Adolf Hitler, Nazi salutes (Hitlergruß), war in Europe, and ethnic cleansing are all back in the news. If I were writing about London’s upcoming revival of Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers, such issues might plausibly be dismissed with some slight merriment. Sadly, I’m not. Instead, many of these supposedly “historical” references emanate from comments or actions made by President Donald J. Trump, senior members of his administration, and their ideological brethren.
While there’s no straight line between members of the administration and the wider online MAGA milieu, there are points of contact: Elon Musk and Steve Bannon throwing Nazi salutes as a “joke”; the promotion of speakers who “revise” the Holocaust in the name of “free speech”; advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. All of these examples exist along a strange continuum. There appears to be some ideology at work here, which brings together advocates of the “deep right,” QAnon, the earlier “Tea Party” movement, far older currents of prejudiced religiosity, and that core staple of twentieth-century Americana: anti-communism.
Little in this potent stew is original, but the active promotion of such views should be of concern, especially in combination with the assault on traditional methods of scrutiny which have historically helped to keep them in check. What we are currently witnessing in America is an attempted “great replacement” of a professional, pluralistic, historical debate with a solitary, whitewashed, single “truth”—one determined by the administration and its acolytes. The past, its archives, its meanings, plus how it is taught and communicated, are all under sustained attack. This is no accident; it is blatant and intentional policy, and an assault on epistemology.
The past, its archives, its meanings, plus how it is taught and communicated, are all under sustained attack. This is no accident; it is an assault on epistemology.
A corollary of this process is the active promotion of what were, until recently, extremist views held by a fringe minority. This is the case with one Candace Owens, a self-proclaimed online expert who has “unorthodox” views about the Nazis and the fate of German civilians during the Second World War. We might presume that robustly refuting Owens’s ideas would be straightforward. But as I will show, it’s not always that simple. Candace Owens follows a standard conspiracists’ playbook that obfuscates more than it educates: She draws selectively on historical facts and narratives to confuse and distort, pretends to have special insight into debates that have flourished among academics for decades, and draws misleading conclusions that undermine collective understanding of the truth and public trust.
Who is Candace Owens?
Candace Owens dwells within this bizarro-multiverse of unverified opinions. She is a big deal online [to paraphrase Don Rickles; “Go ahead, ask her!”]. She has millions of subscribers to her YouTube channel and previously worked with several well-known conservative advocacy groups. These include Turning Point USA (an organization that advocates for conservative politics on university campuses), PragerU (a propaganda vehicle masquerading as an university), and with the “online shock jock” Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire (she recently exited the show over disputes about antisemitism). To be clear, Owens is not a member of the Trump administration; she’s been openly critical of him in some instances, but he has also praised her highly in the past (in 2018, he called her “the hottest thing out there right now”).
My interest in Owens was piqued by an article last summer in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, concerning one of her online “lectures” entitled, “Literally Hitler. Why Can’t We Talk About Him?” Of course, we do talk about Hitler—a lot. Nevertheless, the thrust of her argument illuminates the problem at hand. She claims that decades of communist propaganda have made Americans far too critical of Hitler and the Third Reich and, at the same time, oblivious to the sufferings of twelve million “Christian German speakers” [Volksdeutsche] who were “ethnically cleansed” from Central and Eastern Europe post 1945. She goes on to suggest she finds reports of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments “unconvincing,” and tries to link these issues to the internment of Japanese civilians, the bombing of Nagasaki, the C.I.A.’s Phoenix programme, and Pol Pot.
Some might dismiss Owens’ videos as the incoherent rantings of a rabid, ill-informed ideologue. Which they are. Worryingly, however, there is just enough actual “history” in Owens’s quagmire of conspiracy to cause genuine concern.
At this juncture, some readers might think the sensible response to her videos is just to ignore them; to dismiss them as the incoherent rantings of a rabid, ill-informed ideologue. Which they are. Worryingly, however, there is just enough actual “history” in Owens’s quagmire of conspiracy to cause genuine concern, and to undermine easy refutation.
The Refutation Quagmire
Back in 1996, the author David Irving sued Penguin Books and Dr. Deborah Lipstadt (who would later become President Joe Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism) for accusing him of being a Holocaust denier. He lost because he was one. But it was a difficult, highly complex battle, as Professor R. J. Evans, one of the expert witnesses, makes clear in his book about the trial. Refuting and challenging such views were not straightforward; it required expertise, serious scholarship, and much effort. These are not arguments you can disprove by Googling, watching YouTube videos, or spending five minutes prompting ChatGPT. You need experts to unpack the subject; and if you silence them or limit access to the materials they require, it will create additional challenges. And that all presumes that we actually retain widespread interest in disproving Holocaust deniers.
