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In 1976 a previously unknown professor of electrical engineering
at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, initiated a
concerted effort to win Holocaust denial scholarly and historical
legitimacy. Arthur R. But z, author of The Hoax of the Tw
entieth Century, garnered considerable attention, and his book
was the subject of nesvs stories in some of the nation's major
papers. Butz's position as a professor at one of the more prestigious
universities in the country enhanced the sense of controversy.
It was hard for the public to reconcile Holocaust denial with
the pursuit of truth to which universities and their faculty are
supposedly dedicated. But there was another draw as well: Taking
a different tack than his predecessors, Butz not only revealed
a more subtle, sophisticated and, ultimately, devious approach
to this material, but he also significantly changed the nature
of Holocaust denial.
Relatively little is known of Butz. (1) Born in the mid - 1940s in New York of German and Italian ancestry, he graduated from MIT and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. What distinguishes Butz from virtually all the deniers who preceded him was the veneer of scholarship and the impression of seriousness and objectivity he is able
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to convey. Tenured at Northwestern University since 1974, he is well versed in academic etiquette. His book's format indicated that he understood the structure and nuances of scholarly debate and would use them to his advantage. In contrast to many of the previous publications, particularly the poorly printed pamphlets that had typified much of denial writing, Butz's book contained the requisite myriad notes and large bibliography that were the hallmarks of scholarly works, quoting many of the prominent historians who worked in this field and thanking a number of legitimate research centers and archives. At first glance there were few reasons to question the book's true import or intent but readers who were aware of the identity of the publishers would have had little trouble discerning either. In England the book was brought out by the Historical Review Press, which had published Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die? In the United States the book was released by Noontide Press. ( 2 )
But it was not just the form of Butz's publication that distinguished it from its predecessors. His putative willingness to confront a host of issues most deniers had previously ignored gave the book a different tone -- one that was clearly designed to disarm innocent readers and enhance Butz's aura of scholarly objectivity. He criticized contemporary deniers, describing The Myth of the Six Million, the American denial publication on which Richard Harwood based much of his work, as full of "errors of fact." ( 3 ) Nor did he try to whitewash German wartime behavior. Of equal importance in establishing his scholarly veneer was his willingness to concede that as many as a million Jews may have actually died at the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, he acknowledged that the Einsatzgruppen may have actually murdered civilians and that Jews were singled out for special persecution by the Germans and suffered in concentration camps.
In contrast to Barnes, App, Rassinier, and others, Butz did not justify the German persecution of the Jews by claiming that Jews were disloyal, untrustworthy, or intent on causing Germany's downfall. He gave the impression of being a serious scholar who was critical of Nazi antisemitism. ( 4 ) Closer examination revealed that he harbored precisely the same attitudes and used the same methodology that had characterized all Holocaust denial literature up to this point. The packaging had changed but the contents remained the same. Anything that disagreed with Butz's foregone conclusion and the thesis of his book -- that the story of Jewish extermination in World War II was a propaganda hoax and that the Jews of Europe had not been exterminated ( 5 ) -- was dismissed as "obvious lies," "ludicrous," "breathtakingly absurd," "ab -
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solutely insane," "fishy," "obviously spurious," and "nonsense." ( 6 ) "Survivor literature -- the term is always placed in quotes -- is dismissed as full of "endless raving about extermination." Despite his attempt to project a scholarly aura, however, Butz allows his rhetoric to fall into a very different category: American diplomats engaged in "hysterical yapping about the six million," (7) and stories of "gas chambers" were "wartime propaganda fantasies," "garbage," and "tall tales." ( 8 )
Evincing the same sympathies as previous generations of deniers, Butz declared that the greatest tragedy was that the Germans and Austrians had been the real victims. ( 9 ) He also showed the same antipathies as those who had preceded him. Describing Jews as among "the most powerful groups on earth," he argued that they possessed formidable powers to manipulate governments, control war crimes trials, govern the media, and determine other nations' foreign policy, all in the name of perpetrating the hoax of the twentieth century. (10) According to Butz, Jews invented this hoax in order to further "Zionist ends.'' (11) Thus one could extrapolate from Butz's argument that whatever antisemitism the Nazis displayed was well justified. This demonology, common to virtually every denier, is an affirmation of Nazi ideology. The Nazis depicted Aryans as the "master race" -- strong and invincible. Jews, in contrast, were not human. Despite their superiority Aryans were considered highly vulnerable to Jewish conspiracies. The Jews' ability to create the hoax had proven the Nazi thesis correct: They were a threat to the world.
