“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>* Butz would have us believe that the same Jews whose
rescure 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. These 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
communiques 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 inot 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, Frnech, 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?”
(Lipstadt, 126-128)
<15> Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance,
California, 1976), pp. 93, 94, 100
<16> Ibid., pp. 29, 30, 45, 199, 287
<17> Ibid., p. 87
<18> Ibid.
<19> The Jews were taken to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York.
<20> Ibid., p. 173
<21> Ibid., p. 215
<22> Ibid., pp. 128, 150, 158, 195, 200
* The _St. Louis_ was the German ship that was turned away from Cuba
in May 1939 because the Cuban government had invalidated the landing
certificates of the refugees on board. When the ship tried to land
in Miami government officials denied permission.
Work cited
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of
Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.
Last-Modified: 1994/07/05