So, while we may smugly presume Owens’ rants can easily be dismissed, there’s more than a crumb of credibility in what she says. In this particular case, she repeatedly mentions Peter Molloy’s BBC documentary, 1945: The Savage Peace (re-screened on PBS), about the vengeance meted out to “Ethnic Germans” by the Allies after the Second World War. The end of the war was a veritable Carthaginian peace for the “defeated” German-speaking populations of the Third Reich (and their collaborators). It’s a complex issue (to put it mildly), but German civilians undeniably suffered terribly during the war, as did many peoples from many other countries (consider the violence perpetrated by the Japanese against the Chinese). By 1948, some 12 to 15 million “Germans” had been violently forced from their homes across Central and Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands were murdered, others raped, and thousands more committed suicide.
This is where it gets interesting, because Owens’s statements are not completely at odds with what you might find when casually attempting to fact-check her claims. Read chapter six of Anna Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 and you’ll discover a repetition of the idea that this ethnic cleansing was a communist-supported concept. Read R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane. The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War and you’ll discover this was indeed a “forgotten” event (one miraculously rediscovered by the author).
Interestingly, this supposedly lost narrative has been rediscovered, repeatedly, by multiple authors. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, a campaigning lawyer defending the rights of these German speakers, claimed to have done just that in a series of books he published back in the 1990s. The resurgence of “ethnic violence” across the former Yugoslavia triggered a fresh bout of scholarly investigations: Norman Naimark’s Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe and Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing both argued that this was a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon linked to nationalism. This is not an unreasonable conclusion, but it is just half the story, at best.
At this point, I should add a fistful of caveats: none of the authors mentioned above support Owens’s absurdist positions (any more than Molloy’s documentary does). But a cursory engagement with their work would not dispel them either.
The Fuller Story
To discover the fate of these “expellees,” as they later referred to themselves, you have to delve much deeper. But it has been the subject of lengthy discussion since the 1940s: the rectitude of these post war “population transfers” have been long debated; the “expellees” became a significant force in West German politics well into the 1970s; their removal, who was to blame and who benefitted, triggered arguments among anti-communist Czechoslovak dissidents, and was raised, yet again, during the Czech Republic’s accession to the European Union.
Furthermore, and crucially, the forcing of civilians from their homes is not somehow unique to Central Europe, or to communists, or confined to the twentieth century. Multiple empires, since before the era of the Old Testament, have used similar methods to forcibly relocate recalcitrant populations. The British were still employing these techniques on the Chagossians as late as 1973 (and had proposed them as a solution in Mandatory Palestine in 1937). The world now faces the possibility of such solutions being imposed once more, this time in Gaza.
None of these events are “unknown unknowns.” They have been extensively documented in multiple languages, including English, for more than eighty years. Anyone competently knowledgeable about the history of Central and Eastern Europe would know about them, but you would have to be willing to engage with this community to find this out. And there’s the rub, so to speak: If you think all academics are part of some “Leftist” conspiracy and in cahoots with communists, then you’re unlikely to seek out their advice. So, Owens stumbles across and repeats several long-running historical controversies as secret histories and hidden truths, but by any real historical standards, she simply does not know what she is talking about.
If you think all academics are part of some “Leftist” conspiracy and in cahoots with communists, then you’re unlikely to seek out their advice. So, Owens stumbles across and repeats several long-running historical controversies as secret histories and hidden truths.
This leads us back to the core problem with Molloy’s film and Owens’s reading of it. It’s not that his work contains any blatant falsehoods. Rather, it’s that he resurrects a narrative of Germans as the “true” victims of the Second World War, and he does so naïvely, without any accounting for the fuller historiography. This is the fundamental message that Owens is promoting too: the real perpetrators of unimaginable violence in the last century were not the Nazis but the communists.
