In response to attacks for espousing Harwood’s views, Wilson protested almost reflexively that he was not anti-Nazi or anti-Jewish but “deeply pro ‘objectivity.’” Such protestations are reminiscent of deniers’ claims that they are only interested in the truth and harbor no sympathies toward Nazis or antipathies toward Jews.{76}
The controversy continued until June 1975. Eventually even the editors of books and bookmen felt compelled to respond to readers who criticized the magazine for assigning Harwood’s work for review. The editors assured readers that the pamphlet was “never sent to Colin Wilson for review by b&b nor has it ever been the subject of a review in b&b.”{77} Wilson had included it on his own. The penultimate letter the editors published on this controversy was from Harwood himself. In it he reiterated his false claims regarding the Chambers Encyclopedia’s estimates of the prewar Jewish population of Europe. It was followed by a letter that can be interpreted as the magazine’s final editorial comment on the entire matter. The letter writer wondered if the deniers could explain: “What happened to my German Jewish parents, grandparents and cousins, since I find it hard to attribute their deaths, attested to by the International Red Cross, either to Nazi benevolence or Russian propaganda.”{78}
In the face of this query there was only silence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Entering the Mainstream
The Case of Arthur Butz
In 1977 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. Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, garnered considerable attention, and his book was the subject of news 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 welclass="underline" 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 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,” “absolutely 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.