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 Office 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.16
Butz vacillated between holding Jews solely responsible for this “Jewish hoax”—which was also a “Zionist hoax”17—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.18 It is noteworthy that those Jews who pressured 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 one thousand Jews to enter the United States during the war itself.19, 1* 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 communiqués 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 determine whether the war crimes courts received genuine documents, forged documents, or no documents at all.21 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, 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.2*
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 raids24—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 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 in
terpreted 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 extermination 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—even 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 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 Göring 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 forgeries. 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 false36 (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, 3* 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 only in German documents and the testimony of war crimes defendants. As we have seen in the discussion of Richard Harwood’s work, the ICRCs 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 jus
t 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.
Denying the Holocaust Page 17