reparations to Israel has been based on the theory that vast numbers of Jews were exterminated at the express order of Hitler, some six million being the most usually accepted number" (emphasis in the original). Barnes repeated his ideas many times. In his 1966 essay "Revisionism: A Key to Peace", Barnes wrote: Even if one were to accept the most extreme and exaggerated indictment of Hitler and the National Socialists for their activities after 1939 made by anybody fit to remain outside a mental hospital, it is most alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful than that alleged extermination in gas ovens. (Emphasis in the original.) In his 1967 pamphlet, "The Public Stake in Revisionism", Barnes said that the historical "blackout" with regards to World War II had become a "smotherout" as a result of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Writing about the Eichmann trial of 1961, Barnes said that the trial showed "an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged" (emphasis in original). Barnes wrote that the charges against Eichmann rested on "fundamental but unproved assumptions that what Hitler and the National Socialists did in the years after [the Allies] entered the war". Barnes accused the American media of publishing "sensational articles" about "exaggerated National Socialist savagery". Barnes described the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe as the "final solution" for the German people. Writing of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1945–46, he claimed that "at least four million of them perished in the process from butchery, starvation and disease." Barnes claimed that the Allied bombing offensive, together with the expulsions of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, were far worse than anything the Nazis were alleged to have done. In "The Public Stake in Revisionism", Barnes wrote that "The number of civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during, and after the Second World War, equaled, if it did not far exceed those liquidated by the Germans and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by methods which were far more brutal and painful then whatever extermination actually took place in German gas ovens". Barnes said that certain (unnamed) "court historians" were