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 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 lying and that others may not have been lying 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.)
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.”{51} 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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Institute for Historical Review
Late in the summer of 1979 on the campus of a private technical school near Los Angeles Airport, a relatively obscure organization, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), convened the first Revisionist Convention. At that time the IHR, which had been founded the previous year, had garnered little publicity. Most people who were aware of its existence dismissed it as a conglomeration of Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, philo-Germans, right-wing extremists, antisemites, racists, and conspiracy theorists. At the meeting the director of the institute, a man known to those gathered there as Lewis Brandon, announced that the IHR would pay a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who “could prove that the Nazis operated gas-chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II.” Brandon, whose real name (it would soon be learned) was William David McCalden, subsequently admitted that the offer was never a serious endeavor but was designed as the linchpin of the institute’s publicity-seeking campaign: “The reward was a gimmick to attract publicity.” McCalden boasted to readers of the IHR’s journal, the Journal of Historical Review, that the plan was a great success. It generated newspaper clippings that could be measured in “vertical inches.” McCalden’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the stunt actually ended up costing the IHR dearly.{1}