In the book and in subsequent articles published in the Journal of Histor ic al Review, Butz acknowledged the validity of a number of the criticisms commonly directed at deniers, including that their ranks numbered no historians with any scholarly academic standing. Bemoaning this, Butz attributed it to the fact that respected scholars had been frightened away from questioning something as "established as the Great Pyramid." It was because of the "default" by professional historians that nonhistorians such as himself were left with the responsibility for exposing the "idiotic nonsense" of the Holocaust. (1 2 )
In order to mainstream Holocaust denial and attain for it scholarly respectability, Butz also had to acknowledge that denial books, articles, and journals are published by neo - Nazi, extremist, and racist groups, side by side with intensely nationalist or white - supremacist racial diatribes. Attempting to deflect this criticism, Butz agreed that in an optimal situation deniers' work would appear in scholarly journals, but the normal channels of scholarly research had been blocked to those who would reveal the "truth." In the interest of exposing the hoax, those
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who worked in this field had no option but to turn to these ideological publications. When he depicted the deniers as martyrs willing to risk their reputations by appearing in these publications because they had no other option, he ignored the intensive, symbiotic relationship -- far more than a marriage of inconvenience -- that existed between these groups.
Since the publication of the book, Butz, who has assiduously tried to maintain his image as a disinterested scholar, has been associated with a variety of extremist and neo - Nazi groups. His books are promoted and distributed by the Ku Klux Klan and other neo - Nazi organizations. When his book first appeared it was serialized in the neo - Nazi German weekly Deutsche National Zeitung. In 1985 he presented his hoax ideas at the Savior's Day meeting of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. (1 3 )
Despite its veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz's book is replete with the same expressions of traditional antisemitism, philo - Germanism and conspiracy theory as the Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo - Nazi groups. This is particularly evident when he turns to the hoax itself and the "culprits" responsible for it. Although Jews were the instigators, they engineered this effort with the assistance of other forces. Together they formed a vast conspiratorial network that, despite the broad assortment of groups involved, managed to keep its existence a secret. According to Butz all these vastly different forces were coordinated by Zionists, who nurtured the legend until it achieved the stature of an international, historical hoax. (14) A complex and convoluted process that involved multitudinous forces, it remained undetected, amazingly, until a professor of electrical engineering conducted his own brand of historical research.
Butz's list of culpable parties is all - encompassing. He blames the "Zionist International" and the Communists as well as the U.S. government's War Refugee Board and Offlce of Strategic Services. (15) In addition the New York - based research institute YIVO; U.S. government officials; the prosecutors and judges at the war crimes trials; Polish - Jewish "propagandists"; and Soviet officials all helped perpetrate this fraud, aided and abetted by the media and such international welfare organizations as the Red Cross. (1 6)
Butz vacillated between holding Jews solely responsible for this "Jewish hoax" -- which was also a "Zionist hoax" (1 7 ) -- and presenting it as the result of a cooperative effort in which Washington, London, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Jews everywhere had participated. Using their political power, Jews had amassed a broad array of allies, "official Washington" among them. (1 8 ) It is noteworthy that those Jews who pres -
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sured Washington to cooperate in the hoax were the same ones who were unable to convince it during the prewar and war years to liberalize the immigration system, open its doors to the nine hundred Jews on the St. Louis, admit German Jewish refugee children, transport refugees on empty transport ships returning from Europe, or permit any more than a token number of Jews to enter the United States during the war itself. (1 9 ) * Butz would have us believe that the same Jews whose rescue record was a dismal failure were somehow able to manipulate Washington into participating in this massive hoax.
