from 2.5 to 4 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz is a lie. (None were gassed at all, and for the whole period between January 1940 and February 1945 ‘only 363,000 inmates were registered at the camp’).⁸

Dr. App spent most of his life being labelled an anti-Semite, but toward the end of his Autobiography he answers his critics, and it is with this quote that we close this brief essay:

The term anti-Semite is dishonest. It falsely pretends that Jews are disliked because of their race (which they cannot help, and which even so is more Khazar than Semite) rather than because of their character (which they can help).⁹

1. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977. p. 21.

2. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977. pp. 30, 32.

3. History’s Most Terrifying Peace: Thirteen Reprinted & Original Articles. Austin J. App. 1947. 1970. 3rd Printing. p. 85.

4. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977.

5. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977. p. 200.

6. History’s Most Terrifying Peace: Thirteen Reprinted & Original Articles. Austin J. App. 1947. pp. 2-3.

7. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977. p. 211.

8. The Curse of Anti-Anti-Semitism: Making Pontius Pilates out of Politicians. Boniface Press. 1976. p. 17.

9. Autobiography by Austin J. App, PhD: German-American Voice for Truth and Justice. Boniface Press. Takoma park, Maryland. 1977. p. 283.