| Table of Contents |
|---|
| Introduction |
| A Simple Subject |
| Why a 'Hoax'? |
| A Societal Problem |
| Development of the Controversy |
| Negative Reactions in Academics |
| Conclusions |
Some of you may be accustomed to hearing of me speak on the subject that I call The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
, the title of my book [1] on the legend of the physical extermination of millions of Jews, usually six million, by the Government of National Socialist Germany during the Second World War. On several occasions I have met with interested groups and given them what amounts to an oral synopsis of many of the arguments in my book.
Today I will cover different ground. I shall not concentrate on the Hoax itself but on the development of the international controversy surrounding the Hoax. I have several reasons for this choice of subject and probably the most obvious is the fact that this is after all an advanced group of well informed persons, many or most of whom are familiar with the relevant English language literature. I feel we should not repeat such literature, and Dr. Faurisson is here to show you some things about the Hoax you probably have not seen yet. Another subject only partially known to most here is the development of the international controversy. Indeed many of even the "well informed" Americans are not even aware that there has been a very loud international "Holocaust" controversy recently, because they are forced to get most of their information on world developments from the U.S. press, which sometimes gives readers the impression that Butz is the only author who has rejected or challenged central claims of the extermination legend.
There are important perspectives to be gained by viewing the controversy on an international scale. Permit me to say a few more words motivating the present focus on the controversy surrounding the Hoax rather than the Hoax itself.
One of my dilemmas is that, by writing a whole book on the Hoax, I may have suggested something that I did not wish to suggest, because there is an important point that I should perhaps have stressed. I wrote, but did not stress, that: [2]
There are many considerations supporting [my thesis] and some are so simple that they may surprise the reader even further. The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason; at the end of the war they were still there.
The dilemma I am delineating is that, by generating much verbiage on this subject, I may give some the impression that it is a complex one. Therefore let me state emphatically that the great verbiage is required not because the subject is complicated but because public opinion has become distorted by the media's generation of many times that verbiage, generated over several decades, with the consequence that unusual and elaborate therapy is required. However it is very important that this select group not lose sight of the fact that the subject is quite simple, and that only a cultural illness has made the great efforts of the Revisionists necessary.
The elements in an effective expose of the Hoax are not many. The principal points are as follows.
The Jews were singled out for special persecution by Nazi Germany. Many were deprived of their property, conscripted for labor, or deported east during the war. The German documents do not speak of exterminations. The term "Final Solution" (Endloesung) meant the expulsion of the Jews from Europe, and the deportations to the east were a step toward that objective.
Documents published by the International Red Cross and the Vatican do not harmonize with the extermination claims, and the very well informed wartime Pope, Pius XII, is often castigated for not speaking up against exterminations of Jews.
Partially on account of general wartime conditions and partially as a consequence of the German measures against the Jews (e.g. crowding into ghettos), a large number of Jews perished, but nothing near six million.
Published population statistics are quite meaningless, mainly because almost all of the Jews involved in the problem were East European (e.g. two or three million Polish Jews), but also because in the U.S.A. there has been no reliable count -- the census does not treat this and the concept "Jew" was not admitted into the official records when a very large number entered the U.S. after the war. To the extent that a significant number of Jews might seem to be missing from some region they occupied before the war, they can to the best of our knowledge be accounted for in terms of the massive and well known postwar movements of Jews to the U.S., Palestine and other lands, and also in terms of their simply remaining in the Soviet Union where the Germans had put them, according to the German documents.
The evidence for the extermination allegations depends crucially on trials, such as the Nuremberg trials, held before courts that were for political reasons constrained to accept the basic truth of such allegations. Thus to many relevant defendants it seemed that the only possible defense strategy was to deny not the exterminations but only their personal responsibility for them (e.g. Ernst Kaltenbrunner or Adolf Eichmann).
The horrible scenes we found in the German camps in 1945 were the result of the total collapse, in the context of the total collapse of German industry and transport, of all German countermeasures against diseases, mainly typhus, that had plagued all German camps throughout the war. These German countermeasures had included periodic showers for all inmates and also extensive and periodic use of insecticides, such as Zyklon B, for disinfection purposes.