According to Butz the key to perpetrating the hoax was the forging of massive numbers of documents, an act committed with the complicity of Allied governments. There was no shortage of people to assist in this endeavor: Hundreds of trained staff members were sent to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. They were responsible for "a fabrication constructed of perjury, forgery, distortion of fact and misrepresentation of documents." ( 20 ) Without being discovered by anyone, they created reports by Einsatzgruppen commanders listing the precise cities in which massacres had been conducted and the exact numbers of men, women, and children who had been killed. They prepared documents purporting to be official communiques from the highest - ranking offices of the Third Reich. Not only were they able to falsify and fabricate at will, but they even succeeded in planting the documents in the correct places so that those who were not part of the hoax would happen upon them. So complete was their control that they were able to deterrnine whether the war crimes courts received genuine documents, forged documents, or no documents at all. ( 2 1) They even created false recordings of speeches by Nazi leaders and inserted them into the materials collected by the liberating forces. ( 22 ) Without their scheme being discovered and exposed by anyone, these hundreds of forgers -- working in both Western and Eastern zones, and with the acquiescence of American, British, French, and Soviet officials -- somehow managed, in an incredibly short space of time, to produce thousands of documents, all of which were designed to prove that the Nazis intended to annihilate the Jews.
The most important question was never addressed by either Butz or any of his compatriots: Why, if the "propagandists" responsible for the hoax were so successful at producing such a vast array of documents,
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did they not produce the one piece of paper deniers claim would convince them there had been a Final Solution -- that is, an order from Hitler authorizing the destruction of the Jews?
Butz attempted to explain away Nazi references to extermination, including Hitler's repeated use of the phrase "Vernichtung des Judentums," the destruction of Jewry. He acknowledged that while it could be interpreted to mean "the killing of all Jews," Hitler had used it to mean the "destruction of Jewish influence and power." Recognizing that this stretched the parameters of rational explanation, Butz reluctantly conceded that Hitler "could have chosen his words more carefully." (23)
But it was not only Hitler's references to extermination that were problematic. Himmler, in his famous October 1943 Posen speech to the SS, spoke of the "annihilation" of the Jews:
I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the annihilation of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that are easily said. "The Jewish people is going to be annihilated," says every party member.
Sure, it is our program, elimination of the Jews, annihilation -- we'll take care of it. And then they all come trudging, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Of all those who talk this way, not one has seen it happen, not one has been through it. Most of you must know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and -- excepting cases of human weakness -- to have kept our integrity, that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory, for we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if today -- amid the bombing raids, the hardships and the deprivations of war -- we still had the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators, and demagogues. If the Jews were still ensconced in the body of the German nation, we probably would have reached the 1916-17 stage by now. **
It was critically important for Butz to destroy the credibility of this speech because of its explicit references to the annihilation program.
For those unwilling to dismiss the speech as a forgery, Butz suggested that-the corpses to which Himmler referred were actually corpses of Germans killed by Allied air raids (24) -- a suggestion rendered preposterous by even the most cursory examination of that portion of Himmler's speech. (25)
Butz even tried to cast doubt on Hitler's last will and testament. In it
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the Nazi leader, well aware that his entire Reich had crumbled around him, identified the Jews as "the race that is the real guilty party in this murderous struggle" and observed that he had kept his promise that the real culprits would pay for their guilt. Butz, aware that since the document bore Hitler's signature it would be difficult to dismiss it as a forgery, suggested that it might have been "tampered with." (26) However, he offered no evidence to support his contention. Apparently cognizant of the fact that this was not a very convincing argument, he assured readers that even if the will were genuine, it should not be taken seriously because it simply typified the tendency of all politicians, before terminating their public careers, "to exaggerate the significance of their work." (27)
Butz seemed oblivious to the disturbing implications of his attempt to explain away the true meaning of Hitler's statements by casting the will as an exaggeration. Exaggeration has a number of functions: It can serve to amplify one's own merits and positive accomplishments, compensate for one's failings, or consciously agitate one's followers to take certain actions. What function did Butz think Hitler's "exaggerations" served in this regard? Was he exaggerating in order to compensate for his failure to see this "murderous" struggle through to the end? Was he exaggerating in order to amplify his own merits, which in this case included the persecution of the Jews? Or was he exaggerating as a form of triumphalism to celebrate acts of oppression terrible enough, according to Butz's estimate, to have resulted in the death of a million Jews? Whatever the particular function Butz had in mind, his suggestion that Hitler would want "to exaggerate the significance" of this particular aspect of his "work" bespeaks a very strange notion of National Socialism's "triumphs;" in fact, his reasoning is reminiscent of App's argument that the fact that some Jews survived is proof that no Jews were killed.
