Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Chapter 3: Washington and New York
Germans had machine-gunned from 50,000 to 80,000 of Kiev’s Jewish men,
women and children in late September, 1941 and, two years later – when
Kiev’s recapture by the Red Army seemed imminent – had forced Russian
prisoners of war to burn all the bodies completely destroying all the evidence
of the crime.
[…] On the basis of what we saw, it is impossible for this correspondent to
judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us. […]”
December 6, 1943, p. 10: “CAPTIVE KILLINGS LAID TO GERMANS
London, Dec. 5 (UP) – Evidence that Russian prisoners of war were executed
and cremated in German concentration camps has been offered to the
emigre Czech Government by a Czech Army officer who spent several years in
a German prison camp before he escaped to England.
[…] The officer’s teeth had been kicked out when he was struck on the
mouth, he was deaf in one ear from a blow on the head and on his body was
the scar of a swastika that he said had been carved by Germans to whom he
went for treatment of an infection.
Jews were chosen at random from those in the camp and shot, he said.
[…]”
This completes the survey of relevant New York Times stories for the period of
spring 1942 through 1943. Selectivity on my part was, of course, necessary, but I
believe that an adequate picture has been given of the sort of stories that were in
circulation in supposedly intelligent circles.
What cannot be recaptured is the hysterical atmosphere of the time. The unusually
critical reader will have noticed the rather high page number of many of
the stories cited, especially those which report specific instances of mass killings.
In practical politics only page one counts, and these things seldom appeared on
page one. If Roosevelt said something, it was normally printed on page one, but
only because he said it, not because he said anything interesting or significant.
The allegations of exterminations of Jews do not appear to have had great importance
to the public during the war, if one judges from the lack of any prominence
given to such stories. Another way to express it is to say that if one spends some
time examining the newspapers of the time, a high degree of hostility to the Nazis
is obvious, but the specific basis of the hostility is virtually impossible to distinguish.
Thus, there is something of an emotional nature missing from our survey,
but this is unavoidable.
Two principal observations should be made in regard to the extermination
propaganda. First, the legend has its origin among Zionists and, second, Auschwitz
was not claimed as an extermination camp until very late in the war.
We have seen that the first extermination claims were not based on one scrap
of intelligence data. Zionists, principally the World Jewish Congress, merely presented
their nonsense to the Allied governments, in particular to the U.S. government,
demanding endorsement of their nonsense. The first reactions in Washington
were to scoff at the claims but, on account of various political pressures, and
only on account of those pressures and not because corroborating information had
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