As some of you may recall, Ken McVay posted an item a while back purporting
to show how Arthur Butz was cowed by a righteous, albeit somewhat
obscure, survivor, on a national TV talk shoe. I was unable to get a
video of the show from the CNN tape library. It apparently was not one
of their all-time best sellers; the guy at the tape library said no one
had ever requested it before. There’s an outside chance one could get
a tape or transcript of the show from of the U.S. Holocaust Museum or
the Simon Wiesenthal Center. I was just at the H. museum but I clean
forgot to check.
I also contacted Butz. I’m including in this post my letter to him (which
incorporates McVay’s post) and his responses.
Ross Vicksell
************************************************************************
COMMITTEE FOR OPEN DEBATE ON THE HOLOCAUST (CODOH)
Director: Bradley R. Smith
Box 3267 Visalia CA 93278
Tel/Fax: (209) 733 2653
_________________________________________________________________________
Regional Directors: Andrew Allen(Northwest)Fax:(415)435-3166 David
Cole(Southwest)Tel:(310)836-0211 Robert Countess, Ph.D. (South)
Rolf Hermes(Texas) Tel/Fax: (210)519-8325 Ross Vicksell(New England)
Tel/Fax: (617)272-0321
————————————————————————
Dear Dr. Butz,
I’m the CODOH person in New England. Fritz Berg and I have been
participating in the “alt.revisionism” discussion group on Internet, where
we are greatly outnumbered by exterminationists. Situation normal.
One of them posted the following the other day. I would like you to
comment on it, if you would be so kind. …
Thanks,
Ross Vicksell
********************************************************************
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Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: BUTZ: “I don’t want to hear anymore of this!”
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
From: [email protected] (Ken Mcvay)
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 94 04:35:12 GMT
Organization: The Old Frog’s Almanac
Summary: An Auschwitz survivor confronts Butz head-on – Butz turns
tail and runs ..
Lines: 145
Archive/File: holocaust/usa/ihr butz.002
Last-Modified: 1994/07/05
“Voice of An Auschwitz Survivor”
A Survivor Fights Denials
Including a Media Debate with Arthur Butz and An Account of This
Survivor’s Work in the Auschwitz Crematorium
by Lilli Kopecky
In my monograph, “In the Shadow of the Flames,”<1> I stated in the
preface to Lecture 5<2> that the first comprehensive study dealing
with neo-Nazism and denials of the Holocaust was published to my
knowledge in 1977 by the “Public Committee of Survivors of
Auschwitz and Other Extermination Camps” in Israel, of which I was
SEcretary General until 1988. I wrote there of my conviction that
we, the concentration camp survivors, have the moral obligation and
sacred duty to warn the world so that the tragedy of our past may
not be forgotten and repeated!
In this article, I only want to prove that even ONE person — alone
but unafraid — can and should act in order to be heard.
As I wrote in “In the Shadow of the Flames” (pp. 58-59), one of the
very vicious books in the 1970s, “The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century” by Arthur R. Butz attempts to refute proven facts of the
Holocaust and, indeed, the Holocaust itself.<3> In trying to fill
the gap in historical revisionism, the author reconstructs the
actual evolution of knowledge in the U.S. with regard to the gas
chamber atrocities — knowledge based, in his opinion, solely on
the propaganda of the Nuremberg Trial in 1946, and states that no
German documents from Auschwitz mention a gas chamber. He cites a
document from the construction firm of Topf and Sons in Erfurt
which makes reference to a “Fergasungskeller” (gassing cellar).
However, Butz, with his knowledge of engineering, tries to explain
this as a “gas generation cellar” for igniting the crematoria used
for disposing of those who had died in the camps from presumably
natural cuases. To the great delight of German neo-Nazis, a German
translation of this book is on the market.
On April 30, 1981, I had the singular opportunity of challenging
Butz to his face on the “Freeman Reports,” a television program
carried by Cable News Network (CNN) and broadcast to hundreds of
thousands of viewers. I conversed by phone with him from the
studios of CNN in Hollywood, California. I pointed out to Butz that
his skillfully constructed lies collapse readily in the face of
evidence offered by the following primary sources:
(a) Testimonies of hundreds of former Auschwitz prisoners,
especially “Sonderkommando” survivors, as well as SS officers,
taken during the Auschwitz Trial before the court in Frankfurt am
Main.
(b) Notable memoirs by SS offficers, including those of the
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, Perry Broad of the SS Political
Department, and the diary of Dr. Kremer.
(c) Published manuscripts of “Sonderkommando” prisoners<4> which
were buried and found on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
crematoria.
(d) About two hundred authentic photographs made by the SS
“Erkennungsdienst” (SS photographers) in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
recording the arrivals, selections, and marches towards the gas
chambers of Jews deported in 1944 from Hungary.
(e) Three photos made by the Auschwitz resistance movement showing
“Sonderkommando” members at work.
(f) Reprints of the authentic detailed ground plans of the four
crematoria with eight gas chambers in Birkenau. These plans were
smuggled out of the SS Construction Office in Auschwitz and sent to
the Swiss Consulate in Prague in 1944.<5> Their authenticity is
verified by checks with the gas chamber ruins, now part of the
Polish Museum in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), and against American aerial
reconnaissance photographs from 1944.<6>
I had scarcely finished this list when Butz said, “I don’t want to
hear any more of this.” Pointing my finger at him, I said, “Dr.
Butz, you are a liar. Sue me!” He only answered, “I’m hanging up
now,” and broke off our conversation without responding to the
challenge. I feel that such open and direct confrontation is for
now the best way to expose these fabricators of “facts.”