In order to convince his readers that the Holocaust is the propaganda hoax of the century, if not of recorded history, Butz had to demonstrate that the testimony of numerous war crimes defendants confirming the existence of an annihilation program was false. First he tried to shed doubt on the credibility of witnesses in general by declaring all testimony inferior to documents. His reasons for making this pronouncement were evident. (28) The extensive testimony that exists, whether it comes from victims, perpetrators, bystanders, or neutral parties, all confirms the existence of an annihilation program. Documents could be discounted as forgeries, declared to have been "tampered with," or interpreted in a tangled fashion to satisfy a particular ideological bent. It would have been more difficult -- though Butz, like all deniers, tried to do so -- to dismiss everyone who spoke of an ex-
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termination program as either a liar, dupe, propagandist, or self-incriminator.
Butz's preference for documents notwithstanding, he still had to explain away those defendants who said, "I was there," "I saw the killings," or "I heard Hitler and Himmler speak of the extermination of the Jews." Indeed, Butz's resourcefulness in this regard constitutes the most "creative" aspect of his book. Breaking ranks with previous deniers, he dismissed the explanation that the only reason Nuremberg defendants confessed was because they had been tortured into admitting their guilt. He argued that they recognized that since the world was convinced that a Holocaust had taken place, they could not possibly deny it and hope to be believed. Though they had done no wrong, the world was intent on finding them guilty. Since protesting their innocence would have been counterproductive, the defendants and their lawyers decided that the best tactic was to plead guilty. This approach provided Butz with a reply to one of the most oft-heard criticisms directed at deniers: If the Holocaust is a hoax why did the Nazi defendants themselves acknowledge that it happened? For Butz it was all quite simple: It was better to admit to the crime of the century and risk losing one's life than to protest against a monstrous fraud. However, in pursuing this theory, Butz ignored a basic problem: If the end result promised to be the same -- a death sentence -- what purpose was served by falsely pleading guilty to such a vicious act?
Butz still had to try to discredit defendants who not only testified that the annihilation happened but admitted their complicity in it. Why would defendants confess to personal involvement in such a horrendous crime when they knew that they were innocent and the charges a hoax? Their objective, Butz explained, was to do whatever was necessary to survive while a temporary wave of "post-war hysteria" swept Germany. Thus they deferred setting the record straight to a future time when the truth could emerge. (29)
Because not all the defendants behaved in the same fashion, Butz had to find different ways to demonstrate that their confessions had been duplicitous. Those who admitted that it had occurred cven though they knew it had not -- but argued that they had had nothing to do with it, did so in order to shift the blame onto someone else. This made "it politically possible for the court to be lenient." (30) Oswald Pohl, the high-ranking SS officer in charge of the concentration camp system who oversaw the transfer back to Germany of all the personal possessions of Jews who had been killed, fell into this category. Essentially responsible for running the camps and for the economic aspect of the
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Final Solution, Pohl was condemned to death for his role. He testified at the 1947 war crimes trial that he had heard Himmler deliver his famous 1943 speech to the SS leaders in Posen. (31) Butz declared this to have been part of Pohl's legal strategy to exploit the culpability of the SS leadership by engaging in a "self-serving" attempt to blame those who could not defend themselves. (32)
Butz offered yet another explanation for the defendants' confessions: They had made a mistake. They had not meant to confess to the existence of an annihilation program. They had not comprehended the questions posed to them by their captors. Though their answers made it sound as if they were acknowledging the existence of a death plan, in reality they were not. For example, when Hermann Goring explicitly accepted that there had been mass murders, he was confused. Asked about the mounds of corpses or the high number of deaths, he misunderstood the question. He thought he was being asked about German concentration camps, where many corpses had been found. Had he grasped the question, he would have told the Allies that those corpses were the result of the difficult circumstances that existed toward the end of the war -- circumstances that resulted from Allied actions. (33) How men who had reached positions of incredible power in the German Reich could have misunderstood such serious questions that would determine their own fate remains a mystery, as does why they did not clarify their answers when they saw how they were being interpreted.
