41845358-Antisemitism

184 ANTISEMITISM
Jews, abused unmercifully. App maintained that Nazism was essentially a form
of positive Christianity. National Socialism and Hitler have been victims of
“the crudest, the dirtiest, the vilest character-assassination! Only moral cripples
would stoop to it, and only a brainwashed public would believe it. ...
Even if the wartime atrocities alleged against the Third Reich were factual
(and they are not), they still would not be valid grounds for rejecting National
Socialism.” 5
The Nazis only wanted Jews to emigrate, says App, which “is what every
civilized country has wanted, ... namely to get the Jews out of their hair.”
The Nazi policy of emigration was “quite in tune with the historical and civilizing
development of Europe,” for Jews “subvert . . . Christian culture.” Jews
and “gypsies are historically the only earthly tribes whom no country ever
wanted or wants.” In the United States the Jews “now control the media and
the money—and sex education and pornography. ... They are grand larcenists
and subversives” who have turned New York into “a Jewish Sodom and
Gomorrah.” 6
Dr. Arthur Butz, an electrical engineer who writes for the Journal of Historical
Review, teaches computer science at Northwestern University. In Hoax
of the Twentieth Century, published in 1976 by Noontide Press, Butz skillfully
used a scholarly façade—footnotes, extensive bibliography, and references to
some leading books in the field, to principal research centers, and to collections
of archives—in order to camouflage an antisemitic tract. In 1990 two disgruntled
parents withdrew their thirteen-year-old daughter from an Illinois
classroom because they objected to the way the Holocaust was taught. To support
their case, they used Hoax as a reference, prompting Peter Hayes, who
teaches modern German history at Northwestern, to give this astute evaluation
of Butz’s book: “It presents the history of the Holocaust as Heinrich
Himmler ... wanted people to believe it occurred. Butz accepts the camouflaging
vocabulary of Nazi sources at face value, rejects all other written and
eyewitness records ... and thus concocts an account that virtually all professional
historians have rejected.” 7
A member of the Journal of Historical Review’s editorial board, Ditlieb
Felderer, a Swedish citizen of Austrian birth, publishes and disseminates antisemitic
literature, including pornographic pictures designed to humiliate
Holocaust survivors. In 1983 he was sentenced to ten months in prison for distributing
hate material. The IHR reprinted and distributes his book, which
claims that Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax. He has also organized trips to concentration
camp sites in Poland, instructing the tourists on the “truth” of what
had occurred there.