In the same broadcast, I stated that — except for the
“Sonderkommando” — I am, to my knowledge, the only person to be
brought regularly (in 1943 and 1944) into the old Auschwitz
crematorium. My presence in the crematorium was kept very secret
and I was always threatened with death if I would tell anybody
where I have been. I had to fill — directly from the oversn — the
urns for German inmates (non-Jews) who had died and whose families
had paid for the urns. I was brought there by my boss,
Unterscharfuehrer Albrecht, then head of the Auschwitz crematorium,
from the Registrar’s Office where I worked as a typist. Thus I had
direct knowledge of the gas chamber.
I have been there!
NOTES:
1. Kopecky, Lilli, “In the Shadow of the Flames. Six Lectures
on the Holocaust,” Witness to the Holocaust Project, Emory
University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1982.
2. Ibid. Lecture 5, “Holocaust Denials, Neo-Nazism, Anti-Semitism,
Radicalism and Terrorism.”
3. Butz, Arthur, R. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Historical
Review Press: Richmond, England, 1975. 0Butz has a Ph.D. in
electrical engineering and is a tenured professor at Northwestern
University which in the face of many protests over the years has
insisted on retaining him on the basis of “academic freedom.”
4. Sonderkommando (translated Special Detatchment). Its members
had to pull the corpses (after being gassed) out of the gas
chambers and bring them into the overs or, in 1944, when there
was not enough space in the ovens, burn the corpses on the
stakes.
5. Taken from the office by Vera Foltynova, smuggled by the
underground into Prague to the non-Jewish wife of Ota Kraus and
given to the Swiss Consulate for safekeeping. Source: Erich
Kulka.
6. Central Intelligence Agency, “The Holocaust Revisited; A
Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination
Complex. Prepared by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier, February,
1979.
Source:
Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide – an international information
resource exchange towards understanding, intervention and prevention
of genocide. Published by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide,
P.O. Box 10311, Jerusalem, Israel. (Telephone and Fax: 972-2-720424)
Issue 48 – April, 1994
—
————————–The Old Frog’s Almanac————————-
“However, it is sophistry to proclaim that something must have happened a
certain way because your `reason’ demands it.” (Greg Raven, Institute for
Historical Review)
************************************************************************
July 20, 1994
Dear Mr. Vicksell,
In reply to your inquiry postmarked July 14, I did have a very brief
encounter with CNN. It was around 1981. I have attached some notes I
made on Feb. 13, 1986 when wild claims were made as to what I had said.
>From the program, I remember only the actor Robert Clary. I do not
recall ever having heard of Lilli Kopecky in any connection, but it is
possible she was also somehow involved in that program.
Cooper’s 1986 account of what I said is invented out of thin air. I
certainly didn’t get “about four or five minutes’ to have my “say”, and
I didn’t say what he claimed.
Kopecky account of 1994 is probably a concoction, too. On internal
evidence, one should be suspicious of her, since she reports pointing
her finger at me through a telephone connection, a very good trick! The
remarks she put in my mouth do not sound like me, and I am sure there
was no exploration of the matters of her items (a)-(f) while I was
connected; the encounter was much too emotional for that.
Best Regards,
Arthur R. Butz
———————————————————————
Feb. 13, 1986
Today I got a cassette from David McCalden purporting to be the record
of a meeting held Jan 19 at the Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. Mel
Mermelstein said he attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel who “cried in
front of hundreds and hundreds of teachers” that he had gotten “a
letter and a postcard from a professor (Faurisson) who said that the
Holocaust is nothing but a hoax and that the chimneys of Auschwitz are
only those of the bakery.” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center and co-editor of Response, had a very strange
idea of what I said when I was on the telephone with CNN-TV in Atlanta
a few years ago. I was connected by telephone only and had not seen
the program on TV. My recollection is that I said only a few words and
that Robert Clary made such a scene that I had no opportunity to say
anything more. My recollection does not resemble Rabbi Cooper’s
account, which seems to implicitly report that he, Cooper, was present
during the production of the program. Speaking first of Robert Clary,
Cooper said:
when we first met Robert and a number of other survivors were on on a
CNN television program out of Atlanta … (Butz) wasn’t on the screen
but (the moderator) let him go through his say and after about four or
five minutes the moderator in disgust finally interrupted and said “now
listen here. You’re a professor but you’ve heard everything these
people have said. If you saw the show you saw the materials that the
Nazis, the Germans themselves, took. How in the world can deny what
happened?” And I think that Butz’s answer that day was probably the
most honest statement he has ever made in his adult life. He said “O do
not believe Auschwitz happened because I’m more comfortable not believing
Auschwitz happened. I’m more comfortable believing that Auschwitz did
not happpen” … I think for someone like Butz there’s a lot for us to
learn from, a, in a sense an off the cuff gut statement like that from
that professional bigot.
**********************************************************************
July 23, 1994
Dear Mr. Vicksell,
Since mailing you my letter of July 20 it occurred to me that the
statements Kopecky attributed to me (“I don’t want to hear any more of
this … I’m hanging up now”) might have been uttered by me in reaction
to Clary’s rantings, the precise content of which I don’t remember.
However I could not have reacted that way to points such as her (a) –
(f) in the Internet message, regardless of by whom uttered.
Best Regards,
Arthur R. Butz
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codfish Mon Sep 5 15:44:55 PDT 1994
Article: 15867 of alt.revisionism
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codfish
From: [email protected] (Ross Vicksell)
Subject: Butz’s version of CNN show
Message-ID:
Keywords: Butz
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 1994 02:40:25 GMT
Lines: 300
Last-Modified: 1994/10/29
See Also: ~/butz.002