Butz also claimed that defendants' confessions about the Holocaust were the result of their having been subjected since the end of the war to a barrage of "familiar propaganda": These former leaders of Nazi Germany had themselves become victims of the hoax. One must marvel at the power of those responsible for the hoax. Not only had they won the cooperation of the world's greatest military and political powers, forged thousands of pages of documents in record time without being detected, and created physical evidence attesting to an annihilation program, but among their most impressive achievements was success at convincing the very people they accused of perpetrating the hoax that it had actually happened. According to Butz even this did not exhaust the full extent of Jewish powers. Their most impressive accomplishment was winning the defendants' cooperation in their own incrimination! They persuaded Nazi leaders not only to testify to the veracity of the myth but to sign their own names to the forged documents. "Jewish propagandists" convinced the defendants that this would win them clemency from the prosecutors and the court. (34) That is why some documents have signatures that cannot be dismissed as forg-
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eries. Butz never explained why, long after the war crimes tribunals were concluded, defendants did not come forward and say they had lied in order to win lenient treatment. In fact, many of them continued to acknowledge that the annihilation had happened and that they had played a role in it.
Butz declared that the conspirators not only concocted the proofs to establish the hoax as fact but had won the cooperation of the mass media in disseminating the story. Motivated by both gullibility and culpability, the mass media in Western democracies constituted "a lie machine of vaster extent than even many of the more independent minded have perceived." (35) These charges hark back to the work of Rassinier, App, and Barnes and evoke what has become a standard litany of antisemitic charges regarding Jews' control of the banks and the media.
Butz dismissed the media as a "lie machine" for disseminating the Holocaust legend. At the same time, however, he used the media's wartime failure to highlight news of the annihilation as proof that the story was false (36) (if it were true, the media would have stressed it). This "explanation" ignored an array of other factors that governed the media's and much of the rest of the world's response to this story. (37) *** It also failed to address the fact that all the Allied governments publicly condemned it in December 1942 and a number of papers did consistently feature the story, among them the New Republic, Nation, PM, the Hearst papers, and the Catholic journal Commonweal. Butz's "explanation" had its own internal contradiction: How could the Jews have had such control over the media after the war but virtually none during it?
Butz favorably contrasted the record of the Nazi press with that of the American media. The refusal of newspapers in the Third Reich to even mention the "Jewish extermination claim" was evidence that it was on a higher level than the Allied press. Butz credited the German press for ignoring the propaganda about death camps and focusing its attention on "legitimate" questions such as the "extent and means of Jewish influence in the Allied press." (38) Butz's citation of the Nazi press as an example of high-level journalism, when all forms of public information in the Third Reich were under absolute government control, is itself significant. So, too, is his description of the question of Jewish control of the media as a "legitimate" one. These are reliable indicators of his own worldview.