Concentration camp inmates were an important source of labor for the hard-pressed wartime German economy, and the high death rate that prevailed in the camps throughout the war was considered catastrophic
[3] by the Germans. As a result of the high death rate, about 350,000, or perhaps 400,000, inmates died in the German camps during the war, some minority of that number being Jews. [4]
There were crematoria in all of the camps for the disposal of the bodies of people who died there.
The camps in Germany are not even claimed to have been extermination camps,
except in occasional publications of a frankly sensationalistic nature. The so-called extermination camps,
such as Auschwitz, were all in Poland, and were captured by the Russians after having been evacuated in an orderly fashion by the Germans. The Russians found no horrible scenes comparable to those we later found in Germany, and no evidence of exterminations.
The gas chambers
are fictitious and the best the bearers of the legend can do to argue their existence is to advance the ludicrous claim that the Zyklon did double duty in exterminating Jews as well as lice, or to misrepresent a shower or even an ordinary room as a gas chamber.
Another tactic is to confuse the concept of a gas oven.
All crematorium ovens are gas ovens.
That is the basic structure of the Hoax.
At this point it is convenient to remark on the title I chose for my book. In the controversy, one of the things that jolted some, even some who were otherwise favorably impressed by the book, was my use of the term "Hoax" to describe the received legend. Some felt that, whatever the truth of the legend, the term was not adequate or appropriate to the situation. Such a trivializing concept, it was thought, should not be applied to a legend that lives on the vast scale of the Holocaust
-- it struck some as comparable to criticizing Handel's Messiah as a ditty.
Let me assure you that the choice of Hoax
was calculated, and that today I am even more convinced that it was a felicitous choice, for the reason that the thing really is trivial. The term Hoax
suggests something cheap and crude, and that is precisely what I wish to suggest. A term such as "myth," although correct and sometimes used by me, does not convey this important description of the nature of the evidence supporting the extermination claim.
The uncomfortable reaction to the term Hoax
merely reflects the nature of the great popular delusion on this subject. At one time some of the people who are addressing you here, such as Dr. Faurisson and myself, shared not only the popular belief in the truth of the legend but also the popular impression that its truth was beyond question -- as established as the Great Pyramid,
as I wrote. However, at some point we undertook an investigation and discovered, remarkably quickly, that beneath the legend's face of granite there stood feet of clay.
It is this focus on the feet of clay, that Revisionists have seen in the historical record, that creates a great psychological distance between the Revisionists and even many intelligent people, and sometimes causes the Revisionists to appear to be crusaders of some sort. Those who have not seen the feet of clay cannot have the degree of certainty that seems to accompany the Revisionists. I believe that perhaps this contrast between the apparent dignity of the received legend and the reality of its crude and contemptible foundations is the key point that must be developed in the psychological reorientation of people whom you wish to inform. Once such a psychological reorientation is accomplished, the rest is routine. The jolt that the word "Hoax" causes is a calculated initial step in this reorientation.
Another reason for the wish to focus on the controversy here is that it represents a distinct problem. That is, there is an historical problem, treated in my book, and there is also the problem of the societal status of the legend, the subject of my talk today. The former, the historical problem, is relatively simple in comparison to the latter, or perhaps I should say that I do not feel that I understand the societal status of the Hoax nearly as well as I understand the Hoax itself. However, a couple of obvious features can be safely noted. For one thing, it is a case of media-induced hysteria. For another, the political interests involved are not dead and gone, like those of World War 1, but are as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines, for Israel is always in trouble, and will be in trouble as long as it exists as a Jewish state.
This situation has put historical scholarship into a dreadful situation, which can be seen more clearly if we consider the manner in which knowledge is almost always diffused in the hard
sciences. There it is almost always the case that trained specialists, with appropriate credentials as professionals in the scientific area involved, make the initial revelations of new knowledge. These revelations are normally made first to colleagues and are formulated in the esoteric language of the specialty. Then, over some period of time, the new knowledge filters to general society, with the terms in which it is described undergoing in the process gradual simplification and popularization.
