Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
as a doctor, but the report actually does not make it clear what he was; it appears
that he was supposed to be an “intellectual” or a “clerk.”
The next development seems to have been the publication in 1956 in Israel of
the book Im Schatten des Todes, by J. Oskar Neumann. Neumann had been one of
the leaders of the various Jewish councils and resistance organizations in Slovakia.
In his account, Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel (or Weissmandl), originally
a Hungarian Jew resident in a part of Hungary that was annexed by Czechoslovakia
after World War I, was the leader of Jewish resistance in Slovakia. In
Neumann’s story the two young Slovakian Jews appear on schedule in Slovakia,
as does the Polish major (actually, the WRB report does not say where the Polish
major escaped to). Neumann gives the impression that he actually met these people:
“Yet here sit eye-witnesses, who have told the whole truth.” His account does
not mention the two authors of the third, supplementary, section of the WRB report,
and he does not tell us the names or tattooed registration numbers of the escapees.
Since they were in great danger of being found by the Gestapo, which was
looking for them, they “were sent to an outlying mountainous area to rest.” Rabbi
Weissmandel communicated the report to Budapest, Switzerland, and other destinations,
in order to warn other Jews and to bring help. 160
Weissmandel emigrated to the United States after the war and set up an orthodox
Talmudic seminary in New York State. He died in November 1957. However,
his war memoirs were published posthumously in 1960, unfortunately in Hebrew,
which I am not able to read. The WRB report is a major subject of his book. I
have assumed that his story is essentially similar to Neumann’s, because the two
authors were similarly situated and had the same connections. However, I could
be wrong. 161
Rudolf Vrba
It appears that the next event involved Reitlinger. The anonymity of the authors
of the WRB report is a striking and disturbing feature of the first edition of
Reitlinger’s book, as I am sure he realized. This no doubt bothered him, for it appears
that he set out to locate the authors of the report, for he writes in his second
edition, published in 1968, that Rudolf Vrba, the author of the “most important”
part of the WRB report, i.e., the first section, was “in hospital practice in Cardiff
in 1960.” Reitlinger’s contact with Vrba in 1960, thus, would appear to be the first
appearance of an alleged author of the report in any sort of historical record. Vrba
was apparently produced as a consequence of Reitlinger’s investigations. The
town of Cardiff in south Wales is incidentally only about 150 miles from Reitlinger’s
home in Sussex. Reitlinger does not mention the name of any of the other
authors. He considers a stencil book by Silberschein, Riegner’s World Jewish
Congress colleague in Switzerland, as including the “complete version” of the re-
160
161
124
Neumann, 178-183.
New York Times (Nov. 30, 1957), 21; Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 16, 418-419.