But references to the annihilation of the Jews were contained not
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only in German documents and the testimony of war crimes defendants. As we have seen in the discussion of Richard Harwood's work, the ICRC's report specifically mentioned the "extermination" programs. It is in his treatment of the report that Butz parts company with deniers such as Harwood and his anonymous American counterpart. He did not deny that the ICRC made specific reference to extermination, but he offered a series of explanations as to why these references to "extermination" did not mean just that. Butz insisted that the ICRC capitulated to external political pressures to inject into the report an "anti-German bias." [39] The references to extermination placated the Allies in general and the Russians in particular. (40) Readers who rejected the notion that the ICRC was willing to acquiesce in such tactics were offered another explanation. The ICRC, just like some of the war crimes defendants, was a victim of the hoax. Despite the humanitarian agency's experiences in Europe during the war, its postwar thinking was contorted by the war crimes trials, with their forged documents and spurious testimony. (41)
Finally the reader was warned that the ICRC report which described the aid the relief agency had provided European Jewry was "self-serving." Butz argued that it was typical of a charitable organization's publications to exaggerate the efficacy of the help it rendered and that the ICRC may have done less than the report claimed. In probably one of the more revealing observations in the book, he consoled his readers: "We should not be crushed if it were found that the Hungarian Jewish children or the Jews who walked to Vienna, both of whom were aided by the Red Cross, actually suffered a little bit more than might seem suggested by the Report." (42) His contention that readers might be "crushed" to learn that Jewish children suffered more than the report suggested they did offers a frightening insight into Butz's sentiments.
Butz's treatment of the report reflected the flaws in his methodology. He diminished its trustworthiness, accusing the authors of being political pawns, duped by the hoax. However, when it served his purposes, this same report became an authoritative source for determining that the Holocaust had been a hoax. At one point the report mentioned that many of the inhabitants of Theresienstadt had been "transfer [red] to Auschwitz." Given the report's repeated references to extermination, there was little doubt as to what that statement meant. But Butz postulated that because there were no "sinister interpretations" placed on that remark, the Red Cross did not think it meant anything notorious. For everyone but Butz and his cadre of deniers, the words "transferred to Auschwitz" were sinister enough; no further comment was necessary.
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This attempt to give meaning to the absence of a specific statement is reminiscent of an incident that occurred during the trial of Adolf Eichmann when Pastor Heinrich Gruber, a Protestant minister, appeared as a witness. During the war he had repeatedly attempted to persuade Eichmann to ameliorate the treatment of the Jews. He had asked that unleavened bread be sent to Hungarian Jews for Passover and had traveled to Switzerland to urge his Christian friends to obtain immigration visas and entry permits for Jews. He even tried to visit the concentration camp at Gurs in southern France, where Jews were living in horrendous conditions. He was incarcerated in a concentration camp for his efforts. At his trial Eichmann tried to prove that his behavior during the war had been acceptable to the German public, arguing that no one had "reproached" him for anything in the performance of his duties. "Not even Pastor Gruber claims to have done so." Eichmann acknowledged that Gruber had sought alleviation of Jewish suffering but had "not actually object[ed] to the very performance of my duties as such." (43)
Eichmann and Butz used the same tangled kind of thinking to try to make a situation appear to be other than it was. Eichmann argued that because the pastor had not specifically said "Stop the extermination," he approved of it. So, too, Butz contended that because the ICRC report did not explicitly mention extermination in relation to "transfer to Auschwitz," those words meant nothing sinister.
Butz's treatment of the ICRC report was a prime example of how he tried to play both ends against the middle, claiming that the ICRC officials had been duped while at the same time citing their statement to prove that nothing sinister happened at Auschwitz. As with his treatment of the media, such internal contradictions are standard elements of his methodology. In fact, it is possible for a portion of an individual's testimony or a particular document to contain errors while other portions are correct. Witnesses in a court of law often differ on the details surrounding an event but agree on the essential element. It is axiomatic among attorneys, prosecutors, and judges that human memory is notoriously bad on issues of dimensions and precise numbers but very reliable on the central event. Nevertheless, one of the deniers' favorite tactics is to charge that if a defendant errs in one portion of his testimony, then all of it must be dismissed as false.
