Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
maximize the significance of Auschwitz in every respect possible, and has thus
read in the record something that simply is not there. 154
German Reactions
It is of passing interest to comment on what the Germans were saying about
the Allied propaganda stories. We have seen that von Stumm of the press section
of the German Foreign Office ridiculed the extermination claim when it was first
made by the Allied governments, but that was a rare reference on the part of the
German government to any specific Allied propaganda concoction. The weekly
newspaper Das Reich, published by the Goebbels Ministry, and the Völkischer
Beobachter, the daily newspaper of the Nazi Party, had much comment of a general
sort on the “Greuelpropaganda,” but there were few references to specific
propaganda claims. The usual situation was one of no commentary on the Jewish
extermination claim as well as on other specific propaganda claims, e.g. starvation
and torturing of American and British POWs and the various gruesome inventions
of Hollywood, such as the draining of the blood of children in occupied countries
for the use of the Wehrmacht.
The reason for this relative silence on specific propaganda claims was no
doubt that there was no need, from the German point of view, to review its content.
They had seen it all before, during World War I. Thus, the German press
treatment of the “Greuelpropaganda” was on a higher level, and rather than concern
itself with the specific contents of the stories, it concerned itself with such
questions as the nature of the political interests that were served by the propaganda
and the extent and means of Jewish influence in the Allied press (e.g. Das
Reich for December 20, 1942).
The War Refugee Board Report: Birth of the Auschwitz
Legend
The high level Washington commitment to the claim that Auschwitz was an
extermination camp came in November 1944, after the claimed termination of the
killing program, in the form of the WRB report (the claim had appeared many
times in the propaganda earlier in 1944; those stories are reviewed in Chapter 5).
The issuing of the report was carried by the New York Times on November 26,
1944, (page 1) and some excerpts were given.
The WRB report is described as two reports, one written by “two young Slovakian
Jews” and the other by “a Polish major,” all of whom had been inmates at
Auschwitz from the spring of 1942 until the spring of 1944, when they escaped
154
116
DuBois, 137-138, 186-188.