No Time For Silence: Pleas for a Just Peace Over Four Decades

On April, 1946 Professor Austin J. App of Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, Texas published a brief pamphlet attacking the victors of the Second World War for their unconscionable treatment of the women of Germany and its allies at the war's end and during its aftermath. Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe was first and foremost an indictment of the mass rapes carried out by the troops of the Red Army, but its author didn't spare the United States government for propping up the beleaguered Soviet regime with lend-lease billions or for condoning the widespread sexual exploitation of German womanhood by American occupation troops. While App's pamphlet probably would have been unwelcome reading for the millions of his fellow Americans for whom the inebriation of VE-Day had not yet been displaced by the decades-long hangover of the Cold War, a small clique of determined and influential opponents hit back at its author with tactics that have become characteristic of the enemies of Revisionism. Within several months Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe was banned in Canada, a gloomy portent of the standing ban on Revisionist literature north of the border today. In the United States a chorus of journalists, most of them Jewish, smeared App as an "anti-Semite" and an apologist for Nazism. They didn't shrink from falsifying and distorting the content of App's piece, and they sought to bring subtle but intensifying pressures on App's employers. Nevertheless, within three months of publication App's bold call to conscience had sold more than 40,000 copies and excerpts from it had been inserted into the Congressional Record. Shortly thereafter Professor App would establish the Mission Press (later the Boniface Press) and embark on a long and often lonely quest for justice for the land of his forefathers. Throughout the ensuing four decades App would speak out publicly against what he called "history's most terrifying peace," a peace which has left a Damoclean sword of annihilation hanging, not merely over a still-divided Europe, but over the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the mighty victors in history's most terrible war. During a long career as a publicist and pamphleteer, a career which ran parallel with his long service as a professor of English literature, Austin App's keen sense of justice and steadfast courage in his Western, Christian convictions impelled him to challenge the historical blackout which has shrouded much of the truth concerning the Second World War, a challenge embodied in his membership on the Editorial Advisory Committee of The Journal of Historical Review from its inception in 1980 to his death in 1984.