That is clearly not what has been happening in this Holocaust
area. The non-specialist who has seen the feet of clay cannot get his most urgent and elementary questions answered by consulting the scholarly journals, for the simple reason that the societal and political conditions I have referred to have frightened the scholars away, and that is essentially the cultural illness I referred to earlier. It is not so much that the historians have had the wrong answers -- they have not even confronted the questions, and the number of people outside of the historical profession, to whom that fact is painfully obvious, is at least literal myriads today. Imagine such a situation holding in physics.
Now one can understand the curiosity that so disturbs many people, that this is a field completely dominated by non-historians,
as I wrote. [5] Although the remark is no longer entirely true it is still largely the case that the people who have drawn the obvious conclusions from the feet of clay and have publicized their conclusions do not have backgrounds as historians -- mine is in engineering. I am the first to concede that this is a sorry situation, but the situation would be even more sorry if nobody were asking questions about the so-called Holocaust.
We can and should take considerable comfort from the fact that we have retained the cultural vitality to carry on here despite the default of the historians.
Another facet of this is the fact that, the normal channels for the flow of knowledge having been blocked, leadership in disseminating the Revisionist view of the Final Solution has fallen to publications with special ideological orientations. For example the Spotlight in the US and the National Zeitung in Germany are weekly newspapers that do not claim to be scholarly, but again we should take comfort from the fact that somebody has been beating the drum, for such widely read publications do nevertheless create pressures on the historians that make it more difficult for them to continue avoiding this subject.
They also serve to inform the general public, and here we should take note of the requirements of Historical Revisionism, because I may be misunderstood by some here, and it may appear from my remarks that I am claiming that ideally such matters should be confined to scholarly journals and that the general public should not be bothered with them. I intend no such meaning, but it is true that there must be a distinction between the matters treated by scholars and those treated in the popular press.
The general public does not have the faculties or temperaments to treat knowledge in the ways of the specialists, so one must be prepared to accept something else for such purposes, and here it is useful to distinguish between an intolerable and a tolerable popular outlook. It would for example be intolerable if the populace believed the world to be flat. However, I suppose that for almost all practical purposes a belief that it is spherical would be tolerable, and that a concern for the macro and micro deviations from sphericity can be left to the relevant specialists.
A comparable situation holds in this Holocaust
area, and most of the publications that have been propagating the Revisionist viewpoint on the Six Million have been doing a reasonably good job, both in terms of informing their readerships, given the noted constraints imposed by them, and in terms of generating pressures on the historians who might prefer to avoid the subject.
Before the early Seventies there was only a relatively minor amount of publicly expressed questioning of the Holocaust legend. The most significant literature was the work of the former Buchenwald inmate and French Resistance member Paul Rassinier, who died in 1967. However, in reflection of the fact that there existed little interest in the subject, English translations of the Rassinier books were not published until very recently, i.e. in the past four years.
Around 1972 or 1973 there was an international development, by its nature not noticed at the time, that remains fundamentally mysterious. What I am referring to is the fact that a number of people in several countries, virtually simultaneously and completely independently of each other (in fact each was not even aware of the existence of the others), resolved to question the received legend, in the manner that was appropriate to his own situation, and to publish his conclusions. Thies Christophersen's booklet Die Auschwitz Luege, based on his recollections of his own stay near Auschwitz during the war, and with an introduction by Manfred Roeder, was published in Germany in 1973, and it was soon followed there by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich's short article in the monthly Nation Europa, also based on his recollections of his wartime assignment near Auschwitz. The year 1973 also saw the appearance in the U.S. of Dr. Austin J. App's booklet The Six Million Swindle.
Richard Harwood's booklet Did Six Million Really Die? was published in Britain in the Spring of 1974, and later in the same year there was the uproar at the Sorbonne over a letter by Dr. Robert Faurisson, so both were at work on this subject in 1973 if not earlier. My work commenced in 1972 and my book was published in Britain in the Spring of 1976 and in German translation a year later.
In this review I have not mentioned every relevant publication but no value judgments should be made purely from the inclusion or exclusion of anything from the list. The purpose here is not to offer a bibliography, or a critique, but to discuss the development of the controversy.
