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 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 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.