In the book and in subsequent articles published in the Journal of Historical 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.{12}
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 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.{13}
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 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]
1
The
2
In 1916 the Germans began to lose World War I. The National Socialists attributed this loss to a “stab in the back” administered by the Jews.