But Butz engaged in a different tactic in relation to both the media and the ICRC. He was not declaring that they had made occasional errors but that they had to be rejected in their entirety as factual sources because they themselves constituted "vast lie machine[s]" and political
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pawns. And then he tried to use both these institutions as reliable judges of what happened. Butz cannot have it both ways: Either they were telling the truth about the essential elements or they were not. It cannot be logically argued that when the ICRC spoke of "extermination" it was speaking as a political pawn or a victim of the hoax, but when it spoke of "transfer to Auschwitz" it was indicating that there was no Holocaust.
Butz advanced no independent source of evidence to corroborate his conclusions. Scholars in any field (including electrical engineering), look for data to verify their conclusions. Deniers consistently ignore existing evidence that contradicts their claims. Many years ago Saint Anselm, a prominent figure in the medieval church, spoke of "faith in search of reason." Such is the work of the deniers. Their faith that the Holocaust did not happen leads them to shape reason, facts, and history for their own purposes.
Butz could not conclude his attempt to create his hoax theory without addressing the question of the "missing" Jews. What happened to the Jews whose immediate family say they were killed? He proposed various explanations but offered no proof to support them. First, he scattered these Jews in different places -- most, he claimed, throughout the Soviet Union. (44) In addition, at least fifty-thousand entered the United States. These phantom Jews settled in New York City, where they were able to avoid detection because there were already millions of Jews. Who "would have noticed a hundred thousand more?" (45)
What, then, about all the "survivors" who claimed that their immediate families had been killed? Butz suggested that they may have well been Iying and that others may not have been Iying but mistaken in thinking their families had been murdered when in fact they were really alive. (46) Where then had they gone? They survived the war but did "not reestablish contact with [their] prewar relatives." (47) While some survivors may have been forbidden by the Soviet Union from contacting their families, Butz offered "a more plausible motivation": Many of these survivors were in marriages that were "held together by purely social and economic constraints." (48) Those constraints were dissolved by the war. In the postwar period these "lonely wives and husbands" found other partners and established relationships that were "more valuable" than their previous ones. (49) Abandoning their spouses, children, and other relatives, they started a new life, becoming part of the hoax in order to justify their decision. (This casual explanation of why these people deserted their families could be dismissed as amusing were the topic not so serious.)
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Obviously aware that this could not account for even a fraction of the people who are missing, Butz expanded on how this part of the hoax operated. One person was reported missing by a spouse, children, parents, siblings, and in - laws. Consequently one Jew was repeatedly counted as a victim. "The possibilities for accounting for missing Jews in this way are practically boundless." ( 50 ) Assuring readers of the credibility of this thesis, Butz observed that he too had "lost contact with a great many former friends and acquaintances but I assume that nearly all are still alive." ( 5 1) Even by Butz's own standards of what happened to the Jews -- they were forcibly moved from their homes, placed in ghettos, incarcerated in work camps, separated from their families, and forced to live under such difficult circumstances that one million died -- such a statement was casual and callous. Given the reality of what did happen, it was far more than that.
Every author aspires to some form of immortality, hoping that his or her work will continue to speak beyond the limits of the years. Butz has achieved that. His conclusions are posted on numerous computer bulletin boards, including both mainstream ones as well as those associated with the Klan and neo - Nazis. Armed vigilante groups cite Butz's conclusions to legitimate their antisemitism. ( 52 ) Fascists, racists, and radical extremists all weave his conclusions into their worldview. Together with such other infamous works as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it will serve as a standard against which other implausible and prejudicial theories will be measured.
NOTES
* The St. Louis was the German ship that was turned away from Cuba in May 1939 because the Cuban government had invalidated the landing certificates of the ref ugees on board. When the ship tri ed to land in Miami government of ficials denied permission.
** In 1916 the Germans began to lose World War 1. The National Socialists attributed this loss to a "stab in the back" administered by the Jews.