These developments of the early and mid-Seventies initiated reactions and a controversy that still shows no signs of subsiding, as I think you are aware. In Germany, Roeder was successfully prosecuted for his Introduction to the Christophersen booklet, [6] and Stäglich was punished with a five year, twenty percent reduction of his pension as a retired judge. [7]
is it really so difficult to get this old and neo-Nazi?[8]
remembrance commando,for the offence of having denied the Six Million. [14]
war crimes.I criticized Holocaust elsewhere and I shall not waste words on it here. [15] I understand that it is to be shown again soon.
Final Solutionhave said, and of course the clamor of the Establishment's spokesmen was deafening. Golo Mann wrote that
these two pages ... are the most monstrous that I have had to read in a German book since 1945[18] and the publisher responded to the clamor by stopping the sale of the first edition and substituting a new edition with the two offending pages hastily rewritten, in a style I am assured is not Diwald's, in order to conform to the usual line. Axel Springer further promised publicly, in words I cannot imagine coming from a U.S. publisher under any circumstances, that this was only the beginning of the rewriting of the book, and that by Fall 1979 the book would be
not recognizable.[19]
why do even the Germans concede the reality of the six million murders?or
why do the historians concede them?The market in ideas in this area is not a free one. Throughout the world, there are at least informal and unofficial barriers to free expression and discussion.
X ratingconcept in the U.S.A. except that its application is supervised by the government and not almost entirely restricted to pornography. In theory, the law is supposed to prevent only the availability of things to youth, but when non-pornographic matter goes on the list, the practical effect is to ban it, for the law specifies that listed literature may not be advertized or sold to private parties by mail. It can still be sold in bookstores, subject to certain restrictions, but with the exception of the Diwald book the literature that has been discussed here has never been stocked by regular bookstores in Germany anyway.
exterminations.The system that we see there after the Second World War gives them no other choice.
Establishmentmagazine or newspaper.
anti-semitic,
neoNazi,etc. So here are a few people who have lived well up to or into middle age without it ever having occurred to anybody to call them such things, and who are now so belatedly assaulted with these political cuss words just because they asked questions about the Six Million.
I have suggested that the negative reactions to the revisionists of the Final Solution
have been on the whole emotional, and I made no distinction between reactions of professional scholars and laymen. This was no oversight. I am sad to report that, to an extent that stunned me, the reactions of very many scholars have been what one might have expected from a hyperemotional Jewish grandmother. In the early stages of the public reactions to my book one Prof. Wolfe of New York University made a fool of himself by writing to the New York Times that Northwestern University should bring me up on charges of academic incompetence
and moral turpitude
for authoring and publishing the book whose title, he reported in his letter, was Fabrication of a Hoax. Clearly he had seen the New York Times story about the book, which reported an incorrect title, and he had not seen the book itself. [25]
That was an extreme case but it is still true that scholars who should know better have made a lot of noises while saying almost nothing of substance. In all of the professorial criticism of my book at Northwestern, the only point of historical weight that was raised against it, and that reached me, was that the published population statistics are in conflict with my claims. That fact is mentioned and discussed in the first chapter of my book.
The History Department at Northwestern supposedly undertook to sponsor a series of lectures entitled "Dimensions of the Holocaust," but then in his introductory remarks the Chairman of the Department gave the show away by thanking the Hillel Foundation for rounding up the speakers for the affair. The University shortly later published the lectures in a booklet that is presumably still available.
There was another instructive development at Northwestern. There was published in the student newspaper a full page advertisement, sponsored by the Hillel Foundation and bearing a statement of "condemnation" signed by about half of the faculty. [26] There is no need to reproduce the text here. The statement mentioned the murder of over eleven million people, among them six million Jews, by Nazi Germany,
and I think the most interesting feature of this is not the six million Jews but the five million or more others, who seem to have been added to the propaganda both rather recently and rather arbitrarily, although it is said that so-called Nazihunter
Simon Wiesenthal has used the figure for some time. [27]
There is apparently some specific propaganda point served by the five million Gentiles. Wiesenthal claims that one of the biggest mistakes made on the side of the Jews
has been to emphasize only the six million Jews and not the others, with the result that Jews lost many friends.
I must confess that I do not see the point at all, but apparently it has been decided to toss the five million Gentiles into the propaganda on at least selected occasions.
To return to the statement of condemnation that was signed by so many faculty members at Northwestern, there is clearly something graver involved here than mere conformity to a doctrine or established myth, for it is a certainty that the vast majority of the signers had never heard of the five million goyim until they were confronted with the statement to sign. Their subscription was not therefore based on mere unquestioning acceptance of a familiar historical claim. It was based on considerations even more baleful to an academic environment. I will not explore the point further here, but it is easy to get the dismal impression that many would have signed almost anything related to the controversy, provided the Hillel Foundation wished it signed.
It is dismaying to report such behavior on the part of those to whom society has entrusted the custody of its affairs of the intellect. However there are at least some indications that it is being realized that a more serious treatment of my book, if only to attempt to discredit it, is required. It has recently been said that Butz might succeed in delivering ammunition to more 'revisionists' of the Final Solution. Here lies the danger. Butz should be unmasked, not ignored.
[28]
You can see the gist of the conclusions I am going to draw from this account of the development of the controversy. What I have described to you has been a process whereby a thesis has emerged from the underground, to which it had been assigned both on account of political pressures and on account of its seeming implausibility (given the decades of propaganda), into the light of day where it is being discussed and argued in Establishment publications throughout the world. It is still a minority thesis, but the trend in favor of the Revisionists is obvious to anybody who is not willfully blind.
The revisionists of the Final Solution, a handful of lone individuals of very meager resources, have been successful far beyond their expectations -- at least I did not expect things to unfold so rapidly -- and this cannot be explained entirely in terms of the quality of their efforts. It can only be explained in terms of society's being receptive to such views at this point in history. The development that I have outlined here has now gone so far that I now believe it is almost irrelevant what I and my present Revisionist colleagues do, or what happens to us.
To see the reason for this one need only return to one of my earliest points: this is a simple subject. The almost universal delusions have existed not because of the complexities of the subject but because of political factors in Western society. A corollary of the simplicity of the Hoax is that it only need be questioned and discussed, in a context free of intimidation and hysteria, for the psychological reorientation spoken of earlier to be accomplished, the shattering of the delusions following in due course. That point has for all practical purposes been reached or soon will be reached.
I shall make an observation that may seem harsh. The revisionists of the Holocaust
have been, to put it bluntly, victims of multifarious persecution. You know only a part of it -- the part that appears in the newspapers, such as the book bannings in Germany or Faurisson's suspension at the University of Lyon-2. The other part, the more personal part, is at most only hinted at in the newspapers, is generally not known to you, and we shall not bother you with details of such painful things, but let me assure you they exist. I therefore am fully cognizant that it is harsh of me to make this observation: we should greet the fact of the persecutions, for they are symptomatic of success, and even the victims should be as elated over them as is psychologically possible in the grim personal circumstances they are in.
Sometimes it is said that the revisionist Holocaust thesis is comparable to claiming that the world is flat, but note that nobody bothers the flat earth people. It is not rough to go up against the whole world with no chance of winning, but it is very rough to go up against it with some chance of winning. That is what the Revisionists of the Final Solution did, and that is the reason for the persecutions, but the persecutions are too late and in vain, for as I just noted it is almost irrelevant at this point what happens to today's Holocaust
revisionists. The present inertia of the controversy has the weight to bring down the Hoax even without their personal participation, and deliver these mendacious and pernicious yarns into the trash can of shattered hoaxes.
NOTES
exterminatedmillions were not entered in such records. See the report
The Number of Victims of the National Socialist Persecution,available from the International Tracing Service; D-3548 Arolsen; West Germany. The remark should not be misinterpreted as a claim that the number of Jews who perished was some minority of 350,000. Many more died outside of the concentration camps, from diseases in ghettos, in occasional pogroms, and in other commonplace and uncommonplace ways. The number is not known.
The Holocaust Revisited: a Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex,and is available from the Public Affairs Office; Central Intelligence Agency; Washington, DC 20505.