Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3: Washington and New York
let alone a sensitive agency such as the SD. He was accordingly busted down to
the ranks, but then the appointment in early 1943 of his fellow Austrian and Vienna
acquaintance Kaltenbrunner to head the RSHA seems to have reversed his
fortunes, and he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by the end of the war and
played a responsible role in foreign intelligence work. After the war, he worked
for the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps until 1949 in lining up ex-SS personnel
to give information. It is said that he managed to make this job rather lucrative.
After 1949, he immersed himself in the snake pit of Vienna cold war politics,
maintaining links with neo-Nazis, Soviet agents, and nearly everybody else.
He had a particularly close relationship with one Soviet agent Kurt Ponger, a
naturalized U.S. citizen whom he had met when Ponger was employed as a translator
at the IMT (in addition a Kurt Ponger, probably the same person, was a
prosecution lawyer in NMT Case 4). Höttl consequently became suspect in the
Verber-Ponger espionage case of 1953 and was arrested by U.S. authorities in
March in Vienna but released a few weeks later. In the mid-Fifties, he published
two books on his wartime experiences. In 1961, he signed a prosecution affidavit
for Eichmann’s trial (substantially the same as his IMT affidavits). 150
Authors on my side have written that Höttl was an Allied agent during the war.
This is not correct. The only real fact that is involved in this claim is that Höttl
was in touch with Allen Dulles of the OSS in Switzerland toward the end of the
war. This was a part of his duties: the RSHA was attempting to arrange a favorable
conclusion of the hostilities, and Höttl was one of the persons involved in the
secret contacts with the western Allies.
No doubt, during the very last weeks of the war many of these intelligence officers
started acting with their personal interests in mind, and also without doubt,
Höttl would have been delighted to have been enlisted as an Allied agent at this
juncture of the war and may even have volunteered some favors to Dulles with
this development in mind. However, these contacts are no more evidence that
Höttl was an Allied agent than they are that Dulles was an Axis agent (Dulles is
even said to have peppered his conversation with anti-Semitic remarks when he
was trying to win the confidence of some German contacts 151 ). If Höttl had been
an Allied agent, it would seem that he would boast about this in one of his two
books (The Secret Front and Hitler’s Paper Weapon), but he makes no such
claim. In addition, Ian Colvin, who knows as much about these matters as anybody,
wrote the Introduction for The Secret Front, and makes no remarks in this
connection.
April 27, 1943, p. 10: “NORWEGIAN DEPORTEES DIE
Stockholm, Sweden, April 26 (ONA) – Reports from Oslo said today that
most of the Norwegian Jewish women and children deported from the country
[…] had died of starvation.
Transports of deportees that left Oslo in November and February were re-
150
151
Time (Jul. 12, 1954), 98, 100; New Republic (Dec. 20, 1954), 22; New York Times (Apr. 7, 1953),
20; (Apr. 12, 1953), 33; Eichmann, session 85, A1-L1; IMT, vol. 11, 228.
R. H. Smith, 214-215.
107