Such a suggestion is likely to sound outrageous to some, and not unreasonable to others. The supposed equivalence of communist crimes to those of the Nazis (especially the Holocaust) isn’t new, but it is controversial. Related issues were raised during the Historikerstreit, or the “historians’ dispute” in West Germany during the late 1980s. Central and Eastern European “Memory Entrepreneurs” have long been agitating to legally lump the crimes of Nazis and communists together under the catch-all label of Totalitarianism. At the extremes of these debates, we find the concept of Double Genocide, which openly proposes equivalence in scale and the nature between the Holocaust and the crimes of communism.
You will find further intellectual support for these comparisons contained in the likes of The Black Book of Communism, and they’re promoted by organisations such as the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). They, and others, claim that communists murdered 100 million people during the twentieth century, while the Nazis only managed to kill a “mere” 25 million. Similar attempts at equivalences of suffering can be located in the expellees’ claims that 250,000 were murdered during the forced removals from Czechoslovakia. These figures were regularly cited for decades until they were revised downward in the late 1990s to (a marginally less dreadful) 30,000, by a Czech-German commission of experts.
These narratives of Germans as the “real” victims of the Second World War draw us back to Irving again, who originally made his name with The Destruction of Dresden (1963), exposing the “truth” of the Allies’ wartime “Terror” bombing of German civilians. Equally, accounts of the rape of German women in Berlin in 1945 are oft cited as an example of inherent Soviet/communist/Russian barbarity, while downplaying the widespread use of sexual violence elsewhere during the war. These events undoubtedly occurred, were horrific, and deserve to be more widely known. But the claim that our knowledge of these issues has been suppressed is palpably absurd. And what is worse, the assertion of a conspiracy suggests the existence of conspirators who have something to hide, experts who cannot be trusted, and perhaps should even be punished for their guilt. These are the true dangers lurking within the conspiracists’ approach to history.
Pushing Back
We should tread carefully when rushing to recover the “forgotten crimes” perpetrated against innocent German speakers at the end of the last World War. These approaches have a proven potential to metastasize into the downplaying of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and to undermine trust in the discipline of history. These are the themes that Owens is riffing on.
Real history matters: not as a magical machine spitting out useful “lessons” for policy makers, but as a complex narrative about how we got to where we are, and who we understand ourselves to be.
But real history matters: not, as some seem to believe, as a magical machine spitting out useful “lessons” for policy makers, but as a complex narrative about how we got to where we are, and who we understand ourselves to be. Crucially, it is a discipline that requires some expertise to navigate accurately. Readers might reasonably muse that there’s no reason Owens should know about all these complex historical nuances. And they would be right: there is no reason anyone should automatically “know” about the minutiae of various aspects of the recorded past—I certainly don’t. The difference is whether someone is willing to learn about them, to hear out those who understand more.
Commentary does not need to be confined to “professional” historians. But there should be identifiable methods behind discussions: some comprehension of historiography; the judicious use of an array of evidence; and critical assessments of the credibility of the conclusions reached. Ignore these principles, encourage public figures to pontificate as they see fit, censor, destroy, and omit evidence, and you’re soon adrift in a dangerous, unnavigable morass of “knowingness.” We also need to be asking whether the resources to do this historical work will even exist in a few years’ time.
What is so insidious about Owens’s approach, and so frightening about the Trump administration’s blatant assault on epistemology, is that we need to be asking these questions at all.
Neither Europe, nor the United States is yet at serious risk of forgetting who Adolf Hitler was, what Nazi salutes look like, or of developing amnesia about the legacy of Europe’s wars or the horrors of ethnic cleansing. But Owens and her online comrades forewarn that such a possibility lurks in the future if nothing is done to prevent it. I wish I knew how to stop this from happening. Perhaps the best I can do is make notes, keep a record— “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”—sketch out the contours of the problem, and keep remembering how difficult it is to conjure up neat, definitive answers about the past, while encouraging others in the profession to get out there and do the same.
Martin D. Brown is a professor of international history at Richmond, the American University London, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written extensively about Anglo-Czechoslovak relations during the Second World War and the historiography of the forced removal of German speakers from Central Europe. Find him at @martindbbrown.bsky.social, & https://martindbrown.substack.com/
Image made by Aaron Irion using “Candace Owens,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Tucker Carlson,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Steve Bannon,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Donald Trump,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Bundesarchiv Bild 101III-Wisniewski-001-17, Berlin, Kaserne der LSSAH, Adler auf der Kaserne Recolored,” by Ruffneck’88 licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1985-021-09, Flüchtlinge,” in the German Federal Archives licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany. Any other images used are in the public domain.