*** The most significant was its unprecedented nature.
Chapter 7. Entering the Mainstream
1. Butz refused my request for an interview, Oct. 1992.
2. For additional information on the Liberty Lobby, see chapter 8.
3. Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, Calif., 1976) (hereafter referred to as Hoax), p. 12.
4. Arthur Butz, "The International Holocaust Controversy," Journal of Historical Review, vol. 1:1 (Spring 1980), pp. 5 - 22; "Holocaust 'Revisionism': A Denial of History," ADL Facts, vol. 26:2 (June 1980); "Revisionism and the Right," reprinted in Jewish Echo of Glasgow, January 8, 1982, p. 6; Aronsfeld, "Hoax of the Century," Patterns of Prefudice, Nov. - Dec. 1976, pp. 13ff.
5. Hoax, pp.68,239.
6. Ibid., pp. 107,131,171,195,223.
7. Ibid., p. 249.
8. Ibid., pp. 240,287.
9. Ibid., p. 240.
10. Ibid. , pp. 33,89.
11. Ibid., p. 87.
12. Ibid., pp. 247 - 48.
13. At the same meeting Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi addressed the group via television hookup. In addition to announcing a five million dollar gift to the group, he urged the "destruction of white America" and the formation of a black army in America that would create a separate state . David Moberg, "The Naysayer," North Shore, Sept. 1985, pp. 38ff. Youngstown Jewish Times, Mar. 29,1985.
14. Hoax, pp.239,287.
15. Ibid., pp. 93,94,100.
16. Ibid., pp. 29,30,45,199,287.
17. Ibid., p. 87.
18. Ibid.
19. The Jews were taken to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York.
20. Ibid., p. 173.
21. Ibid., p. 215.
22. Ibid., pp. 128,150,158,195,200.
23. Ibid., p. 73.
24. Ibid., p. 195.
25. The section immediately before this section of the speech reads as follows: "I also want to make reference before you here, in complete frankness, to a really grave matter. Among ourselves, this one it shall be uttered quite frankly; but in public we will never speak of it. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30,1934, to do our duty as ordered, to stand up against the wall comrades who had transgressed and shoot them, so we have never talked about this and never will. It was the tact which I am glad to say is a matter of course to us that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never talk about it. Each of us shuddered, and yet each one knew that he would do it again if it were ordered and if it were necessary." Davidowic z, A Holocaust Reader, pp.132 - 33.
26. Hoax, p. 193.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 19.
29. Ibid., p. 179.
30. Ibid., p. 181.
31. Ibid., p. 195.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 177.
34. Ibid., p. 158.
35. Ibid., p. 249.
36. Ibid., p. 87.
37. See Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933 - 1945 (New York, 1986).
38. Hoax, p. 89.
39. Hoax, p. 145.
40. Ibid., p. 142.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 145.
43. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York, 1963), p. 116.
44. Hoax, p. 217.
45. Ibid., p. 237.
46. Ibid., p. 242.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., pp. 242 - 43.
50. Ibid., p. 243.
51. Ibid.
52. Moberg, "The Naysayer," p. 43.
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This is a part of Deborah Lipstadt's book,
Denying the Holocaust -- The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,
1993, Penguin. We offer this document in relation with a trial
due to take place in the first days of Year 2000 in London, where
British historian David Irving is suing Mrs. Lipstadt for defamation,
--to allow the public to take freely cognizance of the sentences
and words used by the author.
We downloaded this document in October 1999 from <www.angelfire/ak3/deny/pira1.html>. We have seen another copy at <www.altern.org/lipo/pira1.html>. Thanks to them all. As revisionists, we feel grossly misrepresented by Ms Lipstadt; we are not looking for redress in courts, but only in the minds of good readers. The rest of this site is enough, we believe, to prove Ms Lipstad wrong on all accounts. You may retrieve informations on the trial on David Irving's website.
ARTICLE 19. <Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.>The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris.